Bringing Jobs Back to America

Or not.

Because of concerns about threats to travelers to the United States by immigration authorities, the Ig Nobel Prize will be moving its awards ceremony to Europe.

Honestly, I understand the need to relocate to a safer place than the United States.

It could have been Europe, it could have been Japan, it could have been Karg Island, or it could have been Chernobyl. They would all be safer for people going through US customs.

The annual Ig Nobels, a satirical award for scientific achievement, are shifting for the first time from the US to Europe due to concerns about attendees getting visas, organizers announced on Monday.

Organized by the Annals of Improbable Research, a digital magazine that highlights research that makes people laugh and then think, the 36th annual ceremony will be held in Zurich. It’s usually held in the US in September, a few weeks before the actual Nobel prizes are announced.

“During the past year, it has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country,” Marc Abrahams, master of ceremonies and editor of the magazine, told the Associated Press in an email interview. “We cannot in good conscience ask the new winners, or the international journalists who cover the event, to travel to the USA this year.”

The move comes amid Donald Trump’s sweeping crackdown on immigration, in which he has focused on deporting migrants illegally in the US, as well as holders of student and visitor exchange visas.

………

But four of the 10 winners last year chose not to travel to Boston for the ceremony. In previous years, the ceremony has taken place at Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University.

I think that someone should publish a paper in a peer-reviewed journal about this.  You might even get an Ig Nobel Prize for that.

 

We Are So Screwed

One of the side effects of the increasing commerce in liquefied natural gas is the production of uelium.

When you cool down the gas, the helium remains a gas, and you can collect it and use it for things like MRI machines and silicon chip manufacture.

Among the strikes made by Iran in retaliation for attacks on its South Pars natural gas facilities, Iran struck the major helium production at Ras Laffan in Qatar, which looks to have the effect of taking 30% of world helium supplies offline.

Days after the U.S. and Israel launched airstrikes against Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps declared the Strait of Hormuz—the narrow waterway through which roughly one fifth of the world’s oil passes—closed. While oil has dominated headlines, a third of the world’s commercial helium comes from Qatar and has also been cut off.

Often associated with party balloons, helium is indispensable to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners, aerospace and the manufacture of microchips for artificial intelligence. With the strait closed, the disruption of the global helium supply chain could have ripple effects that might last for months and affect the most advanced technologies on Earth.

While there is a decent supply and stockpile out there, it is almost certain that helium providers will shortly announce a "Force majeur," and raise prices on existing contracts immediately.

Thanks, Donnie.

H/t PZ Meyers.

Neither Eric Arthur Blair nor Franz Kafka Would Be Surprised

What can you say about the fact that Halliburton filing an ISDS (Investor–State Dispute Settlement) complaint against Venezuela to revover their damage from US sanctions.

As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know." 

This is functionally identical to murdering one's parent and then asking for mercy as an orphan. 

The ISDS is an administrative secret court that allows for private investors to sue governments for engaging actions that might negatively effect their profits.

In this case Halliburton is suing because the Venezuelan Bolívar was devalued and they had to leave the country because of US sanctions.

On December 11, as the Trump administration was escalating its military campaign against Venezuela by trying to impose a total siege on the country’s oil and gas sector, the US oilfield services company Halliburton quietly filed a suit against Venezuela at the World Bank’s international arbitration court, ICSID.

Long-standing readers are well-versed on investor-state dispute settlements (ISDS), a topic we’ve covered in depth over the past decade or so. As Yves pointed out in a recent post on Russia’s decision to use ISDS to go after the EU’s attempts to permanently confiscate Russian assets, the judgments made in these dispute settlements overwhelmingly benefit investors:

These treaties, designed to override the laws and regulations of states in order to give protected status to investors, make a mockery of national sovereignity. ISDS disputes draw on a small community of arbitrators, many of whom were involved in drafting ISDS treaty provisions, with hearing held in secret and typically not appealable. The rising (and correct) perception that the rules were gutting labor rights and environmental protection was instrumental to stopping their reach being extended further in the US. But it seems no existing ISDS provisions have been unwound.

What makes this case particularly pernicious is that a large part of the losses and foregone profits Halliburton is seeking to claw back stems from Washington’s economic sanctions on Venezuela. What’s more, the case was filed at the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, to which Venezuela has not even been party since 2012.

