From an outsider’s perspective, it’s difficult to discern any coherent U.S. strategy—assuming one even exists. One day it’s a 145% tariff on China. The next, it’s “Well, it’s still 145%, but Apple and Nvidia are exempted because their stock prices might take a hit.” Then comes a 90-day pause, adding to the confusion.
It’s not clear whether Jamieson Greer is actually steering this, or if any of it was thoroughly thought through.
This is Senator Chris Murphy explaining it’s not economic policy, it’s an attempt to blackmail corporations into submission by making a deal with him in return for sanctions relief.
Keep an eye out for what Apple and nvidia might have agreed to give.
These companies could choose to invest in the US instead and not have to worry about any of this.
Tariffs are only usable as extortion if the companies have outsourced the manufacturing that gutted our middle-class.
Externalizing variables comes with risk. This risk should be factored into planning in the future. Just because a politician in the 90s promised cheap labor through globalization, a president 30 years later can flip the script
The last time tariffs were this high, it led to rampant corruption as companies would pay off customs officers. This was one of the reasons for switching to an income tax. For the current administration this possibility counts as a major opportunity to generate personal wealth.
But this isn't the only reason for the policy. For someone who is at heart a coward, bullying and brandishing raw power over others is its own reward. That reason enough for the policy, and damn the consequences for the nation.
There is also a reason tariffs only get raised on a multi-generational time scale, e.g., 1820s, 1890s, 1930s, 2020s.
The effects are so bad that nearly everyone who remembers the disaster must have died off for anyone to think it is a good idea.
At this point, it is obvious that there is no geo-political or geo-strategic plan of any type. The administration is just winging it, and Sen Murphy's explanation is the only one available.
It was also noted that the person occupying the president's chair said "they must be forced to negotiate". When someone is forced to negotiate, that is not a negotiation, that is extortion. Welcome to another nation run like a mob office.
The ABA endorsed constitutional amendment by tweet when Biden tried it, I dont think they have much credibility left.
The law firm thing was just a way of stroking Trumps ego, they take a fraction of their pro bono budget and put it towards free speech causes and move on.
If every major law firm in the country is required to stroke Trump's ego, where should people get lawyers for cases Trump doesn't think they should win?
If this is an attempt at blackmail it appears to be failing. It's only been a few days and Trump has already unilaterally capitulated on several major positions. Unless he's blackmailing himself, the 'plan' is backfiring.
No, so far we only see the very public capitulations coming from the Trump administration. We're also seeing a lot of signaling, also very public, from every other major economy that they are prepared to move on without the US.
There could have been deals/agreements behind the scenes. This is not a republican "first". The democrats did the same to get Facebook and other social media to censor news. Trump is literally playing their book but with his style.
Anyone who can not see the obvious difference in substance, intent, scope, and scale is either willfully ignorant or seriously lacking in reading comprehension and reasoning skills.
Requesting curbs on rampant disinformation is not even close to the same thing as crashing the economy to extort our closest allies and major business and industry players.
I keep seeing these explanations of “4D chess”. It’s Donald Trump. He has absolutely no idea what he’s doing when it comes to economic policies. Unless you believe he can see into the future of how other world leaders would react and consistently outsmart everyone else, there’s no 4D chess being played.
This isn’t advanced negotiation tactics, it’s mafia style negotiation tactics, which are 100% in character. See the law firms now providing him with 100s of millions in pro bono work to avoid punitive executive orders.
I learned that "4D chess" just means, "I see the 3 dimensions, I can't explain what's happening, but I guess they can, because they have that extra dimension.".
At this point it's something like 100D chess, because 99 levels of "Why?" have been explained by "because they're morons" but the defenders keep believing there's an extra dimension...
What about believing that he's a particularly-easily-manipulated patse (esp. when it comes to things he doesn't care about), and so this is someone else playing 4D chess through him?
For all the accusations of fascism, nobody seems to remember that a key feature of fascism is a corporate-cabal shadow government that legitimizes its activities/policies by puppeteering the "real" government to both execute and justify them.
That was more or less the case during Trump's first administration. I think a lot of normie Republicans were hoping for a repeat of that. The ones that aren't in denial are being gravely disappointed.
hard to attribute to competence what you can attribute to malice. just as law firms are being squeezed for $600 million of services through extortion, this is Mafia mentality as well where first something is held hostage and then negotiated for. given the parties involved, I would even assume that there is personal benefits staked in this, and lots of insider trading of course
Completely agree no 4D chess here. Just a guy that wants to keep the attention on him, one day is kissing Russia's ass, the next day when "peace" is failing, it's tariffs, etc etc no strategy at all, just a show to stay on first page day after day.
No, it's not 4D chess, and neither is extorting companies with tariffs, extorting law firms with threats of executive orders, or hammering universities by withholding funds.
It's all blunt-force checkers that any simpleton with power can easily understand.
Yeah he’s obviously in no state to decide on policy. We don’t know who is running things but it’s not him, a number of factions moving the direction a little bit in their favor whenever they get the opportunity. And of course there is massive insider trading going on too.
How can somebody even entertain the idea is able the hold the concept of Chess, much less 4D, while at the same time being aware he nominated Matt Gaetz for Attorney General...Let that sink in for a while...
"In 2020, Gaetz was accused of child sex trafficking and statutory rape. After an investigation, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) decided not to charge him. In December 2024, the House Ethics Committee released a report which found evidence that Gaetz paid for sex—including with a 17-year-old—and abused illegal drugs during his tenure in the U.S. House of Representatives."
Trump is determined to be remembered by history for his bold moves and "greatness". There is no 4D chess here. There is no such thing as 4D chess.
At best, he's using these tariffs as a temporary means to exert pressure and watching how others respond to them, almost like acting like the crazy man with a gun to make people a little more willing to negotiate terms more favorable for the gunman. At least as a matter of intent, anyway. The actual effect is another matter.
Occams razor. It's Donald Trump, I've known he was a joke since the late 80s. In middle school. Baffling to see millions of people think reality TV is real and give him nuke codes.
It's infuriating to rational thought but watching videos of Trump supporters talking about why they support Trump in spite of him hurting them makes it clear where his support comes from - it's a rainbow coalition of the discontented. Obviously the editors will pick the most provocative videos/sound bites but it's a pretty consistent picture.
co-sign, it's the King's Tax (as Murphy had explained in a different video I watched of his). it's that simple. also it was a giant elephant to make everyone forget that they just exposed an entire military action over Signal in a completely illegal and extremely incompetent way.
About as well known as a politically active Lord would be in the UK. The general public probably doesn't recognize his name, anyone interested in politics does.
He's getting more well known pretty fast, over all this. His explainer videos of what's going on and why it's so dangerous are often kinda boring and basic if you're a politics nerd–but that's great, because we don't need to be told, it's the folks who aren't politics nerds who need to be educated on this stuff.
I think Bernie Sanders is the only current senator I'd expect a random American to know. Murphy might make the top 5 highest profile senators but you wouldn't know him if you don't pay attention to politics at all.
What’s interesting to me is that in this horribly corrupt state of affairs we find ourselves in, there are thousands upon thousands of smaller businesses that are not able to seek redress the way a megacorp like Apple or Nvidia can. Your run-of-the-mill office furniture importer doesn’t have the same ability to book up a dinner and pay the requisite multi-million dollar lobbying fee as a Silicon Valley magnate. In the before times, these folks would form interest groups and lobby Congress as a unified front, but at the moment it seems as though that doesn’t work anymore. It doesn’t take imagination to see a highly noncompetitive, post-capitalist future where only the goods from megacorps are exempted, and the goods from medium sized businesses are taxed to oblivion, destroying any semblance of free markets.
Sorry, but what would have been the consequences of the tariffs on Chinese imports? Do you imagine American citizens having to pay twice or more for an iPhone (or not getting one at all) because of Trump? Not being able to afford a new laptop, because of Trump? Not being able to buy all the cheap consumer electronics, because of Trump? The "blackmail" (except it's simply the consequences of his own actions) goes two ways here- see also the TikTok debacle: or how to explain to hundreds of millions of enraged Americans that they cannot use their favourite social network because of Trump.
The rich have always blamed others for the growing wealth gap.
Americans often point to outside forces instead of holding the government accountable.
Years of messaging have trained people to support tariffs, spending cuts, and even anti-immigrant policies—despite the need for labor.
The real issue isn't spending, it's taxation. And we've let China ignore WTO rules for too long. Trump should've targeted tariffs at China alone—but he is the president, not me.
About 30-40% of the country will stand behind the cult of Trump no matter what he does. With that power, almost every single Republican politician is afraid of getting primaried. Trump has already been impeached twice and it went nowhere.
Which didn't really work since what exactly are US tech companies giving Trump in exchange for eliminating tariffs?
And are only large corporations expected to play? I import shopping bags from Chinese manufacturers from my store, like millions of other small businesses do. What exactly are we supposed to offer Trump?
> And are only large corporations expected to play? I import shopping bags from Chinese manufacturers from my store, like millions of other small businesses do. What exactly are we supposed to offer Trump?
You'll eventually be buying them, for more than you pay now but less than the imported price, from a large US company that bribed whoever Dear Leader is at the time, for exemptions.
This assumes that he has more power than the tech companies on the everyday life and I wonder if that is really the case. As I'm not located in the states, I'm very much interested to hear from a US resident if that is really the case.
The biggest mistake tech companies have done over the past 2 decades is not spending enough money lobbying. Every other industry manages to stay under the radar by continuing to pay both sides. Tech industry never got involved in politics so they were easy targets for politicians on minor issues.
I mean given that they are in tech, the biggest mistake was being located in a city or state. I can understand that they have to deal with the US government (any company anywhere in the world have to deal with it) but they don't have to deal with San Francisco/California. They choose that position and they don't deserve sympathy for being passive about it.
From the perspective of a citizen’s everyday life who sees that their life is getting more expensive and consumes information from a curated essentially list - eg. Instagram, fb etc - from the operator of that platform. I don’t think that the average person in the states - like in my European country - watches tv or buys a newspaper. In this context is the PR and hence effect from the government more than that of the tech companies ?
A tech company can’t shoot me with impunity under “qualified immunity”. Put me in jail, harass me because I don’t look like a belong in my own neighborhood, take my property under civil forfeiture without a trial…
You're right about these most serious adverse outcomes, but don't forget what could happen if you (say) randomly get your Big Tech account locked/suspended/banned for some reason that was ultimately erroneously flagged by an AI, and then cheerfully executed at scale.
The examples you provided are more fundamental and I won't trivialize them, but making you lose your "keys to your own digital space" is a very real power they have over you.
As an American, I regret to inform you that you're trying to use logic to understand a situation where it seems like logic wasn't used (in terms of the economic impact). These are the same fuckwits that tried to claim a trade deficit is the same as a tariff.
I am unsure why anyone would want to change the trade imbalance when you are arguably the richest country on earth. You have a trade imbalance because you are rich and can buy everything you want.
Nobody in onshoring manufacturing with this level of instability in the finances of this country at this time. Trump changes his mind too often to build billions of dollars worth of factories.
The budget deficit is not the trade deficit. You are not taking on debt when you purchase a foreign good, just like you as an individual don't take on debt when you go to Walmart and exchange money for goods but Walmart doesn't buy anything from you.
The US domestic economy is vastly larger than its foreign trade (which is only 20% of America's GDP), so you can in fact run a persistent trade deficit and a budget surplus at the same time, which the US actually did for a while during the 90s and early 2000s. We need to teach more economics honestly.
Sure, but pointing a financial gun at the heads of your creditors will cause them to immediately cease giving you further loans and start selling off the debt they already hold.
This isn’t some analogy.
This is precisely what just happened!
The bond market imploded and less stupid people forced Trump to backpedal.
He’s a child playing with many-trillion-dollar matters. I wouldn’t trust Trump to split a dinner cheque.
You are assuming manufacturing trade as only income. Services export and IP export are other where USA leads. When Apple sells iPhone in India and China, it gets to bring back the profits to the USA. Same goes for EU paying for Netflix and Disney movies and Google services. Same for McDonalds, Starbucks, Coca Cola and Pepsi. Collectively, US companies make 100s of billions of profits from outside USA. Another perk is being the reserve currency, you print bonds for free, get clothes/toys for that and rest of the world is just holding onto that IOU. Again, trillions of dollars.
Are you confusing the budget deficit with the trade deficit? Is that what all this is about?
I spend far more on restaurants, household services, and vehicle maintenance than those companies pay me. I have a massive trade imbalance with those companies.
But that has nothing to do with whether my household budget is balanced.
Do people really think that making goods more expensive for consumers will somehow produce the funds to support even greater tax cuts for billionaires?
> I spend far more on restaurants, household services, and vehicle maintenance than those companies pay me. I have a massive trade imbalance with those companies.
And if, for example, a sales tax was increased this would motivate you to buy less services, make food at home and learn how to fix your car.
Sure. But at the cost of the time that I currently use to do other things.
Are you moving the argument from conflating budget and trade deficits to saying the United States’ multi-century economic focus on consumer spending is a mistake, and we need to shift to a savings-focused economy like China used to be? I also think that’s wrong, but it has nothing at all to do with the federal government’s budget deficit.
Or are you under the mistaken impression that trade income is the only income the country has?
The "smart trumpers" I know have already staked out the entire range of possible outcomes:
1) He is completely restructuring global trade and decoupling us from China which is tough but necessary medicine because our biggest geopolitical adversary cannot be our largest trading partner
2) You can't believe half of what he says, he's all bluster, he's addicted to deals and will sign some fake deals to score a domestic win and we will resume status quo
Thinking the status quo will return so easily is like Putin pulling out of Ukraine and saying "So we're back to 23rd January (Edit/Correction: February) 2022, right, friends?".
The trust in the US (dollar) hegemony has now been eroded, and will probably continue until a purge of the regime of idiots (not just the oust of one idiot...).
No president is going to ride out a self-imposed multi-year global trade reconfiguration triggering inflation, shortages and unemployment.
Nor is putting the genie back in the bottle possible now and so even if you return to status quo trade policy, you've now spooked the world re: reliability of US as partners, US dollar, US debt, etc.
Worst of both worlds really. Incredible self owns over and over.
The goals are petty profit, some extortion, some illegal trading. Destroying 80% of the value of the US isn't meaningful if he gets to own a lot more of the remainder. Everything is profit for the broke real estate conman of 2015.
Right so nothing he is doing is smart or makes sense, and the "smart" people who try to put intellectual scaffolding around his actions get repeatedly disproven by his subsequent actions...
Neither. They're unwilling to concede he's run out of the Kremlin and the chaos and damage is the only purpose. The only reason he backs down on any of it is because he can't afford not to, so he's doing the usual brinksmanship, instructed by whoever's telling him to axe those obscure aviation safety committees (someone has detailed info), and probably hoping he can flee to Moscow at some point.
I don't think he'll be let off the hook, though. He's tasked to ruin us well below 'status quo', even for people diligently not paying attention.
He has a plan, it is called Project 2025. Trump appointed the authors of the Project 2025 plan and they are executing it. Here is the chapter on trade and tariffs, authored by Peter Navarro who is currently Trump's senior counselor for trade and manufacturing.
I'd nominate Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni. As authoritarian "president for life" since 1986, he's demonstrated some savvy statecrafting amid Africa's resource wars and ethnic violence, making the country a point of stability and economic growth on the continent.
(Of course, he's got plenty of negatives on the record too. But I think in the game of "Great Man History", he's already left a big legacy.)
I'm curious as to why you chose Napoleon III. The context under which he rose to power seem quite different from Trump's. America isn't in the middle of a 60-years long revolution/counter-revolution cycle. What are the similarities?
It's far from the only place the policy is incoherent. They fired the top ranking officer at the US base in Greenland for having the temerity to tell their host nation "I do not presume to understand current politics, but what I do know is the concerns of the US administration discussed by Vice-President Vance on Friday are not reflective of Pituffik Space Base."
The plan is to make every country and CEO grovel at the feet of the boss to be exempted from the tariffs. I’d say it’s corruption, but it’s more like a protection racket.
There is no planned strategy. Planning requires learning about entire systems, and Trump isn't smart enough to do that. He can only act on things placed before him. If he sees foreigners making money by selling into the US, he has to raise tariffs on it. There is no second order, third order, or any deeper level of understanding of what's going on. It's purely superficial action, on things Trumps eyes sees, not what his brain sees. There is no brain in there that can predict what would happen if tariffs were raised. He can only raise tariffs.
To be smart is to have systemic understanding, and Trump & the Republicans are incapable of that.
It's exactly what happened in his first term, when he got rid of the nation's pandemic preparedness because why would anyone ever need that, right?
The factories will be disassembling the laptops, taking out the batteries. Then the empty laptops will be sent back to China. That will increase exports to China as well.
That's another patronage angle. When the feds buy Lenovo laptops, they have to comply with TAA. So they ship the laptops to Texas, "materially transform" them, package and ship to the customer.
You can be sure some crony owns the company that screws the display and puts stickers on the laptop with minimum wage workers.
When it comes to global impact, can you even confidently say you're being strategic? It almost feels like staying tactical is the only viable strategy - there are simply too many variables. The chances are high that any strategy you come up with is doomed to fail.
I don't know why people keep expecting Trump to be different than what he has consistently shown us for all these years. There's no subtle plan. There's no long-term plan. He's cranking the levers immediately available to him for the drama, as he has always done.
People around him may have ideas and plans. They can sometimes get him to agree to one of these, but it never lasts long.
I mean, his rich friends made 340 billion in the stock market chaos. So I suspect there is at least a vague plan, but it has nothing to do with anyone but himself and those who support him getting richer. But that's the only plan I think Trump has ever had in his entire life, or will ever have.
Like he's just not that deep. He's an incredibly shallow, inexperienced, dim, incurious old man who has never worked a job in his life, never built anything, never did anything. He arrived on top and his greatest achievement in life was managing to not lose it, in a country where it is specifically very hard to do that.
And hearing his supporters talk about how strong he is is just objectively hilarious. Man looks like 4 steepish flights of stairs would kill him stone dead.
(It appears to be a promotional piece for a "CNBC Titans" episode featuring Trump.)
I try to assume good intent, which includes not writing off the odd things people post as bot-generated, but in this case, attributing this to a bot is quite a positive spin.
Maybe it's a puff piece, but it contains examples of what he did with his life and businesses. You couldn't write an article like that after 2015 or so without it being influenced by his disaster of a political career.
My point is, he didn't just sit on daddy's money, he actually pulled off a couple of savvy moves. There are plenty of other things to criticize him for.
Why would you want an article on someone that excludes context from their most impactful and most visible decade? It's true that an author today, who knows about his 2024 conviction for fraudulently overstating the value of his properties, would bring a much more skeptical eye to claims about what a success they were. Did he seem to be making better deals in 2010 because he was better at it then, or because nobody was looking as closely at whether they were really good?
Because the first guy I replied to claimed Trump never did anything earlier in his life but inherit money, and I wanted to provide examples of how that isn't true.
The Tiffany's transaction definitely happened, and no landowner in Manhattan has left money on the table like that since. As scummy and self-promoting as he is, he changed the real estate market in NY and made some investments that paid off in the 70s and 80s.
I think that puts to rest this idea that he just rested on daddy's money and then lost money on his Atlantic City casinos, or whatever.
(Standard disclaimer that he has always sucked, and maybe he never made a good business move after the 80s.)
Did the Tiffany's transaction definitely happen? Is there any independent verification of Trump's claims that he obtained their air rights under favorable terms because other developers were leaving money on the table?
That's how corruption works in a banana republic. Good things for my friends, hell for everyone else. It is the furthest you can be from free trading capitalism that the US was preaching while it was good for them.
Much like Russia's overnight transition to a market economy in 1991, which opened the door to oligarch pillaging of national resources, 2 successive economic crises and a bond default, and 2 brutal wars in Chechnya.
Something tells me Trump's top economic advisers aren't based in the US, just as Yeltsin's strings weren't being pulled from Moscow.
It makes sense if you understand how Trump became president. He'll test something (through a tweet) to his audience and then amplify or kill it based on the response. It worked great with 50% of the US population or so; it doesn't seem to be working at all with the Chinese political elite.
Things like threatening Canada and Greenland's sovereignty, unilaterally tanking stock markets and levying huge tariffs on western trading partners are not popular with his voters.
What they want doesn't matter anymore, these moves are about splitting the western economic and military alliances, a goal Russia has had since the 1960s.
“Well, it’s still 145%, but Apple and Nvidia are exempted because their stock prices might take a hit.”
That's a massive misread. You are confusing the direction of influence between secondary public stock markets and federal executive orders.
The tariffs are supposed to strengthen self sufficiency, and discourage imports of stuff the US can do on their own.
Chip manufacturing, (which by the way is often only the manufacturing and not the design or IP of the chips), is an exception for whatever reason, may be labour costs, but it may also be that chips are a mineral heavy and diverse product, so it's one of the few products where autarky isn't feasible or very rewarding.
And there would be situations without exemptions where the US may have been incentivized to import the raw materials and rebuild megachip factories, of which there are only like a dozen in the world, creating a huge output inefficiency due to political reasons on two fronts.
To understand this, I think you have to neither overestimate or underestimate Trump and Musk.
