The story of Donald Trump’s summit in Beijing is, at its core, a story about big money.
At Davos in January, after Wall Street’s senior figures helped persuade the president to shelve his Greenland annexation plan and smooth relations with America’s European allies, I shared an analysis with my LinkedIn network—150,000 members drawn from private equity, hedge funds, and alternative investment—that made a straightforward case: with Greenland off the table, a full decoupling of the American and Chinese economies was simply not something capital markets could survive. The arithmetic is brutal. EU macroeconomic growth of $10 trillion between 2015 and 2025, combined with $12 trillion of US growth over the same period, amounts to barely 30% of what the US stock market gained ($44 trillion) and the federal debt expanded ($20 trillion) during those years. (Source) For the first time, that calculation was laid out plainly for the people who run Wall Street.
The implication is equally stark. If US equity and bond markets cannot be underpinned by resource acquisitions in Greenland, Venezuela, Iran or elsewhere, and if America simultaneously decouples from—or enters military conflict with—the fastest-growing economies across the Western Pacific, Central Asia and Southeast Asia, a market collapse is not a tail risk. It is the direct consequence. That is the genuine logic behind Wall Street’s enthusiasm for a Beijing summit, and it explains why Larry Fink of BlackRock, David Solomon of Goldman Sachs, and a delegation of seventeen US financial and technology giants were present in the Chinese capital, in direct defiance of the China hawks who dominate Capitol Hill. Their message to Washington’s foreign-policy establishment was unambiguous: any severance of ties between the two economies—now or in the future—will be resisted by the capital interests that underwrite American high technology and finance. It will not be tolerated.
The president’s own financial interests run in precisely the same direction. New disclosure filings with the Office of Government Ethics reveal that Trump recorded more than 3,700 transactions in the first quarter of 2026 alone, including substantial positions in Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta. The total value of those transactions is estimated at between $220 million and $750 million, according to Reuters. His business model has always been to align his interests with those of mainstream capital—and on China, those interests now converge completely.(Source)
Trump has also developed, through decades in real estate, a straightforward admiration for Chinese manufacturing. He believes, not without basis, that the mainland’s real economy delivers better value than Western manufacturing in aggregate. Managing Washington’s political class in the service of his own inner circle is, for a two-term president who has the Supreme Court functioning as a personal shield against liability, a manageable exercise. Eric Trump and his wife joined the Beijing delegation.
There are electoral calculations layered on top of the financial ones. A successful summit plays well with the older, middle-income voters who form MAGA’s backbone. Among younger, educated Americans—a demographic whose view of China has been substantially shaped by platforms such as Xiaohongshu and TikTok—hostility to engagement with Beijing is limited. And beyond any single election cycle, the strategic direction is clear enough: the Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds that represent Trump’s most important sources of external financial patronage are themselves increasingly oriented toward Beijing. Antagonising China would be, on every timescale that matters to this president, counterproductive.
On substance, the summit produced studied ambiguity on Taiwan. Speaking aboard Air Force One, Trump confirmed that Xi had expressed his opposition to Taiwanese independence. “I heard him out. I didn’t make a comment. I made no commitment either way.” He told Fox News he was not looking for Taiwan to declare independence, and told reporters he had yet to decide on a major congressional arms sale to Taipei that awaits his signature. “I will make a determination,” he said. “But the last thing we need right now is a war that’s 9,500 miles away.”
Xi Jinping has accepted an invitation to visit Washington in September. For the financial establishment that engineered this rapprochement, that is the only outcome, smoothly delivered by the president in Beijing, that matters.