14 ms·

25% on South Korea, 32% on Taiwan, 36% on Thailand, 46% on Vietnam What a massive and moronic blow to our soft power.

TomHenderson3 2y ago
It's not just soft power. It is also economic power. Also, note that there is a baseline 10% on all countries.
bigyabai 2y ago
America's leading supply chains just went up in smoke. The fallout is going to be pretty funny from an international POV, methinks.
- wozer 2y ago
  Might cause a global recession, though. And that might be less funny.
ldng 2y ago
Really curious on how it will blow-back on Americans. Because, make no mistakes, it will.
- cmurf 2y ago
  The cost to move these industries to the U.S. exceeds the cost of these tariffs. The market will pass the cost of what are import taxes to the American consumer, resulting in inflation. True, the shareholders will take a pay cut too, because something less than 100% of American consumers will just suck it up without changing their behavior. But in aggregate, we will all save less. If inflation takes off again, maybe eventually there's some monestizing of debt. But in less than 4 years these tariffs will go away, which is why companies won't spent billions of dollars investing in state side manufacturing that'll take maybe 5 years to plan and build. Therefore I'm not sold on the montizing debt motivation yet.
  - tnt128 2y ago
    Why in 4 years they will go away? Is that assuming the new administration will reverse course? It’s my understanding that generally country don’t lower tariffs voluntarily. They are usually bargaining chips.
    - sunflowerfly 2y ago
      We have tried this before about 100 years ago. Supply chains and economies were not nearly as interconnected as they are now. Read the history of the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act.
    - cmurf 2y ago
      Tariffs may not even last 4 months. Trump demanded Powell reduce interest rates, the FRB declined. The might be Trump's way of forcing the Fed to reduce interest rates, by inducing a recession with massive inflation. And then Trump takes the tariffs away once the Fed gives him what he wants. FRB won't reduce interest rates if there's inflation alone. They'd only reduce interest rates if the economy also slows down into recession territory. That's the short term view. In the long term view, they are the biggest tax increase in the history of the country, therefore they are potentially the biggest tax decrease in the history of the country. Political fodder, even for a corpse.
      - floxy 2y ago
        >Tariffs may not even last 4 months. (c) Should any trading partner take significant steps to remedy non-reciprocal trade arrangements and align sufficiently with the United States on economic and national security matters, I may further modify the HTSUS to decrease or limit in scope the duties imposed under this order. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/regulating-imports-with-a-reciprocal-tariff-to-rectify-trade-practices-that-contribute-to-large-and-persistent-annual-united-states-goods-trade-deficits/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/regu...
        Tadpole9181 2y ago
- simne 2y ago
  It depends.. For some goods possible to just immediately raise prices, for others, business will try to compensate from another source. As example, Daimler stated, they will cut cheapest models from export to US, so some segment will got less concurrent market, and probably prices will raise. Probably, this is because Daimler have much higher profits on expensive models, so they could just lower profits on them. Other variant, also possible, expensive niches are more tolerant to price raise. For small countries, tariff raise nearly guarantee prices rise, but US is big country, things are not so simple.
  - atoav 2y ago
    You mean there might be some niche product that: 1. has no US parts in the supply chain 2. has a importer that is willing to sacrifice itself for the greater good A faint drop of hope in an intergalactic ocean of despair.
    - simne 2y ago
      You are just asking things not matter. So you are not looking for truth but you are looking for create more despair. Be calm, ask right questions and you will got truth.
belter 2y ago
Effective total tariffs on China will be 54% effective 9 April. No way US does not go into recession... And wait for the response from the trading partners...
- galimalint 2y ago
  [dead]
- fakeironman2 2y ago
  Correction: average tariffs on China prior to today was 42% https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/2019/us-china-trade-war-tariffs-date-chart https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/2019/us-china-trad.... This means after today, average tariffs on China will be 76%. China is already in a Great Depression, and this tariff hike guarantees China to be in 30+ years of economic depression.
  - belter 2y ago
    Between the US and China, I would be putting my money in China, who by the way, leads in AI. "I Just Saw the Future. It Was Not in America." - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/02/opinion/trump-tariffs-china.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/02/opinion/trump-tariffs-chi...
spacechild1 2y ago
Don't worry, acoording to Trump this will generate billions and billions of dollars and America will be rich as it never has been before. /s
- belter 2y ago
  Yeah, billions and billions: https://youtu.be/u_aLESDql1U https://youtu.be/u_aLESDql1U
- xp84 2y ago
  The more I think about Trumpian strategies the more I suspect that he got some friends together (or they came to him) and decided they'll short everything, then he'll do this for a while. He and those friends would be able to 'generate billions' that way, by legal insider trading (since we learned that anything he does "in an official capacity" is legal and he can pardon anyone who ever got caught). Last term he did some tax on bauxite that had a similar effect of costing billions to a whole industry that processes or buys aluminum, but one of the few bauxite mines in the US, run by a Trump ally of some kind, made bank.
mindslight 2y ago
Can't hear you! USA. USA. USA. Politically it's going to be just like how most everyone fell into line fervently supporting the Iraq War when the corpo media told them to. Then after the unavoidable truth finally seeped in, equivocation and rationalization from "I didn't really support it" to "we were misled". With a lot more visible economic pain, of course. Then that anger from having been "tricked" will be used as raw energy to drive the next con, and so forth. A broken clock is at least right twice a day, but these low information voters will sabotage themselves every single time.
