22 ms·

The 10% apparently also apply to Canada and Mexico now, which they didn’t before: > In a strange turn of events, the president seems to have added another 10 p

by layer8 2y ago

The 10% apparently also apply to Canada and Mexico now, which they didn’t before: > In a strange turn of events, the president seems to have added another 10 percent tariff to Canada and Mexico. Asked earlier if the 10 percent tariff extended to those countries, Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, said that it did. And a White House official clarified for me just now that that was the case. Previously, Canada and Mexico had been exempted from this round of “reciprocal” tariffs, though they still faced a 25 percent tariff that the president imposed last month on many of their goods. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/04/08/business/trump-tariffs-stock-market/df467314-c135-5297-bb7d-f23f99b1ca79 https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/04/08/business/trump-tarif...

matt-p 2y ago
Also china has 125% tarriff but the reason that they couldn't originally give 10% to Vietnam was trans-shipment of Chinese goods. If it wasn't happening before, it certainly will be now. What's actually wrong with them.
- alpha_squared 2y ago
  I'm coming to the conclusion that the tariffs are a distraction. The 10% across the board appears more like a tax hike without calling it one while the focus on China is just the same old trade war from the first term with louder chest-beating.
  - Spivak 2y ago
    But a distraction from what? There doesn't seem to be any kind of obvious other thing they're trying to do with the cover. They're not exactly being secretive with ICE arrests, the mass layoffs from the federal government, or their weird campaign against DEI that the administration seems to have all but forgotten about.
    - tpurves 2y ago
      They literally have no idea what they doing from one moment to the next. Obviously they are making up facts and strategies on the fly maybe minutes before press conferences. Just look all the math errors, irrational formulas and tariffing penguins. The malevolent incompetence is staggering.
    - ozmodiar 2y ago
      I think they're distracting from the fact that it's a huge tax on the general public. You might say it's obvious, but people just don't process it the same way even though that's what a tariff is.
      - prawn 2y ago
        The fact that opponents haven't successfully branded this as a tax is remarkable.
      - matt-p 2y ago
        Ok, but why would you tarrif friendly nations who you have a surplus with? If you tarriff them 10% they'll tarriff you 10% which means your companies lose out more than theirs and you've also pissed off an ally? Why? I'm thinking about Australia, UK those kind of folks.
        prawn 2y ago
        Broadens the tax?
        ModernMech 2y ago
        You know how in a game of Risk, at the early stages you form strategic alliances, but toward the end you inevitably have to break them because eventually someone has to win? That's a little like what's going on now. Pissing off your allies is good because if they're happy, that means you didn't squeeze them enough. And it may hurt us and our companies more than theirs, but it doesn't hurt Trump personally, and that's all he cares about. He's going to be fine, so he's more than happy to cause us pain if it cause them pain as well.
  - barbazoo 2y ago
    I believe at this point it's a simple game of leverage. Look how much damage I can inflict. Now let's negotiate.
    - maxerickson 2y ago
      He only has political leverage over Congress. If they chose to act, they could stop him. Seems weird to kick off negotiations with them by inflicting damage on their constituents.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - bdangubic 2y ago
      damage to himself you mean? he came with a knife to a gunfight…
      - delusional 2y ago
        And then decided to stab himself for some reason.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - dongobread 2y ago
