Welcome to Axis ProRata, a podcast that takes just 10 minutes to get you smarter on the collision of tech business and politics.

I'm Dan Permac. On today's show, Facebook makes even more political enemies and what really happened to Uber's IPO.

But first, trade wars. China this morning announced that it was slapped tariffs on around $80 billion worth of U.S. goods

in retaliation for President Trump's move last Friday to increase tariffs on 200 billion of

Chinese imports.

It's the sort of tit for tat that U.S. business and investors feared, which is why the

Dow Jones Industrial Average is down over 500 points as of this taping.

So for starters, it's important to

understand what a tariff is and what a tariff isn't. These are basically taxes paid

by importers of a product. Now it's possible that the importer will then raise the

price on that product, thus passing the extra costs on the consumers. It's also

possible the importer will simply recognize a smaller profit,

or that the exporter will lower its own price, so the importers made whole, or some combination

of all three. What a tariff is not is a tax paid directly by exporters, let alone from exporting

governments. President Trump has said several times that tariffs have caused China to pay billions

of dollars to the U.S.

Treasury. It's just not true. And given how many times he's been corrected on it, it's pretty

remarkable he keeps spouting it. The question now is if the two sides, China and the U.S., can

actually come together, particularly over issues like intellectual property rights, or if we're

about to fall into a retaliatory spiral that

severely impedes economic growth in both countries. After a year of negotiations, reasons for optimism

are rapidly shrinking. In 15 seconds, we'll go deeper with Axios Markets editor Dionne Reboen. But first,

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