To say that this is Orwellian or Kafkaesque would be an understatement.

………

There is currently very little information available on the ISDS case filed by Halliburton. The following is an excerpt of a firewalled article published by the Global Arbitration Review that was translated into Spanish and posted by the Madrid-based legal firm Bullard Falla Excurra on its LinkedIn page (translated back into English by yours truly, emphasis also my own):

On December 11, 2025, Halliburton filed a claim against Venezuela with the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) under the Barbados-Venezuela Bilateral Investment Treaty. The case will be processed under the Additional Facility Rules, given that Venezuela withdrew from the ICSID Convention in 2012. The dispute stems from Halliburton’s gradual withdrawal from the Venezuelan market between 2016 and 2020, after reporting losses of approximately US$199 million. These losses were attributed to the devaluation of the Venezuelan bolívar and the deteriorating economic and political conditions in Venezuela, which affected its ability to meet payments to its clients, including PDVSA, the state-owned oil company. Halliburton also notes that changes in the Venezuelan government’s exchange rate and US sanctions further complicated the viability of its operations in the country. Halliburton, which had operated in Venezuela since 1940, was forced to cease operations in 2020 [by US sanctions], although it maintained local assets and equipment in the country.

It seems to me that filing an action in a court that has no jurisdiction in response to actions that were taken by a party not a party to the action is fraud, and perhaps attempted extortion.

While Venezuela does not have much in the way of foreign reserves, it seems to me that they do have a court system to charge the people involved, including the members sitting on the ISDS panel with fraud and extortion, and then offer rewards in the low 6 figures for their delivery to Caracas.

Yeah, This is Literally the Worst Thing to Do

In response to high pricing (not high cost, high prices) of pharmaceuticals, the Trump administration is writing higher drug prices into international trade deals.

This isn't lowering prices, it's just hurting other people.

The Trump administration’s position on drug prices is that Americans pay too much while other countries don’t pay nearly enough. A new trade deal with the United Kingdom is addressing that imbalance, raising prices the national health system will pay for new medicines in exchange for tariff exemptions on U.K. pharmaceutical exports valued at about $3.5 billion a year.

The deal announced Monday is an update to a broad trade deal the U.S. struck with the U.K. in May. While the countries describe this new deal as an “agreement in principle,” it sets a precedent that could shape pharmaceutical pacts the Trump administration is still pursuing with other countries.

Before the U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) can use a new medicine, it must first be evaluated by the government’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), which assesses a drug’s cost effectiveness to the health service. NICE’s current cost effectiveness benchmark is a range of £20,000 to £30,000 (about $26,412 to $39,618) per quality adjusted life year. That means a cost-effective drug should lead to the equivalent of one additional year of health and improved quality of life for no greater than £20,000 to £30,000 more than the cost of the current standard of care. Consequently, a drug shown to be safe and therapeutically effective in clinical trials may end up being turned down by NICE because it is not cost effective, though the agency said it applies a higher threshold for medicines developed for ultra-rare conditions.

 This is ineluctably evil.

Headline of the Day

Libertarianism, 13, Dies in Argentina Chainsaw Accident

—The Nerd Reich

Yes, I know, this hed is from a few weeks ago, but it's new to me.

It is, of course, about Argentine President Javier Milei asking, and getting, a bailout from Donald Trump/ 

An Interesting Perspective on China Trade Sanctions

Specifically, Arnaud Bertrand is suggersting that China has been slow walking negotiations until they haD developed alternatives to items that were only available in the United States, particularly helium.

Here's a question I know many are wondering about: why did China wait until now to use rare earths as leverage against the US? Why not in the first Trump administration when the US started the trade hostilities? Or when the Biden administration unleashed the chips export controls 3 years ago?

I just watched a fascinating explanation by a Chinese analyst and, unexpectedly, a big part of the explanation is... helium. 

 I had no idea but as he explains (source here), all the way until 2022 China imported 95% of its helium and most of it was controlled by the US. Of the world's ten largest helium producers, four were American companies, and the remaining six all used American technology. 

Helium isn't just a party balloons gas: it has plenty of industrial applications for things such as quantum computing, rocket technology, MRI machines, as a coolant for chip lithography equipment, etc. 

In a nutshell what he's explaining is that with helium the US had an even stronger card to play if China ever used the rare earths card. 

