The long odds of that meeting defusing the conflict between the world’s two largest economies only appear to be getting longer, as both sides ramp up tough talk — and some new punitive actions. No surprise, then, that the Bloomberg story stoked jitters on Wall Street amid an unsettled day in the stock market: The Dow Jones industrial average swung 900 points over the course of the trading session, closing down about 250 points.

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Per Bloomberg, the Trump administration’s announcement of the tariffs — on more than $250 billion of Chinese imports, approximately doubling the value of the goods from that country subject to duties — could come as early as December. That would initiate a 60-day public comment period, setting the tariffs up to take effect in early February. White House press secretary Sarah Sanders declined to comment on the report Monday, saying she wouldn’t get ahead of the Trump-Xi meeting and hopes it goes well.

Trump, in a Monday interview with Laura Ingraham of Fox News, noted he has “$267 billion waiting to go if we can’t make a deal.” The president said he would “like to make a deal right now. I just say they’re not ready.” He declined to assign a probability to striking an agreement with Xi. “I think that we will make a great deal with China and it has to be great,” he said, “because they’ve drained our country.”

Most of this isn’t new. The president has been threatening publicly since June to level a tariffs against nearly the full slate of Chinese imports. That came even before the administration added duties on another $200 billion in Chinese goods to its initial round on $50 billion. And the U.S. is making what the Chinese consider some non-negotiable demands in the trade talks — including changes to core economic policy, such as state support for favored industries as part of its Made in China 2025 plan.

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Prospects for Trump to follow through have climbed in recent weeks though, as his administration increasingly frames its standoff with the regime in Beijing as a matter of national security concerns in addition to commercial ones.

U.S. officials took their latest punitive measure Monday, with the Commerce Department announcing that it is restricting exports to a state-backed Chinese semiconductor maker named Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit Company. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross cited a threat to national security interests, saying the ban would prevent the company from menacing “the supply chain for essential components in our military systems.”

It comes as the administration has adopted a more outwardly confrontational posture toward the Chinese. Vice President Pence, in a major speech earlier this month, issued a sharp critique of what he framed as China’s economic and military aggression. My colleagues David Nakamura and Anne Gearan described it as part of an administration effort “to mark a turn in the bilateral relationship away from cooperation in many areas and toward outright competition.”

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Secretary of State Mike Pompeo underlined the point in a Friday interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. “I think if you go look at President Xi’s stated intentions, you can clearly see that China has a plan that is different from the one that they had five years ago, or even two or three years ago,” he said. Pompeo said the U.S. welcomes commercial competition, but “when China shows up with bribes to senior leaders in countries in exchange for infrastructure projects that will harm the people of that nation, then this idea of a treasury-run empire build is something that I think would be bad for each of those countries, and certainly presents risks to American interests. And we intend to oppose them at every turn.”

(Xi, for his part, last week told his military command overseeing the South China Sea to prepare for any contingency. “It's necessary to strengthen the mission … and concentrate preparations for fighting a war,” Xi said.)

U.S. companies are reporting bottom-line pain from the tariffs already on the books. A number of household names — among them, 3M, Ford, Honda, Honeywell, and United Technologies — project extra costs next year ranging from hundreds of millions to billions of dollars from the levies. More than a third of S&P 500 companies that have reported third-quarter results have discussed tariff fallout. And more than 70 percent of American companies operating in southern China are weighing whether to delay new investments there or relocating altogether, according to a poll by the American Chamber of Commerce in South China.

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American consumers will be next into the barrel. The Trump team designed the first two rounds of tariffs to shield them by targeting intermediate and capital goods. That’s left the stuff that shoppers buy as the bulk of the products the administration would tax with the next round. Ian Shepherdson, chief economist for Pantheon Macroeconomics, estimated the tariffs would constitute a tax hike of about 0.7 percent of GDP, “to say nothing of the cost of the disruption to supply chains.”