- runarberg 2y ago
  > but these low information voters will sabotage themselves every single time. It is generally not cool to blame the voters. There was a ton of misinformation preceding the Iraq war as you point out, but even then there was a massive popular opposition to it. Hundreds of thousands protested against the war before the invasion in New York and Washington DC. Some polls showed that 5% of all Americans participated in a rally or a protest in the weeks leading up to and following the invasion. And despite that popular opposition, among politicians there was a bipartisan support and just a handful of MPs opposed to it. Meaning the public was never really given a choice. In short, the Iraq war was the fault of the politicians and the politicians alone, the voters came nowhere near it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War
  - mindslight 2y ago
    Yes, I went to a few of those protests. Despite the popularity of opposition, there were still plenty of people arguing in support of attacking Iraq. In fact I'd say that most people were in support of it. "They hate us for our freedom", "fight them over there instead of here", and general reflexive arguments supplicating to power. That's the dynamic I'm talking about. Whether invading Iraq would have still happened without that popular support is besides the point. The point is there was full-throated support from many people, who would reflexively reject dissent while parroting corpo media talking points, and who then only came to see what a poor idea it had been over time.
swat535 2y ago
What's the actual strategy behind the current US administration slapping tariffs on everything? Feels like they're handing them out like Halloween candy. Is there a long game here, or is it just managed chaos and alienating trade partners for short term optics?
- ironyman 2y ago
  People like Navarro believes a non-trivial amount of manufacturing can be coaxed back to the US from China and Vietnam.
  - sitkack 2y ago
    Only if we tank our currency and create a huge population of people willing to work for a buck oh five.
    - cmurf 2y ago
      Kill people's savings, might happen. Discretionary spending is about to get clobbered. Restaurants may be at the top of that list, and travel. I rather doubt Walmart is going to increase the price of only Chinese made goods 25%. I think everything goes up 25% and they pocket the margin as long as they can get away with it.
      - astrange 2y ago
        > Kill people's savings, might happen. It doesn't work because it's basically illegal to be poor in America, or rather to live like a poor person in a developing country. Because of theories about gentrification and such we just banned everything like SROs, company dorms, etc. It worked for a little while in the 2000s because earlier flight from cities had left a lot of empty housing open to gentrify, but none of that is left. There's a few classes of people left like supercommuters and people who live in RVs in the Amazon warehouse parking lot, but not going to run a big factory like that.
        2y ago
hnburnsy 2y ago
>25% on South Korea, 32% on Taiwan, 36% on Thailand, 46% on Vietnam Harley Davidson moved some of its production to Thailand in 2018 to avoid a 31% tariff the EU had on US manufactured motorcycles, announced in 2024 it was moving more production there, and prior to today had plans to sell the Thailand produced bikes back into the US, as the US had a 0% tariff on bikes. Not surprisingly Thailand has a 60% tariff on imported motorcycles. This tariff jumping is real. I guess we will see how it works out for the US.
- dralley 2y ago
  Just think how many companies moved production from China to Vietnam to avoid China tariffs, and now tariffs on Vietnam are larger than on China.
  - h0l0cube 2y ago
    It's just going to be a game of whack-a-mole as production and dumping shift to the less taxed countries. In the end, manufacturing won't shift to the US while labor costs are too high for factory workers. And the only way to remedy that is tanking the currency.
    - Server6 2y ago
      Tanking the currency is literally step 2 in their plan. https://www.nordea.com/en/news/mar-a-lago-accord-explained-a-new-era-for-the-dollar https://www.nordea.com/en/news/mar-a-lago-accord-explained-a...
      - h0l0cube 2y ago
        It's obviously the only real end game to this policy. Asia needs to divest itself off US bonds, which China has been slowly doing the background of late. No matter how it plays out, it's looking like higher interest rates, inflation, and foreclosures for everyday citizens and SMEs are going to be on the cards for the US, and it's going to take something akin to religious faith for people to tolerate the hardship on the way to this promised renewed prosperity.
belter 2y ago
The full list: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/02/trump-reciprocal-tariffs-countries-chart-imports-united-states.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/02/trump-reciprocal-tariffs-cou... 10% tariffs on the Heard Island and McDonald Islands which are uninhabited, and can be reached only by sea, which from Australia takes two weeks by vessel. And also 10% on Svalbard and Jan Mayen which is also uninhabited. That will teach them not to ripoff the USA! Oh NO tariffs on Russia or Belarus. None.
- vidarh 2y ago
  Both Svalbard and Jan Mayen are inhabited. Jan Mayen only by about 35 people, though. Svalbard has both Norwegian and Russian settlements, but of course entirely too small to have impact on US trade.
  - magicalhippo 2y ago
    Svalbard imports a lot of snowmobiles though, given their population. From what I know a substantial fraction, if not most, are from Polaris so made in the US[1]. [1]: https://www.polaris.com/en-us/snowmobiles/owner-resources/help-center/article/KA-01000/ https://www.polaris.com/en-us/snowmobiles/owner-resources/he...
    - vidarh 2y ago
      "A lot" is rather relative here given the total population is around 2.5k people.
      - magicalhippo 2y ago
        True but I think relative numbers are relevant in this context.
        vidarh 2y ago
        The relative numbers says nothing about the impact on US trade.
treetalker 2y ago
But can't you feel the liberation?

