6 ms·

Yeah. If you actually wanted to bring manufacturing back to the US you'd figure out which industries you wanted to develop, probably subsidise them, communicate

Yeah. If you actually wanted to bring manufacturing back to the US you'd figure out which industries you wanted to develop, probably subsidise them, communicate very clearly what you were going to do and then ratchet up the tariffs on those specific finishes products, whilst being sure to maintain access to raw materials and components you still needed. What you wouldn't do is slap unexpectedly high tariffs on absolutely everything, shout about how you'll do a deal if only they respect you, and then walk them back in as inept and inconsistent a manner as possible. That's what you'd do if you wanted to destroy what's left of your industry. Think there's anyone in the rest of the world relying on US suppliers that hasn't started looking elsewhere? And it might now be cheaper for Americans to import from Japan or South Korea than from US companies dependent on Chinese components in their supply chain...

ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
>If you actually wanted to bring manufacturing back to the US you'd... Sure this seems like a great way for if you can sustain a multi-decade effort If you have 3.5 years to re-negotiate a deal, maybe you need to move faster.
- notahacker 2y ago
  If you're spending 3.5 years trying to "renegotiate a deal", you don't have a strategy to bring manufacturing back. If you change your policy multiple times in a week you don't even have a strategy. Easier to onshore manufacturing with multi-year timelines, but you don't need multi-year timelines to impose tariffs on carefully selected industries, not penguins and your existing industries' key suppliers.
  - ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
    This ignores the reality of power in the US. Presidents can't implement multi-decade initiatives. >If you change your policy multiple times you're missing the forest for the trees. the policy has not changed: bring manufacturing back to the US.
    - formerly_proven 2y ago
      Trump-Biden-Trump are 12 years of protectionists being president, if DJT wasn't DJT he could've utilized this to advance his agenda.
      - leereeves 2y ago
        Biden was a protectionist?
        brendoelfrendo 2y ago
        This was the entire purpose of the CHIPS act. Biden just took some of the protectionist policies Trump started in his first term and did gave them an actual objective.
        seanmcdirmid 2y ago
        In the mild sort of way. Mostly Biden didn’t change much and kept things stable (the way businesses like it), but there was definitely room in that for the CHIPs act, which is a double edged sword (by pushing China to invest more in its local chip production). He didn’t bother getting rid of the DJT tariffs that survived after COVID hit either.
        af78 2y ago
        Biden's Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was definitely viewed as protectionist. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act#Relationship_with_foreign_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act#Relati...: > ... some were concerned about the law's provisions favoring American industry. ... the chairman of the 2023 G20 meeting in India, called it "the most protectionist act ever drafted in the world", asking American officials, "You believed in market forces and now you do this?" Other countries have begun to create their own similar laws. China requested WTO dispute consultations with the United States. > 27 European Union finance ministers have expressed "serious concerns" about the financial incentives of the Inflation Reduction Act, and are considering challenging it. They have listed at least nine points in the legislation, which they say could be in breach of World Trade Organization rules. They were opposed to the subsidies for consumers to buy North American-assembled electric cars, as EU officials believe the subsidies discriminate against European carmakers. One EU official told CNBC that, "there is a political consensus (among the 27 ministers) that this plan threatens the European industry" and its supply of raw materials. In February 2023, the European Commission announced it would propose the "Net Zero Industrial Act", similar to the IRA, in turn putting pressure on the United Kingdom and South Korea.
  - Propelloni 2y ago
    Well, if your goal is to pump and dump the stock markets, this is a strategy and it is working. I don't think that the current administration has enough foresight to actually plan for such a scheme but I think they are smart enough to see an opportunity, to wit the posts on social media shortly before withdrawing some tariffs.
- pjc50 2y ago
  I don't think it's physically possible to move much manufacturing in that time. If you think it is, please give estimates in dollar values, number of jobs, and square footage of factory construction expected.
  - ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
    What is your takeaway? That no effort should be made?
    - int_19h 2y ago
      Do it the right way through Congress.
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  Previous government efforts do not need to be sabotaged every time there's an election. For example, when Biden came in he didn't immediately unwind all of Trump's industrial efforts. He kept the China tariffs, and built on top of them with the CHIPS act to add the "carrot" part of "carrot and stick".
- realusername 2y ago
  Bringing back such industry would take a multi decade effort, in the best scenario (which the US clearly isn't now)
- 2muchcoffeeman 2y ago
  Are the commenters defending the chaos serious or just trolls?
ntonozzi 2y ago
Wouldn't you prioritize subsidizing local production over taxing foreign production? It just seems like a much cleaner and more straightforward way to increase local production. It seems like this has been at least somewhat effective with semiconductors over the past ten years. And then you don't have the risk of harming consumers. Everybody wins!
- njarboe 2y ago
  The resources for subsidies come from the taxpayer. Plus how you and who you subsidize becomes political. Lots of complications.
  - mindslight 2y ago
    The resources for subsidies come from printing new money (which is possible by having the world reserve currency), and then spending that new money for deliberate purposes instead of just giving it to the banksters to bid up the asset bubbles. In an imaginary world where we had a Congress that served the People and a mentally competent President, of course. Who gets subsidized is indeed political, but I don't see a way to sidestep that since there's centralization as soon as you take action to prevent the currency from deflating.
    - DonHopkins 2y ago
      Political patronage and cruelty is the point.
    - hgomersall 2y ago
      To be clear, the US is not unique in its ability to do this. Many other countries would benefit from understanding it! In the UK we have a government wanting to build a growth strategy around finance. It's like a parody that nobody gets (yet).
    - dgoldstein0 2y ago
      But Congress doesn't actually decide to print new money? When they decide to spend they have to raise taxes or issue debt (treasuries). The federal reserve, on the other hand, controls interest rates and other mechanisms which actually result in money "bring created" for practical purposes.
pton_xd 2y ago
> If you actually wanted to bring manufacturing back to the US you'd figure out which industries you wanted to develop, probably subsidise them, communicate very clearly what you were going to do and then ratchet up the tariffs on those specific finishes products, whilst being sure to maintain access to raw materials and components you still needed. I'm not here to defend the current approach, but what you're describing sounds like a centrally planned communist / state-directed economy or something. Is that really the way forward?
- croisillon 2y ago
  yeah i was thinking subsidizing is exactly what the European Union does, which as everyone knows is very much a radical left soviet like institution
- lbotos 2y ago
  If you do this to the entire economy, yes sure, fair. If you decide that you want Americans to eat American garlic and you give garlic farmers a tax break or grants to buy seed and fertilizer I wouldn't call that central planning. More "strategic investment". Replace garlic with whatever industry it is that the gov wants to strategically invest in: semiconductors, automobiles, aerospace, weapons, renewable energy.
- surgical_fire 2y ago
  > what you're describing sounds like a centrally planned communist / state-directed economy or something. Is that really the way forward? What they are describing is basically what every sane government does, and what the US used to do until, er, a few months ago. If you consider most western countries to be centrally planned communist states (including the US up until very recently), then I don't have anything else to argue.
  - amiga386 2y ago
    It's not quite as bad as central planning, but it's definitely a big dollop of state aid (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_aid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_aid), distorting competition. You may think this is fair, while others disagree. As there's no "world government" arbiter for these kinds of actions, there are only the actions your country takes, and the actions other sovereign countries take in response - for example, all countries in the world could ban import of anything produced by your burgeoning state-aid factories, leaving you with only a domestic market to sell to; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)#Anti-dumping_actions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)#Anti-...
