The U.S. and China are calling a 90-day truce in their trade war, temporarily lowering tariffs on each other from eye-wateringly high levels.

The sharp climb-down well exceeded market expectations, with investors rushing back into Hong Kong and New York-listed stocks. U.S. levies on most Chinese imports will be reduced to 30% from 145%, while the 125% Chinese duties on US goods will drop to 10%. “Neither side wants to decouple,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday after a weekend of negotiations in Geneva.

It’s a huge relief for small businesses and millions of workers on both sides of the Pacific. But it’s also a sign that despite their strongmen image, President Donald Trump and his counterpart Xi Jinping are not without common sense. With prohibitive levies that would essentially lead to a complete embargo, the world’s two biggest economies are hurting.

In China, while people support Xi’s hardline stance to “fight to the end” on trade, many are genuinely worried about how to make a decent living in an already weak economy. Apparel, for instance, is the third-largest category of US imports from China, after communication devices and electronic equipment. This sector happens to be labor intensive. About 16 million jobs could be at risk thanks to Trump’s tariffs, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. estimates.

How to help those that might fall out of work is becoming a big fiscal and social issue. The government’s unemployment insurance covers about 244 million. In the first quarter — even before Trump ignited his second trade war — payouts to the jobless rose by a whopping 22.4% to 46.5 billion yuan ($6.4 billion). In a sign of more trouble to come, the April PMI reading on new export orders plummeted to a three-year low.

Relocating these low-skilled manufacturing workers into services won’t be easy. Some of the popular gigs are already getting crowded. Last year, the number of ride-hailing drivers jumped by 27% to 38 million, while their compensation fell. In other words, China’s entire 425-million-strong blue-collar class will feel the heat regardless of whether their line of work is directly exposed to trade wars.

The future for many American workers also looks grim. For a president who boasts about creating millions of jobs, Trump is steadily destroying a healthy labor market with his maximalist approach on tariffs. In the US, small businesses account for almost 80% of job openings. Unlike big corporations such as Apple Inc., they have fewer operational levers to pull, often relying on a handful of overseas suppliers. For them, switching production to other countries such as India is an impossible ordeal. As such, if Trump’s 145% tariff lingered, they would have to lay off workers.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that this 90-day truce can hold. A mercurial Trump could change his tone at anytime, to stage manage the exceptionally tough-on-China image he fostered on the campaign trail. Meanwhile, a stubborn Xi might dig his heels in, having vowed to “never kneel down.”

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But the fact that there’s an agreement of this scale after just a weekend of face-to-face talks shows that both sides want an off-ramp. Trump does seem to heed negative public opinion polls, despite calling them fake news. And Xi may not want to remind citizens of the last time he refused to budge: As the iron-fisted politician who locked down Chinese cities despite public outcries against the government’s unscientific COVID-Zero policy.

This 90-day truce is a good start.

Shuli Ren is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Asian markets. A former investment banker, she was a markets reporter for Barron’s. She is a CFA charterholder.

David Souter, the former U.S. Supreme Court justice who died at 85 on Thursday, was sometimes mistakenly thought to have turned into a liberal after being nominated by President George H.W. Bush on the expectation that he would be an ideological conservative.

History will show the opposite: Souter was among the most consistent, principled justices ever to have sat on the Supreme Court in its 235-year history. His jurisprudence was steeped in the value of precedent and the gradual, cautious evolution of the law in the direction of liberty and equality.

Strength, modesty, restraint

A New Englander to the core, he said what he meant and meant what he said. At a moment of unprecedented threat to the rule of law, Souter’s career stands as a model of judicial strength and resilience tempered by modesty and restraint. If the court follows his example, the Republic will survive even the serious dangers it is facing now.

At his confirmation hearings, relics of another time, Souter spoke openly of his admiration for Justice John Marshall Harlan II, known for his explanation that constitutional liberty is derived from a “tradition” that “is a living thing” and cannot be “limited by the specific guarantees” of the text.

The key to Souter’s judicial philosophy was the idea, derived from the common-law method of precedent and also linked with the conservatism of Edmund Burke, that the rule of law works best to protect us when it proceeds by slow steps attuned to social change, not by leaps forward or backward that produce backlash and end up rejected.

Move slowly, don’t break things

The most famous expression of Souter’s precedent-based view came, with characteristic modesty, in a joint opinion that he co-wrote with Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy in the 1992 case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The Casey decision upheld the abortion right laid down in Roe v. Wade on grounds of stare decisis, respect for precedent, even as it distanced itself from Roe’s logic.

The justices explained that overturning Roe “would seriously weaken the court’s capacity … to function as the Supreme Court of a Nation dedicated to the rule of law.” In a sentence that exemplifies Souter’s complex-yet-subtle style, the justices wrote that the court’s power lies “in its legitimacy, a product of substance and perception that shows itself in the People’s acceptance of the judiciary as fit to determine what the Nation’s law means and to declare what it demands.”

Broken down into its component parts, what this all-important passage means is that the Supreme Court can only protect the rule of law if it is perceived as legitimate by the people. That is because the people are the ultimate authors of the Constitution and are ultimately responsible for making sure it is followed. Judicial legitimacy, for Souter, comes from the judicial method, which is to move slowly and not break things.

Breaking of precedent

The conservative majority of the current Supreme Court rejected this logic when it overturned Roe, and with it, Casey. That breaking of precedent weakened the court’s legitimacy, as Souter predicted it would. Now that same Supreme Court must rely on its weaker legitimacy to stand up to save the rule of law.