Shepherdson argued the certainty of the resulting strain should compel the administration to back off. “As well as being politically dumb, then—what happens to the Trump base if the price of everything at Wal-Mart jumps by 10%-plus overnight?—the policy response to maximum tariffs would bring further pain on the economy,” he wrote in a research note earlier this month. “With stocks likely to tank as the tariffs hit, even without higher rates, it seems to us that broad, high tariffs on imports are the quickest possible route to a recession next year. That's why we think it won’t happen—or if it does, the tariffs wouldn't last long—but we just can't be certain.”

One China watcher said the two sides continue to talk through back channels. Pence could engage in some preliminary negotiations when he travels in Trump’s stead to a pair of summits in Asia next month. Then again, this analyst said, “each day seems to bring a new set of actions, a new set of concerns, so it becomes that much harder to see the two sides, following a single presidential meeting, which probably won’t be terribly long, effectively compartmentalizing and stepping back from the brink.”

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MARKET MOVERS

— Investors expect tech stock swings. The Wall Street Journal's Gunjan Banerji: “Stock investors stung by volatility this earnings season are betting that the tumult in technology shares will continue. Investors are pricing in outsize swings for Facebook Inc., Apple Inc. and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., when the companies release their quarterly results this week. . . . After being the darling stock sector for years, technology names have roiled the broader market several times in 2018. Last week, they dragged benchmark indices into negative territory for the year. . . . ‘The momentum that pulled everything up is pulling everything down’ said Jeffrey Pavlik, chief investment officer of Pavlik Capital Management, who oversees options strategies.”

— Morgan Stanley worries about “cyclical bear.” CNBC's Thomas Franck: “Morgan Stanley disagrees with the rest of Wall Street: The bank's top strategists are gearing up for a much longer bear market while others are betting the sell-off is short-lived. ‘The rolling bear market continues to make progress and there is growing evidence that it is morphing into a proper cyclical bear market in the context of a secular bull,’ wrote Michael Wilson, the bank's chief equity strategist. ‘We think the evidence is building and the message from Mr. Market is clear: the consensus outlook for earnings growth is too rosy next year.’ Morgan Stanley is concerned that actions by the Federal Reserve and other central banks are drying up liquidity more than most market participants predicted, putting stocks in a precarious position.”

Goldman Sachs doesn't. Bloomberg News's Joanna Ossinger: “Goldman Sachs Group Inc., on the other hand, thinks the rout has gone too far. ‘The sell-off appears to have overshot the fundamentals,’ strategists led by David Kostin wrote in a note Friday. . . Goldman’s Kostin isn’t saying everything’s rosy — for instance, he expects U.S. gross domestic product growth to decelerate and says that earnings estimates are too optimistic. But amid the backdrop, he recommends buying ‘quality stocks’ as the cycle matures.”

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— Consumer spending inches up. Reuters's Lucia Mutikani: “U.S. consumer spending rose for a seventh straight month in September, but income recorded its smallest gain in more than a year on moderate wage growth, suggesting the current pace of spending was unlikely to be sustained. The report from the Commerce Department on Monday also showed the increase in income at the disposal of households was the smallest in 15 months and savings dropped to their lowest level since December last year . . . ‘We expect consumption growth to moderate in first half of 2019 as the boost from the tax cuts fades, but in the near term favorable fundamentals are likely to translate into another strong holiday shopping season,’ said Roiana Reid, an economist at Berenberg Capital Markets in New York.”

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TRUMP TRACKER

TRADE FLY-AROUND:

— Trade war tests China's resistance to stimulus. Bloomberg: "China’s attempt to break free from the debt-financed stimulus of the past is being stress tested by Donald Trump. As the White House threatens tariffs on everything the U.S. imports from China, policy makers in Beijing are cushioning the economic blow with tax cuts, regulatory relief and investment incentives, rather than the kind of spending and monetary binge seen in 2008 and 2015. While big bang support can’t be discounted should growth and employment really take a hit, economists for now expect China’s composure to hold, meaning more targeted tax cuts rather than breakneck spending."

The government is considering cutting the tax on car purchases in half to revive a sputtering auto market and prop up an industry that's been damaged by the trade war, Bloomberg reports.

