Traders and financial professionals work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) at the closing bell, June 18, 2019 in New York City. U.S. markets surged on Tuesday after President Donald Trump announced that he plans to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping to discuss a trade deal at next week's G-20 summit in Japan.

People in the U.S. farm-belt states know how much their fortunes depend on prompt implementation of the trade deal with China. And so does Wall Street, where the likelihood of the highest investment returns in a decade are riding on a trade truce with America's biggest trade partner.

Even the Germans are cheering up on the possibility that more balanced U.S.-China trade relations could bring similar improvements in trans-Atlantic commerce to prop up Germany's stagnating economy. Berlin's economic strategists think that Washington will have no interest in causing another round of trade problems in an election year.

Germans are also expecting that the U.K. will leave the European Union by the end of next January in a manner that will protect German business interests in a market generating Germany's second-largest (after the U.S.) merchandise trade surplus. Brexit architects, however, may have other ideas, because they apparently wish to position the U.K. as the EU's major competitor.

Washington's extensive use of economic sanctions – a war by other means — is another example of events where markets must reprice assets according to sanctions' expected effects on sales and profits.

The latest example is a sanctions-driven withdrawal last week of one of the key subcontractors from the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline – a large project which would supply natural gas from Russia to Germany and the rest of the EU. The U.S. sanctions have not only created a big political problem between the U.S. and Germany, but they will also hit bottom lines of the project's shareholders consisting of large German, Dutch and French companies.

The situation is particularly difficult in cases where crippling economic sanctions also cause dangerous security side effects.

North Korea and Iran are currently the most prominent examples of that. They are also the cases where international community remains deeply divided with regard to the severity and scope of those countries' curtailed access to world trade and finance.