It's not just soft power. It is also economic power. Also, note that there is a baseline 10% on all countries.

America's leading supply chains just went up in smoke. The fallout is going to be pretty funny from an international POV, methinks.

wozer 2y ago
Might cause a global recession, though. And that might be less funny.

ldng 2y ago

Really curious on how it will blow-back on Americans. Because, make no mistakes, it will.

cmurf 2y ago
The cost to move these industries to the U.S. exceeds the cost of these tariffs. The market will pass the cost of what are import taxes to the American consumer, resulting in inflation. True, the shareholders will take a pay cut too, because something less than 100% of American consumers will just suck it up without changing their behavior. But in aggregate, we will all save less. If inflation takes off again, maybe eventually there's some monestizing of debt. But in less than 4 years these tariffs will go away, which is why companies won't spent billions of dollars investing in state side manufacturing that'll take maybe 5 years to plan and build. Therefore I'm not sold on the montizing debt motivation yet.
- tnt128 2y ago
  Why in 4 years they will go away? Is that assuming the new administration will reverse course? It’s my understanding that generally country don’t lower tariffs voluntarily. They are usually bargaining chips.
  - sunflowerfly 2y ago
    We have tried this before about 100 years ago. Supply chains and economies were not nearly as interconnected as they are now. Read the history of the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act.
  - cmurf 2y ago
    Tariffs may not even last 4 months. Trump demanded Powell reduce interest rates, the FRB declined. The might be Trump's way of forcing the Fed to reduce interest rates, by inducing a recession with massive inflation. And then Trump takes the tariffs away once the Fed gives him what he wants. FRB won't reduce interest rates if there's inflation alone. They'd only reduce interest rates if the economy also slows down into recession territory. That's the short term view. In the long term view, they are the biggest tax increase in the history of the country, therefore they are potentially the biggest tax decrease in the history of the country. Political fodder, even for a corpse.
    - floxy 2y ago
      >Tariffs may not even last 4 months. (c) Should any trading partner take significant steps to remedy non-reciprocal trade arrangements and align sufficiently with the United States on economic and national security matters, I may further modify the HTSUS to decrease or limit in scope the duties imposed under this order. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/regulating-imports-with-a-reciprocal-tariff-to-rectify-trade-practices-that-contribute-to-large-and-persistent-annual-united-states-goods-trade-deficits/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/regu...
      - Tadpole9181 2y ago
simne 2y ago
It depends.. For some goods possible to just immediately raise prices, for others, business will try to compensate from another source. As example, Daimler stated, they will cut cheapest models from export to US, so some segment will got less concurrent market, and probably prices will raise. Probably, this is because Daimler have much higher profits on expensive models, so they could just lower profits on them. Other variant, also possible, expensive niches are more tolerant to price raise. For small countries, tariff raise nearly guarantee prices rise, but US is big country, things are not so simple.
- atoav 2y ago
  You mean there might be some niche product that: 1. has no US parts in the supply chain 2. has a importer that is willing to sacrifice itself for the greater good A faint drop of hope in an intergalactic ocean of despair.
  - simne 2y ago
    You are just asking things not matter. So you are not looking for truth but you are looking for create more despair. Be calm, ask right questions and you will got truth.