cogman10 2y ago
> which industries you wanted to develop yup > probably subsidise them yup > communicate very clearly what you were going to do Probably not. At least, not until right before the ratchet up. You'd want to first subsidize then once industries are starting to build up, you'd want to start the ratchet up. You probably also wouldn't want to say "We are doing this because we want to be better competitors" or whatever. It'd be better if you said something like "We believe country x is doing terrible thing y and for the safety of our country and others we are going to apply a tariff on good z until x stops doing y". But yeah, universal tariffs are the dumbest idea in the world. We've essentially sanctioned every single nation which is going to massively damage us and manufacturing. Going to be real hard to unwind this.
- notahacker 2y ago
  You might add a bit of "Country X" is bad spin in there as political justification for what you're doing, agreed. But you would make damn sure you communicated when the tariffs would hit punitive levels so the rest of the value chain knew and had already had chances to find themselves domestic suppliers
  - cogman10 2y ago
    Gotta be REAL careful about how you signal things if your intent is ultimately to take over a market. Telling manufacturers you intend to isolate could leak out and ultimately trigger pre-emptive tariffs. Honestly, just subsidizing is a lot simpler to do and it doesn't run the risk of making the world mad at you or triggering retaliatory tariffs.
    - notahacker 2y ago
      You're a lot less likely to get retaliatory tariffs when you're communicating to manufacturers that you intend to raise your $nicheproductclasses tariffs to support domestic manufacturing under industrial strategy and national security policy than when you announce blanket tariffs with threats. The US imposed 100% tariffs on EVs last year for example[1], which wasn't exactly a universally popular move but wasn't likely to provoke a trade war. Much easier to accept losing share of a market than every market, plus also less likely to accidentally punish the manufacturing industries you're trying to support. [1]there's a certain irony in one of Biden's last actions being to impose tariffs in a way which massively helped Tesla, and one of Trump's first being to propose tariffs that could seriously hurt its supply chain if they don't get exemptions...
beloch 2y ago
You also wouldn't go out of your way to piss off America's two biggest export markets: Canada and Mexico. As it stands, not only are there significant counter-tariffs that would make U.S. manufacturers even less competitive in Canada[1], there is significant consumer backlash to anything American-made where, just a couple months ago, products "Made in the U.S.A." would have been viewed favourably[2]. The way Trump has done things, any company that manufactures in the U.S. had better be able to get by with just the domestic U.S. market, because exports to Canada and Mexico aren't likely to be significant for quite some time, even if Trump backs off quickly. Lasting damage has already been done. ________________________ [1]It remains to be seen if Mexico will eventually retaliate. [2]Perhaps not favourably in terms of price/quality competitiveness, but certainly in a geopolitical "support your neighbour instead of China" sense.
- cmrdporcupine 2y ago
  My experience is this: The majority of Americans have a hard time believing we (Canada) are their biggest export market and trading partner generally. Because they barely think about Canada, and when they do it's as a quaint and cold place of no real importance to them. And this perception has worked in Trump's favour. "Those weak irrelevant people up there are taking advantage of us, time to teach them a lesson" works well when the people you're telling it to don't realize "those people" are their single biggest customer and a source of wealth for them. American business people aren't generally accustomed to treating their customers this way. I hope they come to their senses.
  - verteu 2y ago
    I'm guessing a few weeks of higher prices will change consumers' minds.
    - sightbroke 2y ago
      Will that even matter though? There's a while before another election and longer while before the person imposing tariffs would expectedly leave.
Taniwha 2y ago
If you really wanted to fix the US economy you'd uncouple the $ from the oil markets and let it float downward - the cost of imports would go up and exporters would earn more (and be more competitive in their domestic markets). The BTW is why China is pushing the yuan down now, because unlike Trump, they understand how this stuff works. Trade imbalances are simply currency imbalances that haven't been allowed to find their own levels - what you can't do is have an artificially high currency (by requiring all global oil sales be made in it, creating an artificial scarcity) and not have a trade deficit - you can't have your cake and eat it too
