Trump's trade war with China has crippled farmers, consumers and now the tech industry: report

A report by Bloomberg illustrates in hard cold numbers the devastating effect the trade policies of President Donald Trump have had on the national economy-- stretching from the soybean fields of the midwest to Silicon Valley.

According to the report, Trump's tariffs and threats of economic retribution against America's trade partners have crippled the economy as prices have increased -- ultimately hitting consumers in the pocketbook.

While noting that China has also felt the economic pinch from Trump's trade war, the report states that the U.S. is feeling an even larger impact.

"The U.S. was also sideswiped by the trade war. Taxing Chinese-made products raised prices for American consumers and factories alike. A pair of studies by trade economists put the losses to the U.S. economy in the tens of billions of dollars annually," the report states, "And that doesn’t count the impact of Chinese retaliation."

"Chinese tariffs hit American farmers hard, as the country halted most imports of soybeans from the U.S, "Bloomberg adds, noting, "Inventories piled up. U.S. agricultural exports, which had been growing exponentially, started to fall, and farm incomes declined. Desperate farmers appealed to Trump for help, and he responded with a wave of direct payments to farmers. But going on the government dole isn't a sustainable business model, and a wave of farm bankruptcies has begun."

According to the report, investors are is also seeing a dangerous trend linked to Trump in an industry where the U.S. is a world leader: technology.

"The struggle to control the future of high technology is arguably even more important to the balance of economic power between the U.S. and China. And the U.S. may also be losing on this front as well," the report states before making an ominous prediction.

"Export controls will hurt Chinese tech in the short term, but in the long term it could merely push China to accelerate its efforts to replicate and surpass U.S. technology," the analysis concludes. "If China becomes a technological peer, its companies will begin to compete more directly with American ones, as Japanese companies did in the 1970s and 1980s."

You can read more here along with accompanying graphs.