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Trade (and Tariffs)

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181–190 of 272 posts

Re: Trade (and Tariffs)

#181
post #46

A current account deficit is a capital account surplus. Persistent deficits shift the balance between Asset vs Export sectors, dumping the export sector and pumping the asset sector. Put differently, we can pay for imports with shit that we make or shit that we own -- and this has implications for people in our country who make shit vs own shit. A better analogy for the trade deficit would be sitting on the couch sla…

Put differently, Trump is explicitly attempting to destroy the reason the American stock market generally goes up.

Yes, and this is good. The American stock market going up benefits 10% of the US population.

The US has the highest share of revenue going to owners than it ever has in history. We've left behind the Gilded Age.

https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2026/06/the-po...

Re: Trade (and Tariffs)

#182
Please explain why tariffs a "good thing" to protect a French winery but a "Bad thing" when it is used to protect an American worker.

Everyone loves the EU and Canada and their tariffs. In Canada for example American poultry and dairy have as much as 200-500% tariffs. Usually it is seen as a big win to prevent undercutting the working class with cheap foreign labor. But as soon as it has any association with Trump all of a sudden the Progressives forget everything they believe in and turn into laissez faire libertarian capitalists.

Re: Trade (and Tariffs)

#183

A current account deficit is a capital account surplus. Persistent deficits shift the balance between Asset vs Export sectors, dumping the export sector and pumping the asset sector. Put differently, we can pay for imports with shit that we make or shit that we own -- and this has implications for people in our country who make shit vs own shit. A better analogy for the trade deficit would be sitting on the couch sla…

It’s reasonable to want to bring back american manufacturing. But the random, temper-tantrum, market-manipulation tariffs are not going to do that. America isn’t going to all of a sudden produce tonnes and tonnes of xmas decorations every year just because of a 50% tariff on all chinese goods that may or may not be around in 6 months. All that’s going to happen is xmas decorations are going to be more expensive. An a…

The insane thing about this discussion is that America does still manufacture a huge amount of products that are used all over the world, and the people that make them are paid salaries that are the envy of the world! Many of the people working in this industry are posting on this site!

It's just that because those products don't come in boxes anymore but are distributed over the Internet people think they don't count?

Re: Trade (and Tariffs)

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the whole trade deficit argument to be beyond stupid. 1. Sending machinery, food, equipment in exchange of pieces of paper with national heroes printed on them should make you think who's benefitting really from the deficit 2. This is the 21st century, you can't ignore services. How many Office and Adobe licenses, credit card transactions, Netflix subscriptions, Hollywood movies and shows, advertisement space…

Services can’t fight a war or feed you. A nation that wishes to be a real power must be able to guarantee it can feed and protect its people.

Alienating every allied nation with tariffs that come out of nowhere will surely help you win wars.

Re: Trade (and Tariffs)

#185
post #112

Alt text: "You legs may have a comparative advantage at running, but we arms have a competitive advantage at swinging hammers, so unless you accept that we're the dominant limbs and stop hogging the oxygen, that running advantage won't be around for long."

Ricardo's comparative advantage result is contingent on the assumption that capital is not mobile across borders. This was a good assumption in 1817. Is it a good assumption today? Furthermore, he's very up front about this in On the Principles , and from this information you can calculate the exact number of people who read the damn thing between the person repeating the talking point and the person originating the…

Arguably studying derivative works, such as a volume on economics, would be sufficiently acceptable as to void your calculation…

Re: Trade (and Tariffs)

#186
post #112

Alt text: "You legs may have a comparative advantage at running, but we arms have a competitive advantage at swinging hammers, so unless you accept that we're the dominant limbs and stop hogging the oxygen, that running advantage won't be around for long."

Ricardo's comparative advantage result is contingent on the assumption that capital is not mobile across borders. This was a good assumption in 1817. Is it a good assumption today? Furthermore, he's very up front about this in On the Principles , and from this information you can calculate the exact number of people who read the damn thing between the person repeating the talking point and the person originating the…

It doesn’t really matter what Ricardo said in 1817: every US academic economist surveyed in 2018 by the Kent Clark Center disagreed that US aluminum and steel tariffs would increase the welfare of the American people ([0]), and this is with the benefit of >200 years in advances in economic scholarship and analysis since Ricardo.

[0] https://kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/steel-and-aluminum-tarif...

Re: Trade (and Tariffs)

#187
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually you, like most of us, have a trade deficit with the grocery store and the movie theater, and a trade surplus with your employer. Which one is more enjoyable to have?

I dislike this analogy because a nation is not a person grocery shopping and anyway if a single grocery store was the only way to get food that would put me in a very lopsided relationship with them and the power dynamics in such a case are obviously bad for the person. Nations have interests and there’s a real conversation to be had that a country should ensure it has strategic industries so its existence is never a…

This is one view. Another view is that maintaining economic interdependence between countries — aside from making both countries richer via specialization and comparative advantage — is a great way to incentivize cooperation and prevent them from killing each other.