Both Trump and Musk seem be to essentially ideologues, visionary tough-talkers, who have actually succeed (or appeared to succeed) to various endeavors through having underling who work to shape their bluffs into coherent plans. This works well for various as long as the delicate balance of competent handlers and loud-mouthed visionaries is maintained.
The problem is the process of Trump winning, losing and then winning again all him to craft an organization and legal framework to put forth he vision uncorrected, unbalanced and lacking all guardrails.
it’s difficult to discern any coherent U.S. strategy—assuming one even exists
The strategy is to keep everyone unsure what might come next.
It's like in boxing. When you hit your opponent and leave them confused and uncertain what you might do next, you use that to your advantage and keep on hitting. It's how you "win."
If Trump has learned anything, it is that the US is a lot easier to bully than others. He is convicted of a felony, he talks down to his own voters, abandons his biggest promises (repealing ACA and building a wall) and they still let him lead the country!
The strategy is to sow fear and uncertainty to drive capital from stocks to government bonds and drive down the bond yield. Bessant is pretty clear about this. Once they get the bond yields down and refinance a lot of the short term debt into longer term debt they free up operating budget. Combine with Elon’s DOGE cutting costs and Lutnick raising some capital from tariffs, and it is a pretty good strategy. I don’t agree with Trump’s policies generally nor am I American, but this is a good short term strategy.
It's not a good short term strategy at all. If that's really the goal, their left and right hands need to have a chat because one of them's going to make the deficit way worse, so if the other's goal is to "free up operating budget" by reducing debt service they really ought to get on the same page, because anything "freed up" is going to be eaten by the other bullshit they're doing.
Besides, this is a wildly expensive way to go about it. The harm to receipts from the economic uncertainty will blow a hole in the federal budget and leave states reeling (to say nothing of the "other hand" making cuts at the IRS, which will also be a net cost)
Great strategy, except its not working. Bond yields are up (probably because foreigners and foreign countries are selling US bonds). DOGE cost cuts are insignificant. Raising capital from tariffs doesn't seem to be working because they're really taxes, and Americans don't like taxes.
This is exactly the strategy but it is failing miserably.
The reason for the pivot was because the 10-30 year yields didn't come down, the price on the 30 year got crushed. The 30 year almost went back to the lows.
There was literally no flight to safety. Completely the opposite.
> I don’t agree with Trump’s policies generally nor am I American, but this is a good short term strategy.
This strategy has failed spectacularly, as bond yields are still up and treasuries are sold like crazy. US treasuries are no longer seen as safe havens. People rather invest in gold or treasuries from other countries which are not led by a corrupt government. Buying US treasuries is now seen as "lending Trump money", and since Trump runs the US economy exactly like he ran his companies, where IIRC he defaulted on debt at least six times, US treasuries are now a rather risky investment.
Can we use Occam's Razor and assume that nobody knows what would be the optimal tariff rates and if you don't have a reliable mathematical model the only choice you are left with is experimentation and A/B tests.
Why is no one highlighting how this is repeating history 8 years ago? I don’t get it, there’s this magical reporting gap where all of this is new strategy but it’s the exact same strategy. Why don’t we acknowledge this instead of searching for some new angle?
The articles you've linked are about threats of 10% to 25% tariffs in the context of active trade negotiations between the US and China. Here, there's an actually imposed tariff of 145% and no talks at all as far as has been reported. It's not the same situation.
The tariffs from 8 years ago were a seemingly rational policy and were largely upheld by the Biden administration.
These tariffs look designed to rapidly eject the US from the global economic order and hand over the reins to China. Though saying they were "designed" at all seems extravagantly generous.
Wow you had these at-the-ready, didn't you. Thanks.
*I've read through a few of these and it seems like perhaps Trump still thinks it's 2018/19, but China's position has only gotten stronger.
It seems the attempt to jack up tariffs so high this time was a bluff to "show" how strong we can be, but he miscalculated on how shaky the stock/bond markets actually currently are and the financial players know we're not in a position to go it alone.
And China knows this and they know they can wait us out. I believe it will be considered a misstep, at best and a catastrophe at worst.
Congratulations! You’ve just realize how journalism doesn’t exist any more (or never really did).
Good luck having a journalist even considering doing historical research about a subject or even stop and put more than 5 minutes into thinking about what they are reporting on.
Seems a bit anti-business to have an unequal playing field just for the star-bellied sneetches. Also silly that those with the biggest piles of capital are getting exemptions when the whole purpose of this exercise is to spur local investment in manufacturing. If anything, small businesses below some threshold of revenue/staff should be getting exemptions.
Do you think all the tech CEO’s attended his inauguration for nothing?
I never imagined I would see such public corruption in any western country. I am saying this as someone who supported some the current administrations agenda
It’s total bullshit. Part of my business involves direct import and that’s now impacted by tariffs. The cherry on top is that what I import is not and cannot be produced in the U.S. I source a number of other products from suppliers in the U.S. and literally every single one of them is impacted by tariffs somehow, whether it’s ingredients, packaging, etc. that comes from somewhere else. Some of my materials originate in the Dominican Republic, which is now subject to a 10% tariff, although it’s more common for others in my industry to source those same materials from China. Now that China is prohibitively expensive, they will be quickly pivoting to other suppliers, which will further drive up prices. Supply chains are in chaos right now.
It burns me up that massive companies like Apple and Nvidia get a free pass while everyone else is subject to the most brain dead economic policy anyone alive today has ever lived through.
The whole thing strikes me as a bunch of nepobaby/fake academic/banker bro advisors who have no idea how the physical world works. As much as I think Musk is a bad actor at this point, talking to him about supply chains would have highlighted how insane this whole plan was from day 1.
My dad is a retired EE who dealt with the 90s offshoring wave and described the process of spinning up offshore production with a new supplier/factor/product as a 1-2 year process.
Now imagine every producer with China exposure trying to do this at the same time dealing with the same limited ex-China options? Nothing was happening in the 90 day pause, let alone before the 2026 midterms or before the end of his reign in 2028.
Complete chaos for American companies who are left with no good options other than try to wait it out, and pass on excess cost to consumers in interim.
It’s pure stupidity and most people don’t even realize it. Last night I met a couple at a country club where I was a guest - one of those $100k/yr places - and they asked me if my trade partners are charging me more with the tariffs. I told them the U.S. government is charging me more with the tariffs and my trade partners are charging me more because the value of the dollar is down. This was the first time anyone told them it’s the importer who pays the tariff and that it will be passed to the customer in multiples to maintain the same profit margin. Man, to be wealthy enough to be a member at a place like that and to be able to live in ignorant bliss… What a life.
It’s not like Caddyshack. At least not this one. There’s golf, tennis, pools, a restaurant, bars, etc. It’s the kind of place where you will see PGA Tour guys hanging around and a few other high profile people. A lot of people are driving cars that cost more than my house. Everyone is pretty chill, but it’s top 1% kind of people in their natural habitat. It’s like a little bubble detached from reality.
Whilst the reason may be singularly obvious to those who consume various forms and sources of media, there's likely enough people that only consume re-published whitehouse press releases and the trump administration probably already has an alternative explanation that they'll use for these increased prices.
And their target market will eat it up and ask for seconds.
Apple has already "committed" to investing in US manufacturing. Also, many companies have committed to AI investments on US soil which would be heavily NVIDIA dependent. Could be a justification for the exemption.
not just a bit, this is so unfair and smells of corruption, only the richest companies getting exemptions, give me a break. this is what organized crime looks like.
That's a funny way of looking at it because the banana republics weren't called that because they were "bananas" or something. They were called that to identify which of those countries had had state and megacorp interference and government toplings, by mostly the United Fruit Company - an American company.
Whatever the banana republics were they were turned into that by the US's doing, so it's funny that now the term comes back home.
People commenting here about Trump corruption are correct, but it's also not new. This is regression to the mean. America has historically been a highly corrupt nation with extreme wealth inequality that occasionally has shocks (e.g. Abolitionism, the Progressive movement, WWII) that allow liberals to take over and purge the system of corruption. If anything, we've had to deal with and defeat (or at least, outlive) smarter and more well-connected fascists than Trump.
I agree and my rationale of it is that it's related to the US dedication to capitalism and thus aversion to any form of socialism (even small pockets that, in my opinion, are evidently positive for society as a whole) as some kind of governmental totalitarianism.
Companies aren’t getting exemptions. The product categories are. The headline is misleading. And while you might already be aware of that, most the people responding to you clearly aren’t.
The result is still that certain companies are getting exemptions for their products while others aren't. And there is no real rhyme or reason behind these decisions
True, yet irrelevant. If Apple imports garlic for it's cafeteria, that will be tariffed. But those commodity categories represent the business of the named companies, and those companies represent the majority of the value of imports to the US in those categories.
8471 ADP (Automatic Data Processing) Machines: PCs, servers, terminals.
8473.30 Parts for ADPs: keyboards, peripherals, printers.
8486 Machines for producing semiconductors & ICs: wafer fab, lithography.
8517.13 Mobile phones and smartphones.
8517.62 Radios, router, modems.
8523.51 Radio/TV broadcasting equipment.
8524 2-way radios.
8528.52 Computer monitors and projectors (no TVs).
8541.10 Diodes, transistors and similar electronic components
8541.21 LEDs
8541.29 Photodiodes and non-LED diodes
8541.30 Transistors
8541.49.10 Other semiconductors that emit light
8541.49.70 Optoelectronics: light sensors, solar cells
8541.49.80 Photoresistors
8541.49.95 Other semiconductor devices
8541.51.00 LEDs for displays
8541.59.00 Other specialized semiconductor devices
8541.90.00 Semiconductor parts: interconnects, packaging, assembly
8542 Electronic ICs
Industrial-scale workarounds were developed for previous tariffs, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43652823. Such loopholes will need to be addressed in any new trade agreements.
I’m not seeing anyone discuss this here, so I figured I’d raise an important point: this style of tariffs is crushing for US manufacturing. While a universal tariff with no exceptions incentivizes domestic manufacturing, a selective tariff with specific industry exceptions is absolute poison.
You might think, as the authors of this exemption did, “well then we will exempt computer parts.” Then people will simply import the parts. But if you manufacture those parts in the US, you are suddenly at a massive disadvantage. Your computer parts factory likely runs using a large amount of imported raw materials, imported machines, and imported tooling, and there are no tariff exemptions for those broad categories… so you’re screwed. Oftentimes there is no reasonable domestic substitute. You will go out of business in favor of someone importing the parts, which now happens tariff-free under an exemption. That’s why, generally speaking, tariff exemptions are deadly to domestic manufacturing.
Universal tariffs with no exception don't even incentivize domestic manufacturing when it cuts local manufacturers off from an outside market that's bigger than the domestic one.
My company manufactures equipment in North America, with the most expensive input coming domestically from Ohio. Guess what though? Retaliatory tariffs from the global community means that the most rational course of action is now to move that manufacturing *out of the US* so that we can sell to the global market without penalty.
Sorry Ohio, but Mexico is currently *not* engaged in a trade war with Canada and half the EU so the rational decision for a company who wants to sell in those markets is to divest from the US.
Even universal tariffs with no exceptions is a problem.
Many things cross US/Canada/Mexico border in the process being manufactured. And tariffs will stack up.
Many advanced products (tech/chip, etc) are not entirely made in any single place. Some stuff is imported, and some is exported again, and tariffing the world, will also make the world tariff you.
I think this is all around bad. Best case scenario the US has elected a president who decided to burn all political capital, alliances and credibility in search of a slightly better deal.
Doing this sort maximum pressure economic extortion style policies, *might* getter you a slightly better deal. But at what cost?
Can EU countries buy US military equipment, when it turns out that the US will withhold support for equipment we've bought and paid for, in order to pressure a democracy, fighting for its existence, into surrender.
Trump may get a win in the headlines, because everyone thinks he'll go away if he get a win.
> Your computer parts factory likely runs using a large amount of imported raw materials, imported machines, and imported tooling, and there are no tariff exemptions for those broad categories… so you’re screwed.
All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local 24/7 news feed for more than eight years, so there’s no point in acting surprised about it. You’ve had plenty of time to lodge any bribe worth the president's time and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now. Oh, for heaven’s sake, Americans, President Trump did a crypto scam on his supporters before being sworn in, you know. I’m sorry, but if you can’t be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that’s your own lookout.
The 8541.* category exclusions are interesting. Does the US self-produce all required quantities of LEDs and piezoelectric crystals and doesn't need to import those? Is the exception on photovoltaic components to discourage American companies from producing solar panels?
Since last night, anyway. The people who make shipping work are frantically trying to keep up. One of the biggest customs brokers posts updates twice a day on weekdays. Last update 4 PM Friday, so they haven't caught the biggest reversal. If tariff rates change while in transit, the bond paid before the item was shipped may now be insufficient. So the container goes into storage (where?) until Customs and Border Protection gets paid. Some recipients don't have the cash to pay. Low-end resellers who order on Alibaba and sell on Amazon, for example.
Port operators hate this. Unwanted containers clog up the portside sorting and storage systems. Eventually the containers are either sent back or auctioned off by CBP, like this stuff.[1]
Some shippers outside the US have stopped shipping to the US until this settles. This includes all the major laptop makers - Lenovo, Acer, Dell, etc.[2] Nobody wants to be caught with a container in transit, a big customs bill due on receipt, and storage charges. That will recover once the rates are stable for a few weeks. Probably.
Customs and Border Protection is trying to keep up. Sometimes you have to pay more because Trump raised tariffs. Sometimes you can get a credit back because Trump dropped tariffs. Those are all exception transactions, with extra paperwork and delays.
Where's the Flexport guy from YC? He should be able to explain all this.
Consumer version: expect to see some empty shelves, rejected orders, and higher prices for the next few weeks.
The thing that’s really been getting to me, is that, I’m liberal, not pro-Trump, but the MAGA American heartland story has been really getting to me. I want to see small business, manufacturing, small town American succeed. And there’s some part of me that thought maybe Trump, as much as I don’t like him, is the thing that is needed to make that happen, but man it seems like he’s really fucking over the people who supported him the most.
One of the most surprising things about this announcement is that it didn't happen during business hours where the insiders could buy call options before hand.
Especially when it comes to certain areas of the economy:
> Democratic countries’ economies are mainly set up as free market economies with redistribution, because this is what maximizes living standards in peacetime. In a free market economy, if a foreign country wants to sell you cheap cars, you let them do it, and you allocate your own productive resources to something more profitable instead. If China is willing to sell you brand-new electric vehicles for $10,000, why should you turn them down? Just make B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps, sell them for a high profit margin, and drive a Chinese car.
> Except then a war comes, and suddenly you find that B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps aren’t very useful for defending your freedoms. Oops! The right time to worry about manufacturing would have been years before the war, except you weren’t able to anticipate and prepare for the future. Manufacturing doesn’t just support war — in a very real way, it’s a war in and of itself.
> China has rapidly established itself as the world’s dominant shipbuilding power, marginalizing the United States and its allies in a strategically important industry. In addition to building massive numbers of commercial ships, many Chinese shipyards also produce warships for the country’s rapidly growing navy. As part of its “military-civil fusion” strategy, China is tapping into the dual-use resources of its commercial shipbuilding empire to support its ongoing naval modernization
I think we need to also consider that "conventional economic thinking" got us into this mess (de-industrialized, vulnerable economy, hollowed out working/middle class, enormous debt/deficit).
There never seems to be any accountability for this though. I suspect it's because a particular section of society has done very well from the status quo.
> (de-industrialized, vulnerable economy, hollowed out working/middle class, enormous debt/deficit).
The debt/deficit is on politicians (and the public who votes them in). See also issues with US Social Security (Canada was on a similar path, but the government(s) sorted things out in the 1990s).
At least for the US, it has not de-industrialized, as exports have never been higher. It makes a smaller portion of total GDP, but that's because of growth of other sectors; and a smaller portion of the workforce, but that's because of automation:
The largest problem nowadays is probably housing costs, and that has nothing to do with trade, but is about things like NIMBY and zoning.
If you want more than "a particular section of society" and more folks to benefit look into redistribution, which plenty of conventional economists will happily agree with.
> a particular section of society has done very well from the status quo
Name me a country where this is not the case. The only thing we've failed to do is educate enough of our people to prosper as a deindustrialized nation. That and failed to protect our democracy.
I think we've promoted little else besides de-industrialized degrees. That's why it's going to be so hard to ramp up again. How many kids think it's cool to get a textile engineering or materials science degree vs marketing or software engineering?
> we've failed to do is educate enough of our people to prosper as a deindustrialized nation
What education did we give them to prosper as an industrialized nation? It seems to me that the population was able to discover that and benefit from it entirely on their own. Why do they need "education" to "prosper" in current conditions?
Aren't we currently living in the most educated time already? That is we have more people going to and graduating from college than ever before. What is currently missing? Do we need to force everyone to go to college? What about those who don't graduate? They just won't ever be able to prosper?
> That and failed to protect our democracy.
I think a little more than half the country would disagree with this assessment.
The US didn't have a de-industrialized or vulnerable economy before Trump. And by the extent it was hollowed out, it's because of blatant corruption, not "conventional economic thinking".
You don't even have a point about the deficit. While there are plenty of economic schools that will give you high deficits, the US didn't get his by following any of those either.
They're called reciprocal but the Chinese tariffs on US goods looks like they're gonna stay. That and dumping our bonds doesn't bode well for the rest of us.
Auto parts come to mind. Also there are plenty of products on shelves at big box retailers like Walmart that are made in China and won’t fall into the exempted categories.
It is a huge amount of various goods. So much so that even if you look up a breakdown, 25% will be in other.
Chemicals, base metals, stone, glass, etc etc.
What doesn't China export? Basically everything. So everything minus these exemptions.
Behind the apparent waffling, the one constant is the administration’s effort to direct hatred towards China. You have American military leaders predicting an invasion of Taiwan in a specific time window. It’s all a circus.
This is a massive sign that Trump's double down strategy is failing badly. He only has one play: Be a bully and double down any time someone fights back. It works when you have the leverage but as soon as you don't anymore you loose, big. The US just ran out of leverage. I don't know about everyone else but I just started looking into how to move money and investments outside the US.
This is pretty much how I expected this to play out, at least for now. Trump acts all tough and doesn't back down publicly, but China actually doesn't back down. So what happens is that some businesses get exemptions to mitigate the impact. Then some fine print gets changed about how the rules are enforced. Like, suddenly it turns out that Kiribati is a major electronics supplier to the US :)
End result - US economy takes a hit, China takes a smaller hit. Trade balance widens further, most likely. The rich get richer, while many small companies struggle to survive.
Maybe publicly was not the right word. What I really meant is that the nominal 145% rate will remain in effect, so he can continue to pretend that the tariffs are still there and still hurting China, while he makes "minor adjustments" to protect American businesses.
The media coverage seems a bit weird to me. The primary source was released 12 hours ago, but when I did a bit of research 4 hours ago I only saw a few reports from dubious Chinese sources like this: https://www.zhitongcaijing.com/content/detail/1277768.html
Then about 2 hours ago all major media outlets were covering it.
It's so painful watching this administration be forced to react to their preventable mistakes in-real-time with no repercussions.
One thing is throwing and seeing what sticks, but at the seat of the presidency, it seems like such an antipattern for leadership. And yet, the support is unwavering. It's exhausting.
My partner just canceled her trip where she'd have easily spent 4-5k in the US economy due to uncertainty in the border governance.
A lot of my friends are rethinking sending their children to US for college education while Trump is in power and are considering European schools. That's probably a few million dollars over next 2-3 years potentially lost from the US economy from just people i personally know. And no one is coming from China.
It's not even a week since Secretary of Commerce Lutnick was explaining how he wants to bring back millions of jobs 'screwing the little screws in iPhones' to Amercia ?
There is really a good chance that we will develop a deep understanding of how the French Revolution happened and why they went straight to guillotines.
Sorry for being vague. I was trying to point out that the first phase of the revolution (“the Revolution of 1789”) was basically a liberal aristocratic revolution not unlike the American Revolution. The radical egalitarians that orchestrated the Terror didn’t seize power until a few years later.
I cannot tell either. It seems to be a potentially well-intended remark about correcting an inaccurate historical analogy to the current U.S. national leadership. It may be important to remark upon potentially inaccurate information, even if in the comments section of an Internet forum, because otherwise more people will have a wrong impression of the French Revolution and the role of guillotines. When they go to watch Les Miserables they will also be surprised. This last remark was unimportant and for that, I deeply apologize.
The original comment was based on a popular but wildly inaccurate summary of the French Revolution, where the average Joes got increasingly fed up with their rich oppressors and eventually decided to execute them. The revolutionaries never adopted a general policy that rich oppressors should face death, and most people who got guillotined were average Joes who ended up on the wrong side of some political dispute or another.
Nothing about the tariffs make any sense. The want to use the tariffs to negotiate with countries but also say they want to use tariffs to bring back manufacturing. If you are using tariffs to negotiate then once the country gives you what you want, you have to lift the tariff thus the free market keeping manufacturing overseas. If you want to bring back manufacturing then you can't use the tariff to negotiate.
I am genuinely at a loss at how his supporters don't understand this.
The finer points don't matter. If it did, they'd be wondering why the nation is not awash in coal jobs and why Obamacare wasn't repealed. Both of those were supposed to have happened by 2020.
