The short history so far suggests that President Trump is using trade and the threat of sanctions, in effect America's economic power, in order to obtain what he regards as a better deal for America in its relations with the rest of the world. As a deal maker his opening statements will always take an aggressive position, hence the expression from a year ago that we should take him "seriously, but not literally" and it seems like the markets, if not necessarily many in the media, are doing just that.

The recent announcements on steel and aluminium, for example, make a lot more sense when viewed as part of a coercion strategy to get Mexico and Canada, who were far more affected than China, to push through a re-negotiation of NAFTA, and to get South Korea to agree a new bilateral agreement. Interestingly the US has acknowledged that it may well rejoin the Trans-Pacific Partnership if conditions are right and made its statement on steel and aluminium literally a few hours after the "TPP-11" (that is, all partner countries aside from the US) made a number of breakthroughs on service industry-related issues at its recent summit in Peru.

The benefits of specialisation and trade are one of the things that almost all economists agree upon, although not necessarily all politicians do and of course the upcoming US mid-term elections certainly have a role to play in all this. However, in my view much of this is about geo-politics rather than domestic politics.

For example, trade pressure from the US in turn reportedly produced trade pressure from China that appears to have brought North Korea to the meeting table, while trade pressure on Europe and others is being shaped to try and ensure that it is America, rather than China, that "sets the rules" – not so much for the old economy of steel and aluminium, but for the new economy of fintech, cloud computing, AI, biotech and autonomous driving.

AXA Framlington's Mark Tinker puts a lot of the recent volatility in equity markets down to "noise traders". Louie Douvis

China has set out its aims to excel in these areas in its "Made in China 2025" strategy, but as President Trump's new Trade advisor Peter Navarro pointed out in an opinion piece in the Financial Times this week that if China "captures these industries, the US simply will not have an economic future".

This is the heart of the issue: the US wants the "internet of things" to be American, not Chinese. What the US really wants is greater access to the Chinese consumer and the giant US multi-nationals who used to fight off the protectionist tendencies of US politicians are no longer doing so, recognising that they need an aggressive US trade stance to wring concessions from the Chinese.

While the noise traders try and play currencies, commodities and "thematic stocks" like steel and shipping, as equity investors we find that if we listen carefully we can already hear the rhetoric has shifted to tech and services. Importantly the Chinese authorities are more than aware of this and we have already seen from recent statements that the process of opening up access to certain Chinese markets will continue.

This is not a concession – it was already happening. The high profile rhetoric has simply ensured that it continues to do so. For investors a move to a multi-polar world is actually a good thing, particularly from a diversification point of view. As to who will benefit most from the burgeoning Chinese consumer, well we would suggest that will be the investor who picks the best companies, regardless of where they are quoted.

Mark Tinker is head of Framlington Equities Asia at AXA Investment Managers in Hong Kong.