belter 2y ago

Effective total tariffs on China will be 54% effective 9 April. No way US does not go into recession... And wait for the response from the trading partners...

galimalint 2y ago
[dead]
fakeironman2 2y ago
Correction: average tariffs on China prior to today was 42% https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/2019/us-china-trade-war-tariffs-date-chart https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/2019/us-china-trad.... This means after today, average tariffs on China will be 76%. China is already in a Great Depression, and this tariff hike guarantees China to be in 30+ years of economic depression.
- belter 2y ago
  Between the US and China, I would be putting my money in China, who by the way, leads in AI. "I Just Saw the Future. It Was Not in America." - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/02/opinion/trump-tariffs-china.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/02/opinion/trump-tariffs-chi...

spacechild1 2y ago

Don't worry, acoording to Trump this will generate billions and billions of dollars and America will be rich as it never has been before. /s

belter 2y ago
Yeah, billions and billions: https://youtu.be/u_aLESDql1U https://youtu.be/u_aLESDql1U
xp84 2y ago
The more I think about Trumpian strategies the more I suspect that he got some friends together (or they came to him) and decided they'll short everything, then he'll do this for a while. He and those friends would be able to 'generate billions' that way, by legal insider trading (since we learned that anything he does "in an official capacity" is legal and he can pardon anyone who ever got caught). Last term he did some tax on bauxite that had a similar effect of costing billions to a whole industry that processes or buys aluminum, but one of the few bauxite mines in the US, run by a Trump ally of some kind, made bank.

mindslight 2y ago

Can't hear you! USA. USA. USA. Politically it's going to be just like how most everyone fell into line fervently supporting the Iraq War when the corpo media told them to. Then after the unavoidable truth finally seeped in, equivocation and rationalization from "I didn't really support it" to "we were misled". With a lot more visible economic pain, of course. Then that anger from having been "tricked" will be used as raw energy to drive the next con, and so forth. A broken clock is at least right twice a day, but these low information voters will sabotage themselves every single time.

runarberg 2y ago
> but these low information voters will sabotage themselves every single time. It is generally not cool to blame the voters. There was a ton of misinformation preceding the Iraq war as you point out, but even then there was a massive popular opposition to it. Hundreds of thousands protested against the war before the invasion in New York and Washington DC. Some polls showed that 5% of all Americans participated in a rally or a protest in the weeks leading up to and following the invasion. And despite that popular opposition, among politicians there was a bipartisan support and just a handful of MPs opposed to it. Meaning the public was never really given a choice. In short, the Iraq war was the fault of the politicians and the politicians alone, the voters came nowhere near it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War
- mindslight 2y ago
  Yes, I went to a few of those protests. Despite the popularity of opposition, there were still plenty of people arguing in support of attacking Iraq. In fact I'd say that most people were in support of it. "They hate us for our freedom", "fight them over there instead of here", and general reflexive arguments supplicating to power. That's the dynamic I'm talking about. Whether invading Iraq would have still happened without that popular support is besides the point. The point is there was full-throated support from many people, who would reflexively reject dissent while parroting corpo media talking points, and who then only came to see what a poor idea it had been over time.

