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Tariffs kinda make sense when you have a deficit in a widely available item. Big trade deficit with Bangladesh? Sure you can buy cheap textiles from Thailand or

Tariffs kinda make sense when you have a deficit in a widely available item. Big trade deficit with Bangladesh? Sure you can buy cheap textiles from Thailand or Vietnam or something. Unfortunately this approach does not work when you lack a viable domestic alternative and you're up against a monopoly. What will the US do if TSMC does not blink? Not buy TSMC made chips? Obviously that is impossible, so the logical conclusion is that American consumers will end up paying the tariffs.

xyst 1y ago
> ... American consumers will end up paying the tariffs This has always been the case. I have never heard of a company absorbing tariffs on behalf of consumers in the day and age of "trickle down economics".
- duxup 1y ago
  So far indications are many companies are eating the tariffs, for now. Even making them visible has drawn the ire of Trump a few times already. But I generally agree that it can't go on forever / not how it works historically.
  - asadotzler 1y ago
    Eating the tariffs by firing workers means more out of work with less purchasing power and prices are going up too. It's fail all the way down.
  - snarf21 1y ago
    A lot of them are "eating" them in the margins of the unreasonable "inflation" increases they used to see how much the public was willing to pay for their products. (Normally, this would be okay in a functioning capitalist market except we've let way to many companies gain a monopolistic position with no real market competition to force a reasonable middle ground between profit and elastic demand.)
  - cnst 1y ago
    I'm actually surprised that some prices are even lower now than they've previously been. I don't think most people actually have a solid understanding of what is and is not affected by which tariffs. If I understand correctly, most of the tech stuff is effectively exempt; and Canada/Mexico tariffs don't apply to most items that are covered under "the rules of origin" certifications under USMCA (the successor to NAFTA). I think the biggest hit has been the elimination of the de minimis rule, which now makes it difficult and/or impossible to get anything directly from China by USPS, be that cheap clothing or small electronics.
    - duxup 1y ago
      I don't think companies know what is affected and when... except when the invoice comes. The tariffs have been a moving target, some announced and never occurred.
      - hedora 1y ago
        Most kicked in on Aug 1st. It takes a few weeks for the international supply chain to turn over.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - yks 1y ago
    Eating the tariffs to avoid punishment from the government is just price controls with the dash of lawlessness. Something will give and it will be either profits or prices.
- thisisit 1y ago
  Well, MAGA supporters have never heard of consumers paying tariffs: https://x.com/dieworkwear/status/1951851958559703117 https://x.com/dieworkwear/status/1951851958559703117
ezst 1y ago
With this administration, it's probably just more blackmail, in the form of "it would be a pity if nobody came to the rescue when China eventually puts its Taiwan plans in motion! (Not that playing ball is a guarantee of anything either)".
- bit1993 1y ago
  > it would be a pity if nobody came to the rescue when China eventually puts its Taiwan plans in motion! Wouldn't that just mean that Taiwan has to choose between two villains, and China can take the advantage of this by changing its narrative and taking the position as a hero, protecting Taiwan from the US.
  - jfengel 1y ago
    Taiwan really, really does not want to be part of China. Or rather, they see themselves as the legitimate government of China, which is undergoing a temporary Communist junta. The separation was extremely violent. I mean, you saw the Three Body Problem. The US fosters this, to retain a toehold there. Taiwan doesn't exactly love us for it, but they know which side their bread is buttered on.
    - wahern 1y ago
      > they see themselves as the legitimate government of China No, they don't. But formally renouncing that position[1] makes them officially secessionist in the eyes of Chinese conservatives, adding pressure to invade. The One China fiction matters, though how much it matters is definitely up for debate. But it's a local minima, and rolling the dice comes with significant risk. [1] At the state level. AFAIU, it's been renounced by several of the major parties in Taiwan, and when in power they've made movements at low levels of government that arguably contravene the policy. But it still remains the official position and its still enshrined in the Taiwanese constitution. And, yes, the US adds pressure to maintain the status quo as it would (might?[2]) be on the hook for the defense of Taiwan. But the majority of the population isn't in favor of formally renouncing it, either; the potential negative consequences are existential, and the material benefit is slim to none. [2] During Trump's first term it was claimed he privately admitted that if China invaded Taiwan he wouldn't intervene.
YetAnotherNick 1y ago
> Not buy TSMC made chips? Obviously that is impossible Why do you think that? Trump clearly wants them to use Intel's 18A which is likely similar to TSMC 2 year old N3P, which is not an impossible option.
- fh973 1y ago
  Them? Nvidia and AMD? RTX 7xxx would then be based on an old Intel process? Would buy these?
  - MBCook 1y ago
    All of Apple’s stuff? even if Intel’s processes worked just as well, there’s no way they have the capacity to take over for all that stuff. We’d be back in a huge shortage.
  - YetAnotherNick 1y ago
    I would buy that if I could get it in 30% lower price.
    - Rohansi 1y ago
      Just buy hardware that's a few years old and you'll basically get the same thing.
- cherryteastain 1y ago
  The same 18A that their CEO is axing? https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/intels-new-ceo-explores-big-shift-chip-manufacturing-business-2025-07-02/ https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/intels-new-...
  - tester756 1y ago
    18A is not getting axed, they'll use it.
  - bigbadfeline 1y ago
_hyn3 1y ago
What would TSMC do if they couldn't sell chips to the USA? It cuts both ways, like most trade negotiations.
- MBCook 1y ago
  Is “don’t buy stuff with TSMC chips” really a valid option we have? Isn’t that basically “stop buying high technology” to a large degree?
  - treyd 1y ago
    We can use older processes if we have to. We'd be taking a step back of... maybe 5-10 years? Computers 10 years ago were not that much slower than they are today. Volume would be a bigger concern than performance. Maybe it'd force the tech industry to start writing more efficient user-facing software instead of depending on the incremental advancements made by chip designers and semi fabs.
    - Aurornis 1y ago
