The FX market kicked off the week trying to make sense of Trump’s latest tariff thunderclap, and the verdict was quick but telling: the knee-jerk dollar selloff said traders saw the U.S., not China, as the biggest loser in any fresh round of escalation. It’s hard to argue otherwise. Beijing is laying down trade bridges faster than Washington can stack tariff walls, and each new barrier seems to hurt U.S. consumers, importers, and supply chains more than it wounds China’s diversified export engine.
Still, every trade squall these days seems to come with a TACO — Tariff-Associated Correction Opportunity ( my new term)— a now-familiar rhythm where panic-selling fades into dip-buying once the headlines start to cool. The greenback proved no exception. After tumbling on the initial tariff announcement, the Dollar Index clawed its way back to 99.00 as traders priced in a possible de-escalation narrative: that Washington’s bark may again outpace its bite. With so many tariff tantrums having ended in last-minute handshakes or “constructive discussions,” shorting the dollar on the first headline has become a perilous sport.
That said, the rebound owed as much to weakness elsewhere as to U.S. strength. The euro still capped political fragility in France, while the yen found little refuge in Japan’s post-election fog. Tokyo remains effectively closed, leaving Singapore’s order books to carry the tape — you can feel the algos probing the edges of illiquid spreads. But beneath the noise, USD/JPY still looks heavy. Japan’s political gridlock makes it harder for any government to pursue aggressive fiscal or currency-weakening policies, and with a minority LDP setup now the base case, that old “Takaichi trade” — short yen, long Nikkei — feels like yesterday’s bet.
The macro current is equally unsupportive for the dollar-yen pair. The U.S. government shutdown shows no signs of resolution, and the Fed’s easing bias has returned to center stage. There’s only so much carry trade altitude USD/JPY can maintain before gravity takes over. If the pair does roll over, it’s likely to do so in fits and bursts — thin liquidity, option hedging flows, and systematic rebalancing all favor quick reversals and fakeouts.
Meanwhile, Gold continues to do what it does best — quietly proving that patience pays better than bravado. It remains one of 2025’s standout trades, grinding higher through every policy storm. The “arc” we’ve been riding all year — long gold versus the dollar — has evolved from a tactical inflation hedge into a structural portfolio anchor. Each tariff flare-up reaffirms its relevance. Central banks are still buying, fiscal deficits are still yawning, and monetary policy has lost its teeth. Against that backdrop, gold has become the anti-TACO: not a reaction trade, but a conviction hold.
So while Trump’s tariff theatrics make headlines and algos scramble to price the next swing, the broader FX story remains one of slow rotation: away from U.S. exceptionalism and toward diversification — both in trade and currency holdings. The world has learned to hedge against Washington’s unpredictability. China’s trade map now stretches like a spiderweb across the Global South, and each new connection further dulls the sting of U.S. tariffs.
For now, the dollar still benefits from muscle memory — the reflex to buy dips on U.S. angst — but that reflex is weakening. Every TACO has a half-life, and each round of tariff theater chips away at the dollar’s credibility as a safe haven. The real winners are those who learned to dance to the rhythm: fade the fear, hold the gold, and keep one eye on Beijing’s bridges.
China’s trade machine keeps rolling despite tariff trenches
Every time the U.S. tries to build a tariff wall around China, Beijing simply builds another trading bridge somewhere else. September’s trade data reads like a quiet victory lap in a long, grinding economic chess match. While Washington keeps trying to squeeze the dragon, China has learned to breathe fire sideways—through ASEAN, Africa, Latin America, and Europe—turning trade diversification into a geopolitical art form.
Exports rose 8.3% year-on-year, their fastest pace since early spring, confounding expectations that tariffs, tech bans, and the geopolitical chill would start to show up in the hard data. The real trick, however, wasn’t in the export line itself—it was in the shape of it. The U.S. piece of the puzzle has collapsed by 27%, but everything else around it has expanded so dramatically that the picture still looks whole. ASEAN up 15.6%, Europe up 14%, Africa exploding nearly 57%. It’s as if China’s trade network has turned into a living organism that reroutes blood flow whenever a limb is cut off.
The composition of exports says even more about the evolving game board. The world wants ships, chips, and electric cars—three sectors where China dominates and the U.S. can’t easily retaliate without hurting itself. The weak links? Apparel, furniture, toys—industries where labor costs and consumer sentiment still matter. Those are the ghosts of the old export model, fading into irrelevance as China moves further up the value chain.
But the real eyebrow-raiser was imports, which surged 7.4%—a 17-month high and a sign that domestic re-stocking or quiet stimulus might be in play. Iron ore, copper, semiconductors, aircraft—China’s appetite for production inputs is alive and well. It’s not a “boom” story, but it’s a resilience story: the industrial furnace is still burning, even if the housing sector remains an ash heap. The import mix—more tech and metals, fewer soybeans and T-shirts—shows that the future of Chinese demand is turning inward toward capability building rather than consumption alone.
In a neat irony, the very tariffs designed to hem in China’s trade may have accelerated this transformation. Beijing’s import partners now look like a Who’s Who of the non-American world: Europe, Japan, South Korea, Latin America, Africa. The U.S. share of China’s total trade continues to shrink, not because of collapse, but because the rest of the world has filled the void. China has learned to globalize without America—a geopolitical version of “decoupling by adaptation.”
Of course, it’s not all smooth sailing. The import boom trimmed the trade surplus down to $90.5 billion, below expectations. And while that’s still an enormous number, it’s a reminder that China’s external accounts are being rebalanced by design. Imports are strategic—think semiconductors, lithium, and aircraft—not the old commodity bloat. It’s Beijing’s way of retooling the economy for a world where U.S. hostility is the baseline, not the shock.
Still, the trade backdrop adds a layer of irony to the renewed political theater. Trump’s latest tariff sabre-rattling, the U.S. Customs’ new port fees on Chinese ships, and China’s own retaliatory port fees have the flavor of a late-season sequel—less original, more performative. Everyone knows the damage that a full-on tariff spiral can inflict. Both sides want leverage, not collapse. That’s why markets are starting to trade the spat more as background noise than as existential threat—until, of course, someone miscalculates and tariffs metastasize into supply-chain panic.
For traders, the key takeaway is that China’s trade engine has adapted far better than the political narrative implies. The U.S. used to account for nearly one-fifth of Chinese exports; now it’s barely 11%. The marginal buyer of Chinese goods is just as likely to be a Brazilian port or a Vietnamese assembler as an American retailer. The world has quietly rewired itself to function around tariff landmines. Even the yuan’s mild depreciation this year—more drift than crisis—has helped make Chinese goods just cheap enough to stay competitive without spooking markets.
So while the headlines scream “Trade War 2.0,” the data whisper “Globalization 3.1.” China’s export machine has evolved from a single engine to a multi-engine jetliner: one engine may sputter (the U.S.), but the others keep the aircraft aloft. And as the pilots in Beijing quietly recalibrate altitude and speed, the markets are starting to realize that tariffs are no longer existential threats—they’re just headwinds in a well-built plane.
Still, one should never discount the possibility of turbulence. A Trump-Xi showdown at APEC could inject fresh volatility, and the algorithmic crowd will be quick to weaponize any “miscalculation” headline into risk-off price action. But if the September data tell us anything, it’s that China’s trade gravity is now global, not bilateral. The U.S. may have built a wall—but China simply learned how to trade around it.