      The US has crashed its own stock market, tanked its own government's approval ratings, and had its own business leaders speak out against the government. This definitely does not increase leverage.
      - gmueckl 2y ago
        But these are all internal to the US. Trade partners still have to deal with the current administration and don't have any recourse.
      - 2y ago
- magicreadu 2y ago
  The reason they have reduced all tariffs back down to 10% even for the countries that were obviously transshipping (Vietnam, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia) is that they need time to negotiate with those countries, to make sure these countries now put similarly high tariffs (100%+) on China, so that transshipping is reduced to nothing
  - matt-p 2y ago
    Wouldn't it be smarter to do that before increasing the tarriff to 125%? That doesn't make sense to me either..
    - bitshiftfaced 2y ago
      If Trump did not counter China's retaliation, then that would've significantly weakened the US's position with every other country.
      - bdangubic 2y ago
        If China doesn’t counter whatever the F we “counter” that would significantly weaken its position with every other country… and the wheel turns with this line of thinking… except of course Trump brought a knife to a gunfight :)
        bitshiftfaced 2y ago
        Only, China isn't actively negotiating tariffs with every other country right now, so whether they retaliate won't impact their situation the same as it does from the US's point of view.
        bdangubic 2y ago
        I really hope you are joking thinking China isn’t negotiating everything with everyone other than USA right now, starting with the very today publicly EU…
    - 2y ago
- delecti 2y ago
  > What's actually wrong with them. Market manipulation. 1. Sell. 2. Threaten tariffs. 3. Buy. 4. Walk back tariffs threats. 5. Repeat. With the secret step 0: Pay enough of an Indulgence to get in the loop of when those are going to happen, and to stay in their good graces so the DoJ doesn't hit you for insider trading.
  - arrrg 2y ago
    That doesn’t make sense to me. Money is not an end. It’s a (one) tool to get there. To the ends you want. To some sort of change in the world you want to achieve. On that front this is incoherent. I vote incompetence.
    - slg 2y ago
      >Money is not an end. It’s a (one) tool to get there. To the ends you want. To some sort of change in the world you want to achieve. Maybe for the overwhelming majority of the population, but it simply isn't the mindset of the billionaire class that supports Trump.
    - disqard 2y ago
      I think you're operating in Marx's C-M-C circuit. Nothing wrong with that, of course (I'm that way too). A lot of the finance folks work in an M-C-M' world, where Money (M) is the alpha and the omega, so you see this kind of (IMO) perverse behavior. I've found this mental model helpful in explaining these kinds of behavior.
  - dataviz1000 2y ago
    "Gutsy Traders Make $1.5 Billion Triple-Leveraged Bet on Nasdaq 100" [0] This was Monday morning when it was trading ~$40. It is at $53 now. What is 20% increase on $1.5 Billion? $300,000,000. [0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/gutsy-traders-make-1-5-billion-triple-leveraged-bet-on-nasdaq-100/ar-AA1CxGoP https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/gutsy-traders-make-1...
  - natebc 2y ago
    I wonder how many executive branch staffers and their kin and kind bought the dip? It's a pretty gross thing to think about.
- munificent 2y ago
  Trump thinks of himself as a powerful, insightful deal-maker. He pathologically needs to feel like he is doing something and his comfort zone for what kinds of things to do is "stuff that feels like business deals". He knows very little about government and policy, but tariffs and dollars and percentages feels familiar to him. He's got a lever, and he can't resist yanking on it to show that he's in charge. Whether yanking on the lever actually benefits the country or him is entirely besides the point. He's a narcissist and narcissists can't let go.