Tariffs are sold to them as "hitting back" against countries "exploiting America". They don't know what they are or how they work, and they definitely do not think of it as a tax, which is the definition you'd see in any AP Macroeconomics textbook.
All that matters is maintaining the illusion that "he's fighting for people like me".
> I am genuinely at a loss at how his supporters don't understand this.
His supporters value blind loyalty and obedience, not logic. They don’t stand for themselves, they stand against others. They’ll gladly suffer if they think the other side is getting it worse. They’re the perfect target to be exploited.
Do you have a source for that? I hear that sentiment expressed often by Americans I meet here, but I never saw anyone explicitly saying "yes, I/we value blind loyalty". Is blind loyalty something Trump followers officially identify with?
Which is the biggest flaw in all this. If the goal was to bring consumer electronics manufacturing back to the US, adding a tariff that goes up every quarter would make sense. People could make plans and build factories. YC might even fund something.
Trump doesn't have the authority to set permanent tariffs. All this is being done as a temporary measure under the Emergency Economic Powers Act, which is for wars.
These backdoor tariffs are being challenged in court, and there's a good chance of the plaintiffs winning.[1]
For tariffs to stick, Congress has to do it. The Constitution gives Congress sole power over tariffs. There's a long-term track on this, going through the US Trade Representative's office, with Federal Register notices and public comments. Last week Greer was up on Capitol Hill testifying before a congressional committee. That's the normal path by which tariff changes are made. Greer is so out of the loop that he hadn't been told about the big tariff on China. That change came out while he was in front of the committee. He was publicly humiliated. Which means he can't do his job of negotiating with other countries on behalf of the US. Greer may quit.
When you dig into this, you don't find "4D chess".
That's what you get for electing a president with the intelectual and emotional maturity of a 5 year old.
Oh, oh, also, electing a felon, you get a lot of grifring, including, but not limited to the trump crypto scam, the insider trading Trump boasted about on video (about his friends making billions in the stock market).
This guy is not playing 5d chess guys, he's just a clown surrounded by yes men.
Maybe Trump genuienly wants to disrupt neoliberalism?
Now, a lot of people on the left use "neoliberalism" in the same way people on the right use "woke", or (Eu) football fans use the word "offside" i.e. it means "it's anything the other side do that I don't like". But neoliberalism actually has a definition used by more serious people - generally free trade and the reduction of government interference.
Maybe Trump doesn't want globalisation, maybe Trump wants stuff to be made in the USA. Maybe he wants to roll trade back to before 1968, the Hakone Maru, and the TEU container, to when he was in his 20s (a lot of people think that their formative years were the best, since that's when they were made, and I doubt Trump is an exception). I'm not saying Trump isn't a hypocrite, but is it slightly possible that some of what he says is actually what he intends to do, e.g. "making America great again" meaning in part a disruption to the globalised world order that the online left always seems to think is evil?
Maybe maybe maybe. These excuses are a fantasy. Have you considered maybe he really likes money and himself and anything outside of that doesn't fire any neurons?
Have you heard the engineering adage "the purpose of a system is what it does"?
Second-guessing the motivations of the Trump administration is tiresome. Let's just judge it by what it does and its effects, both speak for themselves.
> Maybe Trump doesn't want globalisation, maybe Trump wants stuff to be made in the USA.
As I said, what he is doing is not going to get stuff made in the US. Even if we had all of the raw materials needed (we don't), the US doesn't have the talent to spin up a manufacturing hub. That is the missing piece to all of these conversations. So we don't have the materials, we don't have the skills, and we seem to be attacking education so it doesn't look training people to do these things is in the cards? How is this plan meant to work?
The only lifeline I can throw your comment is that he wants to invade Canada and Greenland to steal their raw materials which at least lines up with the idea of getting raw materials to build up manufacturing.
> Even if we had all of the raw materials needed (we don't),
What is this brand of defeatist bullpucky? There is no raw material which is not contained within the borders of the US. Only some which are less expensive to extract elsewhere.
> the US doesn't have the talent to spin up a manufacturing hub.
I humbly invite you to visit https://www.imts.com/ this year in Chicago. If, after that, you believe that there's something that can't be manufactured in the US, I'll eat my hat.
> What is this brand of defeatist bullpucky? There is no raw material which is not contained within the borders of the US. Only some which are less expensive to extract elsewhere.
Let me rephrase this. We don't have the raw materials unless we destroy national parks and pollute our waterways. We also don't have the facilities to process these materials.
> I humbly invite you to visit https://www.imts.com/ this year in Chicago. If, after that, you believe that there's something that can't be manufactured in the US, I'll eat my hat.
> Let me rephrase this. We don't have the raw materials unless we destroy national parks and pollute our waterways.
I've got news for you, that ship sailed a hundred, two hundred years ago. Most of the eastern seaboard of the US was clearcut of old growth forest. What we have now on the east coast is new growth. Still, the number of acres of old growth remaining is staggering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_old-growth_forests#Uni... And I see no problem with forestry when practiced sustainably.
If you're asking for no resource extraction, then you're asking either for negative economic growth or exploitation of someone else somewhere else. Far more responsible to regulate the industry here, where we have jurisdiction to ensure it is done sustainably, safely, and equitably. And far better for economic integrity in cases of pandemic or war.
> And I see no problem with forestry when practiced sustainably.
I don't have a problem with most things when done sustainably. What in the history of the US makes you believe it will be done sustainably? Gas companies still publicly deny or downplay climate change.
> What in the history of the US makes you believe it will be done sustainably?
Unions, labor law, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_sit-down_strike in which the national guard and police used automatic weapons against striking workers, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Hall_disaster immortalized in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oz7oguguIZE the winning of the work week, overtime pay, healthcare of any kind, holidays, payment in legal tender, existence of the country in the first place... so much more. I won't sugar coat it, no human endeavor is ever perfect, but I find the attitude that we can't do it, or we don't want to do it here as backwards and regressive. Worthy of rebuke. If our society depends on something, we should have no shame in doing it here. And if we can't figure out how to do it here safely, then we definitely shouldn't be doing it elsewhere.
> Now, a lot of people on the left use "neoliberalism" in the same way people on the right use "woke", or (Eu) football fans use the word "offside" i.e. it means "it's anything the other side do that I don't like". But neoliberalism actually has a definition used by more serious people - generally free trade and the reduction of government interference.
economics is a lot of made up theory and not hard science. you won't get any of his smarter supporters replying because even if they did you're showing an inability to model best-case. i mean you're personally at a loss?
if you took the average supporter of both sides neither seem smart. the clips they have of both sides is shameful. but those aren't the people implementing the policy, but they both support their tribes.
if you really are interested in understanding how they think you couldn't do worse than this:
It's not that they are managing it badly that I'm talking about.
It's that they manage it in a way to maximize their personal profits, with an absolute disregard of the ordinary folks.
Tariffs are one example - none of it makes sense, but companies still pay millions for a 'dinner at Mar-a-Lago' to get a favorable treatment.
What's hapening with law firms is even more disgusting.
I get the feeling that a lot of Democrats and 'real' Republicans thinks that he will get what he wants and then they just wait out 4 years. It's an almost 80 years narcissist, who doesn't care about people nor law, and who dreams about becoming a King. It only gets worse from here, not better.
If that was the case there'd be more coherency. There's these days where multiple people are asked a question, each answer is a shocking departure from policy and they all contradict and then an administrator comes out and is like "you're going to bring mining the global supply for rare earth minerals to Ohio?! Geology does not support you my good man".
So not even cynicism is supported by the evidence.
I mean they're also pillaging of course. Incompetent And malice. Both are possible
They just spouted two different justifications, jobs will come back to America, and robots will do the jobs. I guess the most generous explanation is jobs for people making robots in America by combining the two separate statements, but that's not even close to what they said.
they're manoeuvring to win the vote of American manufacturing robots for 2028. suffrage for manufacturing robots is something the far left & far right could both support, although there may be some disagreement over if the robots themselves or their owners should be allocated the votes.
The idea that you could "bring industry back" into the US with blanket tariffs is delusional and demonstrates a complete ignorance of the complexity of economic ecosystems and industrial culture. It takes a long time for sustained expertise and the needed supply chains to grow and form and mature in an economy.
You could argue that perhaps a selective application of tariffs might help the formation of such domestic industry, but tariffs are not something to wield lightly.
Slightly off-topic, but is the result of the USA tariff "trade-war" mean that we get to trade at a discount with China in Europe? What I mean is, since it's cheaper for China to trade with us in Europe now, does that mean we gain some bargaining power?
One danger is that all the cheap Chinese crap will be redirected at Europe. It does have to upside of cheaper goods for Europe overall, which is fine for everything we don't make and which is overall adding value. The risk is that we also get all cheap plastic junk, unless EU regulations can keep it out environmental concerns.
So we are going to… uhh… tariff and try to repatriate a lot of lower value less strategically important manufacturing while giving up on higher value strategic stuff like chips?
This reads to me as "we're doubling-down on 145%+ tariffs for everyone else".
This is getting frighteningly close to a Russian-style economy. As in, a handful of powerful, connected "insiders" will be allowed to operate businesses, and will dominate... while everyone else gets wiped out, by acts of government. The furthest system possible from the free-market paradigm that built the American economy as it stands today.
> a handful of powerful, connected "insiders" will be allowed to operate businesses, and will dominate... while everyone else gets wiped out, by acts of government
Note that this is not an exemption for companies, but an exemption for goods:
> A new list of goods to be exempted from the latest round of tariffs on U.S. importers was released, and it includes smartphones, PCs, servers, and other technology goods, many of which are assembled in China.
So all anyone has to do to qualify is produce some of the most complicated electronic devices and components in the history of the world at the largest scale possible, without which there is zero chance of being sustainable or competitive, and then they can benefit from the gifts to the established giants?
What a gift. What a great idea. That'll surely spur innovation and domestic production and have no effect to further insulate the giants from competition.
> without which there is zero chance of being sustainable or competitive
It seems like some of these comments are missing how competition works.
Competition happens within the same type(s) of goods, not across them.
That is, the companies making the goods still affected by tariffs aren’t in competition with the companies making goods now exempt by tariffs.
Yes, its true that they will have a better chance at thriving under these exemptions, but whether they thrive or not should have little impact on the other companies.
To be clear, I’m not arguing in favor of this decision — or any of the tariffs, for that matter.
I’m just simply arguing that competition isn’t really the angle to use to argue against this particular decision.
> Competition happens within the same type(s) of goods, not across them.
Not true, for example smart phones replaced home computers for most people. Those are two very different goods, but since they can accomplish the same thing for the average person they end up competing.
It is incentive to somewhere you can get Chinese components without massive Chinese tariffs, can sell to the US without massive tariffs, and has cheap labour or tax incentives. Several countries will be sticking up their hand, if manufacturers take the gamble that the tariffs will remain for a long enough period.
No. This reads as capitulation by Trump who is now finding out his long held, half-baked economic theories are wrong. Trump got spanked by the bond market and realized how weak his position was. He can't walk it all back overnight without appearing even weaker than he already is. He's going to slowly roll back most consequential tariffs to try to escape blame for damaging the economy.
I’m completely over the tech industry falling over itself to bootlick and apologize away everything we’ve seen play out recently. The Cloudflare CEO, Matthew Prince, recently posted on X trying to explain the strategy and likely calm investors fears: https://x.com/eastdakota/status/1909822463707652192
“They’re not stupid. I know enough of the players involved to know they’re not idiots.”
“They’re not just in it for themselves. I get that this has become non-conventional wisdom, but I am going to assume for this that the goal isn’t merely grift.”
TLDR: don’t worry, it’s 5D chess. Keep on bootlicking your way to success while your stock gets trashed by these policies and we double down on anti-science rhetoric which will hasten our decline. I guess most of these leaders will have cashed out before it all implodes.
It opens up avenues to all sorts off oligarchy style bribery and lack of market competition. ultimately, the country will be looted, since the most successful businesses will not thrive on its merits
We're building a hybrid of Italian Fascist and a Argentinian Peronist like state.
The desire for transactional wins and power overshadows all. Trump will unironically ally himself with a turd like Elon, or a turd like the UAW dude who glazed him on "Liberation Day". The state control of business is missing... perhaps we'll see that develop with Tesla.
It's a weird movement, because the baseline assumption is that the country is ruined. So any marginal win is celebrated, any loss is "priced in" politically.
This reeks "pay to play" very typical for banana republics.
Donations to presidential inauguration fund to get access to the president was already tradition in the US. Trump government just exploits it without shame.
This is a populism move, not pay-to-play. The imminent reality would have been this: many Americans will want to take a vacation to Canada to get a deal on their phone. That just doesn’t make sense.
The exclusion is by category: Smartphones, laptop computers, memory chips, machines used to create semiconductors, flat screen TVs, tablets and desktop computers. Apple, NVidia, and Dell are simply examples of some companies that will “benefit” (be harmed less).
Yes, but people don’t always follow the law. CBP reported a spike in people smuggling eggs last month, and the margin on iPhones is a lot more tempting.
It's very clear that the system of Constitutional governance has been intentionally broken. It is very common for authoritarian regimes to have compliant judiciaries and broad legislative control.
Effective restoration and reconstruction of Constitutional governance will necessarily be dramatic. It's still doable, but optimism is more of a survival strategy than an obvious conclusion at this stage.
It’s not “insider” trading if you post about it publicly on Truth Social, the same way it’s not “insider” trading if you took out an ad in the New York Times.
The government is allowed to announce policy before doing it! Even if it affects stock prices!
Too bad! Insider trading, as a crime, requires that the information be nonpublic material information. You can join Truth Social and follow Donald Trump, so that makes the information public.
It actually is that broad. Futures traders often rely on industry-specific periodicals, which are “public”. Same for anything in the (high monthly cost!) Bloomberg terminal. So posting on a specific social media platform, where subscribing is free? That’s 100% public.
It's not vague. I'm not a lawyer but usually cases of trading with insider information are taken very seriously. It's theft, basically. And the scale here is enormous.
He won by a single point, when 30% of the population didn’t vote. It’s not good for the future of the country that he got anywhere as many votes as he did but we should remember that an emboldened minority is still a minority.
Tinfoil hat time, I don't think the man claiming everyone else cheated and who got caught cheating in a previous election got all his votes in a legal manner
All the data suggests the opposite. He wasn't in a position of power at the time; the federal government was controlled by the democrats. Elections are run at the state level and are so disparate procedurally that Russia gave up trying to flip them directly. There has been no discrepancy between exit polls and the results. We have to face the fact that this is who the United States chose, and this is who a significant portion of the electorate is ok with.
Elections are, in many if not most states, run electronically.
I don't know about you, but I certainly don't trust all the companies that make the voting machines. For instance, does Musk own stock in some of them? Do their owners vote Trump?
Voting machine integrity was litigated in the election trump lost. Fox, trump's propaganda organ, had to pay $781 million because they could not substantiate claims of electronic fraud. There are adversarial reviews of voting data at all levels, and audits done at the physical and electronic level. 60 lawsuits found no evidence of fraud. You can't just say, "I think this might have happened because it sounds sinister." There is a ton of legal, procedural, monitored, and reviewed data that overwhemingly makes the case that electronic voting fraud did not happen. If you have evidence to the contrary, present it. Otherwise, its just vibes.
It's a winner take all two-party election where a 3% swing in sentiment results in a complete blowout.
Generally one of the two participants wins those.
There's a really serious systemic problem with the party that chose him in its primaries, and there is nothing to prevent it from happening again, but my point is that a 49.8% mandate given the circumstances is... Well, it's not one of overwhelming sentiment.
He did not, he got <50% of the total votes at final tally. People who parrot this are under-informed, or lying to claim a mandate his administration lacks.
The US economy was not built on a free-market. US private capitalists have been built on a free market; now that their profits are under attack because they are being outcompeted by China, so they are running away with the ball. American economy real growth, where most white Americans gained wealth, came after World War II, where it was government led and controlled. It was the same for Europe, where they had to rebuild all that was destroyed after the war. It was all mostly government controlled and financed.
The problem today is that US and European capitalists are in power and do not want to admit that the Chinese economic model of government-controlled economic direction, though not perfect, would work better and help all the world's people rather than the select few. As China becomes the dominant economy, the rest of the world has to follow to stay competitive. So these are the death knell of a dying economic and government system. The US had the chance to bring real change for the people with Bernie Sanders, but that was scuttled by the capitalist non-democratic forces, allowing for the rise of Trump. US citizens have been hoodwinked by linking socialist thought, where caring about your fellow man is undemocratic, i.e., socialism.
>the Chinese economic model of government-controlled economic direction, though not perfect, would work better
You want the US government to provide more subsidies to US tech companies so they can stay competitive? Because that is what China is doing for its tech sector.
You only look at the surface China is subsidizing everything but at the same time forcing the companies to share the wealth created with all of its populace not just the company and company share holders.
Subsidizing companies is not the problem not sharing the wealth with the workers is the problem. US not subsidizing it companies is bullshit fed to you. As Boeing, Tesla, SpaceX, Microsoft from the tel-cos to the power suppliers to banks and hedge fund all have been subsidized by American tax payers or are still being subsidized with and you get share buybacks. Americans are being bullshitted into loosing their social and healthcare subsidies in favor of giving it to corporations but the sharing back of the wealth in conveniently forgotten
>You only look at the surface China is subsidizing everything but at the same time forcing the companies to share the wealth created with all of its populace not just the company and company share holders.
Do you have in mind any examples that make your case the strongest? In particular, examples caused by subsidy to the company, and not to the population[1].
The US already subsidizes these companies, sometimes more severely.
The problem is these companies are thieves, mostly. They just take the money and pocket most of it. Infrastructure be damned.
And when the house of cards inevitably tumbles down, they don’t pay the price. The gains are private, but the losses are public.
US companies always favor tomorrow, not next week. They look to enriching themselves NOW. But in doing so they take on a debt. They put everything on a metaphorical credit card. Eventually the competition is too hot and they have to pay their debt very quickly, and they shutter despite their subsidies and long-running success.
>>Chinese economic model of government-controlled economic direction, though not perfect, would work better and help all the world's people rather than the select few
Is it better? For some reason average European lives better then Chinese, inequality is also not so huge
The US reconstructed Europe after WW2 using its own funds mostly and has subsidized its defense spending for the past 80 years and counting.
Europe also has enormous amounts of resource wealth expropriated from its many colonies around the world, plus significant ownership stakes in resource supply chains in those countries that persists to this day. Every single Russian oligarch, plus dictators in Asia and Africa have stashed their wealth in European banks.
It's not the furthest thing from the American economy as it stands today, but the inevitable conclusion of the "free-market" capitalism we've been practicing over the past number of decades.
Donald Trump is the poster child of American capitalism gone right, he's an aspiration for wealthy capitalists across the nation. Generally people have felt that if only we could get an American businessman like Trump in charge of the country, running things the way a true capitalist would (as opposed to how those dirty awful communists/socialists tend to run things), then the country would start going right for a change.
Well now we have that, and in short order the country has Russian-style crony capitalism from the top. This would not happen in a country that actually cares about free markets. But we don't. Everything we consume is owned by like 10 companies. If you want to get a start in the market you have to get access to capital they control, or meet regulations they set, because they've captured the government regulators through bribes.
Trump is just taking this whole system of favoritism we've been living under and making it official. I for one am for it because honestly people pretending there is no corruption is worse than the corruption at this point.
The prevailing school of economic thought in America, until Nixon, is actually what Trump idealizes. Protectionism from outside “threats”, on the basis of security and sufficiency, and a loosely regulated internal market. In comparison, Russia has a lot of regulatory capture and straight up corruption that stifles the internal market.
I’d understand if these exemptions applied to companies and not industries. For comparison, Putin unilaterally nationalizes and sells off companies to benefit his inner circle. The US isn’t nationalizing AMD and selling it to Nvidia at the behest of Jensen.
> I’d understand if these exemptions applied to companies and not industries.
Same thing, these companies essentially run these industries and nobody else can get in.
If you want to make a competitor to Nvidia it would take you 20 years if you started RIGHT NOW. Hope you have a few hundred billion dollars lying around :P
The distinction between domains and companies fully disappears in an oligarchy.
Yet. They are still in the process of consolidating control over the government, the law, and universities. Once that's done, they will move on to corporations. It's been 2 months and change, give them time.
Especially when it comes to certain areas of the economy:
> Democratic countries’ economies are mainly set up as free market economies with redistribution, because this is what maximizes living standards in peacetime. In a free market economy, if a foreign country wants to sell you cheap cars, you let them do it, and you allocate your own productive resources to something more profitable instead. If China is willing to sell you brand-new electric vehicles for $10,000, why should you turn them down? Just make B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps, sell them for a high profit margin, and drive a Chinese car.
> Except then a war comes, and suddenly you find that B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps aren’t very useful for defending your freedoms. Oops! The right time to worry about manufacturing would have been years before the war, except you weren’t able to anticipate and prepare for the future. Manufacturing doesn’t just support war — in a very real way, it’s a war in and of itself.
> China has rapidly established itself as the world’s dominant shipbuilding power, marginalizing the United States and its allies in a strategically important industry. In addition to building massive numbers of commercial ships, many Chinese shipyards also produce warships for the country’s rapidly growing navy. As part of its “military-civil fusion” strategy, China is tapping into the dual-use resources of its commercial shipbuilding empire to support its ongoing naval modernization
So the broligarchs get an escape hatch and everyone else (particularly the middle class) has to pay up to appease the ego of the worst president in US history? This seems like a bad economic and very undemocratic plan that we're getting here.