The Chinese embarked on a crash program to develop helium extraction technologies and to nutralize other US controlled choke-points.

Now that this has been achieved, they can throw choke-points the United States' way. 

Even if you don't admire the player, you have to admire the play. 

So, How Corrupt is the Supreme Court?

We're about to find out, because the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, I normally refer to them as the "Patent Court", but they cover international trade as well, has ruled that Donald Trump has no authority to implement tariffs.

The legal reasoning is fairly straightforward, if one looks at the black letter of the Constitution, only Congress can levy taxes, which includes tariffs, and in all cases where the Congress has given the President the authority to act on their behalf, they have explicitly listed them in the language of the bill.

The International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) has no mention of tariffs at all.

The injunction has been stayed until October to allow for an appeal to the Supreme Court.

The real question here is whether or not the Supreme Court will ignore the Constitution in order to more deeply fellate Donald Trump.

I expect a 5-4 or 6-3 decision in his favor. 

He's F%$#ing Broken the F%$#ing Post Office!

Most of the postal services in Europe have stopped shipping parcels to the United States, as have Japan, Australia, and Taiwan.

In addition, shipping giant DHL has suspended shipping parcels as well.

In most cases this only applies to their lower cost shipping services from commercial entities, typically items from private people listed as gifts are still being shipped.

The customs process has become too much of a headache.

You have to f%$#-up hard to kill postal service without resorting to armed conflict.

About Those Tariffs

The Producer Price Index rose by 0.9% in July.

That annualizes out to about an 11% inflation rate, though it should be noted that this is only 1 month of data.

I'm more pro tariff than a lot of people, I believe that friction in international commerce and international finance is a good thing because it provides stability and prevents destructive capital flows. (I take the term "Destructive Capital Flows," from Keynes.) 

That being said, tariffs drive up costs.  That's as close to a fact as you can find in economics.

The question is, or should be, whether the additional costs create any societal benefit, and if so, is the benefit worth the cost.

Wholesale prices rose far more than expected in July, providing a potential sign that inflation is still a threat to the U.S. economy, a Bureau of Labor Statistics report Thursday showed.

The producer price index, which measures final demand goods and services prices, jumped 0.9% on the month, compared with the Dow Jones estimate for a 0.2% gain. It was the biggest monthly increase since June 2022.

Excluding food and energy prices, core PPI rose 0.9% against the forecast for 0.3%. Excluding food, energy and trade services, the index was up 0.6%, the biggest gain since March 2022.

To quote Bette Davis, "Fasten your seat-belts; it's going to be a bumpy night." 

An Ignored Truth

In the discussions of tariffs and international trade, something that is frequently ignored is that the trade regime of the 80s, 90s, and particularly the 2000s did actually result in large numbers oi job losses.

When one looks at things like the GATT, later the WTO, and to an even greater extant WIPO, it becomes clear that the so-called "Free Trade" deals of that era were neither about freedom nor trade.

Instead, they were orgies of self-dealing and political lobbying, with the interests of labor ignored for the benefit for the interests of international finance. 

It's all about one countries negotiating deals that benefit their particular brand or rent-seekers. 

The goal was to create greater inequality through labor arbitrage.

There are claims that it was all due to productivity increases, but this growth was pitiful compared to earlier times.

I had a couple of people ask me what I thought of this NYT piece on trade and manufacturing from last week. The piece makes some valid points, but it continues to push the elites’ big lie, that trade was not the major factor in the collapse of manufacturing employment in the 00s.

It makes this point explicitly:

Take manufacturing. Of the six million factory jobs erased during the 2000s, Chinese imports accounted for about one-sixth of the losses, or a million jobs. But the other five million were killed off by other forces. 

The other forces are supposed to be productivity growth and the shift from goods consumption to service consumption. There is a big problem with these alternative explanations. We had productivity growth forever. We also have been seeing people shift from goods consumption to service for a long time. It did not just begin in the 00s, or end there. But the job loss in manufacturing did.

As can be seen, there are cyclical ups and downs throughout the whole period, but the only time we saw widespread job loss outside of a recession was in the 00s. It seems a bit fantastical to think that productivity growth and a shift to service consumption cost us 40 percent of manufacturing jobs in this decade when the trade deficit exploded, but not in the decades before or in the last fifteen years, when employment in the sector has been on a modest upward trend.

You can read the rest. 

