4 ms·
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
by 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 agoGotta 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 agoYou'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...