It's funny, (well, not funny) because the social issues are the ones where the toothpaste doesn't go back in the bottle. Progress over the long run only goes in the right direction, there's no path to undoing broad acceptance of homosexuality just like we'll never go back to forbidding interracial marriage or women voting.
So the top 1% will benefit economically from the right being in power, but the rest will spend the rest of their lives mad about whatever the current social change is, regardless of who's in power.
> Progress over the long run only goes in the right direction, there's no path to undoing broad acceptance of homosexuality just like we'll never go back to forbidding interracial marriage or women voting.
This is remarkably naive. I wish you were right, but this sentiment isn't optimism; it's complacency.
Progress seems to only go in the right direction on social issues, because people are very good at developing reasons why the social views they happen to hold are the objectively correct ones. As any advocate will talk your ears off about, open borders used to be the consensus position, until 150 years of immigration restrictions convinced people that it's not realistic to just let anyone move wherever they'd like.
Other businesses not exempt from these tariffs should sue for violation of equal protection. Equal protection under the law means equal treatment under the law and this absolutely is not equal treatment at all.
>This latest round of tariff rates is currently set at 125% for Chinese goods and a 10% tax on imports from other trading partners. China also had an additional 20% tax on its goods that began in March, bringing its total to 145%.
Importers of these electronics will no longer face the newest taxes, and it cuts the Chinese rate down to 20% for them. The exceptions cover $385 billion worth of 2024 imports, 12% of the total. It includes $100 billion from China, 23% of 2024 imports from there. For these electronics, the average tax rate went from 45% to 5% with this rule.
The biggest global exemption is the import category that includes PCs and servers, with $140 billion in 2024 imports, 26% of it from China. Circumstances may change again, but this benefits AI king Nvidia, server-makers like Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise
HPE
+2.91%
, and Super Micro, and PC makers like Dell and HP
HPQ
+2.49%
. The average tax rate went from 45% to 5% here, according to Barron’s calculations.
The biggest newly exempt category for Chinese goods is smartphones, with $41 billion in 2024 U.S. imports, 81% of all smartphone imports. A 145% tax on that would be $60 billion, but even the new 20% tax is a hefty $8 billion.
Pointed it out in the other thread, but this is a capitulation. China imposed retaliatory tariffs that remain in effect! There are a handful of businesses that do indeed export to China, and the net effect here is that they've all been thrown under the bus. China gets to kill/pick/control them at will now.
As a result of that, they got into some really successful negotiations with a lot of countries in Asia, Africa, Europe and America. I think they want to keep the subject on the news for as long as possible.
And then I imagine they'll probably silently drop the tariffs, because those are harmful for them.
The horrifying thing is that they don't have to. They hold all the cards now. They can drop their new trade barriers at will. Maybe they'll ask for concessions. Maybe they'll leave them in place to kill off troublesome competitors. Maybe they'll coerce the affected companies into selling to Chinese-owned interests at a steep discount. Maybe they'll just take a bunch of bribes.
This is how a trade war looks. And we're losing. Badly.
What do you mean "now?" With the amount of trade imbalance they had the ability to simply block exports at any time. It perhaps only works once but it's a very powerful lever.
So now the finished products are tariff free, but the input costs when bought into America are tariffed. The exact opposite of what you would want to do to bring manufacturing back to America.
Nothing means anything anymore. This of course will change completely on monday, then again on tuesday. Of course in the spirit of insider plundering. This circus will go on until we hear the magic words "the chocolate rations have been increased by 20g".
Things started to make more sense to me once I realized that human beings hate freedom and love tyranny. Once you accept this, it all falls in place. Deporting citizens to foreign prisons? Sounds great. Incoherent foreign and economic policy? Love it. Freedom of the press? Who needs it! Destruction of democracy? Own the libs! Legalize bribery of foreign officials? Even the playing field! And finally, words don’t need to mean anything because they are simply evocations intended to stir up certain emotions. They are more akin to a hunter’s duck call. The hunter doesn’t speak duck and doesn’t care whether that sounds he’s making have any meaning, he simply makes noise and looks for a result. Not getting the desired result? Just change the noise a little.
This is why democracy will eventually fail and autocracy will rise in its place. And no one will ever learn.
Wasn’t Howard Lutnick on TV recently explicitly saying they wanted to bring iPhone assembly here? How is one to understand the union of these two perspectives?
Howard Lutnick got pulled from the TV sidelines over stuff like this apparently. Bessent is running the show now which is probably why they’re actually responding to the bond market punching them in the face this week
Trump's unpredictable tariff decisions challenged long-standing investment assumptions, even shaking confidence in U.S. Treasury bills, assets once considered the safest in the world. It showed how a handful of people can make global markets, and people's lives tremble.
The corruption is the plan. The tariffs are the boot on everyone's neck. Carve outs based on friend, foe, and bribes adjust the pressure. This will be on-going and capricious.
It actually feels nice to see US people having a taste of the kind of government their intelligence service force other nations to have by coups, except that it does not feel nice at all. I'm sorry guys.
I am among the few who think it might eventually prove itself a good idea.
To start with, Europe has no good cards to play. Ultimately, Europe will side with the United States while it builds self-sufficiency on several fronts, especially defense. Europe also recognizes that the complete relocation of production capacity into China wasn't good in the long run; it's just that they had no ability to act on their own.
The US has repeatedly suggested publicly that it's not entirely about tariffs, and more might have been said privately. The tariffs the EU and Britain will drop are probably not what the US is after; what the US wants is to reduce global demand for Chinese manufacturing. Europe will find it easier to sell this—bringing manufacturing back and protectionism even at the cost of say, welfare and environment—to the public due to the violent shakedown over the past two weeks, as well as what happened with Ukraine and Russia. Ongoing European emergency measures to increase defense spending will be followed by incentives to rebuild strategic industry—like how China supported civilian–military partnership with policy.
Meanwhile the Indian government is already looking for ways to replace Chinese imports with US imports, where it can [1]. Japan and North Korea will follow suit; Trump is already saying that Korea needs to pay for US troops.
The US is (in my view) on solid footing here. At the very least, they get better trade deals from everyone else—Europe, India, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, etc. A number of companies will move production back into the US, and the government can prioritize those with more military value (chip-making, batteries, cars, shipbuilding [2] , etc.). And if the US can convince others to start decoupling from China, this will weaken Chinese manufacturing capacity.
Given the pain it's going to inflict in the short term, Trump is the only person who could have started this trade war. There might have been ways to do this without such a shake-up, but I am not convinced that this was a stupid move.
This was an anti-China move right from the beginning, disguised as an outrage against everyone's tariffs.
I also imagine this is maximum negative sentiment.
I follow the Chinese economy pretty closely and I just can't imagine 2025 passes without a deal.
Of course, neither Trump or Xi were going to back down here before a big meeting. I don't see how this is sustainable on any real time frame though for either economy.
Some people seem to be framing this as some kind of win for China. That is crazy. Chinese stocks had been in the toilet for a while, got a slight bump and that was mostly erased last week. I am far more confident in my US bets than China bets here.
I think EU will be fine, it really depends on how much the US cares about advancing Russian interests.
Long game, the UK may transform into being a sort of vassal of the US, assuming it survives as an entity. The EU interest may align more with China. If the US is de-empathizing NATO, they need a counterweight to the Russia/US axis.
It's the end of pax americana, and the future is more uncertain.
Ugh. Note that this is a capitulation. China's retaliatory import tariff rate remains in effect, and they get to decide which industries to relax, if any. The net effect is that if you're in one of the handful of businesses that export to China, the Trump administration threw you under the proverbial bus.
Smartphones getting exemptions? Didn't the administration talk about how American's would be tightening screws on iPhones as they brought back these jobs? I'm starting to think they don't know what they are doing.... /s
https://archive.ph/xQGXr
From an outsider’s perspective, it’s difficult to discern any coherent U.S. strategy—assuming one even exists. One day it’s a 145% tariff on China. The next, it’s “Well, it’s still 145%, but Apple and Nvidia are exempted because their stock prices might take a hit.” Then comes a 90-day pause, adding to the confusion.
It’s not clear whether Jamieson Greer is actually steering this, or if any of it was thoroughly thought through.
This is the only explanation that has made sense to me so far. And it makes even more sense based on these exemptions.
https://www.instagram.com/share/_jW_V1hwM
This is Senator Chris Murphy explaining it’s not economic policy, it’s an attempt to blackmail corporations into submission by making a deal with him in return for sanctions relief.
Keep an eye out for what Apple and nvidia might have agreed to give.
These companies could choose to invest in the US instead and not have to worry about any of this.
Tariffs are only usable as extortion if the companies have outsourced the manufacturing that gutted our middle-class.
Externalizing variables comes with risk. This risk should be factored into planning in the future. Just because a politician in the 90s promised cheap labor through globalization, a president 30 years later can flip the script
The term for this is extortion.
The last time tariffs were this high, it led to rampant corruption as companies would pay off customs officers. This was one of the reasons for switching to an income tax. For the current administration this possibility counts as a major opportunity to generate personal wealth.
But this isn't the only reason for the policy. For someone who is at heart a coward, bullying and brandishing raw power over others is its own reward. That reason enough for the policy, and damn the consequences for the nation.
You are 100% spot on in this analysis. Thank you for summarizing it so well.
There is also a reason tariffs only get raised on a multi-generational time scale, e.g., 1820s, 1890s, 1930s, 2020s.
The effects are so bad that nearly everyone who remembers the disaster must have died off for anyone to think it is a good idea.
At this point, it is obvious that there is no geo-political or geo-strategic plan of any type. The administration is just winging it, and Sen Murphy's explanation is the only one available.
It was also noted that the person occupying the president's chair said "they must be forced to negotiate". When someone is forced to negotiate, that is not a negotiation, that is extortion. Welcome to another nation run like a mob office.
Instead of coming to Trump for pledges of political loyalty those companies should instead come to Europe to be able to make business again freely.
It's exactly what it is. And, the seemingly haphazard, unpredictable nature of it is a feature, serving as perfect cover:
"Why these exemptions?"
"Who knows? None of it makes sense."
But, of course, it does.
It's also consistent with other, publicly-wielded cudgels, like the law-firm extortions under threat of executive orders.
People should be more alarmed of these law firms, they will be used as his private army.
I think his private armies are going to be his private armies. Think Wagner group, to be deployed domestically and in central/South America.
As opposed to his public army, which he actually does control as President of the United States. I’m alarmed of that.
I’m sure the richest corporations are rushing to retain these firms in an attempt to be on the winning side.
People should be more alarmed, the bar does not expel the lawyers at those firms from the profession. They must be breaking every misconduct rule.
"The ABA rejects efforts to undermine the courts and the legal profession" - https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/aba-news-archives/2...
Rule 8.4: Misconduct: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/professional_responsibili...
The ABA endorsed constitutional amendment by tweet when Biden tried it, I dont think they have much credibility left.
The law firm thing was just a way of stroking Trumps ego, they take a fraction of their pro bono budget and put it towards free speech causes and move on.
If every major law firm in the country is required to stroke Trump's ego, where should people get lawyers for cases Trump doesn't think they should win?
"Nice smartphone business you have here..."
If this is an attempt at blackmail it appears to be failing. It's only been a few days and Trump has already unilaterally capitulated on several major positions. Unless he's blackmailing himself, the 'plan' is backfiring.
You don't know what capitulations are happening behind the scenes
No, so far we only see the very public capitulations coming from the Trump administration. We're also seeing a lot of signaling, also very public, from every other major economy that they are prepared to move on without the US.
"Trump to investors: My policies will never change" - https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-investors-my-policies...
There could have been deals/agreements behind the scenes. This is not a republican "first". The democrats did the same to get Facebook and other social media to censor news. Trump is literally playing their book but with his style.
Anyone who can not see the obvious difference in substance, intent, scope, and scale is either willfully ignorant or seriously lacking in reading comprehension and reasoning skills.
Requesting curbs on rampant disinformation is not even close to the same thing as crashing the economy to extort our closest allies and major business and industry players.
Yikes
I keep seeing these explanations of “4D chess”. It’s Donald Trump. He has absolutely no idea what he’s doing when it comes to economic policies. Unless you believe he can see into the future of how other world leaders would react and consistently outsmart everyone else, there’s no 4D chess being played.
This isn’t advanced negotiation tactics, it’s mafia style negotiation tactics, which are 100% in character. See the law firms now providing him with 100s of millions in pro bono work to avoid punitive executive orders.
Imagine a mob trying to extort you while also stabbing himself and having a beef with the whole city at the same time.
They never mentioned if they are providing "him" - as in the US government, or "him" as in Donald Trump, 100s of millions in pro Bono work ...
Articles said causes supported by Trump.
I learned that "4D chess" just means, "I see the 3 dimensions, I can't explain what's happening, but I guess they can, because they have that extra dimension.".
At this point it's something like 100D chess, because 99 levels of "Why?" have been explained by "because they're morons" but the defenders keep believing there's an extra dimension...
What about believing that he's a particularly-easily-manipulated patse (esp. when it comes to things he doesn't care about), and so this is someone else playing 4D chess through him?
For all the accusations of fascism, nobody seems to remember that a key feature of fascism is a corporate-cabal shadow government that legitimizes its activities/policies by puppeteering the "real" government to both execute and justify them.
That's what German industrialists were hoping to achieve through Hitler, but they didn't end up with anything like it.
That was more or less the case during Trump's first administration. I think a lot of normie Republicans were hoping for a repeat of that. The ones that aren't in denial are being gravely disappointed.
hard to attribute to competence what you can attribute to malice. just as law firms are being squeezed for $600 million of services through extortion, this is Mafia mentality as well where first something is held hostage and then negotiated for. given the parties involved, I would even assume that there is personal benefits staked in this, and lots of insider trading of course
Completely agree no 4D chess here. Just a guy that wants to keep the attention on him, one day is kissing Russia's ass, the next day when "peace" is failing, it's tariffs, etc etc no strategy at all, just a show to stay on first page day after day.
No, it's not 4D chess, and neither is extorting companies with tariffs, extorting law firms with threats of executive orders, or hammering universities by withholding funds.
It's all blunt-force checkers that any simpleton with power can easily understand.
Exactly but this is NOT economic policy
Yeah he’s obviously in no state to decide on policy. We don’t know who is running things but it’s not him, a number of factions moving the direction a little bit in their favor whenever they get the opportunity. And of course there is massive insider trading going on too.
How can somebody even entertain the idea is able the hold the concept of Chess, much less 4D, while at the same time being aware he nominated Matt Gaetz for Attorney General...Let that sink in for a while...
"In 2020, Gaetz was accused of child sex trafficking and statutory rape. After an investigation, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) decided not to charge him. In December 2024, the House Ethics Committee released a report which found evidence that Gaetz paid for sex—including with a 17-year-old—and abused illegal drugs during his tenure in the U.S. House of Representatives."
Trump is determined to be remembered by history for his bold moves and "greatness". There is no 4D chess here. There is no such thing as 4D chess.
At best, he's using these tariffs as a temporary means to exert pressure and watching how others respond to them, almost like acting like the crazy man with a gun to make people a little more willing to negotiate terms more favorable for the gunman. At least as a matter of intent, anyway. The actual effect is another matter.
Occams razor. It's Donald Trump, I've known he was a joke since the late 80s. In middle school. Baffling to see millions of people think reality TV is real and give him nuke codes.
I knew he was a joke in the lates eighties at middle school - in the UK. Baffling indeed. I am US citizen now - equally baffling on some days...
It's infuriating to rational thought but watching videos of Trump supporters talking about why they support Trump in spite of him hurting them makes it clear where his support comes from - it's a rainbow coalition of the discontented. Obviously the editors will pick the most provocative videos/sound bites but it's a pretty consistent picture.
co-sign, it's the King's Tax (as Murphy had explained in a different video I watched of his). it's that simple. also it was a giant elephant to make everyone forget that they just exposed an entire military action over Signal in a completely illegal and extremely incompetent way.
I’m British so not that knowledgeable about us politics beyond the big players.
How well known is Murphy? I’d never heard of him until I saw this video but he seems very impressive and much more electable than Biden or harris.
About as well known as a politically active Lord would be in the UK. The general public probably doesn't recognize his name, anyone interested in politics does.
Murphy isn't well known.
He's getting more well known pretty fast, over all this. His explainer videos of what's going on and why it's so dangerous are often kinda boring and basic if you're a politics nerd–but that's great, because we don't need to be told, it's the folks who aren't politics nerds who need to be educated on this stuff.
he's a US Senator. Senators are very important here
Yeah I get that he’s a senator! I mean how much in the public eye is he. Would a random person know who he is?
We have hundreds of Members of Parliament here in the UK, but probably only 10 that most people could name.
I wondered how big his public profile is.
Most Senators are not well known nationally (sadly) unless they’ve either:
- done a non-negligible Presidential campaign
- been born from a famous family
- the press either love them or love to hate them
- have a leadership position and/or are conspicuously ancient
Relentless self-promotors are a superset of 3, the ones who succeed
Unfortunately being sensible, cooperative, or good with policy isn’t on the list
It can occasionally work for state Governors
I think Bernie Sanders is the only current senator I'd expect a random American to know. Murphy might make the top 5 highest profile senators but you wouldn't know him if you don't pay attention to politics at all.
Tracking-free link: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIALTQjMKma
What’s interesting to me is that in this horribly corrupt state of affairs we find ourselves in, there are thousands upon thousands of smaller businesses that are not able to seek redress the way a megacorp like Apple or Nvidia can. Your run-of-the-mill office furniture importer doesn’t have the same ability to book up a dinner and pay the requisite multi-million dollar lobbying fee as a Silicon Valley magnate. In the before times, these folks would form interest groups and lobby Congress as a unified front, but at the moment it seems as though that doesn’t work anymore. It doesn’t take imagination to see a highly noncompetitive, post-capitalist future where only the goods from megacorps are exempted, and the goods from medium sized businesses are taxed to oblivion, destroying any semblance of free markets.
Mid-cap stocks peaked two days after the election and have been free falling every since. [0]
[0]https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/IWM/
Sorry, but what would have been the consequences of the tariffs on Chinese imports? Do you imagine American citizens having to pay twice or more for an iPhone (or not getting one at all) because of Trump? Not being able to afford a new laptop, because of Trump? Not being able to buy all the cheap consumer electronics, because of Trump? The "blackmail" (except it's simply the consequences of his own actions) goes two ways here- see also the TikTok debacle: or how to explain to hundreds of millions of enraged Americans that they cannot use their favourite social network because of Trump.
> Keep an eye out for what Apple and nvidia might have agreed to give.
Well we know Nvidia did give a million dollars already:
"A $1M-per-head dinner at Mar-a-Lago is how you get AI chips to China" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43652504
I think the most probable outcome is that Trump causes enough trouble to incite the whole country against him.
I don't see him completing his term. He's going to be impeached.
If he's impeached, it will be after midterms change the composition of the house. He will be acquitted in the Senate though
He was impeached twice already with zero impact. No one is forcing him to leave office.
The rich have always blamed others for the growing wealth gap.
Americans often point to outside forces instead of holding the government accountable.
Years of messaging have trained people to support tariffs, spending cuts, and even anti-immigrant policies—despite the need for labor.
The real issue isn't spending, it's taxation. And we've let China ignore WTO rules for too long. Trump should've targeted tariffs at China alone—but he is the president, not me.
About 30-40% of the country will stand behind the cult of Trump no matter what he does. With that power, almost every single Republican politician is afraid of getting primaried. Trump has already been impeached twice and it went nowhere.
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Which didn't really work since what exactly are US tech companies giving Trump in exchange for eliminating tariffs?
And are only large corporations expected to play? I import shopping bags from Chinese manufacturers from my store, like millions of other small businesses do. What exactly are we supposed to offer Trump?
Bribes. Obvious bribes. Over and over. How many millions do you spend on your Mar-a-Lago memberships? How many nights do you pay for in Trump hotels?
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
Buy a meal at Mar-A-Lago, $5mil a plate.
The second worst part is the actual food on the plate is just a dumped out bag from McDonalds.
> And are only large corporations expected to play? I import shopping bags from Chinese manufacturers from my store, like millions of other small businesses do. What exactly are we supposed to offer Trump?
You'll eventually be buying them, for more than you pay now but less than the imported price, from a large US company that bribed whoever Dear Leader is at the time, for exemptions.
Bribes
This assumes that he has more power than the tech companies on the everyday life and I wonder if that is really the case. As I'm not located in the states, I'm very much interested to hear from a US resident if that is really the case.
>This assumes that he has more power than the tech companies
lol
Even the San Francisco city council is bullying American tech companies and tech executives.
The power of US tech companies is vastly overstated.
The biggest mistake tech companies have done over the past 2 decades is not spending enough money lobbying. Every other industry manages to stay under the radar by continuing to pay both sides. Tech industry never got involved in politics so they were easy targets for politicians on minor issues.
> The biggest mistake tech companies have done over the past 2 decades is not spending enough money lobbying.