sva_ 2y ago
Like when an LLM does a tiny coding error that isn't too noticeable though.
- neogodless 2y ago
  "Oh! Well this is not a mundane detail, Michael!"
CobrastanJorji 2y ago
Idiots, all. This feels like the sort of mistake I'd make. As in, me, myself, without a team of people planning and reviewing who could comfortably doublecheck when they thought I was getting something a little wrong in my orders. Which suggests to me that this is being done by one or two guys who do not have such a team. Which is insane.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Sgt_Apone 2y ago
Seems they reversed course on that. Or, they don’t know what they’re doing. > It's been a confusing day. > As Verity said, it turns out Canada and Mexico are not getting a new 10 per cent tariff after all. > The White House reversed its earlier announcement in a new statement just now. Here's the bottom line: No new developments for Canada and Mexico today. > That means there are still worldwide 25 per cent tariffs on steel and aluminum, on some auto parts in North America, and on some goods traded within North America outside the rules of the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement on trade (CUSMA). > The bottom line here: Trump is starting an economic war on China, and U.S. allies are all taking some friendly fire. But a large swath of Canadian trade is spared. https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/livestory/trump-pauses-most-global-tariffs-but-changes-nothing-for-canada-and-mexico-9.6717027?ts=1744229247426 https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/livestory/trump-pauses-most-gl...
- magicreadu 2y ago
  They know what they are doing. The goal is decoupling from China. They raised tariffs on everyone to see which countries stood with US and which stood with China. Once each country has made their allegiance clear, they delay the deadline to give more time for negotiation. They likely want every ally to raise their tariffs on China to be very very high, to avoid any more transshipping from China.
  - matt-p 2y ago
    But the EU announced retaliatory tarrifs, just they weren't yet in effect. Why did they get off scot free?
    - bitshiftfaced 2y ago
      Presumably because those were in retaliation for the steel and aluminum tariffs, not the reciprocal tariffs. It takes them time to respond because the EU members must vote on it. We have yet to see what their action will be with the reciprocal tariffs.
      - 2y ago
parliament32 2y ago
This seems to have been clarified to not be the case, as of 30m ago -- no change to Canada/Mexico: >There’s no change to Canada and Mexico tariffs, indicating that their levies aren’t going down to the 10% baseline. Recall that Trump initially threatened a 25% surtax on each of them. That morphed over time to affect non-USMCA compliant goods -- and it’s not crystal-clear exactly what proportion of Canadian and Mexican shipments that then affects. Canadian energy products also got a smaller rate. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/live-blog/2025-04-08/trump-tariffs-stock-market-updates?cursorId=67F6D25CB2200001 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/live-blog/2025-04-08/trump-ta...
beloch 2y ago
The U.S. ambassador to Canada has since informed the government that this is not the case, and the tariff's currently in place will remain unchanged for now[1]. However, with this administration, who really knows? Perhaps Trump is staying quiet to avoid aiding Carney in the election. Perhaps he'll announce harsher tariff's on Canada tomorrow. Canada did retaliate and hasn't been hit with retaliation for retaliating, which gives the lie to Trump's statements that countries should refrain from retaliating if they don't want to be treated even worse. There is not one whit of consistency or logic on display here. [1]https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-canada-will-not-be-subject-to-new-10-tariff-says-ambassador-to-us/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-canada-will...