Souter would have an answer: The court can and must return to precedent, because that body of judicial opinions going back in time is the only basis on which the court can rely when saying that its interpretation of the Constitution is best. The court cannot and must not insist that its interpretation is correct because it is certainly or objectively true. Rather, the weight and legitimacy of the court’s interpretation of the Constitution comes from its acknowledgment of its own uncertainty.

That is a complicated thought, but it is the essence of Souter’s profound insight into constitutional judgment. In a commencement address he gave at Harvard University after retiring from the court, Souter rejected the false certainty of originalism, which he ascribed to the false aspiration to certainty. Where he differed from the originalists like the late Justice Antonin Scalia, he said, was in Souter’s “belief that in an indeterminate world I cannot control it is possible to live fully in the trust that a way will be found leading through the uncertain future.”

The justices must interpret “constitutional uncertainties” by “relying on reason that respects the words the framers wrote, by facing facts, and by seeking to understand their meaning for the living. He concluded: “That is how a judge lives in a state of trust.” The trust, in other words, comes not from inherent certainty but from following the path the living Constitution has followed, a path of evolving precedent.

Continuity with American ideals

Personally, Souter’s self-conception paralleled his philosophy of living tradition. It was sometimes said that Souter was a man of the 18th century. That was almost, but not precisely, correct. He abjured technology and lived much of his adult life in a centuries-old family farmhouse in Weare, New Hampshire (population 9,092). He worked seven days a week, allowing himself to arrive late in chambers on Sunday morning only because he had attended Episcopal Church. He never wore a coat in Washington, maintaining that it was never cold enough to warrant it, even while standing for hours in the snow awaiting the casket of Justice Harry Blackmun. He ate nothing but an apple and yogurt for lunch, ran miles every day in all weather and loved books as much or perhaps more than he loved people.

Yet in fact, in his mind and in his soul — which were in his case almost the same thing — Souter was, to a remarkable degree, a man of the late 19th century, the time when the ideals and assumptions of the founders’ America ran headlong into modern democracy, modern industry and modern capitalism. His favorite authors, whose literary style influenced his distinctive judicial opinions, were the novelist Henry James (1843-1916) and the historian-statesman Henry Adams (1838-1918). He wrote his senior essay as a philosophy undergraduate on the thought of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841-1935); he was awarded his degree summa cum laude for it before going off to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.

Like those great American thinkers, Souter devoted himself to trying to figure out how to maintain continuity with the ideals of the American past while acknowledging vast discontinuities in contemporary reality. If, in the distant future, his own diaries become public, I expect those who have the privilege of reading them will marvel  at the similarity of the intellectual and spiritual challenges faced by James, Adams, Holmes and Souter, born a hundred years later than the foundational figures with whom he identified.

‘Clerking for Souter was the privilege of a lifetime’

Clerking for Souter was the privilege of a lifetime. His kindness, his charm and his elegance of character were all palpable beneath the formidable facade of New England reserve. Sitting in his office exchanging ideas and stories with him, as the light faltered, I knew, as I have rarely known anything before or since, that I was in a chain of transmission that went back to the Puritan fathers who were his literal ancestors and my metaphorical ones.

He was the best and wisest man I have ever known.

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People.”

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Minnesota’s job data were effectively flat for April, with the state losing a net 1,300 jobs and the unemployment rate rising one-tenth of a percentage point to 3.2%, the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development said in a release Thursday.

The state’s unemployment rate compares with 4.2% nationally. Nearly 3,300 people joined the state labor force in the month. The state’s labor force participation rate is 68.2%, compared to 62.6% nationally. This measures the number of people working or actively seeking work as a percentage of the population.

“Overall, Minnesota’s jobs market continued to show strength in April, with a favorable unemployment rate and an active and growing labor force,” said DEED Commissioner Matt Varilek in the release.

Mass layoff announcements from the federal government or other employers are not reflected in this data, DEED said, because a job decline will not appear until employees are actually off payroll.

Minnesota wage growth in April rose 5.6% over the year, more than double the rate of inflation.

Of alternative measures of unemployment, the broadest, called the U-6, dropped to 6.8% in April, from 6.9% in March and 5.4% a year ago, DEED said. This measure factors in people who have voluntarily left the labor force, such as stay-at-home parents, discouraged workers who have stopped seeking jobs, and part-time or otherwise marginally employed workers.

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Minnesota state trooper Jeremy Francis Plonski now faces a four-count federal indictment charging him with producing and distributing child pornography that state charges say involves an infant.

Plonski, 29, of Shakopee, was initially charged May 1 in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis by criminal complaint with one count of producing child pornography. He was charged in Scott County District Court the next day with first-degree criminal sexual conduct of a minor.

Jeremy Francis Plonski (Courtesy of the Sherburne County Sheriff’s Office)

Plonski was indicted on the four counts Thursday, and he remains jailed ahead of future hearings.

The federal charges remains sealed from public view; however, the state criminal complaint provides details into the related cases.

FBI special agents in Houston on April 30 began forensically analyzing a cellphone in an investigation into child sexual abuse materials. Federal law enforcement identified Plonski as the suspect and found several videos of him sexually assaulting an infant girl.

Plonski told law enforcement he sent four or five videos of him sexually assaulting the infant in his home to someone he met on the social media application Kik in 2022. He said after recording and sending the “four or five” incidents, “which he believed was sometime in 2022,” he “ceased all sexual contact with victim and has not touched her since,” the complaint says.

Plonski became a state trooper in 2022 and is on leave, with an internal affairs investigation underway.

He faces a mandatory minimum of 15 years in federal prison if convicted, according to prosecutors.

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