- suraci 2y ago
  > uncouple the $ from the oil markets and let it float downward - the cost of imports would go up and exporters would earn more can you explain it with more details?
  - grumple 2y ago
    If your currency is high value (which USD is due to demand in part due to oil and part due to others having reserves of it), foreign goods are cheap to you. This makes importing attractive, but it makes it very expensive for other countries to buy your exports. If your currency has a lower value, it’s cheap for others to buy your exports, but expensive for you to import goods.
- freeone3000 2y ago
  The dollar is kept artificially strong through oil, so america can maintain an effectively infinite debt and an arbitrarily large deficit without the dollar ever weakening despite how much is printed… I’m sure this sounds bad to someone, but if I was America, I wouldn’t try to put the gift horse into the wood chipper.
  - TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
    Oil supported by the world's biggest military and huge subsidies. It's why moving to renewables would be catastrophic for the US. And for all of the big Fossils, including Russia and the Saudis. And the smaller second-order beneficiaries like the UK who make money from "services" - moving the big money around and avoiding taxes on it. We're in a messy transition to a post-fossil global economy. It's going to take decades, and it's not obvious how much will be left standing when it's over. But one way or another, it's locked in and unavoidable.
tdb7893 2y ago
Subsidizing specific manufacturing and having at least some consistency was a big part of the US strategy until the last few months. Most notably, the US passed huge subsidies for semiconductor manufacturing in 2022. I don't know how effective that will be but it at least seems more coherent than these goofy tariffs (whatever people think of tariffs overall we absolutely cannot keep shifting them week to week).
- mullingitover 2y ago
  > we absolutely cannot keep shifting them week to week We absolutely cannot create the expectation that we plan to get what we say we want: zero trade deficits. If we even succeed in making the rest of the world believe we're going to do this it will be catastrophic. So much of the advantages the US enjoys rides on trust and goodwill, and zeroing trade deficits would wreck the world economy and destroy trust in the US dollar as a safe haven. Just like paying down the national debt would.
  - immibis 2y ago
    Zeroing trade deficits means by definition that the rest of the world won't have (many) US dollars. (Pedantically: it means the rest of the world has exactly as much US currency as the US has the rest of the world's currency)
    - Jensson 2y ago
      No, it could also mean that US have many foreign currencies stockpiled.
    - whatshisface 2y ago
      The trade deficit is a measure of the flow of currency, not the stores.
- douglasisshiny 2y ago
  It was insanely effective: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRMFGCON https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRMFGCON. Notice the sharp dip at the end there.
ta998 2y ago
(Software dev working for a European manufacturer of industrial automation equipment) We just hit pause on a major product development effort in order to go back and re-evaluate some of our vendor choices. Specifically to see how we can eliminate as many dependencies on US companies as possible. Fortunately we were relatively early in a 18-24 month development cycle for a somewhat complex hardware device. The company already started a project two months ago to look at how we can migrate off AWS and Azure and instead use domestic alternatives for our online systems. For the hardware components this is a bit more work, but it looks like we can find replacements for most of the key items. Though there are a few components where we would have to rearchitect some of the systems to eliminate US components. For us it is simple: we need stability and predictability. We have long development cycles and long lifecycles for the things we make. Stopping development and trying to eliminate things that depend on the US is a bit unreal and shocking, but management have to deal with the world as it is. I know some of my colleagues at other companies in the sector are going through similar exercises. Right now changes are taking place that will not be visible for years, but that will stick around for decades. The current administration in the US is doing real, long term damage to the US. It is really weird for us (Europeans) to read hacker news and it see mostly indifference to what is happening in your country. You probably should worry a bit more about this than you do.

ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago

>If you actually wanted to bring manufacturing back to the US you'd... Sure this seems like a great way for if you can sustain a multi-decade effort If you have 3.5 years to re-negotiate a deal, maybe you need to move faster.

notahacker 2y ago
If you're spending 3.5 years trying to "renegotiate a deal", you don't have a strategy to bring manufacturing back. If you change your policy multiple times in a week you don't even have a strategy. Easier to onshore manufacturing with multi-year timelines, but you don't need multi-year timelines to impose tariffs on carefully selected industries, not penguins and your existing industries' key suppliers.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
  This ignores the reality of power in the US. Presidents can't implement multi-decade initiatives. >If you change your policy multiple times you're missing the forest for the trees. the policy has not changed: bring manufacturing back to the US.
  - formerly_proven 2y ago
    Trump-Biden-Trump are 12 years of protectionists being president, if DJT wasn't DJT he could've utilized this to advance his agenda.
    - leereeves 2y ago
      Biden was a protectionist?
      - brendoelfrendo 2y ago
        This was the entire purpose of the CHIPS act. Biden just took some of the protectionist policies Trump started in his first term and did gave them an actual objective.
      - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
        In the mild sort of way. Mostly Biden didn’t change much and kept things stable (the way businesses like it), but there was definitely room in that for the CHIPs act, which is a double edged sword (by pushing China to invest more in its local chip production). He didn’t bother getting rid of the DJT tariffs that survived after COVID hit either.
      - af78 2y ago
        Biden's Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was definitely viewed as protectionist. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act#Relationship_with_foreign_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act#Relati...: > ... some were concerned about the law's provisions favoring American industry. ... the chairman of the 2023 G20 meeting in India, called it "the most protectionist act ever drafted in the world", asking American officials, "You believed in market forces and now you do this?" Other countries have begun to create their own similar laws. China requested WTO dispute consultations with the United States. > 27 European Union finance ministers have expressed "serious concerns" about the financial incentives of the Inflation Reduction Act, and are considering challenging it. They have listed at least nine points in the legislation, which they say could be in breach of World Trade Organization rules. They were opposed to the subsidies for consumers to buy North American-assembled electric cars, as EU officials believe the subsidies discriminate against European carmakers. One EU official told CNBC that, "there is a political consensus (among the 27 ministers) that this plan threatens the European industry" and its supply of raw materials. In February 2023, the European Commission announced it would propose the "Net Zero Industrial Act", similar to the IRA, in turn putting pressure on the United Kingdom and South Korea.
- Propelloni 2y ago
  Well, if your goal is to pump and dump the stock markets, this is a strategy and it is working. I don't think that the current administration has enough foresight to actually plan for such a scheme but I think they are smart enough to see an opportunity, to wit the posts on social media shortly before withdrawing some tariffs.
pjc50 2y ago
I don't think it's physically possible to move much manufacturing in that time. If you think it is, please give estimates in dollar values, number of jobs, and square footage of factory construction expected.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
  What is your takeaway? That no effort should be made?
  - int_19h 2y ago
    Do it the right way through Congress.
bryanlarsen 2y ago
Previous government efforts do not need to be sabotaged every time there's an election. For example, when Biden came in he didn't immediately unwind all of Trump's industrial efforts. He kept the China tariffs, and built on top of them with the CHIPS act to add the "carrot" part of "carrot and stick".
realusername 2y ago
Bringing back such industry would take a multi decade effort, in the best scenario (which the US clearly isn't now)
2muchcoffeeman 2y ago
Are the commenters defending the chaos serious or just trolls?

ntonozzi 2y ago

Wouldn't you prioritize subsidizing local production over taxing foreign production? It just seems like a much cleaner and more straightforward way to increase local production. It seems like this has been at least somewhat effective with semiconductors over the past ten years. And then you don't have the risk of harming consumers. Everybody wins!

njarboe 2y ago
The resources for subsidies come from the taxpayer. Plus how you and who you subsidize becomes political. Lots of complications.
- mindslight 2y ago
  The resources for subsidies come from printing new money (which is possible by having the world reserve currency), and then spending that new money for deliberate purposes instead of just giving it to the banksters to bid up the asset bubbles. In an imaginary world where we had a Congress that served the People and a mentally competent President, of course. Who gets subsidized is indeed political, but I don't see a way to sidestep that since there's centralization as soon as you take action to prevent the currency from deflating.
  - DonHopkins 2y ago
    Political patronage and cruelty is the point.
  - hgomersall 2y ago
    To be clear, the US is not unique in its ability to do this. Many other countries would benefit from understanding it! In the UK we have a government wanting to build a growth strategy around finance. It's like a parody that nobody gets (yet).
  - dgoldstein0 2y ago
    But Congress doesn't actually decide to print new money? When they decide to spend they have to raise taxes or issue debt (treasuries). The federal reserve, on the other hand, controls interest rates and other mechanisms which actually result in money "bring created" for practical purposes.

pton_xd 2y ago

> If you actually wanted to bring manufacturing back to the US you'd figure out which industries you wanted to develop, probably subsidise them, communicate very clearly what you were going to do and then ratchet up the tariffs on those specific finishes products, whilst being sure to maintain access to raw materials and components you still needed. I'm not here to defend the current approach, but what you're describing sounds like a centrally planned communist / state-directed economy or something. Is that really the way forward?