      > We'd be taking a step back of... maybe 5-10 years? Computers 10 years ago were not that much slower than they are today There’s more to the world of computing than your laptop. Stepping back to 10 year old GPUs and server CPUs would be a massive handicap on the country. > Maybe it'd force the tech industry to start writing more efficient user-facing software instead of depending on the incremental advancements made by chip designers and semi fabs. It’s not about the speed of your laptop loading Slack. Large scale compute is already squeezing as much performance as we can out of server hardware.
      - MBCook 1y ago
        Not to mention there wouldn’t even be enough capacity to make all the chips we need even if we went with slower chips.
    - notTooFarGone 1y ago
      And that's my friends is how to crash the stock market.
tw04 1y ago
>so the logical conclusion is that American consumers will end up paying the tariffs. That’s been the point all along… they are significantly raising taxes on the bottom 90% of Americans and most are too stupid to even understand it. Gotta pay for those tax cuts for the wealthy somehow.
- nosignono 1y ago
  It has nothing to do with stupidity. Stop painting people as idiots because they exist in one of the most information hostile environments in human history. This isn't some natural state that's unrecoverable. The people you describe have been given a highly addictive media environment tailor made to engender outrage and drive behavior. It shouldn't be a shock when most people cannot resist it. The first step to changing it is not writing them off or insulting them for being had.
  - heraldgeezer 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - jrflowers 1y ago
      >I recently lost my COVID kilos, 10-15kg. Was easy. It took you five years to do that though. Why did it take that long if it was easy
      - heraldgeezer 1y ago
        I started in like December or January... Was COVID 5 years ago fuck me. Also, COVID weight gain would be during lockdowns, and ALSO my job went fully remote. Being fully remote was an issue for sure. So it's like COVID was extended for me. I never really weighed myself and then felt weird like a big mechelin man and I saw I was 10-12 kg heavier, makes sense why I feel bad I thought, and I did not weigh before and just decided to lose it, was easy when I decided. That's my story. I was always slow on the uptake on things, hygiene, clothes etc. Weight too, I grew up always being skinny, but getting to 30+ I never noticed when I got heavier as it takes a long time, you talk as if everything is obvious, but it is not. But it is easy once you know. So, if you have already identified weight as being the issue, losing weight is easy, in my experience. As I said, fasting feels good, skip meals, skip the beer, drink sugar-free. 10 kg gone fast, I promise you. The issue for me is identifying the problem. Love the downvotes, btw. >It took you five years to do that though. Why did it take that long if it was easy I should specify, I have been BMI 19-20 for 3–4 months now, again, as from teenager to 25-ish thats my range, thats "me", it feels like myself, so. So that's what I mean when “recently”, not yesterday. Time warps when you get old. So fast. ALSO, easy things can still take a long time. You understand the words?
mathiaspoint 1y ago
If there's one product we have domestic alternatives to it's semiconductors. We're a couple nodes behind TSMC. Using US only foundries or paying a premium for TSMC is not the end of the world.
- J_McQuade 1y ago
  More people need to hear this. Similar argument when they tried to stop China from buying certain types of silicon - "Oh well... anyway!". I am not American, nor am I Chinese. Both of those countries have the capability to make enough compute to do whatever the hell they want. I am, however, European...
  - silisili 1y ago
    So is ASML. You guys hold the real keys to the kingdom :).
- DiddlyWinks 1y ago
  Really? I was not under the impression that we had anything truly competitive. Could we make an iPhone, for example, using only U.S.-made chips?
  - mathiaspoint 1y ago
    We couldn't make an iPhone because apple would refuse to cooperate, not because of a technical limitation. We could make a similarly capable phone though.
    - robertjpayne 1y ago
      iPhone performance and battery life would likely slide back 5-10 years if Apple was forced to use Intel chips instead of TSMC today. Not just that, the raft of features that may have to be disabled until that performance and performance per watt gets back to where it is today.
      - 1y ago
lanthissa 1y ago
tsmc(taiwan) will blink for the same reason europe did and japan did, and for the same reason india and brazil did not. when you take a step back and look at the deal breakdown, this is protection money not a trade negotiation.
- alephnerd 1y ago
  > the same reason india and brazil did not. India's issues with the US are for completely separate reason. Bihar elections are coming up in 2 months [2]. Any incumbent government in India can't give trade concessions on agriculture during peak campaigning season in a swing state that can impact elections in 2-3 additional states as well as the general election in 4 years. The main Indian exports to the US (pharma, electronics, and services) are all tariff exempted so the economic pain is marginal. The only export that's hurt is textiles, but frankly, textile workers don't matter in Indian elections, especially when most of them leave for 3-4 months each year to work on the family farm and get social benefits based on their agrarian status and voter rolls that they never updated. Realistically, India and US will sign a deal either after the Bihar elections, or after making ag/dairy a separate track from the rest of the deal. Trump needs to keep the cheeseheads of Wisconsin happy just like the NDA needs to keep Bihari farmers happy through direct subsidizes [0] and hardline agriculture policies [1], hence why both the US and India will maintain maximalist positions on agriculture and dairy. My hunch is a comprehensive deal will be announced during the election media blackout in the run-up of the Bihar elections or shortly after the election. [0] - https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/prime-minister-narendra-modi-in-bihar/article69257763.ece https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/prime-minister-narend... [1] - https://indianexpress.com/article/political-pulse/why-makhana-board-bihar-decisive-move-assembly-election-year-9812318/ https://indianexpress.com/article/political-pulse/why-makhan... [2] - https://www.eci.gov.in/election-symbol-details/2066 https://www.eci.gov.in/election-symbol-details/2066
- thisisit 1y ago