What does "enough" look like?
https://www.datawrapper.de/_/Ldiwf/
I mean given that they are in tech, the biggest mistake was being located in a city or state. I can understand that they have to deal with the US government (any company anywhere in the world have to deal with it) but they don't have to deal with San Francisco/California. They choose that position and they don't deserve sympathy for being passive about it.
> This assumes that he has more power than the tech companies on the everyday life
How?
From the perspective of a citizen’s everyday life who sees that their life is getting more expensive and consumes information from a curated essentially list - eg. Instagram, fb etc - from the operator of that platform. I don’t think that the average person in the states - like in my European country - watches tv or buys a newspaper. In this context is the PR and hence effect from the government more than that of the tech companies ?
A tech company can’t shoot me with impunity under “qualified immunity”. Put me in jail, harass me because I don’t look like a belong in my own neighborhood, take my property under civil forfeiture without a trial…
You're right about these most serious adverse outcomes, but don't forget what could happen if you (say) randomly get your Big Tech account locked/suspended/banned for some reason that was ultimately erroneously flagged by an AI, and then cheerfully executed at scale.
The examples you provided are more fundamental and I won't trivialize them, but making you lose your "keys to your own digital space" is a very real power they have over you.
They can permanently ban you from the economy though.
As an American, I regret to inform you that you're trying to use logic to understand a situation where it seems like logic wasn't used (in terms of the economic impact). These are the same fuckwits that tried to claim a trade deficit is the same as a tariff.
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I am unsure why anyone would want to change the trade imbalance when you are arguably the richest country on earth. You have a trade imbalance because you are rich and can buy everything you want.
Nobody in onshoring manufacturing with this level of instability in the finances of this country at this time. Trump changes his mind too often to build billions of dollars worth of factories.
Trade imbalance causes debt. Debt causes payments. As debt grows, payment grow. Eventually it causes default.
It's OK to have trade imbalance for some time. It can't last forever.
Current account deficits cause debt, not trade imbalances. Imports and exports factor in, sure, but they are far from the only determinants.
I'm pretty sure it can last indefinitely as long as you keep growing and don't sabotage yourself with massive tarrifs
US debt grows not linearly. Kind of exponentially or something like that. Economy growth does not match that.
The budget deficit is not the trade deficit. You are not taking on debt when you purchase a foreign good, just like you as an individual don't take on debt when you go to Walmart and exchange money for goods but Walmart doesn't buy anything from you.
The US domestic economy is vastly larger than its foreign trade (which is only 20% of America's GDP), so you can in fact run a persistent trade deficit and a budget surplus at the same time, which the US actually did for a while during the 90s and early 2000s. We need to teach more economics honestly.
Sure, but pointing a financial gun at the heads of your creditors will cause them to immediately cease giving you further loans and start selling off the debt they already hold.
This isn’t some analogy.
This is precisely what just happened!
The bond market imploded and less stupid people forced Trump to backpedal.
He’s a child playing with many-trillion-dollar matters. I wouldn’t trust Trump to split a dinner cheque.
The US was rich before there was a trade imbalance and remains rich in spite of it, not because of it.
“Fix” implies it’s broken. This is like saying it’s one way to fix America’s relative wealth.
If you spend more money than you make, then yes it's broken. And no printing money is not a solution, it's just a different form of taxation.
You are assuming manufacturing trade as only income. Services export and IP export are other where USA leads. When Apple sells iPhone in India and China, it gets to bring back the profits to the USA. Same goes for EU paying for Netflix and Disney movies and Google services. Same for McDonalds, Starbucks, Coca Cola and Pepsi. Collectively, US companies make 100s of billions of profits from outside USA. Another perk is being the reserve currency, you print bonds for free, get clothes/toys for that and rest of the world is just holding onto that IOU. Again, trillions of dollars.
Are you confusing the budget deficit with the trade deficit? Is that what all this is about?
I spend far more on restaurants, household services, and vehicle maintenance than those companies pay me. I have a massive trade imbalance with those companies.
But that has nothing to do with whether my household budget is balanced.
Do people really think that making goods more expensive for consumers will somehow produce the funds to support even greater tax cuts for billionaires?
> I spend far more on restaurants, household services, and vehicle maintenance than those companies pay me. I have a massive trade imbalance with those companies.
And if, for example, a sales tax was increased this would motivate you to buy less services, make food at home and learn how to fix your car.
Sure. But at the cost of the time that I currently use to do other things.
Are you moving the argument from conflating budget and trade deficits to saying the United States’ multi-century economic focus on consumer spending is a mistake, and we need to shift to a savings-focused economy like China used to be? I also think that’s wrong, but it has nothing at all to do with the federal government’s budget deficit.
Or are you under the mistaken impression that trade income is the only income the country has?
This is all very confused and nonsensical.
Million dollar "dinners' seem to help.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
There is no plan. Talk tough, reverse under pressure, rinse repeat. Anyone surprised must not have watched season one which aired in 2019.
The "smart trumpers" I know have already staked out the entire range of possible outcomes:
1) He is completely restructuring global trade and decoupling us from China which is tough but necessary medicine because our biggest geopolitical adversary cannot be our largest trading partner
2) You can't believe half of what he says, he's all bluster, he's addicted to deals and will sign some fake deals to score a domestic win and we will resume status quo
Like yeah - sounds smart, but which is it?
Thinking the status quo will return so easily is like Putin pulling out of Ukraine and saying "So we're back to 23rd January (Edit/Correction: February) 2022, right, friends?".
The trust in the US (dollar) hegemony has now been eroded, and will probably continue until a purge of the regime of idiots (not just the oust of one idiot...).
Well yes, either position was dismissibly stupid.
No president is going to ride out a self-imposed multi-year global trade reconfiguration triggering inflation, shortages and unemployment.
Nor is putting the genie back in the bottle possible now and so even if you return to status quo trade policy, you've now spooked the world re: reliability of US as partners, US dollar, US debt, etc.
Worst of both worlds really. Incredible self owns over and over.
The goals are petty profit, some extortion, some illegal trading. Destroying 80% of the value of the US isn't meaningful if he gets to own a lot more of the remainder. Everything is profit for the broke real estate conman of 2015.
2 ignores all the damage caused in the meanwhile
1 is wrong because if he wanted to decouple us from China he'd lower tarrifs on other countries especially close allies
Right so nothing he is doing is smart or makes sense, and the "smart" people who try to put intellectual scaffolding around his actions get repeatedly disproven by his subsequent actions...
Neither. They're unwilling to concede he's run out of the Kremlin and the chaos and damage is the only purpose. The only reason he backs down on any of it is because he can't afford not to, so he's doing the usual brinksmanship, instructed by whoever's telling him to axe those obscure aviation safety committees (someone has detailed info), and probably hoping he can flee to Moscow at some point.
I don't think he'll be let off the hook, though. He's tasked to ruin us well below 'status quo', even for people diligently not paying attention.
He has a plan, it is called Project 2025. Trump appointed the authors of the Project 2025 plan and they are executing it. Here is the chapter on trade and tariffs, authored by Peter Navarro who is currently Trump's senior counselor for trade and manufacturing.
https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_CHA...
If Trump is America's Napoleon III, who is the world's modern Otto von Bismark?
I'd nominate Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni. As authoritarian "president for life" since 1986, he's demonstrated some savvy statecrafting amid Africa's resource wars and ethnic violence, making the country a point of stability and economic growth on the continent.
(Of course, he's got plenty of negatives on the record too. But I think in the game of "Great Man History", he's already left a big legacy.)
I'm curious as to why you chose Napoleon III. The context under which he rose to power seem quite different from Trump's. America isn't in the middle of a 60-years long revolution/counter-revolution cycle. What are the similarities?
Conservatives think so.
Probably Putin.
As a thoughtful person, you've got to learn to curb your instinct to make sense out of things like this. It's a waste of calories.
It's far from the only place the policy is incoherent. They fired the top ranking officer at the US base in Greenland for having the temerity to tell their host nation "I do not presume to understand current politics, but what I do know is the concerns of the US administration discussed by Vice-President Vance on Friday are not reflective of Pituffik Space Base."
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/creq99l218do
The plan is to make every country and CEO grovel at the feet of the boss to be exempted from the tariffs. I’d say it’s corruption, but it’s more like a protection racket.
I wonder what these companies had to offer?
There is no planned strategy. Planning requires learning about entire systems, and Trump isn't smart enough to do that. He can only act on things placed before him. If he sees foreigners making money by selling into the US, he has to raise tariffs on it. There is no second order, third order, or any deeper level of understanding of what's going on. It's purely superficial action, on things Trumps eyes sees, not what his brain sees. There is no brain in there that can predict what would happen if tariffs were raised. He can only raise tariffs.
To be smart is to have systemic understanding, and Trump & the Republicans are incapable of that.
It's exactly what happened in his first term, when he got rid of the nation's pandemic preparedness because why would anyone ever need that, right?
Every company that wants an exemption has to pay. It's a personal tax system.
I'd say it's clear that none of it was thoroughly thought through at the least.
> "assuming one even exists"
I actually doubt it does. Everyting is just too chaotic to be a strategy.
Agreed. I think at this point we can discard the assumption of 4D chess.
(This is not to say that there aren't some Project 2025 plans in the background that parts of the administration are aiming to push through.)
they thought it up and published a report back on it in nov 2024.
here's the plan, you can use it to advise your investments:
https://www.hudsonbaycapital.com/documents/FG/hudsonbay/rese...
the media is garbage and they can't cover anything well enough to inform. but i bet clicks are up!
The plan: What if we ran the richest, more powerful country on history as if it were a giant meme stock geared to benefit those in charge?
Import Chinese battery: 145% tariff
Import Chinese battery inside Chinese laptop: 20% tariff
Import Chinese battery inside Vietnamese laptop: 0% tariff
Truly this will bring back American manufacturing!
The factories will be disassembling the laptops, taking out the batteries. Then the empty laptops will be sent back to China. That will increase exports to China as well.
That's another patronage angle. When the feds buy Lenovo laptops, they have to comply with TAA. So they ship the laptops to Texas, "materially transform" them, package and ship to the customer.
You can be sure some crony owns the company that screws the display and puts stickers on the laptop with minimum wage workers.
It's vibe governing, just like any other populist government
When it comes to global impact, can you even confidently say you're being strategic? It almost feels like staying tactical is the only viable strategy - there are simply too many variables. The chances are high that any strategy you come up with is doomed to fail.
> assuming one even exists
Why would you assume that?
I don't know why people keep expecting Trump to be different than what he has consistently shown us for all these years. There's no subtle plan. There's no long-term plan. He's cranking the levers immediately available to him for the drama, as he has always done.
People around him may have ideas and plans. They can sometimes get him to agree to one of these, but it never lasts long.
I mean, his rich friends made 340 billion in the stock market chaos. So I suspect there is at least a vague plan, but it has nothing to do with anyone but himself and those who support him getting richer. But that's the only plan I think Trump has ever had in his entire life, or will ever have.
Like he's just not that deep. He's an incredibly shallow, inexperienced, dim, incurious old man who has never worked a job in his life, never built anything, never did anything. He arrived on top and his greatest achievement in life was managing to not lose it, in a country where it is specifically very hard to do that.
And hearing his supporters talk about how strong he is is just objectively hilarious. Man looks like 4 steepish flights of stairs would kill him stone dead.
I don't like him either, but it's not like accomplished nothing: https://www.cnbc.com/2010/11/09/Donald-Trumps-Best-and-Worst...
There are some failures in there but also some wins, like buying air rights for. Heap and making effective use of them.
You found a puff piece from 2010 to extoll Trump?
(It appears to be a promotional piece for a "CNBC Titans" episode featuring Trump.)
I try to assume good intent, which includes not writing off the odd things people post as bot-generated, but in this case, attributing this to a bot is quite a positive spin.
Maybe it's a puff piece, but it contains examples of what he did with his life and businesses. You couldn't write an article like that after 2015 or so without it being influenced by his disaster of a political career.
My point is, he didn't just sit on daddy's money, he actually pulled off a couple of savvy moves. There are plenty of other things to criticize him for.
Why would you want an article on someone that excludes context from their most impactful and most visible decade? It's true that an author today, who knows about his 2024 conviction for fraudulently overstating the value of his properties, would bring a much more skeptical eye to claims about what a success they were. Did he seem to be making better deals in 2010 because he was better at it then, or because nobody was looking as closely at whether they were really good?
Because the first guy I replied to claimed Trump never did anything earlier in his life but inherit money, and I wanted to provide examples of how that isn't true.
The Tiffany's transaction definitely happened, and no landowner in Manhattan has left money on the table like that since. As scummy and self-promoting as he is, he changed the real estate market in NY and made some investments that paid off in the 70s and 80s.
I think that puts to rest this idea that he just rested on daddy's money and then lost money on his Atlantic City casinos, or whatever.
(Standard disclaimer that he has always sucked, and maybe he never made a good business move after the 80s.)
Did the Tiffany's transaction definitely happen? Is there any independent verification of Trump's claims that he obtained their air rights under favorable terms because other developers were leaving money on the table?
That's how corruption works in a banana republic. Good things for my friends, hell for everyone else. It is the furthest you can be from free trading capitalism that the US was preaching while it was good for them.
I think its crystal clear there is no actual plan.
https://www.hudsonbaycapital.com/documents/FG/hudsonbay/rese...
Much like Russia's overnight transition to a market economy in 1991, which opened the door to oligarch pillaging of national resources, 2 successive economic crises and a bond default, and 2 brutal wars in Chechnya.
Something tells me Trump's top economic advisers aren't based in the US, just as Yeltsin's strings weren't being pulled from Moscow.
It makes sense if you understand how Trump became president. He'll test something (through a tweet) to his audience and then amplify or kill it based on the response. It worked great with 50% of the US population or so; it doesn't seem to be working at all with the Chinese political elite.
Things like threatening Canada and Greenland's sovereignty, unilaterally tanking stock markets and levying huge tariffs on western trading partners are not popular with his voters.
What they want doesn't matter anymore, these moves are about splitting the western economic and military alliances, a goal Russia has had since the 1960s.
> but Apple and Nvidia are exempted because their stock prices might take a hit
They already took a hit - which they monetized by both ways
If there is a strategy it is probably dominating the news cycle with this chaotic bullshit, while they navigate towards the real goal in the shadows.
It's not in the shadows, they're breaking everything that can oppose them to try to make the US an autocracy. It's right out in the open.
“Well, it’s still 145%, but Apple and Nvidia are exempted because their stock prices might take a hit.”
That's a massive misread. You are confusing the direction of influence between secondary public stock markets and federal executive orders.
The tariffs are supposed to strengthen self sufficiency, and discourage imports of stuff the US can do on their own.
Chip manufacturing, (which by the way is often only the manufacturing and not the design or IP of the chips), is an exception for whatever reason, may be labour costs, but it may also be that chips are a mineral heavy and diverse product, so it's one of the few products where autarky isn't feasible or very rewarding.
And there would be situations without exemptions where the US may have been incentivized to import the raw materials and rebuild megachip factories, of which there are only like a dozen in the world, creating a huge output inefficiency due to political reasons on two fronts.
Exceptions are reasonable.
To understand this, I think you have to neither overestimate or underestimate Trump and Musk.
Both Trump and Musk seem be to essentially ideologues, visionary tough-talkers, who have actually succeed (or appeared to succeed) to various endeavors through having underling who work to shape their bluffs into coherent plans. This works well for various as long as the delicate balance of competent handlers and loud-mouthed visionaries is maintained.
The problem is the process of Trump winning, losing and then winning again all him to craft an organization and legal framework to put forth he vision uncorrected, unbalanced and lacking all guardrails.
And that's where we are.
chaos is the strategy
Chaos is a strategy but in this case it's just chaos.
Destruction is the goal.
it’s difficult to discern any coherent U.S. strategy—assuming one even exists
The strategy is to keep everyone unsure what might come next.
It's like in boxing. When you hit your opponent and leave them confused and uncertain what you might do next, you use that to your advantage and keep on hitting. It's how you "win."
As if there are any winners here.
He isn't really hitting an opponent though, he is mainly hitting the U.S.
The US is what needs beaten into submission so he can rule over the ruins.
If Trump has learned anything, it is that the US is a lot easier to bully than others. He is convicted of a felony, he talks down to his own voters, abandons his biggest promises (repealing ACA and building a wall) and they still let him lead the country!
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The strategy is to sow fear and uncertainty to drive capital from stocks to government bonds and drive down the bond yield. Bessant is pretty clear about this. Once they get the bond yields down and refinance a lot of the short term debt into longer term debt they free up operating budget. Combine with Elon’s DOGE cutting costs and Lutnick raising some capital from tariffs, and it is a pretty good strategy. I don’t agree with Trump’s policies generally nor am I American, but this is a good short term strategy.
It's not a good short term strategy at all. If that's really the goal, their left and right hands need to have a chat because one of them's going to make the deficit way worse, so if the other's goal is to "free up operating budget" by reducing debt service they really ought to get on the same page, because anything "freed up" is going to be eaten by the other bullshit they're doing.
Besides, this is a wildly expensive way to go about it. The harm to receipts from the economic uncertainty will blow a hole in the federal budget and leave states reeling (to say nothing of the "other hand" making cuts at the IRS, which will also be a net cost)
Great strategy, except its not working. Bond yields are up (probably because foreigners and foreign countries are selling US bonds). DOGE cost cuts are insignificant. Raising capital from tariffs doesn't seem to be working because they're really taxes, and Americans don't like taxes.
This is exactly the strategy but it is failing miserably.
The reason for the pivot was because the 10-30 year yields didn't come down, the price on the 30 year got crushed. The 30 year almost went back to the lows.
There was literally no flight to safety. Completely the opposite.
It seems like there was a flight to safety but then China started dumping bonds. I think we are witnessing the ‘war’ in trade war!
> I don’t agree with Trump’s policies generally nor am I American, but this is a good short term strategy.
This strategy has failed spectacularly, as bond yields are still up and treasuries are sold like crazy. US treasuries are no longer seen as safe havens. People rather invest in gold or treasuries from other countries which are not led by a corrupt government. Buying US treasuries is now seen as "lending Trump money", and since Trump runs the US economy exactly like he ran his companies, where IIRC he defaulted on debt at least six times, US treasuries are now a rather risky investment.
Can we use Occam's Razor and assume that nobody knows what would be the optimal tariff rates and if you don't have a reliable mathematical model the only choice you are left with is experimentation and A/B tests.
Why is no one highlighting how this is repeating history 8 years ago? I don’t get it, there’s this magical reporting gap where all of this is new strategy but it’s the exact same strategy. Why don’t we acknowledge this instead of searching for some new angle?
Here are a bunch of links from 2018/2019:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/13/apple-dodges-iphone-tariff-a...
https://www.kiplinger.com/slideshow/investing/t052-s001-14-s...
https://www.texastribune.org/2019/06/07/trump-tariff-threat-...
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/trumps-tariff-str...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-to-delay-tariff-increases...
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/19/hundreds-of-chines...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/china-threatens-retalia...
https://www.cfr.org/blog/trumps-tariffs-are-killing-american...
The articles you've linked are about threats of 10% to 25% tariffs in the context of active trade negotiations between the US and China. Here, there's an actually imposed tariff of 145% and no talks at all as far as has been reported. It's not the same situation.
The tariffs from 8 years ago were a seemingly rational policy and were largely upheld by the Biden administration.
These tariffs look designed to rapidly eject the US from the global economic order and hand over the reins to China. Though saying they were "designed" at all seems extravagantly generous.
Wow you had these at-the-ready, didn't you. Thanks.
*I've read through a few of these and it seems like perhaps Trump still thinks it's 2018/19, but China's position has only gotten stronger.
It seems the attempt to jack up tariffs so high this time was a bluff to "show" how strong we can be, but he miscalculated on how shaky the stock/bond markets actually currently are and the financial players know we're not in a position to go it alone.
And China knows this and they know they can wait us out. I believe it will be considered a misstep, at best and a catastrophe at worst.
Congratulations! You’ve just realize how journalism doesn’t exist any more (or never really did).
Good luck having a journalist even considering doing historical research about a subject or even stop and put more than 5 minutes into thinking about what they are reporting on.
You see it again and again, constantly.
Seems a bit anti-business to have an unequal playing field just for the star-bellied sneetches. Also silly that those with the biggest piles of capital are getting exemptions when the whole purpose of this exercise is to spur local investment in manufacturing. If anything, small businesses below some threshold of revenue/staff should be getting exemptions.
Wdym? It's entirely merit-based, with the 'merit' being $1 million dollar totally-not-a-bribe dinner with the president: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
That's definitely how it looks like
You are right.
Do you think all the tech CEO’s attended his inauguration for nothing?
I never imagined I would see such public corruption in any western country. I am saying this as someone who supported some the current administrations agenda
The inauguration donations are pretty common across all parties, I think the Trump coin launching the day prior was the most corrupt.
The whole idea of an inauguration donation is gross. No president should accept, and no one should offer.
It’s total bullshit. Part of my business involves direct import and that’s now impacted by tariffs. The cherry on top is that what I import is not and cannot be produced in the U.S. I source a number of other products from suppliers in the U.S. and literally every single one of them is impacted by tariffs somehow, whether it’s ingredients, packaging, etc. that comes from somewhere else. Some of my materials originate in the Dominican Republic, which is now subject to a 10% tariff, although it’s more common for others in my industry to source those same materials from China. Now that China is prohibitively expensive, they will be quickly pivoting to other suppliers, which will further drive up prices. Supply chains are in chaos right now.