by layer8 2y ago

matt-p 2y ago

Also china has 125% tarriff but the reason that they couldn't originally give 10% to Vietnam was trans-shipment of Chinese goods. If it wasn't happening before, it certainly will be now. What's actually wrong with them.

alpha_squared 2y ago
I'm coming to the conclusion that the tariffs are a distraction. The 10% across the board appears more like a tax hike without calling it one while the focus on China is just the same old trade war from the first term with louder chest-beating.
- Spivak 2y ago
  But a distraction from what? There doesn't seem to be any kind of obvious other thing they're trying to do with the cover. They're not exactly being secretive with ICE arrests, the mass layoffs from the federal government, or their weird campaign against DEI that the administration seems to have all but forgotten about.
  - tpurves 2y ago
    They literally have no idea what they doing from one moment to the next. Obviously they are making up facts and strategies on the fly maybe minutes before press conferences. Just look all the math errors, irrational formulas and tariffing penguins. The malevolent incompetence is staggering.
  - ozmodiar 2y ago
    I think they're distracting from the fact that it's a huge tax on the general public. You might say it's obvious, but people just don't process it the same way even though that's what a tariff is.
    - prawn 2y ago
      The fact that opponents haven't successfully branded this as a tax is remarkable.
    - matt-p 2y ago
      Ok, but why would you tarrif friendly nations who you have a surplus with? If you tarriff them 10% they'll tarriff you 10% which means your companies lose out more than theirs and you've also pissed off an ally? Why? I'm thinking about Australia, UK those kind of folks.
      - prawn 2y ago
        Broadens the tax?
      - ModernMech 2y ago
        You know how in a game of Risk, at the early stages you form strategic alliances, but toward the end you inevitably have to break them because eventually someone has to win? That's a little like what's going on now. Pissing off your allies is good because if they're happy, that means you didn't squeeze them enough. And it may hurt us and our companies more than theirs, but it doesn't hurt Trump personally, and that's all he cares about. He's going to be fine, so he's more than happy to cause us pain if it cause them pain as well.
- barbazoo 2y ago
  I believe at this point it's a simple game of leverage. Look how much damage I can inflict. Now let's negotiate.
  - maxerickson 2y ago
    He only has political leverage over Congress. If they chose to act, they could stop him. Seems weird to kick off negotiations with them by inflicting damage on their constituents.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - bdangubic 2y ago
    damage to himself you mean? he came with a knife to a gunfight…
    - delusional 2y ago
      And then decided to stab himself for some reason.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
  - dongobread 2y ago
    The US has crashed its own stock market, tanked its own government's approval ratings, and had its own business leaders speak out against the government. This definitely does not increase leverage.
    - gmueckl 2y ago
      But these are all internal to the US. Trade partners still have to deal with the current administration and don't have any recourse.
    - 2y ago
magicreadu 2y ago
The reason they have reduced all tariffs back down to 10% even for the countries that were obviously transshipping (Vietnam, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia) is that they need time to negotiate with those countries, to make sure these countries now put similarly high tariffs (100%+) on China, so that transshipping is reduced to nothing
- matt-p 2y ago
  Wouldn't it be smarter to do that before increasing the tarriff to 125%? That doesn't make sense to me either..
  - bitshiftfaced 2y ago
    If Trump did not counter China's retaliation, then that would've significantly weakened the US's position with every other country.
    - bdangubic 2y ago
      If China doesn’t counter whatever the F we “counter” that would significantly weaken its position with every other country… and the wheel turns with this line of thinking… except of course Trump brought a knife to a gunfight :)
      - bitshiftfaced 2y ago
        Only, China isn't actively negotiating tariffs with every other country right now, so whether they retaliate won't impact their situation the same as it does from the US's point of view.
        bdangubic 2y ago
        I really hope you are joking thinking China isn’t negotiating everything with everyone other than USA right now, starting with the very today publicly EU…
  - 2y ago
delecti 2y ago
> What's actually wrong with them. Market manipulation. 1. Sell. 2. Threaten tariffs. 3. Buy. 4. Walk back tariffs threats. 5. Repeat. With the secret step 0: Pay enough of an Indulgence to get in the loop of when those are going to happen, and to stay in their good graces so the DoJ doesn't hit you for insider trading.
- arrrg 2y ago
  That doesn’t make sense to me. Money is not an end. It’s a (one) tool to get there. To the ends you want. To some sort of change in the world you want to achieve. On that front this is incoherent. I vote incompetence.
  - slg 2y ago
    >Money is not an end. It’s a (one) tool to get there. To the ends you want. To some sort of change in the world you want to achieve. Maybe for the overwhelming majority of the population, but it simply isn't the mindset of the billionaire class that supports Trump.
  - disqard 2y ago
    I think you're operating in Marx's C-M-C circuit. Nothing wrong with that, of course (I'm that way too). A lot of the finance folks work in an M-C-M' world, where Money (M) is the alpha and the omega, so you see this kind of (IMO) perverse behavior. I've found this mental model helpful in explaining these kinds of behavior.
- dataviz1000 2y ago
  "Gutsy Traders Make $1.5 Billion Triple-Leveraged Bet on Nasdaq 100" [0] This was Monday morning when it was trading ~$40. It is at $53 now. What is 20% increase on $1.5 Billion? $300,000,000. [0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/gutsy-traders-make-1-5-billion-triple-leveraged-bet-on-nasdaq-100/ar-AA1CxGoP https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/gutsy-traders-make-1...
- natebc 2y ago
  I wonder how many executive branch staffers and their kin and kind bought the dip? It's a pretty gross thing to think about.
munificent 2y ago
Trump thinks of himself as a powerful, insightful deal-maker. He pathologically needs to feel like he is doing something and his comfort zone for what kinds of things to do is "stuff that feels like business deals". He knows very little about government and policy, but tariffs and dollars and percentages feels familiar to him. He's got a lever, and he can't resist yanking on it to show that he's in charge. Whether yanking on the lever actually benefits the country or him is entirely besides the point. He's a narcissist and narcissists can't let go.