The reason that our economy, and our society, feel so out of whack is because the haves have increasingly crafted a system which is designed to allow them to loot the have nots.

A lot of this is the outgrowth of the DMCA, signed into law in the 1990s, not the safe harbor provisions, but the anti-circumvention provisions, which created an orgy of rent seeking and speculation that drove out building and investment.

Trump is a symptom of this, not the disease. 

 

And the Spanish Armada Gets Boned Again

According to reports from El Pais, (translation here) the Spanish government is ending its plans to buy the F-35 from the United States.

Instead, it will buy some European fighter aircraft instead, most likely the Eurofighter Typhoon or the in-development Future Combat Air System.

This is a problem for Spain's aircraft carrier, the Juan Carlos, since it is a STOVL carrier, with a ramp in the front and no arresting gear, and as it stands now, it will not be able to maintain its AV-8B Harriers much longer.

In order to accommodate something like the Rafale-M, they would need to add an arrester gear and angled flight deck, which is a significant rebuild.

The purchase of F-35 Lightning II aircraft, the fifth-generation American stealth fighter, for the Spanish Armed Forces has been definitively shelved, according to a report published by the Spanish newspaper El País, citing government sources.

Preliminary contacts that had already begun have been suspended indefinitely. Although the government approved a 10.471 billion Euro plan last April and has committed to spending 2% of its gross domestic product (GDP) on security and defense, the decision to invest 85% of these funds in Europe is considered incompatible with acquiring an American aircraft.

………

Spain’s defense ministry never moved beyond a non-binding RFI (Request For Information) for the Lightning II. The 2023 budget even penciled in 6.25 billion Euro for “replacement aircraft for the AV-8B and C-15M, phase 2” (in other words, the Navy’s Harriers and the Air Force’s remaining F-18 Hornets). Looks like those plans are now scrapped.

That leaves the Armada (Navy) in a corner. The AV-8Bs are expected to be retired by 2030, and extending their service is no longer realistic: the aircraft are aging, and with both the USMC and Italian Navy phasing theirs out (and replacing them with the F-35B), Spain would be left as the only operator, facing a vanishing spares market. The only viable STOVL replacement is the F-35B. Passing on it would mean the Juan Carlos I loses its fixed-wing fast jet capability and reverts to helicopters only.

Spanish Armada has a problem.

Maybe they could license the Yak 141 from Russia.

Interesting Tech

A South African has initiated a program to make rhinoceros horns radioactive in an attempt to thwart poachers.

This is extremely low levels or radiation, but it's enough that it can be detected in a shipping container using already in place equipment designed to prevent nuclear weapon proliferation. 

A South African university has launched an anti-poaching campaign to inject the horns of rhinoceroses with radioactive isotopes that it says are harmless for the animals but can be detected by customs agents.

Under the collaborative project involving the University of the Witwatersrand, nuclear energy officials and conservationists, five rhinos were injected in what the university hopes will be the start of a mass injection of the declining rhino population, which they are calling the Rhisotope Project.

Last year, about 20 rhinos at a sanctuary were injected with isotopes in trials that paved the way for Thursday’s launch. The radioactive isotopes even at low levels can be recognised by radiation detectors at airports and borders, leading to the arrest of poachers and traffickers.

Researchers at Witwatersrand’s Radiation and Health Physics Unit said tests conducted in the pilot study confirmed that the radioactive material was not harmful to the rhinos.

 Kewl.

It's Thursday ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So, both the initial unemployment claims and the continuing unemployment claims numbers were flat this week.

The former is at an OK level, and the latter is at a very much not OK leve.l 

Meanwhile, the Fed's Open Market Committee kept interest rates unchanged, as predicted, unleashing a storm of whining from Donald Trump, and rose at a robust 3% annual rate in the 2nd quarter, but this number, much like the contraction seen in the 1st quarter fall in GDP are likely more a response to the incoherence of Trump's tariff policy than anything else.

I have no clue what this all means. 

Gee, You Think?

Gee, who could have known that among the wretched hive of scum and villainy that is the trump administration, at least one of them would be making a profit on inside information about Commander TACO's flip flops.

Of course they are: 

………

Front-running is a trading term. It means using fore-knowledge of an impending trade or price move to engage in a personal or proprietary securities transaction in advance of that trade or move. If you know in advance that a price will move sharply, either up or down, front-running means trading in advance of that move, then getting out after the move is complete.

