Yesterday it did not make hardly any news except for I guess people who deal in the critical minerals space but China slapped not only restrictions on the exports of various critical minerals but they also issued what can only be described as order to other countries, outside of the US, about what they could and couldn't do with the minerals they imported. It was a wild wild strategy that honestly screamed of desperation because not only has the US and Europe been rapidly scaling up new alternative pathways to get the critical minerals they have but President Trump was supposed to meet with China's leader in less than two weeks. What made this move by China even more confusing was how Trump has recently moved to allow Nvidia to export higher quality GPU's to the country reversing a multi year effort by the US to hamper China's ability in the AI as well as other emerging technology spaces. 

Today we have now seen this explode into the public and for China.... I am not going to lie it is not likely going over as well as they thought. If they had done this a few weeks ago when the US was way more worried about avoiding a government shut down or the peace plan in Israel/Gaza was not being implemented they likely could have squeaked this by. However they didnt and now President Trump can clearly see these moves. As a result he just issued NEW 100% tariffs on everything from China and in doing so did not give companies the ability to do what they have been doing in surging imports before the tariffs go into place. Not only that but he is slapping even more extreme export controls onto China than had previously been done AND it has moved to the software aspect as well not just the hardware. 

These announcements have sent the markets plummeting with the major US indexes all down and because of the afterhours nature of so much of this movement crypto in particular has been absolutely walloped. As of me writing this BTC was down under $109k something that even yesterday I would have laughed at and part of me does wonder how low it could go since this is a three day weekend in the US. I have already thrown a few bucks into BTC and will likely do the same for Solana since I have some USDC in my Phantom wallet and after selling some in the $200 range and waiting for a pull back. Granted this could all spiral into a wild back and forth between the two countries and drive down the markets even more. The US markets have been slowing down and the economic numbers have started to get worse and worse in spite of the stock markets move upward but this not something I expected for China with the leaders meeting in two weeks. 

Unless something wild happens I would expect to now see that very meeting called off and the markets could further panic and fall but hey I have some $$$ and I have been waiting for a pullback to invest! 

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