croisillon 2y ago
yeah i was thinking subsidizing is exactly what the European Union does, which as everyone knows is very much a radical left soviet like institution
lbotos 2y ago
If you do this to the entire economy, yes sure, fair. If you decide that you want Americans to eat American garlic and you give garlic farmers a tax break or grants to buy seed and fertilizer I wouldn't call that central planning. More "strategic investment". Replace garlic with whatever industry it is that the gov wants to strategically invest in: semiconductors, automobiles, aerospace, weapons, renewable energy.
surgical_fire 2y ago
> what you're describing sounds like a centrally planned communist / state-directed economy or something. Is that really the way forward? What they are describing is basically what every sane government does, and what the US used to do until, er, a few months ago. If you consider most western countries to be centrally planned communist states (including the US up until very recently), then I don't have anything else to argue.
- amiga386 2y ago
  It's not quite as bad as central planning, but it's definitely a big dollop of state aid (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_aid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_aid), distorting competition. You may think this is fair, while others disagree. As there's no "world government" arbiter for these kinds of actions, there are only the actions your country takes, and the actions other sovereign countries take in response - for example, all countries in the world could ban import of anything produced by your burgeoning state-aid factories, leaving you with only a domestic market to sell to; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)#Anti-dumping_actions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)#Anti-...

cogman10 2y ago

> which industries you wanted to develop yup > probably subsidise them yup > communicate very clearly what you were going to do Probably not. At least, not until right before the ratchet up. You'd want to first subsidize then once industries are starting to build up, you'd want to start the ratchet up. You probably also wouldn't want to say "We are doing this because we want to be better competitors" or whatever. It'd be better if you said something like "We believe country x is doing terrible thing y and for the safety of our country and others we are going to apply a tariff on good z until x stops doing y". But yeah, universal tariffs are the dumbest idea in the world. We've essentially sanctioned every single nation which is going to massively damage us and manufacturing. Going to be real hard to unwind this.

notahacker 2y ago
You might add a bit of "Country X" is bad spin in there as political justification for what you're doing, agreed. But you would make damn sure you communicated when the tariffs would hit punitive levels so the rest of the value chain knew and had already had chances to find themselves domestic suppliers
- cogman10 2y ago
  Gotta be REAL careful about how you signal things if your intent is ultimately to take over a market. Telling manufacturers you intend to isolate could leak out and ultimately trigger pre-emptive tariffs. Honestly, just subsidizing is a lot simpler to do and it doesn't run the risk of making the world mad at you or triggering retaliatory tariffs.
  - notahacker 2y ago
    You're a lot less likely to get retaliatory tariffs when you're communicating to manufacturers that you intend to raise your $nicheproductclasses tariffs to support domestic manufacturing under industrial strategy and national security policy than when you announce blanket tariffs with threats. The US imposed 100% tariffs on EVs last year for example[1], which wasn't exactly a universally popular move but wasn't likely to provoke a trade war. Much easier to accept losing share of a market than every market, plus also less likely to accidentally punish the manufacturing industries you're trying to support. [1]there's a certain irony in one of Biden's last actions being to impose tariffs in a way which massively helped Tesla, and one of Trump's first being to propose tariffs that could seriously hurt its supply chain if they don't get exemptions...

beloch 2y ago

You also wouldn't go out of your way to piss off America's two biggest export markets: Canada and Mexico. As it stands, not only are there significant counter-tariffs that would make U.S. manufacturers even less competitive in Canada[1], there is significant consumer backlash to anything American-made where, just a couple months ago, products "Made in the U.S.A." would have been viewed favourably[2]. The way Trump has done things, any company that manufactures in the U.S. had better be able to get by with just the domestic U.S. market, because exports to Canada and Mexico aren't likely to be significant for quite some time, even if Trump backs off quickly. Lasting damage has already been done. ________________________ [1]It remains to be seen if Mexico will eventually retaliate. [2]Perhaps not favourably in terms of price/quality competitiveness, but certainly in a geopolitical "support your neighbour instead of China" sense.

cmrdporcupine 2y ago
My experience is this: The majority of Americans have a hard time believing we (Canada) are their biggest export market and trading partner generally. Because they barely think about Canada, and when they do it's as a quaint and cold place of no real importance to them. And this perception has worked in Trump's favour. "Those weak irrelevant people up there are taking advantage of us, time to teach them a lesson" works well when the people you're telling it to don't realize "those people" are their single biggest customer and a source of wealth for them. American business people aren't generally accustomed to treating their customers this way. I hope they come to their senses.
- verteu 2y ago
  I'm guessing a few weeks of higher prices will change consumers' minds.
  - sightbroke 2y ago
    Will that even matter though? There's a while before another election and longer while before the person imposing tariffs would expectedly leave.

