It says something when Wall Street trembles at every public statement from the leader of the free world but takes comfort from the general secretary of the Chinese communist party, but that seems to be the current state of the world.

Share prices rose strongly on Tuesday from the opening after Xi Jinping pledged to lower protectionist barriers and to take seriously complaints from foreign companies about intellectual property theft. After last week’s bellicose rhetoric from Donald Trump, this was seen as an attempt by Beijing to reduce the trade tension between China and the US.

Trump, it is hoped, will see Xi’s emollient words as evidence that his tough approach has worked and call victory without imposing threatened tariffs on Chinese goods. Once he has done so, China will remove the threat of retaliation. A tit-for-tat trade war will have been averted.

If this sounds a bit too good to be true, that’s because it probably is. Trump has gone quiet on protectionism this week, but that’s only because his focus has temporarily switched from China to Russia, and from trade to Syria. Wall Street should not see a period of silence from the White House as a sign that peace has broken out.

As Julian Evans-Pritchard, the China expert at Capital Economics, has pointed out, Xi’s concessions were less meaningful than they appeared at first blush, but were really just a bundling together of previously announced – and hitherto undelivered – pledges.

Nor does Xi’s attempt to portray China as the defender of globalisation and free trade in the face of American isolationism and protectionism really stack up. China has higher tariffs than either the EU or the US, is far less open to foreign investment, and operates an economic model weighted deliberately in favour of state-run enterprises.

Xi is operating a two-pronged strategy. Publicly, he is talking the language of conciliation. Privately, reports suggest that he is looking at ways in which a deliberate devaluation of the Chinese currency could counter US tariffs. That suggests that Beijing thinks Trump, unlike Wall Street, might not respond with great enthusiasm to warm words and reheated initiatives. That seems a reasonable assumption.

‘Cheer up, things couldn’t be better’ – Bank of England

The Bank of England thinks it has done a remarkably good job over the past decade. Almost everybody is better off as a result of Threadneedle Street’s low interest rates and quantitative easing programme.

Who thinks so? Why, the Bank of England, of course, which has had enough of carping from pensioners angry at nugatory returns on their savings and young people priced out of the housing market by the asset-price boom stimulated by cheap money. In a speech in Australia, the Bank’s chief economist, Andy Haldane, said the recession would have been deeper and more jobs would have been lost. After marking its own homework, the Bank has decided to award itself 10 out of 10 and a gold star.

Monetary policy often works in subtle ways, according to Haldane, so it is not the fault of voters that they don’t easily grasp just how well they are being served by the Bank. What would help, he added, would be personal monetary policy scorecards that put a cash number on being employed and seeing the value of pensions and property go up. The Bank estimates this to be £23,000 a year for the average household.

Having spent most of his speech explaining why 10 years of loose monetary policy had been good for Britain, Haldane said this should not imply that a tougher stance would be bad. If, in the face of rising inflation, a small increase in interest rates now avoided a bigger increase later, the impact would also be positive.

The conclusion from this is that Haldane is inclined to vote for an increase in interest rates next month. His “Trust us, we know what we are doing” is an attempt to soften up the public for dearer borrowing.

‘The cheque is in the post’ – government

Government action to tackle the late payment of suppliers by big contractors is welcome and long overdue. Whitehall departments are obliged to pay invoices within five days, but according to the commercial law firm EMW, it took one of the top 10 outsourcing firms 31 days on average to pay their suppliers in 2017, up from 29 days in 2016. Carillion took 62 days.

Small businesses will doubtless greet this latest initiative with weary scepticism. They have heard this sort of talk many times before and are still waiting for it be turned into action.