  Different countries have different considerations. Most of these "deals" aren't deals and rather frameworks. And given the tumultuous nature of bilateral trade where countries might not follow on their promises. Happens all the time and countries end up arguing at the WTO. So, it is hard to say whether Europe or Japan "blinked". Given the timing of the European deal it might be to help Trump so that he does not have egg on his face for not having 200 deals by 1st August. India wants to cozy up to US and was one of the first countries to start trade negotiation. Trump-Modi dynamic has been good. The sticking point is agriculture and dairy. Both countries subsidize agriculture and diary. And in both countries farmers form a big chunk of politically aware voters. For the Indian government it is political suicide to even nod along like Japan and Europe. But if you hear Trump he keeps saying it is about Russian oil. Brazil might have the same issue. Historically, US was the largest soyabeans exporter. But last time Trump got into a trade war with China, the country has moved away from US exports and started buying from China. So, again even the appearance of a deal might be problematic for the government. And reading this side by side, maybe US farmers are not that economically aware?
mrtksn 1y ago
Yes it's a tax on consumption and when applied to everything the same way it's essentially a VAT. The admin keeps telling that EU will pay, India will pay but at best they can do is to weaken their currency so the goods become cheeper and it compensates for the tariffs US importers pay. Arguably, US consumers are super consumers and maybe it will be better for everyone if Americans consume a bit less? I don't think that it should be necessarily bad for business, maybe it's time to switch to world building instead of consuming, maybe as so many people works so hard we as species should gradually move on to use our output for longer and enrich our lives with each new tool instead of consume more and more and keep working the same or more. Eastern Europeans are or used to be a bit likte that, have a slow paced life, have low GDP output, on paper economy and everything is bad but actually have a great life if you have a house with a garden and some stuff you bought 30 years ago and still functioning good enough.
croemer 1y ago
There's no problem with having a trade deficit against one country. There's no need to balance each country, just as there's no need for people to have no imbalance in daily exchanges. It's as if you were going back to a barter economy where there was no money.
Supermancho 1y ago
The baseline of no trade deficit between all countries and the US makes no sense, since countries are not uniform in resource or production. eg Lesotho/Bangladesh won't achieve a trade balance with the US when they produce what the US wants and don't consume enough to balance it out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ah9SrbCB7-k&t=1147s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ah9SrbCB7-k&t=1147s Let's say this was the starting point. Almost immediately, this strategy of trade balance was dispensed with, leaving most countries with some random tariff rate that wasn't strategically decided. Many recognizable countries, specifically the ones that the administration targeted for political reasons, ended up with adjusted tariffs based on politic. This was due to the administration figuring out they had overstepped or thought that they were too soft, when the influence wasn't effective. When it became clear the economics were being ignored, Trump called them some epithet that meant "unreasonable" and abandoned the tariff tactic in all but rhetoric. What was the point? The most predictable sequence of IMMEDIATE events were likely the point. I believe the point was to try to convert the global crises (political, economic, and social) that existed around the world to purely economic concerns for simplicity. This was paired with jamming up the entire global trade system, which would allow the administration to listen for the squeakiest wheels. It was supposed to be an efficient way to prioritize immediate problems such that the administration would not have to learn about and weigh all the problems in the world. Short and long term, the tariffs have accelerated the de-dollarization of the world economy, they has amplified income inequality, and have destroyed supply chains across multiple sectors. The replacements are necessarily less efficient (value is cannibalized by tariffs). It was a lazy and poorly considerer tactic, but it might have achieved the goal, given my assumption of purpose. The issues that were raised to the administration were largely, left unsolved. The most prominent of which are the Ukrainian, Taiwanese, and Palestinian fronts and the weakening of the US hegemony due to trade conflicts. The good trade relations with traditionally friendly nations have been damaged, long term. Canada, India, China, most of the EU have made moves to distance themselves from the US chaos. Some strange side effects, like this weird buy in to american companies is a side effect of the show, rather than a specific intent. I can concede it wasn't all bad. The US did see some new corporate inroads into a few countries. Notably concessions from Mexico, who was willing to meet the US goals in achieving a trade balance (more or less). Overall, it's possible the tariffs succeeded as a self-serving tool of the administration, but failed in serving the US as policy. Maybe I'm just wrong, but maybe Trump is just this simple minded and his administration is playing into the fallout, as it advances their 2025 goals (or whatever).
prng2021 1y ago
“ What will the US do if TSMC does not blink? Not buy TSMC made chips?” I think their assumption is that TSMC will certainty give in to any demands. Taiwan needs US support to defend against a much worse (and unfortunately just next door) adversary.. China.
- hedora 1y ago
  That’s probably true, though I’d pay a 50% tariff just to get working drivers vs. whatever Intel was shipping 5-10 years ago. AMD and Apple offer that; Intel still(?) does not.
  - 20after4 1y ago
    I've been using Intel hardware on Linux for more than 10 years. The instances of driver issues that I can think of are very very few and they were never related to anything Intel did.
    - hedora 1y ago
      I wonder what hardware you've been buying. I've tried Apple, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Intel OEM, Toshiba, ASRock, and a half dozen others. I never saw any of them run Windows (OEM or from Microsoft), Linux, or MacOS X (on the Mac) reliably. The most recent Intel machine that did work reliably is now 15 years old (and humming along nicely, for what it's worth). Sure, they had Linux drivers, but they also would do crap like kernel panic, unsuspend in my laptop and overheat, screw up USB, and so on. They did it under all operating systems. My current desktop is an AMD system on chip. It's great, except it has an Intel WiFi/Bluetooth module. There's been a bug open against all Intel Bluetooth modules for about a decade: They fail to advertise themselves in a timely fashion at boot, so the intel driver (Linux or Windows) doesn't see them so you have to keep rebooting until it does (or write a bash script that retries modprobe). Here's the manual for the wildly popular ASUS bluetooth dongle that works around this crap by not using an Intel part. Look at page 1 where they show you how to disable the Windows driver for your existing Bluetooth radio, which apparently can't coexist with a second bluetooth adapter under windows: https://www.asus.com/us/supportonly/usb-bt500/helpdesk_manual?model2Name=USB-BT500 https://www.asus.com/us/supportonly/usb-bt500/helpdesk_manua... (Manual revision U24085 will do -- it's the top in the list). I'll give you one guess: Which brand has the bug that requires the workaround?