swat535 2y ago

What's the actual strategy behind the current US administration slapping tariffs on everything? Feels like they're handing them out like Halloween candy. Is there a long game here, or is it just managed chaos and alienating trade partners for short term optics?

ironyman 2y ago
People like Navarro believes a non-trivial amount of manufacturing can be coaxed back to the US from China and Vietnam.
- sitkack 2y ago
  Only if we tank our currency and create a huge population of people willing to work for a buck oh five.
  - cmurf 2y ago
    Kill people's savings, might happen. Discretionary spending is about to get clobbered. Restaurants may be at the top of that list, and travel. I rather doubt Walmart is going to increase the price of only Chinese made goods 25%. I think everything goes up 25% and they pocket the margin as long as they can get away with it.
    - astrange 2y ago
      > Kill people's savings, might happen. It doesn't work because it's basically illegal to be poor in America, or rather to live like a poor person in a developing country. Because of theories about gentrification and such we just banned everything like SROs, company dorms, etc. It worked for a little while in the 2000s because earlier flight from cities had left a lot of empty housing open to gentrify, but none of that is left. There's a few classes of people left like supercommuters and people who live in RVs in the Amazon warehouse parking lot, but not going to run a big factory like that.
      - 2y ago

hnburnsy 2y ago

>25% on South Korea, 32% on Taiwan, 36% on Thailand, 46% on Vietnam Harley Davidson moved some of its production to Thailand in 2018 to avoid a 31% tariff the EU had on US manufactured motorcycles, announced in 2024 it was moving more production there, and prior to today had plans to sell the Thailand produced bikes back into the US, as the US had a 0% tariff on bikes. Not surprisingly Thailand has a 60% tariff on imported motorcycles. This tariff jumping is real. I guess we will see how it works out for the US.

dralley 2y ago
Just think how many companies moved production from China to Vietnam to avoid China tariffs, and now tariffs on Vietnam are larger than on China.
- h0l0cube 2y ago
  It's just going to be a game of whack-a-mole as production and dumping shift to the less taxed countries. In the end, manufacturing won't shift to the US while labor costs are too high for factory workers. And the only way to remedy that is tanking the currency.
  - Server6 2y ago
    Tanking the currency is literally step 2 in their plan. https://www.nordea.com/en/news/mar-a-lago-accord-explained-a-new-era-for-the-dollar https://www.nordea.com/en/news/mar-a-lago-accord-explained-a...
    - h0l0cube 2y ago
      It's obviously the only real end game to this policy. Asia needs to divest itself off US bonds, which China has been slowly doing the background of late. No matter how it plays out, it's looking like higher interest rates, inflation, and foreclosures for everyday citizens and SMEs are going to be on the cards for the US, and it's going to take something akin to religious faith for people to tolerate the hardship on the way to this promised renewed prosperity.

belter 2y ago

The full list: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/02/trump-reciprocal-tariffs-countries-chart-imports-united-states.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/02/trump-reciprocal-tariffs-cou... 10% tariffs on the Heard Island and McDonald Islands which are uninhabited, and can be reached only by sea, which from Australia takes two weeks by vessel. And also 10% on Svalbard and Jan Mayen which is also uninhabited. That will teach them not to ripoff the USA! Oh NO tariffs on Russia or Belarus. None.

vidarh 2y ago
Both Svalbard and Jan Mayen are inhabited. Jan Mayen only by about 35 people, though. Svalbard has both Norwegian and Russian settlements, but of course entirely too small to have impact on US trade.
- magicalhippo 2y ago
  Svalbard imports a lot of snowmobiles though, given their population. From what I know a substantial fraction, if not most, are from Polaris so made in the US[1]. [1]: https://www.polaris.com/en-us/snowmobiles/owner-resources/help-center/article/KA-01000/ https://www.polaris.com/en-us/snowmobiles/owner-resources/he...
  - vidarh 2y ago
    "A lot" is rather relative here given the total population is around 2.5k people.
    - magicalhippo 2y ago
      True but I think relative numbers are relevant in this context.
      - vidarh 2y ago
        The relative numbers says nothing about the impact on US trade.

treetalker 2y ago

But can't you feel the liberation?