Fear Of Economic Collapse Forced China To Negotiate With Trump, Quietly Reach Out First: Reuters Report

Three weeks ago, when we first reported that as a result of the ongoing Trump trade war with China, "chinese factories are shutting down, laying off workers", we said that as a result of this war of attrition in which the outcome of every incremental clash and battle will be used just as aggressively for media propaganda, "the fact that any marginal pain will be amplified as trade war weakness will mean that Beijing will do everything in its power to prevent the full extent of the shutdowns from being revealed."

Sure enough, last week the WSJ reported that whereas "not long ago, anyone could comb through a wide range of official data from China... then it started to disappear." 

We detailed the unprecedented disappearance of Chinese "data", fake as it traditionally may have been, earlier this week. But while we had our theories why China quietly vaporized hundreds of data sets - naturally one wouldn't be deleting the data if it was good, or could at least be massaged in a credible way - it was not until today when a Reuters report confirmed what we said from day one, namely that in the long run China's economy has more to lose than the US, where the hit would be faster but would focus primarily on the market, and once the initial selloff shock wears off leverage would swing to benefit the White House.