andrei_says_ 1y ago
I much prefer “import taxes”. These arm-twisting games are exhausting and expensive.
- pstuart 1y ago
  These tariffs are presented as trying to bolster domestic industry but that's a smokescreen. The primary goal is to use this to replace income taxes so the rich are freed from their onerous (/s) taxation. The bonus is that it's a tool for punishing perceived enemies and inciting interested parties to purchase favor from the regime to try and ease them back. https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/28/business/taxes-trump-tariffs https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/28/business/taxes-trump-tariffs
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
captainregex 1y ago
more likely than not I think this ends with a vague promise, a loudly declared victory, and a quiet defanging of the promise or just outright ignoring it in the future
eru 1y ago
> Tariffs kinda make sense when you have a deficit in a widely available item. Big trade deficit with Bangladesh? Sure you can buy cheap textiles from Thailand or Vietnam or something. Sorry, how do they 'make sense'? What's the problem with a trade deficit with Bangladesh? And in your example, you'd just shift bilateral trade balances around, without impact the overall trade balance of the US? I could perhaps believe that an overall trade deficit is bad (maybe..), but I've yet to hear why bilateral trade deficits should matter, especially with places like Bangladesh that are not strategic rivals or are even allies like Japan or Taiwan or NATO.
- CSMastermind 1y ago
  Because of the Triffin dilemma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma Trade deficits in isolation aren't good or bad but because the US has the world reserve currency it must supply it's currency to the world. This basically forces it to have a trade deficit with everyone which over time can hollow out manufacturing sectors. Making the whole economy vulnerable to shocks and ultimately causing it to fail. It's similar to "Dutch disease," where external demand overvalues the currency and harms tradable sectors. It's not sustainable without careful policy management, and attempts to weaken the currency via tariffs, devaluation, or some other mechanism. You might not like Trump or his approach but he is directionally correct and does have a powerful bargaining chip (access to the US market - which is basically on track to be the only 1st world consumer driven economy 5 years from now).
  - dmix 1y ago
    Doesn’t this assume tariffs are efficiently adapting to changes in the market? Markets, trade, innovation, even currency prices change all the time. Tariffs change every decade if you’re lucky and when they do there’s a thousand conditional statements baked in that make it even more disconnected from reality
  - protimewaster 1y ago
    > You might not like Trump or his approach but he is directionally correct and does have a powerful bargaining chip (access to the US market - which is basically on track to be the only 1st world consumer driven economy 5 years from now). Interestingly, though, Robert Triffin International put out a paper essentially arguing that Trump's tariff approach is all wrong.
acchow 1y ago
The objective is to force TSMC to accelerate their US production plans.
teaearlgraycold 1y ago
The tariffs are largely just a means to getting world leaders to beg Donald Trump for relief. I can’t imagine many things making him happier.
notepad0x90 1y ago
I don't know why analysis like this doesn't go a bit deeper. Yes americans will pay more, but TSMC will also see less demand. Intel has it's own foundry, maybe it can start competing against TSMC, because now TSMC costs a lot more and intel's cost of manufacturing in the US to compete against TSMC can be recouped much better thanks to the new market prices set by the TSMC tariffs? Government's shouldn't put up with monopolies either, if it wasn't for trump's political baggage, HN would be all over this I'm sure, TSMC is already investing on US factories which even without purchasing a share of intel, it would force them to use those factories and bring them online sooner. We've had multiple unfortunate wars due to dependence on foreign resources that don't have good/sufficient competition state-side, that is not a good pattern to repeat. If TSMC doesn't blink, maybe they'll get their way for now but all their American projects and in general doing business in the US will be unpleasant and costly until 2028+. Which is cheaper? I don't know, I'm asking because a lot of opinion on the subject isn't talking/explaining about the actual numbers and nuanced economic considerations.
- ExoticPearTree 1y ago
  I think the problem with Intel's foundry is that it cannot produce the same quality and quantity at the level of TSMC. I was looking through the list of fabrication technology for the latest CPUs, and while they say they are 3nm, it is using TSMCs technology (Arrow Lake S: Fabrication process: Compute Tile (Contains the CPU cores) TSMC's N3B node.) My guess is that Trump is trying to save Intel by forcing TSMC to buy them under the guise of "I'm forcing companies invest in the US".
- mallets 1y ago
  It doesn't work if you don't have 1:1 product, which Intel foundry absolutely doesn't. Not in performance, price or just ease of use. No one is going to risk years and billions to get it working on Intel, that's a sure way to lose your edge. Companies (like Nvidia) will just raise prices and if demand drops they will divert more of it to countries like China and EU. And demand isn't going to drop much anyway for in-demand stuff like Apple chips or AI stuff. Best case scenario, they (not TSMC) temporarily eat the cost or spread it around. This has nothing to do with Trump, it simply doesn't result in competitive local manufacturing. Increasingly rent-seeking AND subsidized, with no pressure to compete.
h3lp 1y ago
It occurred to me that tariffs are really a backdoor way of introducing consumption tax (aka sales tax, VAT, etc). It has been a conservative policy goal for many years, as the conservatives believe that income tax penalizes entrepreneurship, but the politics make it virtually impossible to switch to because consumption tax is regressive, and it is a huge change. The tariffs debate and the general political atmosphere created a misdirection, resulting in both income and consumption tax being with us now. The next development will be the politicians discovering to their horror the high levels of taxation, and abolishing the income tax. Brilliant!
unmole 1y ago
> Tariffs kinda make sense when you have a deficit in a widely available item. Big trade deficit with Bangladesh? Sure you can buy cheap textiles from Thailand or Vietnam or something. What exactly does this acomplish?
hooli42 1y ago
> What will the US do if TSMC does not blink? Not buy TSMC made chips? Yes. > Obviously that is impossible I assume you're willing to short Intel at this point?