Taniwha 2y ago

If you really wanted to fix the US economy you'd uncouple the $ from the oil markets and let it float downward - the cost of imports would go up and exporters would earn more (and be more competitive in their domestic markets). The BTW is why China is pushing the yuan down now, because unlike Trump, they understand how this stuff works. Trade imbalances are simply currency imbalances that haven't been allowed to find their own levels - what you can't do is have an artificially high currency (by requiring all global oil sales be made in it, creating an artificial scarcity) and not have a trade deficit - you can't have your cake and eat it too

suraci 2y ago
> uncouple the $ from the oil markets and let it float downward - the cost of imports would go up and exporters would earn more can you explain it with more details?
- grumple 2y ago
  If your currency is high value (which USD is due to demand in part due to oil and part due to others having reserves of it), foreign goods are cheap to you. This makes importing attractive, but it makes it very expensive for other countries to buy your exports. If your currency has a lower value, it’s cheap for others to buy your exports, but expensive for you to import goods.
freeone3000 2y ago
The dollar is kept artificially strong through oil, so america can maintain an effectively infinite debt and an arbitrarily large deficit without the dollar ever weakening despite how much is printed… I’m sure this sounds bad to someone, but if I was America, I wouldn’t try to put the gift horse into the wood chipper.
- TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
  Oil supported by the world's biggest military and huge subsidies. It's why moving to renewables would be catastrophic for the US. And for all of the big Fossils, including Russia and the Saudis. And the smaller second-order beneficiaries like the UK who make money from "services" - moving the big money around and avoiding taxes on it. We're in a messy transition to a post-fossil global economy. It's going to take decades, and it's not obvious how much will be left standing when it's over. But one way or another, it's locked in and unavoidable.

tdb7893 2y ago

Subsidizing specific manufacturing and having at least some consistency was a big part of the US strategy until the last few months. Most notably, the US passed huge subsidies for semiconductor manufacturing in 2022. I don't know how effective that will be but it at least seems more coherent than these goofy tariffs (whatever people think of tariffs overall we absolutely cannot keep shifting them week to week).

mullingitover 2y ago
> we absolutely cannot keep shifting them week to week We absolutely cannot create the expectation that we plan to get what we say we want: zero trade deficits. If we even succeed in making the rest of the world believe we're going to do this it will be catastrophic. So much of the advantages the US enjoys rides on trust and goodwill, and zeroing trade deficits would wreck the world economy and destroy trust in the US dollar as a safe haven. Just like paying down the national debt would.
- immibis 2y ago
  Zeroing trade deficits means by definition that the rest of the world won't have (many) US dollars. (Pedantically: it means the rest of the world has exactly as much US currency as the US has the rest of the world's currency)
  - Jensson 2y ago
    No, it could also mean that US have many foreign currencies stockpiled.
  - whatshisface 2y ago
    The trade deficit is a measure of the flow of currency, not the stores.
douglasisshiny 2y ago
It was insanely effective: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRMFGCON https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRMFGCON. Notice the sharp dip at the end there.

ta998 2y ago

(Software dev working for a European manufacturer of industrial automation equipment) We just hit pause on a major product development effort in order to go back and re-evaluate some of our vendor choices. Specifically to see how we can eliminate as many dependencies on US companies as possible. Fortunately we were relatively early in a 18-24 month development cycle for a somewhat complex hardware device. The company already started a project two months ago to look at how we can migrate off AWS and Azure and instead use domestic alternatives for our online systems. For the hardware components this is a bit more work, but it looks like we can find replacements for most of the key items. Though there are a few components where we would have to rearchitect some of the systems to eliminate US components. For us it is simple: we need stability and predictability. We have long development cycles and long lifecycles for the things we make. Stopping development and trying to eliminate things that depend on the US is a bit unreal and shocking, but management have to deal with the world as it is. I know some of my colleagues at other companies in the sector are going through similar exercises. Right now changes are taking place that will not be visible for years, but that will stick around for decades. The current administration in the US is doing real, long term damage to the US. It is really weird for us (Europeans) to read hacker news and it see mostly indifference to what is happening in your country. You probably should worry a bit more about this than you do.