It burns me up that massive companies like Apple and Nvidia get a free pass while everyone else is subject to the most brain dead economic policy anyone alive today has ever lived through.
The whole thing strikes me as a bunch of nepobaby/fake academic/banker bro advisors who have no idea how the physical world works. As much as I think Musk is a bad actor at this point, talking to him about supply chains would have highlighted how insane this whole plan was from day 1.
My dad is a retired EE who dealt with the 90s offshoring wave and described the process of spinning up offshore production with a new supplier/factor/product as a 1-2 year process.
Now imagine every producer with China exposure trying to do this at the same time dealing with the same limited ex-China options? Nothing was happening in the 90 day pause, let alone before the 2026 midterms or before the end of his reign in 2028.
Complete chaos for American companies who are left with no good options other than try to wait it out, and pass on excess cost to consumers in interim.
It’s pure stupidity and most people don’t even realize it. Last night I met a couple at a country club where I was a guest - one of those $100k/yr places - and they asked me if my trade partners are charging me more with the tariffs. I told them the U.S. government is charging me more with the tariffs and my trade partners are charging me more because the value of the dollar is down. This was the first time anyone told them it’s the importer who pays the tariff and that it will be passed to the customer in multiples to maintain the same profit margin. Man, to be wealthy enough to be a member at a place like that and to be able to live in ignorant bliss… What a life.
I have seen country clubs only in movies. Do those places really exist and are they as stereotypical as one might expect?
It’s not like Caddyshack. At least not this one. There’s golf, tennis, pools, a restaurant, bars, etc. It’s the kind of place where you will see PGA Tour guys hanging around and a few other high profile people. A lot of people are driving cars that cost more than my house. Everyone is pretty chill, but it’s top 1% kind of people in their natural habitat. It’s like a little bubble detached from reality.
Country clubs aren't terribly different than a Manhattan co-op..
They really exist. There are lots. I went to one in Dallas as a guest once. Sure as hell not my scene.
This is why I don't know if he will/would actually hold fast through the turbulence of actually implementing anything he's threatened.
Once we eat through inventories and stuff that left the ports & currently on the water, prices will go up.
The country went insane when inflation crossed 5%, are we really going to do it again.. when the reason for it will be so singularly obvious?
Whilst the reason may be singularly obvious to those who consume various forms and sources of media, there's likely enough people that only consume re-published whitehouse press releases and the trump administration probably already has an alternative explanation that they'll use for these increased prices.
And their target market will eat it up and ask for seconds.
"Star-bellied sneetches" maybe, but it's not about "biggest piles of capital" as much as about importing things with the following codes:
8471 8473.30 8486 8517.13.00 8517.62.00 8523.51.00 8524 8528.52.00 8541.10.00 8541.21.00 8541.29.00 8541.30.00 8541.49.10 8541.49.70 8541.49.80 8541.49.95 8541.51.00 8541.59.00 8541.90.00 8542
It took me a minute to figure out what you were referring to:
| Code | Description |
|--------------|------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| 8471 | Automatic data processing machines (e.g., computers, servers, laptops) |
| 8473.30 | Parts/accessories for machines of 8471 (e.g., computer parts) |
| 8486 | Machines for manufacturing semiconductors or ICs |
| 8517.13.00 | Smartphones |
| 8517.62.00 | Data transmission machines (e.g., routers, modems) |
| 8523.51.00 | Solid-state storage (e.g., USB drives, flash memory) |
| 8524 | Recorded media (e.g., tapes, disks — mostly obsolete) |
| 8528.52.00 | LCD/LED monitors for computers |
| 8541.10.00 | Diodes (not including LEDs) |
| 8541.21.00 | Transistors (<1 W dissipation) |
| 8541.29.00 | Other transistors |
| 8541.30.00 | Thyristors, diacs, triacs |
| 8541.49.10 | Gallium arsenide LEDs |
| 8541.49.70 | Other LEDs (not GaAs) |
| 8541.49.80 | Other photosensitive semiconductors |
| 8541.49.95 | Other semiconductors not elsewhere specified |
| 8541.51.00 | Unassembled photovoltaic cells |
| 8541.59.00 | Other photovoltaic cells/modules |
| 8541.90.00 | Parts for items in 8541 |
| 8542 | Electronic integrated circuits (e.g., microprocessors, memory chips) |
I copied the codes from the actual government communication: https://content.govdelivery.com/bulletins/gd/USDHSCBP-3db9e5...
As other commenter says, it’s interesting that there are also exceptions within the exceptions.
I'm reaching here but....
Apple has already "committed" to investing in US manufacturing. Also, many companies have committed to AI investments on US soil which would be heavily NVIDIA dependent. Could be a justification for the exemption.
not just a bit, this is so unfair and smells of corruption, only the richest companies getting exemptions, give me a break. this is what organized crime looks like.
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if it is not, what is your interpretation of it then?
It is all companies in the categories of phones, computers, and chips.
so what difference does that make, my interpretation still holds :)
False, you said:
> only the richest companies getting exemptions
…when the reality is that certain classes of goods were exempted. You reiterated the clickbaity headline.
Products like the Librem phone have exceptions. Is Purism one of the richest companies?
It applies to huawei as much as Apple.
America has finally become the banana republic it has accused others of being.
That's a funny way of looking at it because the banana republics weren't called that because they were "bananas" or something. They were called that to identify which of those countries had had state and megacorp interference and government toplings, by mostly the United Fruit Company - an American company.
Whatever the banana republics were they were turned into that by the US's doing, so it's funny that now the term comes back home.
This has been the best TIL moment for me on HN.
Thanks, man, I am now in the rabbit hole of reading up.
In that same context, did you read the article about how diplomats were "convincing" the Mexican government to not use open source over Microsoft?
It sure sounds like the same strategy.
[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/1013776/
It bears some resemblance to the Imperial Boomerang.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_boomerang
People commenting here about Trump corruption are correct, but it's also not new. This is regression to the mean. America has historically been a highly corrupt nation with extreme wealth inequality that occasionally has shocks (e.g. Abolitionism, the Progressive movement, WWII) that allow liberals to take over and purge the system of corruption. If anything, we've had to deal with and defeat (or at least, outlive) smarter and more well-connected fascists than Trump.
I agree and my rationale of it is that it's related to the US dedication to capitalism and thus aversion to any form of socialism (even small pockets that, in my opinion, are evidently positive for society as a whole) as some kind of governmental totalitarianism.
This is probably the most corrupt, pay to play government in the history of the US. Merit has no place here.
That’s how oligarchies work.
Eastern Europe and large part of Asia to US citizens: "First time?"
[dead]
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Companies aren’t getting exemptions. The product categories are. The headline is misleading. And while you might already be aware of that, most the people responding to you clearly aren’t.
The result is still that certain companies are getting exemptions for their products while others aren't. And there is no real rhyme or reason behind these decisions
K. We aren’t in disagreement there. Not sure if you’re giving pushback on something I said.
True, yet irrelevant. If Apple imports garlic for it's cafeteria, that will be tariffed. But those commodity categories represent the business of the named companies, and those companies represent the majority of the value of imports to the US in those categories.
It’s not irrelevant at all when the headline implies that companies were singled out by name. Details matter.
Because they can’t do it, and will be sued, to my understanding. I think you’re trying to make the admins look good.
Per Bloomberg, 20% fentanyl tariff on China still applies and these categories may yet receive their own unique tariff, https://archive.is/jKupW
The exemption categories include components and assembled products, https://content.govdelivery.com/bulletins/gd/USDHSCBP-3db9e5...
Industrial-scale workarounds were developed for previous tariffs, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43652823. Such loopholes will need to be addressed in any new trade agreements.> 8486 Machines for producing semiconductors & ICs: wafer fab, lithography.
Does US buy them from China too?
Unlikely. The exclusions above are for reciprocal tariffs from all countries, i.e.
I’m not seeing anyone discuss this here, so I figured I’d raise an important point: this style of tariffs is crushing for US manufacturing. While a universal tariff with no exceptions incentivizes domestic manufacturing, a selective tariff with specific industry exceptions is absolute poison.
You might think, as the authors of this exemption did, “well then we will exempt computer parts.” Then people will simply import the parts. But if you manufacture those parts in the US, you are suddenly at a massive disadvantage. Your computer parts factory likely runs using a large amount of imported raw materials, imported machines, and imported tooling, and there are no tariff exemptions for those broad categories… so you’re screwed. Oftentimes there is no reasonable domestic substitute. You will go out of business in favor of someone importing the parts, which now happens tariff-free under an exemption. That’s why, generally speaking, tariff exemptions are deadly to domestic manufacturing.
Universal tariffs with no exception don't even incentivize domestic manufacturing when it cuts local manufacturers off from an outside market that's bigger than the domestic one.
My company manufactures equipment in North America, with the most expensive input coming domestically from Ohio. Guess what though? Retaliatory tariffs from the global community means that the most rational course of action is now to move that manufacturing *out of the US* so that we can sell to the global market without penalty.
Sorry Ohio, but Mexico is currently *not* engaged in a trade war with Canada and half the EU so the rational decision for a company who wants to sell in those markets is to divest from the US.
Even universal tariffs with no exceptions is a problem.
Many things cross US/Canada/Mexico border in the process being manufactured. And tariffs will stack up.
Many advanced products (tech/chip, etc) are not entirely made in any single place. Some stuff is imported, and some is exported again, and tariffing the world, will also make the world tariff you.
I think this is all around bad. Best case scenario the US has elected a president who decided to burn all political capital, alliances and credibility in search of a slightly better deal.
Doing this sort maximum pressure economic extortion style policies, *might* getter you a slightly better deal. But at what cost?
Can EU countries buy US military equipment, when it turns out that the US will withhold support for equipment we've bought and paid for, in order to pressure a democracy, fighting for its existence, into surrender.
Trump may get a win in the headlines, because everyone thinks he'll go away if he get a win.
> Your computer parts factory likely runs using a large amount of imported raw materials, imported machines, and imported tooling, and there are no tariff exemptions for those broad categories… so you’re screwed.
All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local 24/7 news feed for more than eight years, so there’s no point in acting surprised about it. You’ve had plenty of time to lodge any bribe worth the president's time and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now. Oh, for heaven’s sake, Americans, President Trump did a crypto scam on his supporters before being sworn in, you know. I’m sorry, but if you can’t be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that’s your own lookout.
I've no sympathy at all.
Exempt items are:
8471: Computers.
8473.30: Computer parts.
8486: Semiconductor manufacturing equipment.
8517.13.00: Smartphones.
8517.62.00: Network equipment.
8523.51.00: Solid state media.
8524 and 8528.52.00: Computer displays.
8541.* (with some subheadings excluded): Semiconductor components EXCEPT LEDs, photovoltaic components, piezoelectric crystals).
8542: Integrated circuits.
The 8541.* category exclusions are interesting. Does the US self-produce all required quantities of LEDs and piezoelectric crystals and doesn't need to import those? Is the exception on photovoltaic components to discourage American companies from producing solar panels?
[1] https://hts.usitc.gov/search?query=[INSERT HEADING CODE HERE. EXAMPLE: 8471]
The question that is in everybody's head: How long until he changes his mind on that too?
This link is better:
https://wccftech.com/trumps-reciprocal-tariffs-have-reported...
Or, the primary source seems to be:
https://content.govdelivery.com/bulletins/gd/USDHSCBP-3db9e5...
But you'd have to look up those codes to know they're for PCs, smartphones
Thanks for a great free article.
The title is sensationalism when it should be phone and computer associated parts are exempted from tariffs or something like that.
Since last night, anyway. The people who make shipping work are frantically trying to keep up. One of the biggest customs brokers posts updates twice a day on weekdays. Last update 4 PM Friday, so they haven't caught the biggest reversal. If tariff rates change while in transit, the bond paid before the item was shipped may now be insufficient. So the container goes into storage (where?) until Customs and Border Protection gets paid. Some recipients don't have the cash to pay. Low-end resellers who order on Alibaba and sell on Amazon, for example.
Port operators hate this. Unwanted containers clog up the portside sorting and storage systems. Eventually the containers are either sent back or auctioned off by CBP, like this stuff.[1]
Some shippers outside the US have stopped shipping to the US until this settles. This includes all the major laptop makers - Lenovo, Acer, Dell, etc.[2] Nobody wants to be caught with a container in transit, a big customs bill due on receipt, and storage charges. That will recover once the rates are stable for a few weeks. Probably.
Customs and Border Protection is trying to keep up. Sometimes you have to pay more because Trump raised tariffs. Sometimes you can get a credit back because Trump dropped tariffs. Those are all exception transactions, with extra paperwork and delays.
Where's the Flexport guy from YC? He should be able to explain all this.
Consumer version: expect to see some empty shelves, rejected orders, and higher prices for the next few weeks.
[1] https://bid.cwsmarketing.com/auctions/catalog/id/167
[2] https://www.techspot.com/news/107504-trump-tariffs-force-maj...
Ryan Petersen was on the Bloomberg Odd Lots podcast a few days ago.
In a dark sense this is probably perfect for him.
He announces big tough tariffs on China, his base claps, hoots and hollers. He quietly walks it back via internal memo to CBP on a Friday night.
His base gets to see him be tough on China, without actually suffering any consequences of goods shortages or price increases.
Has the Proton CEO acknowledged just how farcically off base he was when he said the GOP was the party of small businesses?
I was thinking about this yesterday and how stupid a comment it was to make.
Demand for Proton services is probably up.
The thing that’s really been getting to me, is that, I’m liberal, not pro-Trump, but the MAGA American heartland story has been really getting to me. I want to see small business, manufacturing, small town American succeed. And there’s some part of me that thought maybe Trump, as much as I don’t like him, is the thing that is needed to make that happen, but man it seems like he’s really fucking over the people who supported him the most.
Here's the set of categories exempted from the tariffs (via perplexity) Original source: https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/USDHSCBP/bulletins/... Backup: https://archive.is/el9Mz
via Perplexity:
8471: Automatic data-processing machines and units thereof, including computers, laptops, disc drives, and other data processing equipment.
8473.30: Parts and accessories for automatic data-processing machines, such as components used in computers.
8486: Machines and apparatus for the manufacture of semiconductor devices or electronic integrated circuits.
8517.13.00: Mobile phones (cellular telephones) or other wireless network devices.
8517.62.00: Communication apparatus capable of connecting to a network, such as routers and modems.
8523.51.00: Solid-state storage devices (e.g., flash drives) used for recording data.
8524: Recorded media, such as DVDs, CDs, and other optical discs.
8528.52.00: Flat-panel displays capable of video playback, including monitors and televisions.
8541.10.00: Diodes, including light-emitting diodes (LEDs).
8541.21.00: Transistors with a dissipation rate of less than 1 watt.
8541.29.00: Other transistors not specified elsewhere.
8541.30.00: Thyristors, diacs, and triacs used in electronics.
8541.49.10 to 8541.49.95: Semiconductor devices such as integrated circuits (ICs) categorized by specific types or functions.
8541.51.00: Semiconductor devices designed for photovoltaic applications (solar cells).
8541.59.00: Other semiconductor devices not elsewhere classified.
8541.90.00: Parts of semiconductor devices or electronic integrated circuits.
8542: Electronic integrated circuits, including microprocessors and memory chips.
So we are exempting all the tech transfer & natsec risk items but maintaining new embargo-level tariffs on cameras, children's toys, and t-shirts.
Makes a lot of sense if you don't think about it.
I cannot read it, but didn't China restrict the export of some tech related items as part of their tariffs ?
I remember hearing those items are need to make assemble some components needed for some boards.
I hope Wall Street is still hammering this admin. on why these tariffs are bad.
You're thinking of rare elements.
One of the most surprising things about this announcement is that it didn't happen during business hours where the insiders could buy call options before hand.
Insiders already bought call before market close on the previous day.
There are valid reasons for tariffs:
* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/when-are-tariffs-good
Especially when it comes to certain areas of the economy:
> Democratic countries’ economies are mainly set up as free market economies with redistribution, because this is what maximizes living standards in peacetime. In a free market economy, if a foreign country wants to sell you cheap cars, you let them do it, and you allocate your own productive resources to something more profitable instead. If China is willing to sell you brand-new electric vehicles for $10,000, why should you turn them down? Just make B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps, sell them for a high profit margin, and drive a Chinese car.
> Except then a war comes, and suddenly you find that B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps aren’t very useful for defending your freedoms. Oops! The right time to worry about manufacturing would have been years before the war, except you weren’t able to anticipate and prepare for the future. Manufacturing doesn’t just support war — in a very real way, it’s a war in and of itself.
* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/manufacturing-is-a-war-now
> China has rapidly established itself as the world’s dominant shipbuilding power, marginalizing the United States and its allies in a strategically important industry. In addition to building massive numbers of commercial ships, many Chinese shipyards also produce warships for the country’s rapidly growing navy. As part of its “military-civil fusion” strategy, China is tapping into the dual-use resources of its commercial shipbuilding empire to support its ongoing naval modernization
* https://www.csis.org/analysis/ship-wars-confronting-chinas-d...
But none of the current "reasons"—which may simply be rationalizations / retcons by underlings for one man's fickle will—really make much sense:
* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/all-the-arguments-for-tariffs-...
I think we need to also consider that "conventional economic thinking" got us into this mess (de-industrialized, vulnerable economy, hollowed out working/middle class, enormous debt/deficit). There never seems to be any accountability for this though. I suspect it's because a particular section of society has done very well from the status quo.
> (de-industrialized, vulnerable economy, hollowed out working/middle class, enormous debt/deficit).
The debt/deficit is on politicians (and the public who votes them in). See also issues with US Social Security (Canada was on a similar path, but the government(s) sorted things out in the 1990s).
At least for the US, it has not de-industrialized, as exports have never been higher. It makes a smaller portion of total GDP, but that's because of growth of other sectors; and a smaller portion of the workforce, but that's because of automation:
* https://www.csis.org/analysis/do-not-blame-trade-decline-man...
The largest problem nowadays is probably housing costs, and that has nothing to do with trade, but is about things like NIMBY and zoning.
If you want more than "a particular section of society" and more folks to benefit look into redistribution, which plenty of conventional economists will happily agree with.
> a particular section of society has done very well from the status quo
Name me a country where this is not the case. The only thing we've failed to do is educate enough of our people to prosper as a deindustrialized nation. That and failed to protect our democracy.
I think we've promoted little else besides de-industrialized degrees. That's why it's going to be so hard to ramp up again. How many kids think it's cool to get a textile engineering or materials science degree vs marketing or software engineering?
> we've failed to do is educate enough of our people to prosper as a deindustrialized nation
What education did we give them to prosper as an industrialized nation? It seems to me that the population was able to discover that and benefit from it entirely on their own. Why do they need "education" to "prosper" in current conditions?
Aren't we currently living in the most educated time already? That is we have more people going to and graduating from college than ever before. What is currently missing? Do we need to force everyone to go to college? What about those who don't graduate? They just won't ever be able to prosper?
> That and failed to protect our democracy.
I think a little more than half the country would disagree with this assessment.
The US didn't have a de-industrialized or vulnerable economy before Trump. And by the extent it was hollowed out, it's because of blatant corruption, not "conventional economic thinking".
You don't even have a point about the deficit. While there are plenty of economic schools that will give you high deficits, the US didn't get his by following any of those either.
They're called reciprocal but the Chinese tariffs on US goods looks like they're gonna stay. That and dumping our bonds doesn't bode well for the rest of us.
And in ~24hr policy will zigzag again
It's not like businesses need to plan or anything so this is great
What imports of size from China are then under full tariffs?
Seems silly just to mess up a few toy importers.
Clothing. A lot of apparel and accessory retailers have significant portions of their items produced in China.
Sextoys...
Auto parts come to mind. Also there are plenty of products on shelves at big box retailers like Walmart that are made in China and won’t fall into the exempted categories.
It is a huge amount of various goods. So much so that even if you look up a breakdown, 25% will be in other. Chemicals, base metals, stone, glass, etc etc.
What doesn't China export? Basically everything. So everything minus these exemptions.
Auto parts, but also autos.
So Tesla gets a handwave against world conquering BYDs.
He definitely blinked. Also illegal immigrants who work in hotels and on farms won’t be deported. Weird.
Behind the apparent waffling, the one constant is the administration’s effort to direct hatred towards China. You have American military leaders predicting an invasion of Taiwan in a specific time window. It’s all a circus.
This is a massive sign that Trump's double down strategy is failing badly. He only has one play: Be a bully and double down any time someone fights back. It works when you have the leverage but as soon as you don't anymore you loose, big. The US just ran out of leverage. I don't know about everyone else but I just started looking into how to move money and investments outside the US.
> I don't know about everyone else but I just started looking into how to move money and investments outside the US.
Based on tweets I've seen, you are not the only one engaging in "capital flight". Not great for the US.
One would like to think this will be a good lesson for the administration. But I'm worried that they are not acting completely rationally.
he only has the one play so there is really only one outcome.