xyst 1y ago

> ... American consumers will end up paying the tariffs This has always been the case. I have never heard of a company absorbing tariffs on behalf of consumers in the day and age of "trickle down economics".

duxup 1y ago
So far indications are many companies are eating the tariffs, for now. Even making them visible has drawn the ire of Trump a few times already. But I generally agree that it can't go on forever / not how it works historically.
- asadotzler 1y ago
  Eating the tariffs by firing workers means more out of work with less purchasing power and prices are going up too. It's fail all the way down.
- snarf21 1y ago
  A lot of them are "eating" them in the margins of the unreasonable "inflation" increases they used to see how much the public was willing to pay for their products. (Normally, this would be okay in a functioning capitalist market except we've let way to many companies gain a monopolistic position with no real market competition to force a reasonable middle ground between profit and elastic demand.)
- cnst 1y ago
  I'm actually surprised that some prices are even lower now than they've previously been. I don't think most people actually have a solid understanding of what is and is not affected by which tariffs. If I understand correctly, most of the tech stuff is effectively exempt; and Canada/Mexico tariffs don't apply to most items that are covered under "the rules of origin" certifications under USMCA (the successor to NAFTA). I think the biggest hit has been the elimination of the de minimis rule, which now makes it difficult and/or impossible to get anything directly from China by USPS, be that cheap clothing or small electronics.
  - duxup 1y ago
    I don't think companies know what is affected and when... except when the invoice comes. The tariffs have been a moving target, some announced and never occurred.
    - hedora 1y ago
      Most kicked in on Aug 1st. It takes a few weeks for the international supply chain to turn over.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- yks 1y ago
  Eating the tariffs to avoid punishment from the government is just price controls with the dash of lawlessness. Something will give and it will be either profits or prices.
thisisit 1y ago
Well, MAGA supporters have never heard of consumers paying tariffs: https://x.com/dieworkwear/status/1951851958559703117 https://x.com/dieworkwear/status/1951851958559703117

ezst 1y ago

With this administration, it's probably just more blackmail, in the form of "it would be a pity if nobody came to the rescue when China eventually puts its Taiwan plans in motion! (Not that playing ball is a guarantee of anything either)".

bit1993 1y ago
> it would be a pity if nobody came to the rescue when China eventually puts its Taiwan plans in motion! Wouldn't that just mean that Taiwan has to choose between two villains, and China can take the advantage of this by changing its narrative and taking the position as a hero, protecting Taiwan from the US.
- jfengel 1y ago
  Taiwan really, really does not want to be part of China. Or rather, they see themselves as the legitimate government of China, which is undergoing a temporary Communist junta. The separation was extremely violent. I mean, you saw the Three Body Problem. The US fosters this, to retain a toehold there. Taiwan doesn't exactly love us for it, but they know which side their bread is buttered on.
  - wahern 1y ago
    > they see themselves as the legitimate government of China No, they don't. But formally renouncing that position[1] makes them officially secessionist in the eyes of Chinese conservatives, adding pressure to invade. The One China fiction matters, though how much it matters is definitely up for debate. But it's a local minima, and rolling the dice comes with significant risk. [1] At the state level. AFAIU, it's been renounced by several of the major parties in Taiwan, and when in power they've made movements at low levels of government that arguably contravene the policy. But it still remains the official position and its still enshrined in the Taiwanese constitution. And, yes, the US adds pressure to maintain the status quo as it would (might?[2]) be on the hook for the defense of Taiwan. But the majority of the population isn't in favor of formally renouncing it, either; the potential negative consequences are existential, and the material benefit is slim to none. [2] During Trump's first term it was claimed he privately admitted that if China invaded Taiwan he wouldn't intervene.

YetAnotherNick 1y ago

> Not buy TSMC made chips? Obviously that is impossible Why do you think that? Trump clearly wants them to use Intel's 18A which is likely similar to TSMC 2 year old N3P, which is not an impossible option.

fh973 1y ago
Them? Nvidia and AMD? RTX 7xxx would then be based on an old Intel process? Would buy these?
- MBCook 1y ago
  All of Apple’s stuff? even if Intel’s processes worked just as well, there’s no way they have the capacity to take over for all that stuff. We’d be back in a huge shortage.
- YetAnotherNick 1y ago
  I would buy that if I could get it in 30% lower price.
  - Rohansi 1y ago
    Just buy hardware that's a few years old and you'll basically get the same thing.
cherryteastain 1y ago
The same 18A that their CEO is axing? https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/intels-new-ceo-explores-big-shift-chip-manufacturing-business-2025-07-02/ https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/intels-new-...
- tester756 1y ago
  18A is not getting axed, they'll use it.
- bigbadfeline 1y ago

_hyn3 1y ago

What would TSMC do if they couldn't sell chips to the USA? It cuts both ways, like most trade negotiations.