You can make a lot of money if you know what the market will do. Using advance, non-public knowledge of a market-moving transaction or announcement is usually illegal (unless you’re a member of Congress; I mean that literally). 

With that in mind, note this:

Nothing to see here.  Move along.

Vibes? F%$#ing Vibes?????

According to Rolling Stone, there was no intelligence indicating that Iran was attempting a nuclear weapons break-out, nor that such an activity was authorized in any way, and so, "Trump’s Attacks on Iran Were Based on Vibes. 

Given that Trump is now calling for regime change in Iran, despite earlier claiming that there was no intent to cause regime change and that they wanted to resume negotiations:

President Donald Trump on Sunday called into question the future of Iran’s ruling theocracy after a surprise attack on three of the country’s nuclear sites, seemingly contradicting his administration’s earlier calls to resume negotiations and avoid an escalation in fighting.

“It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change???” Trump posted on social media. “MIGA!!!”

The posting on Truth Social marked something of a reversal from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Sunday morning news conference that detailed the aerial bombing.

“This mission was not and has not been about regime change,” Hegseth said.

I can think of no better reason for Iran to feel a need for nuclear weapons than the above.

Rather unsurprisingly, the Iranian parliament voted to close the Strait of Hormuz, the critical waterway through about ⅕ of the world's oil passes.  

While that vote has no force, the actual decision would be made by the Iranian Supreme National Security Council, it is a significant step, and one which does not bode well for energy prices or the world economy.

It really is amazing just f%$#ing incompetent these guys are. 

The Fed Punts

Economists and financiers can deal with risk.  What they cannot deal with is uncertainty.

The former gives you at least a rough percentage chance of what might happen, while the latter case means that you have no idea what would happen.

An example of uncertainty would be a if we had an impulsive, petulant, narcissistic, and possibly senile person running US trade policy, for example.

It's a good thing that we don't have THAT in the United States, otherwise, the Federal Reserve might look at this uncertainty and hold off on rate cuts. 

Oh, wait, the Fed did look at this uncertainty and hold off on rate cuts. 

Funny, innit? 

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell projected confidence when he insisted the central bank was in a good position to handle whatever the economy does next—all while repeatedly acknowledging the Fed has little idea what’s actually coming.

The Fed is trying to see how the dust will settle from the aftereffects of President Trump’s April 2 “Liberation Day” tariff announcements, among other policy changes. Most economists expect tariffs to lift prices over the coming months, and that is a worry for the Fed because officials still don’t feel as if they completely vanquished inflation after a three-year-long fight.

“We haven’t been through a situation like this, and I think we have to be humble about our ability to forecast it,” Powell said.

Inflation has eased recently, but tariff effects loom. The job market shows hints of softness, though unemployment remains low at 4.2%.

We are f%$#ed.

Of Course They Did

What a surprise.

Because they knew that Donald Trump was going to announce insane tariffs, and that this would crash the market, senior administration officials dumped stock before Trump made his announcement.

Corrupt insider trading by Trump officials?  

Well knock me over with a Pennsylvania Railroad's class Q2 steam locomotive!

The week before President Donald Trump unveiled bruising new tariffs that sent the stock market plummeting, a key official in the agency that shapes his administration’s trade policy sold off as much as $30,000 of stock.

Two days before that so-called “Liberation Day” announcement on April 2, a State Department official sold as much as $50,000 in stock, then bought a similar investment as prices fell.

And just before Trump made another significant tariff announcement, a White House lawyer sold shares in nine companies, records show.

More than a dozen high-ranking executive branch officials and congressional aides have made well-timed trades since Trump took office in January, most of them selling stock before the market plunged amid fears that Trump’s tariffs would set off a global trade war, according to a ProPublica review of disclosures across the government.

All of the trades came shortly before a significant government announcement or development that could influence stock prices. Some who sold individual stocks or broader market funds used their earnings to buy investments that are generally less risky, such as bonds or treasuries. Others appear to have kept their money in cash. In one case unrelated to tariffs, records show that a congressional aide bought stock in two mining companies shortly before a key Senate committee approved a bill written by his boss that would help the firms.

Corrupt bastards.

It Does Seem to be Constitution 101

The U.S. Court of International Trade has ruled that Donald Trump lacks the authority to imposed tariffs, which does seem to be a rather straightforward reading of the Constitution, which very clearly assigns taxing authority to Congress.