Examples here: https://www.hoover.org/research/when-trade-wars-become-shoot...

Re: Trade (and Tariffs)

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An actual plan would look like the IIJA, IRA, CHIPS Act -- what Biden was doing, but act larger scale. The problem with globalization is not that free trade failed to create a surplus, it's that 150% of the surplus went to capital and -50% went to labor, which can and should be fixed with tax and spend. Instead, of course, we didn't tax capital and we spent the money on stupid wars. That said, good industrial policy…

An important point is that "capital" is essentially just another way of saying "investment". Investment is what creates opportunities and demand for labor. Strong demand for labor increases wages e.g. construction wages going through the roof because of data center investment. If you disincentivize investment, economic surplus tends to shift toward rent-seeking behavior which creates relatively little labor demand. M…

Absolutely not! The word "investment" according to most definitions in most economics classes would encompass the activity of merging together all of the companies in a sector for mega rent extraction. They would even call that a successful investment! If you want investment to create jobs, you must ensure it is going somewhere with a track record for job creation. Historically, the export sector did a good job of employing people per unit investment while the asset sector did not. In general the point is that you have to check.

There are circumstances in which tilting tax, labor, trade etc policy towards capital is actually good for everyone, in which trickle-down economics actually does work, but they are rare and specific, typically apply to developing economies, and are not nearly as universal as they are portrayed in the typical American econ class. Here's how you judge: look at interest rates. Real rates, not nominal rates. The price to rent money. Is it high? Then the economy knows how to productively deploy a marginal dollar of capital, as evidenced by people willing to pay to do it. Is it low? Then the economy has no idea how to deploy the marginal dollar of capital, as evidenced by its willingness to let you try for dirt cheap. In the latter case, proposals to shift tax, labor, and trade policy towards capital are simply propaganda put forward by the wealthy for purely self-serving reasons.

Re: Trade (and Tariffs)

#189
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s reasonable to want to bring back american manufacturing. But the random, temper-tantrum, market-manipulation tariffs are not going to do that. America isn’t going to all of a sudden produce tonnes and tonnes of xmas decorations every year just because of a 50% tariff on all chinese goods that may or may not be around in 6 months. All that’s going to happen is xmas decorations are going to be more expensive. An a…

The insane thing about this discussion is that America does still manufacture a huge amount of products that are used all over the world, and the people that make them are paid salaries that are the envy of the world! Many of the people working in this industry are posting on this site! It's just that because those products don't come in boxes anymore but are distributed over the Internet people think they don't coun…

The balance of trade accounts for "export of computer services," because of course it does, and the account is in deficit in spite of these, because of course it is. The insane thing is that you tried to offer this "insight" without even bothering to check!

Re: Trade (and Tariffs)

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tarrifs are the worst decision a politician can make. The main reason we have open-ish border for people and goods is to reduce the risk of war. You are not going to wage war with a country that do business with. This undermines this idea.

Maybe letting other countries rob us blind is worse. The US has hardly any factories left. Is that "peace" or is that just losing, slowly? Open borders can be GREAT, but they can also be a point of vulnerability if we lose control of them

No, we're robbing them blind. We used "free trade" to dump subsidized agricultural goods into countries, destroy their farmers, then buy up their farms. We used it to push wages down both here and overseas so that our poor got poorer, and so in other countries they couldn't take advantage of the work to improve their lives, just inflate the incomes of a bunch of elite middle men.

The international monetary system as envisioned by Keynes was supposed to use a central world bank and settlement currency (the Bancor) to make sure that strong countries couldn't be parasitic on weak countries. This was sabotaged by a US official who was also working as a Soviet spy, Harry Dexter White. Neither pole of the new postwar bipolar order wanted anything that would limit their dominance.

The long-term outcome, however, was that the poverty of the world was much more attractive to exploit than the workers of the US, the consumer base for all of this production was left to deteriorate - to shrink to just the wealthy whose income came from investments, as all production shifted overseas.

Everything would have gone great if it weren't for those dastardly Chinese, who didn't let oligarchs shape their economy, and planned for the well-being of China, not their own personal well-being. Western oligarchs were going for a slave planet controlled by the largest bank accounts; this required no competition because it had (and desired) few real assets. China cultivated a manufacturing powerhouse, perfected its infrastructure, and operated from a base of actual, controlled domestic capital.

The West is now stuck trying to trade paper, and manufacturing whose only value is the poverty surrounding it, for Chinese goods. Now they're going to treat the US like the US treated Mexico. Manufacturing will come back in the US, owned by the Chinese.

Tariffs and the well-being of US workers are the only way out of this. Elite Americans will do anything but this, because they are 1) bad people, and 2) barely American.

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