This is pretty much how I expected this to play out, at least for now. Trump acts all tough and doesn't back down publicly, but China actually doesn't back down. So what happens is that some businesses get exemptions to mitigate the impact. Then some fine print gets changed about how the rules are enforced. Like, suddenly it turns out that Kiribati is a major electronics supplier to the US :)
End result - US economy takes a hit, China takes a smaller hit. Trade balance widens further, most likely. The rich get richer, while many small companies struggle to survive.
> doesn't back down publicly
Seems like he has been backing down publicly all week. Quickly too.
This has been a massive catastrophe, though I suspect you're right about the end result.
Maybe publicly was not the right word. What I really meant is that the nominal 145% rate will remain in effect, so he can continue to pretend that the tariffs are still there and still hurting China, while he makes "minor adjustments" to protect American businesses.
Actual source: https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/USDHSCBP/bulletins/...
Not something you would do if there was any chance of a larger deal near term
Who would have guessed.
Yeah, they're really exemplifying the "shoot first and ask questions later" model.
That might explain why Apple's stock was leading the rally yesterday...
Isn't this the same scam that Yelp pulls?
The media coverage seems a bit weird to me. The primary source was released 12 hours ago, but when I did a bit of research 4 hours ago I only saw a few reports from dubious Chinese sources like this: https://www.zhitongcaijing.com/content/detail/1277768.html
Then about 2 hours ago all major media outlets were covering it.
You're likely seeing the effect of timezones.
It was announced at 11pm and American news companies didn't feel it urgent enough to report before their usual morning weekend staff's shift.
Love the timing.
It's so painful watching this administration be forced to react to their preventable mistakes in-real-time with no repercussions.
One thing is throwing and seeing what sticks, but at the seat of the presidency, it seems like such an antipattern for leadership. And yet, the support is unwavering. It's exhausting.
oh, they'll be repercussions. We, as a nation, will be paying for this for years and years to come.
My partner just canceled her trip where she'd have easily spent 4-5k in the US economy due to uncertainty in the border governance.
A lot of my friends are rethinking sending their children to US for college education while Trump is in power and are considering European schools. That's probably a few million dollars over next 2-3 years potentially lost from the US economy from just people i personally know. And no one is coming from China.
It's not even a week since Secretary of Commerce Lutnick was explaining how he wants to bring back millions of jobs 'screwing the little screws in iPhones' to Amercia ?
There is really a good chance that we will develop a deep understanding of how the French Revolution happened and why they went straight to guillotines.
The French Revolution didn’t go “straight to guillotines”, not even close.
Had to lynch a lot of people first!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%80_la_lanterne
I cannot tell what point you're making here. Why is this important to say?
Sorry for being vague. I was trying to point out that the first phase of the revolution (“the Revolution of 1789”) was basically a liberal aristocratic revolution not unlike the American Revolution. The radical egalitarians that orchestrated the Terror didn’t seize power until a few years later.
I cannot tell either. It seems to be a potentially well-intended remark about correcting an inaccurate historical analogy to the current U.S. national leadership. It may be important to remark upon potentially inaccurate information, even if in the comments section of an Internet forum, because otherwise more people will have a wrong impression of the French Revolution and the role of guillotines. When they go to watch Les Miserables they will also be surprised. This last remark was unimportant and for that, I deeply apologize.
The original comment was based on a popular but wildly inaccurate summary of the French Revolution, where the average Joes got increasingly fed up with their rich oppressors and eventually decided to execute them. The revolutionaries never adopted a general policy that rich oppressors should face death, and most people who got guillotined were average Joes who ended up on the wrong side of some political dispute or another.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact-checking
Nothing about the tariffs make any sense. The want to use the tariffs to negotiate with countries but also say they want to use tariffs to bring back manufacturing. If you are using tariffs to negotiate then once the country gives you what you want, you have to lift the tariff thus the free market keeping manufacturing overseas. If you want to bring back manufacturing then you can't use the tariff to negotiate.
I am genuinely at a loss at how his supporters don't understand this.
The finer points don't matter. If it did, they'd be wondering why the nation is not awash in coal jobs and why Obamacare wasn't repealed. Both of those were supposed to have happened by 2020.
Tariffs are sold to them as "hitting back" against countries "exploiting America". They don't know what they are or how they work, and they definitely do not think of it as a tax, which is the definition you'd see in any AP Macroeconomics textbook.
All that matters is maintaining the illusion that "he's fighting for people like me".
> maintaining the illusion that "he's fighting for people like me"
There is no illusion - if Trump was a profesional working in any trade, the plebs wouldn't hire him, yet they elected him president.
It's just that the plebs think Trumps is the aristocrat most like them, and by electing him they somehow screw the arisrocrats over.
> I am genuinely at a loss at how his supporters don't understand this.
His supporters value blind loyalty and obedience, not logic. They don’t stand for themselves, they stand against others. They’ll gladly suffer if they think the other side is getting it worse. They’re the perfect target to be exploited.
Do you have a source for that? I hear that sentiment expressed often by Americans I meet here, but I never saw anyone explicitly saying "yes, I/we value blind loyalty". Is blind loyalty something Trump followers officially identify with?
Can you provide any source in history where someone said they identified with being a blind follower?
The evidence comes in the form of continued support after each incident of hypocrisy, lying, etc
Why would someone say they blindly follow someone when that's bad?
Not to mention no one is investing in manufacturing if the economic conditions to support it get changed every day or two.
Which is the biggest flaw in all this. If the goal was to bring consumer electronics manufacturing back to the US, adding a tariff that goes up every quarter would make sense. People could make plans and build factories. YC might even fund something.
Trump doesn't have the authority to set permanent tariffs. All this is being done as a temporary measure under the Emergency Economic Powers Act, which is for wars. These backdoor tariffs are being challenged in court, and there's a good chance of the plaintiffs winning.[1]
For tariffs to stick, Congress has to do it. The Constitution gives Congress sole power over tariffs. There's a long-term track on this, going through the US Trade Representative's office, with Federal Register notices and public comments. Last week Greer was up on Capitol Hill testifying before a congressional committee. That's the normal path by which tariff changes are made. Greer is so out of the loop that he hadn't been told about the big tariff on China. That change came out while he was in front of the committee. He was publicly humiliated. Which means he can't do his job of negotiating with other countries on behalf of the US. Greer may quit.
When you dig into this, you don't find "4D chess".
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2025/04/10/can-tru...
Typical cult leader stuff: say and do increasingly indefensible and nonsensical stuff to isolate your true believers even more.
That's what you get for electing a president with the intelectual and emotional maturity of a 5 year old.
Oh, oh, also, electing a felon, you get a lot of grifring, including, but not limited to the trump crypto scam, the insider trading Trump boasted about on video (about his friends making billions in the stock market).
This guy is not playing 5d chess guys, he's just a clown surrounded by yes men.
Maybe Trump genuienly wants to disrupt neoliberalism?
Now, a lot of people on the left use "neoliberalism" in the same way people on the right use "woke", or (Eu) football fans use the word "offside" i.e. it means "it's anything the other side do that I don't like". But neoliberalism actually has a definition used by more serious people - generally free trade and the reduction of government interference.
Maybe Trump doesn't want globalisation, maybe Trump wants stuff to be made in the USA. Maybe he wants to roll trade back to before 1968, the Hakone Maru, and the TEU container, to when he was in his 20s (a lot of people think that their formative years were the best, since that's when they were made, and I doubt Trump is an exception). I'm not saying Trump isn't a hypocrite, but is it slightly possible that some of what he says is actually what he intends to do, e.g. "making America great again" meaning in part a disruption to the globalised world order that the online left always seems to think is evil?
Maybe maybe maybe. These excuses are a fantasy. Have you considered maybe he really likes money and himself and anything outside of that doesn't fire any neurons?
Have you heard the engineering adage "the purpose of a system is what it does"?
Second-guessing the motivations of the Trump administration is tiresome. Let's just judge it by what it does and its effects, both speak for themselves.
>Maybe Trump doesn't want globalisation,
Strange of him to renegotiate NAFTA in his first term then
> Maybe Trump doesn't want globalisation, maybe Trump wants stuff to be made in the USA.
As I said, what he is doing is not going to get stuff made in the US. Even if we had all of the raw materials needed (we don't), the US doesn't have the talent to spin up a manufacturing hub. That is the missing piece to all of these conversations. So we don't have the materials, we don't have the skills, and we seem to be attacking education so it doesn't look training people to do these things is in the cards? How is this plan meant to work?
The only lifeline I can throw your comment is that he wants to invade Canada and Greenland to steal their raw materials which at least lines up with the idea of getting raw materials to build up manufacturing.
> Even if we had all of the raw materials needed (we don't),
What is this brand of defeatist bullpucky? There is no raw material which is not contained within the borders of the US. Only some which are less expensive to extract elsewhere.
> the US doesn't have the talent to spin up a manufacturing hub.
I humbly invite you to visit https://www.imts.com/ this year in Chicago. If, after that, you believe that there's something that can't be manufactured in the US, I'll eat my hat.
> What is this brand of defeatist bullpucky? There is no raw material which is not contained within the borders of the US. Only some which are less expensive to extract elsewhere.
Let me rephrase this. We don't have the raw materials unless we destroy national parks and pollute our waterways. We also don't have the facilities to process these materials.
> I humbly invite you to visit https://www.imts.com/ this year in Chicago. If, after that, you believe that there's something that can't be manufactured in the US, I'll eat my hat.
This link says 2026 not 2025.
> Let me rephrase this. We don't have the raw materials unless we destroy national parks and pollute our waterways.
I've got news for you, that ship sailed a hundred, two hundred years ago. Most of the eastern seaboard of the US was clearcut of old growth forest. What we have now on the east coast is new growth. Still, the number of acres of old growth remaining is staggering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_old-growth_forests#Uni... And I see no problem with forestry when practiced sustainably.
If you're asking for no resource extraction, then you're asking either for negative economic growth or exploitation of someone else somewhere else. Far more responsible to regulate the industry here, where we have jurisdiction to ensure it is done sustainably, safely, and equitably. And far better for economic integrity in cases of pandemic or war.
> And I see no problem with forestry when practiced sustainably.
I don't have a problem with most things when done sustainably. What in the history of the US makes you believe it will be done sustainably? Gas companies still publicly deny or downplay climate change.
> What in the history of the US makes you believe it will be done sustainably?
Unions, labor law, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_sit-down_strike in which the national guard and police used automatic weapons against striking workers, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Hall_disaster immortalized in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oz7oguguIZE the winning of the work week, overtime pay, healthcare of any kind, holidays, payment in legal tender, existence of the country in the first place... so much more. I won't sugar coat it, no human endeavor is ever perfect, but I find the attitude that we can't do it, or we don't want to do it here as backwards and regressive. Worthy of rebuke. If our society depends on something, we should have no shame in doing it here. And if we can't figure out how to do it here safely, then we definitely shouldn't be doing it elsewhere.
> Now, a lot of people on the left use "neoliberalism" in the same way people on the right use "woke", or (Eu) football fans use the word "offside" i.e. it means "it's anything the other side do that I don't like". But neoliberalism actually has a definition used by more serious people - generally free trade and the reduction of government interference.
... That's how it's used on the left
economics is a lot of made up theory and not hard science. you won't get any of his smarter supporters replying because even if they did you're showing an inability to model best-case. i mean you're personally at a loss?
if you took the average supporter of both sides neither seem smart. the clips they have of both sides is shameful. but those aren't the people implementing the policy, but they both support their tribes.
if you really are interested in understanding how they think you couldn't do worse than this:
https://www.hudsonbaycapital.com/documents/FG/hudsonbay/rese...
They gave every strong indication of their incompetence possible - over years. A bunch of people said "yay for incompetence" and here we are.
These are the people who score in the bottom 20% and make up conspiracy theories on how they were right and it's the establishment who's wrong.
Any random person waiting at a bus stop would likely have managed things better.
It's not that they are managing it badly that I'm talking about.
It's that they manage it in a way to maximize their personal profits, with an absolute disregard of the ordinary folks.
Tariffs are one example - none of it makes sense, but companies still pay millions for a 'dinner at Mar-a-Lago' to get a favorable treatment.
What's hapening with law firms is even more disgusting.
I get the feeling that a lot of Democrats and 'real' Republicans thinks that he will get what he wants and then they just wait out 4 years. It's an almost 80 years narcissist, who doesn't care about people nor law, and who dreams about becoming a King. It only gets worse from here, not better.
If that was the case there'd be more coherency. There's these days where multiple people are asked a question, each answer is a shocking departure from policy and they all contradict and then an administrator comes out and is like "you're going to bring mining the global supply for rare earth minerals to Ohio?! Geology does not support you my good man".
So not even cynicism is supported by the evidence.
I mean they're also pillaging of course. Incompetent And malice. Both are possible
It’s the looting of America while they use the same old racial ideologies so their supporters don’t break rank even under abuse.
Racism is a tool wielded by the owner class to divide workers as they wage class warfare against them.
The grassroots development of class consciousness and a united working class is our only way out of this.
if you were in Russia in the late XIX century then yes
but history learns (this is also why we cannot ever have another revolutionary hero, nor another french revolution) so no.
class consciousness and a united "working class" will not help us anymore. a lot has changed since those ideas made sense
They just spouted two different justifications, jobs will come back to America, and robots will do the jobs. I guess the most generous explanation is jobs for people making robots in America by combining the two separate statements, but that's not even close to what they said.
they're manoeuvring to win the vote of American manufacturing robots for 2028. suffrage for manufacturing robots is something the far left & far right could both support, although there may be some disagreement over if the robots themselves or their owners should be allocated the votes.
The French Revolution was against the establishment.
I wouldn’t argue Trump represents the establishment.
The idea that you could "bring industry back" into the US with blanket tariffs is delusional and demonstrates a complete ignorance of the complexity of economic ecosystems and industrial culture. It takes a long time for sustained expertise and the needed supply chains to grow and form and mature in an economy.
You could argue that perhaps a selective application of tariffs might help the formation of such domestic industry, but tariffs are not something to wield lightly.
“I don’t know how you can be that stupid. How do you get to be president and then you’re stupid?”
As if the US would make the propaganda machine / spy device / tracker more expensive
Slightly off-topic, but is the result of the USA tariff "trade-war" mean that we get to trade at a discount with China in Europe? What I mean is, since it's cheaper for China to trade with us in Europe now, does that mean we gain some bargaining power?
One danger is that all the cheap Chinese crap will be redirected at Europe. It does have to upside of cheaper goods for Europe overall, which is fine for everything we don't make and which is overall adding value. The risk is that we also get all cheap plastic junk, unless EU regulations can keep it out environmental concerns.
I suspect that trade policy is one of the core competences of the EU.
And countries arguing for particular tariff policies and getting cutouts is widespread EU past time.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/technology/apple-nvidia-dell...
So we are going to… uhh… tariff and try to repatriate a lot of lower value less strategically important manufacturing while giving up on higher value strategic stuff like chips?
This reads to me as "we're doubling-down on 145%+ tariffs for everyone else".
This is getting frighteningly close to a Russian-style economy. As in, a handful of powerful, connected "insiders" will be allowed to operate businesses, and will dominate... while everyone else gets wiped out, by acts of government. The furthest system possible from the free-market paradigm that built the American economy as it stands today.
Russia is not a prosperous nation.
> a handful of powerful, connected "insiders" will be allowed to operate businesses, and will dominate... while everyone else gets wiped out, by acts of government
Note that this is not an exemption for companies, but an exemption for goods:
> A new list of goods to be exempted from the latest round of tariffs on U.S. importers was released, and it includes smartphones, PCs, servers, and other technology goods, many of which are assembled in China.
So all anyone has to do to qualify is produce some of the most complicated electronic devices and components in the history of the world at the largest scale possible, without which there is zero chance of being sustainable or competitive, and then they can benefit from the gifts to the established giants?
What a gift. What a great idea. That'll surely spur innovation and domestic production and have no effect to further insulate the giants from competition.
> without which there is zero chance of being sustainable or competitive
It seems like some of these comments are missing how competition works.
Competition happens within the same type(s) of goods, not across them.
That is, the companies making the goods still affected by tariffs aren’t in competition with the companies making goods now exempt by tariffs.
Yes, its true that they will have a better chance at thriving under these exemptions, but whether they thrive or not should have little impact on the other companies.
To be clear, I’m not arguing in favor of this decision — or any of the tariffs, for that matter.
I’m just simply arguing that competition isn’t really the angle to use to argue against this particular decision.
> Competition happens within the same type(s) of goods, not across them.
Not true, for example smart phones replaced home computers for most people. Those are two very different goods, but since they can accomplish the same thing for the average person they end up competing.
And if you build your tech in US, well, you are disadvantaged because you have to pay the tariffs on every component you import from China.
So it’s actually an incentive to build in China.
It is incentive to somewhere you can get Chinese components without massive Chinese tariffs, can sell to the US without massive tariffs, and has cheap labour or tax incentives. Several countries will be sticking up their hand, if manufacturers take the gamble that the tariffs will remain for a long enough period.
So is your component in the list from a comment below -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43665766
Then you don't pay the tariff.
Aluminum isn’t a component, but you would pay a tariff on importing it to build with it.
The other benefit of building in China is that you will get unrestricted access to Europe and other markets
Why is this downvoted? This is factual.
Electronic imports, no/low tariffs.
Import material to produce electronics, high imports.
It isn’t really cheap or easy to build a PC or smartphone business with name recognition…
Nor is it cheap or easy to build a company that would likely be able to appeal tariff exemptions…
It’s exactly as easy or cheap to build a smartphone or PC business as it was a month ago. The headline is misleading.
I like the way that you phrased “I agree with you, it is not cheap or easy” here
Speaking of which, what are the tariffs for Russia?
Oh, we don't need tariffs for Russia. But we put them in for Ukraine. - the Republican administration
What about penguins? Are they going to get a tariff exemption?
I thought this is what happened during covid already. We wiped out a large number of small businesses.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre...
Small businesses die and start all the time.
It's unsurprising that more of them would die during a massive recession and a global pandemic.
Those numbers are meaningless without a similar count of small businesses opening.
I gather you haven't started your own business, or did yours start and die repeatedly?
People die all the time, and every year, more people are dying than any prior year in history.
Without context for how many people are born every year, one might read that and conclude that we're about to all die out.
No. This reads as capitulation by Trump who is now finding out his long held, half-baked economic theories are wrong. Trump got spanked by the bond market and realized how weak his position was. He can't walk it all back overnight without appearing even weaker than he already is. He's going to slowly roll back most consequential tariffs to try to escape blame for damaging the economy.
This is it exactly. And all the people who are calling Trump a 4cd chess master and a genius are in my opinion highly influenced by his propaganda.
They have a Trump Derangement Syndrome in a worship sense.
It's called a cult of personality.
Trump's Reality Distortion Field.
I’m completely over the tech industry falling over itself to bootlick and apologize away everything we’ve seen play out recently. The Cloudflare CEO, Matthew Prince, recently posted on X trying to explain the strategy and likely calm investors fears: https://x.com/eastdakota/status/1909822463707652192
“They’re not stupid. I know enough of the players involved to know they’re not idiots.”
“They’re not just in it for themselves. I get that this has become non-conventional wisdom, but I am going to assume for this that the goal isn’t merely grift.”
TLDR: don’t worry, it’s 5D chess. Keep on bootlicking your way to success while your stock gets trashed by these policies and we double down on anti-science rhetoric which will hasten our decline. I guess most of these leaders will have cashed out before it all implodes.
Trump’s next book: “The Art of the Fold”.
“Gambling with your savings”
You don't send 6 casinos broken and remain solvent by gambling with your savings.
He is, and always has, gambled with other people's savings.
It opens up avenues to all sorts off oligarchy style bribery and lack of market competition. ultimately, the country will be looted, since the most successful businesses will not thrive on its merits
His crypto coin also allows anyone to bribe him anonymously. It's incredibly corrupt.
We're building a hybrid of Italian Fascist and a Argentinian Peronist like state.
The desire for transactional wins and power overshadows all. Trump will unironically ally himself with a turd like Elon, or a turd like the UAW dude who glazed him on "Liberation Day". The state control of business is missing... perhaps we'll see that develop with Tesla.
It's a weird movement, because the baseline assumption is that the country is ruined. So any marginal win is celebrated, any loss is "priced in" politically.
Well these tariffs are a great opportunity for state control and corruption, companies are bribing him already.
Every dictatorship is unhappy in its own way but they all involve:
Myth of the strong man dictator
Erosion of rule of law
Undermining independent judiciary
Arbitrary detention and arbitrary enforcement of laws
Separate paramilitary groups
There are signs of all of this in the US just now.
This reeks "pay to play" very typical for banana republics.
Donations to presidential inauguration fund to get access to the president was already tradition in the US. Trump government just exploits it without shame.
This is a populism move, not pay-to-play. The imminent reality would have been this: many Americans will want to take a vacation to Canada to get a deal on their phone. That just doesn’t make sense.
Where do you see the populism in favoring Apple, Nvidia, Dell ?
The exclusion is by category: Smartphones, laptop computers, memory chips, machines used to create semiconductors, flat screen TVs, tablets and desktop computers. Apple, NVidia, and Dell are simply examples of some companies that will “benefit” (be harmed less).
There is no favoring of Apple, Nvidia or Dell. The headline is misleading. “and others” is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
> many Americans will want to take a vacation to Canada to get a deal on their phone. That just doesn’t make sense.
