CNBC reports that Trade Representative Jamieson Greer signaled agreements of some kind have emerged from two days of talks between the American and Chinese leaderships. The details, we are promised, will follow on Monday. I have lived long enough — in disposition if not in years — to be suspicious of any bargain whose particulars are kept for a later announcement. A contract read in outline is not yet a contract.

Now, I was never an enemy of trade. Commerce, conducted honestly, is among the most civilizing activities a people can undertake. When a Philadelphia merchant exchanged goods with a London house, both parties were compelled to keep their word or lose their credit — and that discipline was the whole engine of the thing. The question I would put to any trade framework between Washington and Beijing is the same: what is the mechanism of discipline? What happens when one side defects? A maxim I have always believed: a verbal agreement isn't worth the paper it isn't printed on — and a headline without details is a near cousin to a verbal agreement.

Tariffs, I will note, are not free money for the treasury. They are a tax, and like all taxes, they are ultimately paid by someone with a household to manage. The importer pays the duty at the dock; he passes it to the merchant; the merchant passes it to the shopkeeper; the shopkeeper passes it to the family buying tools or cloth or the hundred small necessities of a working life. When diplomats announce relief from tariffs, working families may breathe easier — but only if the relief is real, durable, and not quietly replaced by some other restriction. I mark that as inference on the current specifics, since the details are not yet published.

I spent years as a postmaster and as a diplomat, and I learned that the speed at which information travels determines how quickly a market can correct itself. The announcement that details are coming "Monday" is itself a kind of information management — a deliberate pause that allows certain parties to position themselves before others can react. I do not say this is dishonest; I say it is the ordinary practice of large powers, and the small trader would do well to remember she is not the intended first audience.

My counsel to any working person watching this unfold: do not reprice your inventory, renegotiate your supplier contracts, or make capital commitments on the strength of a headline. Wait for the text. Read it. Ask what the enforcement mechanism is, what the timeline is, and whether the relief is conditional on future behavior by either side. Nations, like borrowers, should be judged not by what they promise in the flush of a successful negotiation, but by what they actually deliver over the following seasons. Patience, in commerce as in science, is its own instrument of discovery.