sva_ 2y ago

Like when an LLM does a tiny coding error that isn't too noticeable though.

neogodless 2y ago
"Oh! Well this is not a mundane detail, Michael!"

CobrastanJorji 2y ago

Idiots, all. This feels like the sort of mistake I'd make. As in, me, myself, without a team of people planning and reviewing who could comfortably doublecheck when they thought I was getting something a little wrong in my orders. Which suggests to me that this is being done by one or two guys who do not have such a team. Which is insane.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Sgt_Apone 2y ago

Seems they reversed course on that. Or, they don’t know what they’re doing. > It's been a confusing day. > As Verity said, it turns out Canada and Mexico are not getting a new 10 per cent tariff after all. > The White House reversed its earlier announcement in a new statement just now. Here's the bottom line: No new developments for Canada and Mexico today. > That means there are still worldwide 25 per cent tariffs on steel and aluminum, on some auto parts in North America, and on some goods traded within North America outside the rules of the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement on trade (CUSMA). > The bottom line here: Trump is starting an economic war on China, and U.S. allies are all taking some friendly fire. But a large swath of Canadian trade is spared. https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/livestory/trump-pauses-most-global-tariffs-but-changes-nothing-for-canada-and-mexico-9.6717027?ts=1744229247426 https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/livestory/trump-pauses-most-gl...

magicreadu 2y ago
They know what they are doing. The goal is decoupling from China. They raised tariffs on everyone to see which countries stood with US and which stood with China. Once each country has made their allegiance clear, they delay the deadline to give more time for negotiation. They likely want every ally to raise their tariffs on China to be very very high, to avoid any more transshipping from China.
- matt-p 2y ago
  But the EU announced retaliatory tarrifs, just they weren't yet in effect. Why did they get off scot free?
  - bitshiftfaced 2y ago
    Presumably because those were in retaliation for the steel and aluminum tariffs, not the reciprocal tariffs. It takes them time to respond because the EU members must vote on it. We have yet to see what their action will be with the reciprocal tariffs.
    - 2y ago

parliament32 2y ago

This seems to have been clarified to not be the case, as of 30m ago -- no change to Canada/Mexico: >There’s no change to Canada and Mexico tariffs, indicating that their levies aren’t going down to the 10% baseline. Recall that Trump initially threatened a 25% surtax on each of them. That morphed over time to affect non-USMCA compliant goods -- and it’s not crystal-clear exactly what proportion of Canadian and Mexican shipments that then affects. Canadian energy products also got a smaller rate. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/live-blog/2025-04-08/trump-tariffs-stock-market-updates?cursorId=67F6D25CB2200001 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/live-blog/2025-04-08/trump-ta...

beloch 2y ago

The U.S. ambassador to Canada has since informed the government that this is not the case, and the tariff's currently in place will remain unchanged for now[1]. However, with this administration, who really knows? Perhaps Trump is staying quiet to avoid aiding Carney in the election. Perhaps he'll announce harsher tariff's on Canada tomorrow. Canada did retaliate and hasn't been hit with retaliation for retaliating, which gives the lie to Trump's statements that countries should refrain from retaliating if they don't want to be treated even worse. There is not one whit of consistency or logic on display here. [1]https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-canada-will-not-be-subject-to-new-10-tariff-says-ambassador-to-us/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-canada-will...