MBCook 1y ago
Is “don’t buy stuff with TSMC chips” really a valid option we have? Isn’t that basically “stop buying high technology” to a large degree?
- treyd 1y ago
  We can use older processes if we have to. We'd be taking a step back of... maybe 5-10 years? Computers 10 years ago were not that much slower than they are today. Volume would be a bigger concern than performance. Maybe it'd force the tech industry to start writing more efficient user-facing software instead of depending on the incremental advancements made by chip designers and semi fabs.
  - Aurornis 1y ago
    > We'd be taking a step back of... maybe 5-10 years? Computers 10 years ago were not that much slower than they are today There’s more to the world of computing than your laptop. Stepping back to 10 year old GPUs and server CPUs would be a massive handicap on the country. > Maybe it'd force the tech industry to start writing more efficient user-facing software instead of depending on the incremental advancements made by chip designers and semi fabs. It’s not about the speed of your laptop loading Slack. Large scale compute is already squeezing as much performance as we can out of server hardware.
    - MBCook 1y ago
      Not to mention there wouldn’t even be enough capacity to make all the chips we need even if we went with slower chips.
  - notTooFarGone 1y ago
    And that's my friends is how to crash the stock market.

tw04 1y ago

>so the logical conclusion is that American consumers will end up paying the tariffs. That’s been the point all along… they are significantly raising taxes on the bottom 90% of Americans and most are too stupid to even understand it. Gotta pay for those tax cuts for the wealthy somehow.

nosignono 1y ago
It has nothing to do with stupidity. Stop painting people as idiots because they exist in one of the most information hostile environments in human history. This isn't some natural state that's unrecoverable. The people you describe have been given a highly addictive media environment tailor made to engender outrage and drive behavior. It shouldn't be a shock when most people cannot resist it. The first step to changing it is not writing them off or insulting them for being had.
- heraldgeezer 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - jrflowers 1y ago
    >I recently lost my COVID kilos, 10-15kg. Was easy. It took you five years to do that though. Why did it take that long if it was easy
    - heraldgeezer 1y ago
      I started in like December or January... Was COVID 5 years ago fuck me. Also, COVID weight gain would be during lockdowns, and ALSO my job went fully remote. Being fully remote was an issue for sure. So it's like COVID was extended for me. I never really weighed myself and then felt weird like a big mechelin man and I saw I was 10-12 kg heavier, makes sense why I feel bad I thought, and I did not weigh before and just decided to lose it, was easy when I decided. That's my story. I was always slow on the uptake on things, hygiene, clothes etc. Weight too, I grew up always being skinny, but getting to 30+ I never noticed when I got heavier as it takes a long time, you talk as if everything is obvious, but it is not. But it is easy once you know. So, if you have already identified weight as being the issue, losing weight is easy, in my experience. As I said, fasting feels good, skip meals, skip the beer, drink sugar-free. 10 kg gone fast, I promise you. The issue for me is identifying the problem. Love the downvotes, btw. >It took you five years to do that though. Why did it take that long if it was easy I should specify, I have been BMI 19-20 for 3–4 months now, again, as from teenager to 25-ish thats my range, thats "me", it feels like myself, so. So that's what I mean when “recently”, not yesterday. Time warps when you get old. So fast. ALSO, easy things can still take a long time. You understand the words?

mathiaspoint 1y ago

If there's one product we have domestic alternatives to it's semiconductors. We're a couple nodes behind TSMC. Using US only foundries or paying a premium for TSMC is not the end of the world.

J_McQuade 1y ago
More people need to hear this. Similar argument when they tried to stop China from buying certain types of silicon - "Oh well... anyway!". I am not American, nor am I Chinese. Both of those countries have the capability to make enough compute to do whatever the hell they want. I am, however, European...
- silisili 1y ago
  So is ASML. You guys hold the real keys to the kingdom :).
DiddlyWinks 1y ago
Really? I was not under the impression that we had anything truly competitive. Could we make an iPhone, for example, using only U.S.-made chips?
- mathiaspoint 1y ago
  We couldn't make an iPhone because apple would refuse to cooperate, not because of a technical limitation. We could make a similarly capable phone though.
  - robertjpayne 1y ago
    iPhone performance and battery life would likely slide back 5-10 years if Apple was forced to use Intel chips instead of TSMC today. Not just that, the raft of features that may have to be disabled until that performance and performance per watt gets back to where it is today.
    - 1y ago

lanthissa 1y ago

tsmc(taiwan) will blink for the same reason europe did and japan did, and for the same reason india and brazil did not. when you take a step back and look at the deal breakdown, this is protection money not a trade negotiation.

alephnerd 1y ago
> the same reason india and brazil did not. India's issues with the US are for completely separate reason. Bihar elections are coming up in 2 months [2]. Any incumbent government in India can't give trade concessions on agriculture during peak campaigning season in a swing state that can impact elections in 2-3 additional states as well as the general election in 4 years. The main Indian exports to the US (pharma, electronics, and services) are all tariff exempted so the economic pain is marginal. The only export that's hurt is textiles, but frankly, textile workers don't matter in Indian elections, especially when most of them leave for 3-4 months each year to work on the family farm and get social benefits based on their agrarian status and voter rolls that they never updated. Realistically, India and US will sign a deal either after the Bihar elections, or after making ag/dairy a separate track from the rest of the deal. Trump needs to keep the cheeseheads of Wisconsin happy just like the NDA needs to keep Bihari farmers happy through direct subsidizes [0] and hardline agriculture policies [1], hence why both the US and India will maintain maximalist positions on agriculture and dairy. My hunch is a comprehensive deal will be announced during the election media blackout in the run-up of the Bihar elections or shortly after the election. [0] - https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/prime-minister-narendra-modi-in-bihar/article69257763.ece https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/prime-minister-narend... [1] - https://indianexpress.com/article/political-pulse/why-makhana-board-bihar-decisive-move-assembly-election-year-9812318/ https://indianexpress.com/article/political-pulse/why-makhan... [2] - https://www.eci.gov.in/election-symbol-details/2066 https://www.eci.gov.in/election-symbol-details/2066
thisisit 1y ago
Different countries have different considerations. Most of these "deals" aren't deals and rather frameworks. And given the tumultuous nature of bilateral trade where countries might not follow on their promises. Happens all the time and countries end up arguing at the WTO. So, it is hard to say whether Europe or Japan "blinked". Given the timing of the European deal it might be to help Trump so that he does not have egg on his face for not having 200 deals by 1st August. India wants to cozy up to US and was one of the first countries to start trade negotiation. Trump-Modi dynamic has been good. The sticking point is agriculture and dairy. Both countries subsidize agriculture and diary. And in both countries farmers form a big chunk of politically aware voters. For the Indian government it is political suicide to even nod along like Japan and Europe. But if you hear Trump he keeps saying it is about Russian oil. Brazil might have the same issue. Historically, US was the largest soyabeans exporter. But last time Trump got into a trade war with China, the country has moved away from US exports and started buying from China. So, again even the appearance of a deal might be problematic for the government. And reading this side by side, maybe US farmers are not that economically aware?