A panel of federal judges on Wednesday blocked President Trump from imposing some of his steepest tariffs on China and other U.S. trading partners, finding that federal law did not grant him “unbounded authority” to tax imports from nearly every country around the world.

The ruling, by the U.S. Court of International Trade, delivered an early yet significant setback to Mr. Trump, undercutting his primary leverage as he looks to pressure other nations into striking trade deals more beneficial to the United States.

Before Mr. Trump took office, no president had sought to invoke the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a 1977 law, to impose tariffs on other nations. The law, which primarily concerns trade embargoes and sanctions, does not even mention tariffs.

But Mr. Trump adopted a novel interpretation of its powers as he announced, and then suspended, high levies on scores of countries in April. He also used the law to impose tariffs on products from Canada and Mexico in return for what he said was their role in sending fentanyl to the United States.

Yeah, great job normalizing bat=sh%$ insane and clearly unconstitutional behavior.

The decision has been stayed by the appellate court, which is not a surprise, as this is clearly going to the Supreme Court, where the results should be a slam dunk for the opponents of the tariffs, if one assumes that the justices are neither corrupt nor political partisans.

Of course, since 6 of the current Justices are corrupt political partisans, so I'm not sure as to the likelihood of an honest ruling.

TACO

There Can Be Only One Taco 

It appears that Trump has picked up a nickname among the Wall Street types, "TACO," which stands for, "Trump Always Chickens Out," and Donald is experiencing major butt-hurt over this.

It may be petty to be so amused by this, but I'm a pretty petty guy:

President Trump, it would seem, is not one for a “TACO.” The taco in question is not a dish made with tortillas, but rather a reference to how markets are responding to his tariff policies.

The TACO trade, short for Trump Always Chickens Out, is a tongue-in-cheek term coined by the Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong. It has been adopted by some analysts and commentators to describe the potentially lucrative pattern in which markets tumble after Mr. Trump makes tariff threats, only to rebound sharply when he relents and allows countries more time to negotiate deals.

The president has spent years cultivating a reputation for political muscle. So when he was asked by a reporter in the Oval Office on Wednesday whether the term might be a valid description of his approach to tariffs, Mr. Trump reacted with ire.

“I chicken out? I’ve never heard that,” he said. “Don’t ever say what you said,” he told the reporter. “That’s a nasty question. To me, that’s the nastiest question.”

Awww, Trump has his feelings hurt.

What a delicate snowflake. 

A Pissing Contest, and the Rest of Us Need Umbrellas

In response to threats by the United States to sanction any entity that purchases Huwaei chips, the PRC has announced that any entity involved in such activities will be subject to criminal sanctions under Chinese law.

Needless to say, it's going to be the rest of us that suffer as a result of this:

China said it could take legal action against anyone enforcing US restrictions on using Huawei Technologies Co.’s AI chips, escalating a dispute that’s upset a tentative truce on tariffs.

“China believes that the US abuses export controls to contain and suppress China, which violates international law and basic norms of international relations,” the Commerce Ministry in Beijing said in a statement on Wednesday, adding that this hurt the country’s development interests and companies.

“Any organization or individual that implements or assists in the implementation of US measures” would be subject to the Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law and “and must bear corresponding legal responsibilities,” the ministry said.

The statement comes a day after China said the Trump administration undermined recent trade talks in Geneva because it warned that using the Huawei semiconductors “anywhere in the world” would violate US export controls.

I'm rather unclear on how a Chinese company exporting domestically manufactured chips to another country would violate US sanctions, there is no US involvement here, but this does seem to be the norm for US foreign policy over the past few decades.

Rather unsurprisingly, the US response was to backtrack:

The US Commerce Department has changed its wording to say the agency was issuing guidance about the risks of using China’s “advanced computing ICs, including specific Huawei Ascend chips,” removing the “anywhere in the world” reference. The formal guidance, dated May 13, says using Huawei’s Ascend chips “risks” violating export controls.

Over the past few years, China has established a legislative framework to push back against US unilateral sanctions, and given the current environment, where the Trump administration is literally putting tariffs on islands inhabited entirely by penguins, it seems to me that a significant portion of the world is likely to take China's side on this.

This is f%$#ed up and sh%$.