If they’re following the law they’d have to declare the purchase when they come home.
Yes, but people don’t always follow the law. CBP reported a spike in people smuggling eggs last month, and the margin on iPhones is a lot more tempting.
Of course, I would declare the purchase, but I imagine not everyone would.
There will be a new aristocracy. The aristocracy of pull. #iykyk
Exactly. I hope our government can survive the next 4 years for criminal investigations into this era. We can't become Russia.
What crimes were committed and could be prosecuted under the Supreme Court's immunity ruling?
It's very clear that the system of Constitutional governance has been intentionally broken. It is very common for authoritarian regimes to have compliant judiciaries and broad legislative control.
Effective restoration and reconstruction of Constitutional governance will necessarily be dramatic. It's still doable, but optimism is more of a survival strategy than an obvious conclusion at this stage.
Market manipulation?
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/well-timed-options-...
(Besides, at this point I wouldn't be surprised if Trump's Russian oligarch friends were among these traders.)
Pausing tariffs was an official act. The Supreme Court ruled courts could not consider presidents' motives for official acts.
But what about leaking information about it?
It’s not “insider” trading if you post about it publicly on Truth Social, the same way it’s not “insider” trading if you took out an ad in the New York Times.
The government is allowed to announce policy before doing it! Even if it affects stock prices!
Yeah, I'm not on that social media, nor do I read NYT. The same holds for millions of others.
Too bad! Insider trading, as a crime, requires that the information be nonpublic material information. You can join Truth Social and follow Donald Trump, so that makes the information public.
It actually is that broad. Futures traders often rely on industry-specific periodicals, which are “public”. Same for anything in the (high monthly cost!) Bloomberg terminal. So posting on a specific social media platform, where subscribing is free? That’s 100% public.
Leaking is vague. What part of what law?
It's not vague. I'm not a lawyer but usually cases of trading with insider information are taken very seriously. It's theft, basically. And the scale here is enormous.
Leaking, insider trading, and theft are different. And laws contain specific definitions.
There is evidence of him tweeting insider information.
Again I'm not a lawyer, and I don't care what law is applicable here. But surely this warrants further investigation.
Trump won the popular vote. I don't think this is going away without a major demographic shift, time probably measured in decades.
He won by a single point, when 30% of the population didn’t vote. It’s not good for the future of the country that he got anywhere as many votes as he did but we should remember that an emboldened minority is still a minority.
A large minority is still large. And not voting is a signal of apathy. Not opposition.
Might be true, but a president is a president for all, not just those who voted for him.
How would this platitude apply to this discussion even if Trump believed it?
Tinfoil hat time, I don't think the man claiming everyone else cheated and who got caught cheating in a previous election got all his votes in a legal manner
All the data suggests the opposite. He wasn't in a position of power at the time; the federal government was controlled by the democrats. Elections are run at the state level and are so disparate procedurally that Russia gave up trying to flip them directly. There has been no discrepancy between exit polls and the results. We have to face the fact that this is who the United States chose, and this is who a significant portion of the electorate is ok with.
Elections are, in many if not most states, run electronically.
I don't know about you, but I certainly don't trust all the companies that make the voting machines. For instance, does Musk own stock in some of them? Do their owners vote Trump?
Conflicts of interest are not evidence of fraud.[1]
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/mattblaze.org/post/3lmgt4ufllc26
Voting machine integrity was litigated in the election trump lost. Fox, trump's propaganda organ, had to pay $781 million because they could not substantiate claims of electronic fraud. There are adversarial reviews of voting data at all levels, and audits done at the physical and electronic level. 60 lawsuits found no evidence of fraud. You can't just say, "I think this might have happened because it sounds sinister." There is a ton of legal, procedural, monitored, and reviewed data that overwhemingly makes the case that electronic voting fraud did not happen. If you have evidence to the contrary, present it. Otherwise, its just vibes.
Wait, do you also think Biden won because of voter fraud?
He got 49.8% of the popular vote.
He won the popular vote in a year when incumbents across the world ate shit at the polls because of COVID inflation.
The US had the smallest drop in support for an incumbent party.
And yet he still won
It's a winner take all two-party election where a 3% swing in sentiment results in a complete blowout.
Generally one of the two participants wins those.
There's a really serious systemic problem with the party that chose him in its primaries, and there is nothing to prevent it from happening again, but my point is that a 49.8% mandate given the circumstances is... Well, it's not one of overwhelming sentiment.
> Trump won the popular vote.
He did not, he got <50% of the total votes at final tally. People who parrot this are under-informed, or lying to claim a mandate his administration lacks.
The person who received the most votes is the popular vote winner.
74,749,891 v 77,168,458 for Trump. Last time I checked, thats winning the popular vote
The US economy was not built on a free-market. US private capitalists have been built on a free market; now that their profits are under attack because they are being outcompeted by China, so they are running away with the ball. American economy real growth, where most white Americans gained wealth, came after World War II, where it was government led and controlled. It was the same for Europe, where they had to rebuild all that was destroyed after the war. It was all mostly government controlled and financed.
The problem today is that US and European capitalists are in power and do not want to admit that the Chinese economic model of government-controlled economic direction, though not perfect, would work better and help all the world's people rather than the select few. As China becomes the dominant economy, the rest of the world has to follow to stay competitive. So these are the death knell of a dying economic and government system. The US had the chance to bring real change for the people with Bernie Sanders, but that was scuttled by the capitalist non-democratic forces, allowing for the rise of Trump. US citizens have been hoodwinked by linking socialist thought, where caring about your fellow man is undemocratic, i.e., socialism.
>the Chinese economic model of government-controlled economic direction, though not perfect, would work better
You want the US government to provide more subsidies to US tech companies so they can stay competitive? Because that is what China is doing for its tech sector.
You only look at the surface China is subsidizing everything but at the same time forcing the companies to share the wealth created with all of its populace not just the company and company share holders.
Subsidizing companies is not the problem not sharing the wealth with the workers is the problem. US not subsidizing it companies is bullshit fed to you. As Boeing, Tesla, SpaceX, Microsoft from the tel-cos to the power suppliers to banks and hedge fund all have been subsidized by American tax payers or are still being subsidized with and you get share buybacks. Americans are being bullshitted into loosing their social and healthcare subsidies in favor of giving it to corporations but the sharing back of the wealth in conveniently forgotten
>You only look at the surface China is subsidizing everything but at the same time forcing the companies to share the wealth created with all of its populace not just the company and company share holders.
Do you have in mind any examples that make your case the strongest? In particular, examples caused by subsidy to the company, and not to the population[1].
[1] like this one: https://www.gov.cn/zhengce/202501/content_6997459.htm
The US already subsidizes these companies, sometimes more severely.
The problem is these companies are thieves, mostly. They just take the money and pocket most of it. Infrastructure be damned.
And when the house of cards inevitably tumbles down, they don’t pay the price. The gains are private, but the losses are public.
US companies always favor tomorrow, not next week. They look to enriching themselves NOW. But in doing so they take on a debt. They put everything on a metaphorical credit card. Eventually the competition is too hot and they have to pay their debt very quickly, and they shutter despite their subsidies and long-running success.
Why not if it brings long term benefits to the country?
Better than putting that money in the military, isn't it?
>>Chinese economic model of government-controlled economic direction, though not perfect, would work better and help all the world's people rather than the select few
Is it better? For some reason average European lives better then Chinese, inequality is also not so huge
"For some reason", really?
The US reconstructed Europe after WW2 using its own funds mostly and has subsidized its defense spending for the past 80 years and counting.
Europe also has enormous amounts of resource wealth expropriated from its many colonies around the world, plus significant ownership stakes in resource supply chains in those countries that persists to this day. Every single Russian oligarch, plus dictators in Asia and Africa have stashed their wealth in European banks.
* stood yesterday
It's not the furthest thing from the American economy as it stands today, but the inevitable conclusion of the "free-market" capitalism we've been practicing over the past number of decades.
Donald Trump is the poster child of American capitalism gone right, he's an aspiration for wealthy capitalists across the nation. Generally people have felt that if only we could get an American businessman like Trump in charge of the country, running things the way a true capitalist would (as opposed to how those dirty awful communists/socialists tend to run things), then the country would start going right for a change.
Well now we have that, and in short order the country has Russian-style crony capitalism from the top. This would not happen in a country that actually cares about free markets. But we don't. Everything we consume is owned by like 10 companies. If you want to get a start in the market you have to get access to capital they control, or meet regulations they set, because they've captured the government regulators through bribes.
Trump is just taking this whole system of favoritism we've been living under and making it official. I for one am for it because honestly people pretending there is no corruption is worse than the corruption at this point.
> Donald Trump is the poster child of American capitalism gone right
This is the same guy who went bankrupt 3 times, including a casino?
The same guy who'd be as rich as he is today if he had invested the funds bequeathed by his father?
The one who had a TV show based on him that was incredibly manipulated to make him appear richer and wiser than he really is?
They don't put the reality on the poster.
The prevailing school of economic thought in America, until Nixon, is actually what Trump idealizes. Protectionism from outside “threats”, on the basis of security and sufficiency, and a loosely regulated internal market. In comparison, Russia has a lot of regulatory capture and straight up corruption that stifles the internal market.
The Russia comparison is the corruption, not the protectionism.
I’d understand if these exemptions applied to companies and not industries. For comparison, Putin unilaterally nationalizes and sells off companies to benefit his inner circle. The US isn’t nationalizing AMD and selling it to Nvidia at the behest of Jensen.
> I’d understand if these exemptions applied to companies and not industries.
Same thing, these companies essentially run these industries and nobody else can get in.
If you want to make a competitor to Nvidia it would take you 20 years if you started RIGHT NOW. Hope you have a few hundred billion dollars lying around :P
The distinction between domains and companies fully disappears in an oligarchy.
Yet. They are still in the process of consolidating control over the government, the law, and universities. Once that's done, they will move on to corporations. It's been 2 months and change, give them time.
There's no "regulatory capture and straight up corruption" in the US, that's for sure /s
I didn’t know HN was coming around to how regulation and bureaucracy are anti-competitive.
Seems like the tariffs are becoming a lot more complicated, and it is possible that it is happening by design
Tariffs can be very expensive to enforce, so you want to keep it as simple as possible.
There are valid reasons for tariffs:
* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/when-are-tariffs-good
Especially when it comes to certain areas of the economy:
> Democratic countries’ economies are mainly set up as free market economies with redistribution, because this is what maximizes living standards in peacetime. In a free market economy, if a foreign country wants to sell you cheap cars, you let them do it, and you allocate your own productive resources to something more profitable instead. If China is willing to sell you brand-new electric vehicles for $10,000, why should you turn them down? Just make B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps, sell them for a high profit margin, and drive a Chinese car.
> Except then a war comes, and suddenly you find that B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps aren’t very useful for defending your freedoms. Oops! The right time to worry about manufacturing would have been years before the war, except you weren’t able to anticipate and prepare for the future. Manufacturing doesn’t just support war — in a very real way, it’s a war in and of itself.
* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/manufacturing-is-a-war-now
> China has rapidly established itself as the world’s dominant shipbuilding power, marginalizing the United States and its allies in a strategically important industry. In addition to building massive numbers of commercial ships, many Chinese shipyards also produce warships for the country’s rapidly growing navy. As part of its “military-civil fusion” strategy, China is tapping into the dual-use resources of its commercial shipbuilding empire to support its ongoing naval modernization
* https://www.csis.org/analysis/ship-wars-confronting-chinas-d...
But none of the current "reasons"—which may simply be rationalizations / retcons by underlings for one man's fickle will—really make much sense:
* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/all-the-arguments-for-tariffs-...
So the broligarchs get an escape hatch and everyone else (particularly the middle class) has to pay up to appease the ego of the worst president in US history? This seems like a bad economic and very undemocratic plan that we're getting here.
I’ve noticed that the pro-trump posters have been quiet on this site recently, pretty funny.
Because, in reality, they voted for his regressive cultural policies, not his regressive economic policies.
Though in November I'm sure they were telling us how good he would be on the economic front.
It's funny, (well, not funny) because the social issues are the ones where the toothpaste doesn't go back in the bottle. Progress over the long run only goes in the right direction, there's no path to undoing broad acceptance of homosexuality just like we'll never go back to forbidding interracial marriage or women voting.
So the top 1% will benefit economically from the right being in power, but the rest will spend the rest of their lives mad about whatever the current social change is, regardless of who's in power.
> Progress over the long run only goes in the right direction, there's no path to undoing broad acceptance of homosexuality just like we'll never go back to forbidding interracial marriage or women voting.
This is remarkably naive. I wish you were right, but this sentiment isn't optimism; it's complacency.
Progress seems to only go in the right direction on social issues, because people are very good at developing reasons why the social views they happen to hold are the objectively correct ones. As any advocate will talk your ears off about, open borders used to be the consensus position, until 150 years of immigration restrictions convinced people that it's not realistic to just let anyone move wherever they'd like.
Perhaps the task of rewriting history needs to start right away.
Other businesses not exempt from these tariffs should sue for violation of equal protection. Equal protection under the law means equal treatment under the law and this absolutely is not equal treatment at all.
https://www.marketwatch.com/articles/tariffs-exclusions-exem...
>This latest round of tariff rates is currently set at 125% for Chinese goods and a 10% tax on imports from other trading partners. China also had an additional 20% tax on its goods that began in March, bringing its total to 145%.
Importers of these electronics will no longer face the newest taxes, and it cuts the Chinese rate down to 20% for them. The exceptions cover $385 billion worth of 2024 imports, 12% of the total. It includes $100 billion from China, 23% of 2024 imports from there. For these electronics, the average tax rate went from 45% to 5% with this rule.
The biggest global exemption is the import category that includes PCs and servers, with $140 billion in 2024 imports, 26% of it from China. Circumstances may change again, but this benefits AI king Nvidia, server-makers like Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise
HPE
+2.91% , and Super Micro, and PC makers like Dell and HP
HPQ
+2.49% . The average tax rate went from 45% to 5% here, according to Barron’s calculations.
The biggest newly exempt category for Chinese goods is smartphones, with $41 billion in 2024 U.S. imports, 81% of all smartphone imports. A 145% tax on that would be $60 billion, but even the new 20% tax is a hefty $8 billion.
Art of the deal.
Art of the bribe, actually.
Pointed it out in the other thread, but this is a capitulation. China imposed retaliatory tariffs that remain in effect! There are a handful of businesses that do indeed export to China, and the net effect here is that they've all been thrown under the bus. China gets to kill/pick/control them at will now.
How will China react to this, I wonder.
As a result of that, they got into some really successful negotiations with a lot of countries in Asia, Africa, Europe and America. I think they want to keep the subject on the news for as long as possible.
And then I imagine they'll probably silently drop the tariffs, because those are harmful for them.
They will either ignore it or double down with an export tax on items in that class.
China waits paitiently for the big BOOM of US treasury bond in June.
The horrifying thing is that they don't have to. They hold all the cards now. They can drop their new trade barriers at will. Maybe they'll ask for concessions. Maybe they'll leave them in place to kill off troublesome competitors. Maybe they'll coerce the affected companies into selling to Chinese-owned interests at a steep discount. Maybe they'll just take a bunch of bribes.
This is how a trade war looks. And we're losing. Badly.
> They hold all the cards now
What do you mean "now?" With the amount of trade imbalance they had the ability to simply block exports at any time. It perhaps only works once but it's a very powerful lever.
Isn’t that the lever that we pulled on ourselves?
So now the finished products are tariff free, but the input costs when bought into America are tariffed. The exact opposite of what you would want to do to bring manufacturing back to America.
Not full exemption. They're still subject to the 20% tariff (instead of the ridiculous 145%) so Trump can save his face.
I was trying to find out of this is still the case.
How did you reach that conclusion?
Anyone have a readable mirror that contains text?
Welcome to technofeudalism.
Nothing means anything anymore. This of course will change completely on monday, then again on tuesday. Of course in the spirit of insider plundering. This circus will go on until we hear the magic words "the chocolate rations have been increased by 20g".
Things started to make more sense to me once I realized that human beings hate freedom and love tyranny. Once you accept this, it all falls in place. Deporting citizens to foreign prisons? Sounds great. Incoherent foreign and economic policy? Love it. Freedom of the press? Who needs it! Destruction of democracy? Own the libs! Legalize bribery of foreign officials? Even the playing field! And finally, words don’t need to mean anything because they are simply evocations intended to stir up certain emotions. They are more akin to a hunter’s duck call. The hunter doesn’t speak duck and doesn’t care whether that sounds he’s making have any meaning, he simply makes noise and looks for a result. Not getting the desired result? Just change the noise a little.
This is why democracy will eventually fail and autocracy will rise in its place. And no one will ever learn.
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Wasn’t Howard Lutnick on TV recently explicitly saying they wanted to bring iPhone assembly here? How is one to understand the union of these two perspectives?
https://fortune.com/2025/04/07/howard-lutnick-iphones-americ...
Howard Lutnick got pulled from the TV sidelines over stuff like this apparently. Bessent is running the show now which is probably why they’re actually responding to the bond market punching them in the face this week
> How is one to understand the union of these two perspectives?
Only one perspective actually matters right now, and it's notoriously mercurial.
Administration officials often have about as much knowledge of what's to come as we do.
How bananas is it that Trump ran against big tech and now big tech is the winner while mom and pop shops are the losers.
Trump's unpredictable tariff decisions challenged long-standing investment assumptions, even shaking confidence in U.S. Treasury bills, assets once considered the safest in the world. It showed how a handful of people can make global markets, and people's lives tremble.
The corruption is the plan. The tariffs are the boot on everyone's neck. Carve outs based on friend, foe, and bribes adjust the pressure. This will be on-going and capricious.
It actually feels nice to see US people having a taste of the kind of government their intelligence service force other nations to have by coups, except that it does not feel nice at all. I'm sorry guys.
Fascism is when colonialism comes home.
I am among the few who think it might eventually prove itself a good idea.
To start with, Europe has no good cards to play. Ultimately, Europe will side with the United States while it builds self-sufficiency on several fronts, especially defense. Europe also recognizes that the complete relocation of production capacity into China wasn't good in the long run; it's just that they had no ability to act on their own.
The US has repeatedly suggested publicly that it's not entirely about tariffs, and more might have been said privately. The tariffs the EU and Britain will drop are probably not what the US is after; what the US wants is to reduce global demand for Chinese manufacturing. Europe will find it easier to sell this—bringing manufacturing back and protectionism even at the cost of say, welfare and environment—to the public due to the violent shakedown over the past two weeks, as well as what happened with Ukraine and Russia. Ongoing European emergency measures to increase defense spending will be followed by incentives to rebuild strategic industry—like how China supported civilian–military partnership with policy.
Meanwhile the Indian government is already looking for ways to replace Chinese imports with US imports, where it can [1]. Japan and North Korea will follow suit; Trump is already saying that Korea needs to pay for US troops.
The US is (in my view) on solid footing here. At the very least, they get better trade deals from everyone else—Europe, India, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, etc. A number of companies will move production back into the US, and the government can prioritize those with more military value (chip-making, batteries, cars, shipbuilding [2] , etc.). And if the US can convince others to start decoupling from China, this will weaken Chinese manufacturing capacity.
Given the pain it's going to inflict in the short term, Trump is the only person who could have started this trade war. There might have been ways to do this without such a shake-up, but I am not convinced that this was a stupid move.
This was an anti-China move right from the beginning, disguised as an outrage against everyone's tariffs.
[1]: https://www.financialexpress.com/business/industry/replace-c...
[2]: https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3306177/u...
To clarify: none of this is China's fault. They did a fantastic job for their country, pulling hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
I also imagine this is maximum negative sentiment.
I follow the Chinese economy pretty closely and I just can't imagine 2025 passes without a deal.
Of course, neither Trump or Xi were going to back down here before a big meeting. I don't see how this is sustainable on any real time frame though for either economy.
Some people seem to be framing this as some kind of win for China. That is crazy. Chinese stocks had been in the toilet for a while, got a slight bump and that was mostly erased last week. I am far more confident in my US bets than China bets here.
I think EU will be fine, it really depends on how much the US cares about advancing Russian interests.
Long game, the UK may transform into being a sort of vassal of the US, assuming it survives as an entity. The EU interest may align more with China. If the US is de-empathizing NATO, they need a counterweight to the Russia/US axis.
It's the end of pax americana, and the future is more uncertain.
Or this is maximum negative emotionally charged sentiment and 5 years from now won't look all that much different.
It is really that you should just read what Peter Zeihan says and know that is exactly what is not going to happen.
China is the EUs largest export market. I’m not so sure the EU will align with the US here.
> at the cost of... welfare
If politicians no longer care about winning elections, then they might campaign on this.
Ugh. Note that this is a capitulation. China's retaliatory import tariff rate remains in effect, and they get to decide which industries to relax, if any. The net effect is that if you're in one of the handful of businesses that export to China, the Trump administration threw you under the proverbial bus.
While we're at it, China might as well impose a 145% export tax on phones, computers and chips, just to taunt.
This certainly is a surprise. :eyeroll:
Smartphones getting exemptions? Didn't the administration talk about how American's would be tightening screws on iPhones as they brought back these jobs? I'm starting to think they don't know what they are doing.... /s
Are the tariffs good or bad?
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