mrtksn 1y ago

Yes it's a tax on consumption and when applied to everything the same way it's essentially a VAT. The admin keeps telling that EU will pay, India will pay but at best they can do is to weaken their currency so the goods become cheeper and it compensates for the tariffs US importers pay. Arguably, US consumers are super consumers and maybe it will be better for everyone if Americans consume a bit less? I don't think that it should be necessarily bad for business, maybe it's time to switch to world building instead of consuming, maybe as so many people works so hard we as species should gradually move on to use our output for longer and enrich our lives with each new tool instead of consume more and more and keep working the same or more. Eastern Europeans are or used to be a bit likte that, have a slow paced life, have low GDP output, on paper economy and everything is bad but actually have a great life if you have a house with a garden and some stuff you bought 30 years ago and still functioning good enough.

croemer 1y ago

There's no problem with having a trade deficit against one country. There's no need to balance each country, just as there's no need for people to have no imbalance in daily exchanges. It's as if you were going back to a barter economy where there was no money.

Supermancho 1y ago

The baseline of no trade deficit between all countries and the US makes no sense, since countries are not uniform in resource or production. eg Lesotho/Bangladesh won't achieve a trade balance with the US when they produce what the US wants and don't consume enough to balance it out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ah9SrbCB7-k&t=1147s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ah9SrbCB7-k&t=1147s Let's say this was the starting point. Almost immediately, this strategy of trade balance was dispensed with, leaving most countries with some random tariff rate that wasn't strategically decided. Many recognizable countries, specifically the ones that the administration targeted for political reasons, ended up with adjusted tariffs based on politic. This was due to the administration figuring out they had overstepped or thought that they were too soft, when the influence wasn't effective. When it became clear the economics were being ignored, Trump called them some epithet that meant "unreasonable" and abandoned the tariff tactic in all but rhetoric. What was the point? The most predictable sequence of IMMEDIATE events were likely the point. I believe the point was to try to convert the global crises (political, economic, and social) that existed around the world to purely economic concerns for simplicity. This was paired with jamming up the entire global trade system, which would allow the administration to listen for the squeakiest wheels. It was supposed to be an efficient way to prioritize immediate problems such that the administration would not have to learn about and weigh all the problems in the world. Short and long term, the tariffs have accelerated the de-dollarization of the world economy, they has amplified income inequality, and have destroyed supply chains across multiple sectors. The replacements are necessarily less efficient (value is cannibalized by tariffs). It was a lazy and poorly considerer tactic, but it might have achieved the goal, given my assumption of purpose. The issues that were raised to the administration were largely, left unsolved. The most prominent of which are the Ukrainian, Taiwanese, and Palestinian fronts and the weakening of the US hegemony due to trade conflicts. The good trade relations with traditionally friendly nations have been damaged, long term. Canada, India, China, most of the EU have made moves to distance themselves from the US chaos. Some strange side effects, like this weird buy in to american companies is a side effect of the show, rather than a specific intent. I can concede it wasn't all bad. The US did see some new corporate inroads into a few countries. Notably concessions from Mexico, who was willing to meet the US goals in achieving a trade balance (more or less). Overall, it's possible the tariffs succeeded as a self-serving tool of the administration, but failed in serving the US as policy. Maybe I'm just wrong, but maybe Trump is just this simple minded and his administration is playing into the fallout, as it advances their 2025 goals (or whatever).

prng2021 1y ago

“ What will the US do if TSMC does not blink? Not buy TSMC made chips?” I think their assumption is that TSMC will certainty give in to any demands. Taiwan needs US support to defend against a much worse (and unfortunately just next door) adversary.. China.

hedora 1y ago
That’s probably true, though I’d pay a 50% tariff just to get working drivers vs. whatever Intel was shipping 5-10 years ago. AMD and Apple offer that; Intel still(?) does not.
- 20after4 1y ago
  I've been using Intel hardware on Linux for more than 10 years. The instances of driver issues that I can think of are very very few and they were never related to anything Intel did.
  - hedora 1y ago
    I wonder what hardware you've been buying. I've tried Apple, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Intel OEM, Toshiba, ASRock, and a half dozen others. I never saw any of them run Windows (OEM or from Microsoft), Linux, or MacOS X (on the Mac) reliably. The most recent Intel machine that did work reliably is now 15 years old (and humming along nicely, for what it's worth). Sure, they had Linux drivers, but they also would do crap like kernel panic, unsuspend in my laptop and overheat, screw up USB, and so on. They did it under all operating systems. My current desktop is an AMD system on chip. It's great, except it has an Intel WiFi/Bluetooth module. There's been a bug open against all Intel Bluetooth modules for about a decade: They fail to advertise themselves in a timely fashion at boot, so the intel driver (Linux or Windows) doesn't see them so you have to keep rebooting until it does (or write a bash script that retries modprobe). Here's the manual for the wildly popular ASUS bluetooth dongle that works around this crap by not using an Intel part. Look at page 1 where they show you how to disable the Windows driver for your existing Bluetooth radio, which apparently can't coexist with a second bluetooth adapter under windows: https://www.asus.com/us/supportonly/usb-bt500/helpdesk_manual?model2Name=USB-BT500 https://www.asus.com/us/supportonly/usb-bt500/helpdesk_manua... (Manual revision U24085 will do -- it's the top in the list). I'll give you one guess: Which brand has the bug that requires the workaround?

