This is CBS Eye on the World.

Here's John Batchelor.

Gordon Chang, I'm Gordon-Gee Chang, my colleague and co-host,

and we go to our guide on manufacturing and trade these last years,

more than a decade now. But here we are in the

arena. Alan Tonelson, who blogs at Reality Check. Alan, I read the CNBC headline. It is most

promising and confusing at the same time. Besant, that's the Secretary of the Treasury,

understood generally as the adult in the room. Besson says he expects, quote, de-escalation, end quote, in U.S. China

terror flight in the, again, quote, very near future. Alan, what the heck does that mean? Good day to you. Hi, John, and hi, Gordon,

and I got to tell you, especially because there's no complete transcript, at least not one that I've

seen, it's really difficult to know what to make of this and related news reports. It could very

well mean that Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary, feels that the Trump

administration is close to some kind of a deal with the Chinese that would lower tariffs.

It also might mean that he's signaling to what seemed to have been a pretty heavily

Wall Street audience that the Trump administration might be ready in some respect to back down.

That would, I think, be very bad news for the American economy.

But even the possibility of a U.S.-China trade deal might be caused for concern if it's not the right kind of deal.

There's been so much focus on lowering tariffs and on getting zero-for-zero-zero-tariff deals

with various countries, including China, that it's been overlooked largely that the non-tariff

barriers that countries like China have erected to stop or to slow down the flow of U.S.

exports can be even more important than with China,

in particular, because these non-tariff barriers are put into place by a very secretive bureaucracy,

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