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China could target U.S. tourism. The Post's David Lynch: "Fewer Chinese business executives, tourists and students are visiting the United States, a sign that the trade war between Washington and Beijing might spread in unpredictable and costly ways. The nascent decline — visible in visa approvals and airline bookings — isn’t the result of official action by Beijing. But it highlights a potent weapon that China could use if the trade war persists: slashing the $60 billion that Chinese consumers spend each year on American services such as travel and tourism. Already, 102,000 fewer Chinese people received business, leisure and educational visas from May through September of this year compared with the same period last year, a 13 percent drop, according to State Department statistics."

— U.S. warns Europeans over metal tariffs. Reuters's Tom Miles: “The United States urged European Union governments on Monday to reflect on whether it was really in their interest for the EU to go ahead with a trade dispute over U.S. metals tariffs, and said it was hopeful of settling the issue with Mexico and Canada. U.S. Ambassador Dennis Shea told the WTO’s monthly dispute settlement meeting, which was considering 12 requests for adjudication over U.S. tariffs and related retaliation, that Washington was ‘deeply disappointed’ with the EU’s stance. ‘We would encourage the European countries to consider carefully their broader economic, political, and security interests,’ Shea said, according to a transcript of his remarks seen by Reuters.”

POCKET CHANGE

— BP is awash in cash. WSJ's Sarah Kent: "BP said Tuesday its profit more than doubled in the third quarter, as strong crude prices put Big Oil on track to deliver record levels of cash this year. London-based BP said its replacement cost profit—a number analogous to the net income that U.S. oil companies report—was $3.1 billion in the third quarter, compared with $1.4 billion in the same period a year earlier. Its underlying profits rose to $3.8 billion, a five-year high and roughly a third higher than analysts expected. BP shares were up about 4% in early trading in London. Exxon Mobil Corp. , Chevron Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell PLC are all due to report results later this week."

— Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase change internship recruitment. WSJ's Liz Hoffman: “Two Wall Street investment banks are easing up in the race to hire their most junior employees. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. won’t interview or extend summer internship offers to college sophomores this year and will go back to recruiting students in the fall of their junior year, executives said. . . .

“Fierce competition has pushed the timetable earlier over the past few years. Last year, applications opened at many schools in winter for summer 2019 internships, meaning that sophomores — many of whom hadn’t yet declared a major or taken basic finance classes — were jockeying for jobs that wouldn’t start for more than a year. ‘It’s madness,’ said Barbara Hewitt, who runs career services at the University of Pennsylvania, a major feeder for Wall Street. ‘Everybody I talk to at the banks thinks it has moved too early but nobody has wanted to be the first to pull back,’ for fear of losing top candidates to rivals.”

MONEY ON THE HILL

— Why the GOP likes Maxine Waters. Politico's Zachary Warmbrodt: "Trump has mocked Maxine Waters as a 'low IQ person,' and she has called for the president’s impeachment. But Republicans who work with the California Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee see something different: a rare deal-maker in a polarized Congress. Waters, who would chair the committee if Democrats win the House, has shown a surprising willingness to work across the aisle and with industry groups, even helping to deliver White House-backed legislation to ease regulations and crack down on China...

"To be sure, Waters led the charge against Republican-led efforts this year to roll back post-crisis banking rules, and she has called the GOP’s signature tax reform bill a scam. But her track record on other key issues — as well as pressure she will face from more business-friendly Democrats in what could be a narrowly divided House — has left some lobbyists and Republicans cautiously optimistic about the prospects for getting things done even if the liberal firebrand uses the chair as a platform to attack Trump."

DAYBOOK

Today

The Brookings Institution hosts a debate, titled “Are US and Chinese long-term interests fundamentally incompatible?”, in Washington.

The Peterson Institute for International Economics holds a presentation of the book “Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World” by Adam Tooze in Washington.

THE FUNNIES

— A New Yorker cartoon from Liana Finck:

BULL SESSION

White House on pipe bombs and Pittsburgh: “First thing” media did was “condemn the president.”