andrei_says_ 1y ago

I much prefer “import taxes”. These arm-twisting games are exhausting and expensive.

pstuart 1y ago
These tariffs are presented as trying to bolster domestic industry but that's a smokescreen. The primary goal is to use this to replace income taxes so the rich are freed from their onerous (/s) taxation. The bonus is that it's a tool for punishing perceived enemies and inciting interested parties to purchase favor from the regime to try and ease them back. https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/28/business/taxes-trump-tariffs https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/28/business/taxes-trump-tariffs

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

captainregex 1y ago

more likely than not I think this ends with a vague promise, a loudly declared victory, and a quiet defanging of the promise or just outright ignoring it in the future

eru 1y ago

> Tariffs kinda make sense when you have a deficit in a widely available item. Big trade deficit with Bangladesh? Sure you can buy cheap textiles from Thailand or Vietnam or something. Sorry, how do they 'make sense'? What's the problem with a trade deficit with Bangladesh? And in your example, you'd just shift bilateral trade balances around, without impact the overall trade balance of the US? I could perhaps believe that an overall trade deficit is bad (maybe..), but I've yet to hear why bilateral trade deficits should matter, especially with places like Bangladesh that are not strategic rivals or are even allies like Japan or Taiwan or NATO.

CSMastermind 1y ago
Because of the Triffin dilemma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma Trade deficits in isolation aren't good or bad but because the US has the world reserve currency it must supply it's currency to the world. This basically forces it to have a trade deficit with everyone which over time can hollow out manufacturing sectors. Making the whole economy vulnerable to shocks and ultimately causing it to fail. It's similar to "Dutch disease," where external demand overvalues the currency and harms tradable sectors. It's not sustainable without careful policy management, and attempts to weaken the currency via tariffs, devaluation, or some other mechanism. You might not like Trump or his approach but he is directionally correct and does have a powerful bargaining chip (access to the US market - which is basically on track to be the only 1st world consumer driven economy 5 years from now).
- dmix 1y ago
  Doesn’t this assume tariffs are efficiently adapting to changes in the market? Markets, trade, innovation, even currency prices change all the time. Tariffs change every decade if you’re lucky and when they do there’s a thousand conditional statements baked in that make it even more disconnected from reality
- protimewaster 1y ago
  > You might not like Trump or his approach but he is directionally correct and does have a powerful bargaining chip (access to the US market - which is basically on track to be the only 1st world consumer driven economy 5 years from now). Interestingly, though, Robert Triffin International put out a paper essentially arguing that Trump's tariff approach is all wrong.

acchow 1y ago

The objective is to force TSMC to accelerate their US production plans.

teaearlgraycold 1y ago

The tariffs are largely just a means to getting world leaders to beg Donald Trump for relief. I can’t imagine many things making him happier.

notepad0x90 1y ago

I don't know why analysis like this doesn't go a bit deeper. Yes americans will pay more, but TSMC will also see less demand. Intel has it's own foundry, maybe it can start competing against TSMC, because now TSMC costs a lot more and intel's cost of manufacturing in the US to compete against TSMC can be recouped much better thanks to the new market prices set by the TSMC tariffs? Government's shouldn't put up with monopolies either, if it wasn't for trump's political baggage, HN would be all over this I'm sure, TSMC is already investing on US factories which even without purchasing a share of intel, it would force them to use those factories and bring them online sooner. We've had multiple unfortunate wars due to dependence on foreign resources that don't have good/sufficient competition state-side, that is not a good pattern to repeat. If TSMC doesn't blink, maybe they'll get their way for now but all their American projects and in general doing business in the US will be unpleasant and costly until 2028+. Which is cheaper? I don't know, I'm asking because a lot of opinion on the subject isn't talking/explaining about the actual numbers and nuanced economic considerations.

ExoticPearTree 1y ago
I think the problem with Intel's foundry is that it cannot produce the same quality and quantity at the level of TSMC. I was looking through the list of fabrication technology for the latest CPUs, and while they say they are 3nm, it is using TSMCs technology (Arrow Lake S: Fabrication process: Compute Tile (Contains the CPU cores) TSMC's N3B node.) My guess is that Trump is trying to save Intel by forcing TSMC to buy them under the guise of "I'm forcing companies invest in the US".
mallets 1y ago
It doesn't work if you don't have 1:1 product, which Intel foundry absolutely doesn't. Not in performance, price or just ease of use. No one is going to risk years and billions to get it working on Intel, that's a sure way to lose your edge. Companies (like Nvidia) will just raise prices and if demand drops they will divert more of it to countries like China and EU. And demand isn't going to drop much anyway for in-demand stuff like Apple chips or AI stuff. Best case scenario, they (not TSMC) temporarily eat the cost or spread it around. This has nothing to do with Trump, it simply doesn't result in competitive local manufacturing. Increasingly rent-seeking AND subsidized, with no pressure to compete.

h3lp 1y ago

It occurred to me that tariffs are really a backdoor way of introducing consumption tax (aka sales tax, VAT, etc). It has been a conservative policy goal for many years, as the conservatives believe that income tax penalizes entrepreneurship, but the politics make it virtually impossible to switch to because consumption tax is regressive, and it is a huge change. The tariffs debate and the general political atmosphere created a misdirection, resulting in both income and consumption tax being with us now. The next development will be the politicians discovering to their horror the high levels of taxation, and abolishing the income tax. Brilliant!

unmole 1y ago

hooli42 1y ago

> What will the US do if TSMC does not blink? Not buy TSMC made chips? Yes. > Obviously that is impossible I assume you're willing to short Intel at this point?