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Trump's Trade War Escalates as China Retaliates with 34% Tariffs

nytimes.com

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Re: Trump's Trade War Escalates as China Retaliates with 34% Tariffs

#141

Post by rsynnott »

boxed wrote: post #10

How is it retaliation to destroy your own economy by making the same bad life choices? Isn't actual retaliation to just ignore the entire thing and thank the US for the extra percentage points in advantage you got for free?

They likely expect Europe and the other big economies to join in. US attacks every country in the world, most of those countries retaliate by attacking the US (at this point, the US, which has a trade war with the world, is in a worse position than everyone else, who only have trade wars with the US), US capitulates, would be the theory. The intent is to make the problem go away, quickly. Of course, the flaw there is that this requires borderline-sane leadership.

Re: Trump's Trade War Escalates as China Retaliates with 34% Tariffs

#142

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #85
wtcactus wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Negative trends of what? Exchanging highly paid services for cheap goods? EU needs to start taxing heavily any services provided here by the USA. Having the USA moron in Chief pretending that the comercial balance is solely made of physical goods to create an Excel sheet warrants a nice lesson.

>EU needs to start taxing heavily any services provided here by the USA. Their services are provided by companies/branches in the EU not the US. When you buy a EC2/S3 bucket from AWS you get invoiced by Amazon Luxembourg, not Amazon Washington. When you buy a Microsoft, Google, PayPal, Meta or Apple service, you'll be buying from a company registered in Ireland or Netherlands. And most of them also have datacenters i…

So, it'll probably be tarriffing the large US financial institutions first, and excluding them from public procurement.

Honestly not sure what they'll do about tech, but it's not gonna be pretty.

Trade wars are bad for everyone, but we are where we are I guess.

Re: Trump's Trade War Escalates as China Retaliates with 34% Tariffs

#143

Post by ffsm8 »

16bytes wrote: post #123
wtcactus wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Chinese don’t have proper elections so there, I don't know. But you can be sure that in the USA, this will all stop in 2 years with the midterms, and be reversed in 4 with the presidential elections. No one other than Trump’s fan base likes this even now, imagine in a few months when people start feeling the terrible repercussions.

How can you even remotely be sure of that given the results of the 2016 and 2024 elections?

Esp. considering how they've always got someone to blame for the issues that they cause. It's an ancient playbook

1. Identity a problem

2. Blame $group of people for the issue and rally citizens to you

3. Oust previous administration/rulers with rallied citizens

And then to stay in power

1. Create or identity a problem

2. Blame $group of people for the problem

3. Rally citizens to ostracize the new group of ppl

4. Back to 1

The issues never need to be resolved, as long as the citizens blame someone and feel empowered to lash out against someone (the people getting blamed).

Re: Trump's Trade War Escalates as China Retaliates with 34% Tariffs

#144

Post by lenerdenator »

heisgone wrote: post #41
lenerdenator wrote: post #14

I hate to say it: this might be the thing that actually screws his movement. Biden was uninspiring but ultimately did okay on a few things. The things that screwed him were inflation - some of which was Trump's fault - and his mental state, which can happen to anyone at that age. The inflation followed Harris in her run, as people were fondly remembering 2017-2019 and the era of lower prices. They thought putting Tru…

No doubt Lutnick and Bessent are taking crazy risks with their strategy. If they are to be believed, their plan is to have a recession at the begining of the term to get long term bond price lower and refinance the debt. By their own account, they outright said to Trump things aren't going to be good until 2028. So, I guess we have to prepare for a few years of crap. Let's hope it doesn't trigger a depression that wo…

I don't think they have a strategy.

These aren't people who care about the national debt. Trump has not only stated, but bragged publicly, that he does what he can to pay as little in tax as possible. He's had an appeal in front of the IRS for probably over a decade now for writing down the value of a business loss (the casino in Atlantic City, IIRC) that he received monetary gain from.

That's not what you do when you see a financial issue as a threat to the nation you supposedly love. They are too short-sighted to have a strategy.

If there's a depression or major recession, I don't think the government bailout would be the main concern. Civil unrest would be. I'm in my early 30s and I've seen four major financial crises (2002, 2008, 2020, and now 2025) in my lifetime. I'm doing alright because I come from a place of privilege. There are literally millions of people my age who aren't going to be doing alright in the situation you describe, and there's a good chance they would see that as the death knell of their hopes and dreams, all because of the shareholder and political classes in this country.

Re: Trump's Trade War Escalates as China Retaliates with 34% Tariffs

#145

Post by bathtub365 »

mppm wrote: post #136

One thing that I'd like to inject into this discussion, is that the nominal trade imbalance is not the only relevant figure, and maybe not the most important one. For many goods, there is a very strong disconnect between the market value (the lowest price you can offer a group of suppliers competing against each other) and what one might call, for lack of a better word, true value (the price you'd be willing to pay i…

I’m not sure what you mean by “the West” in this context. No one besides the US are unilaterally raising tariffs on China. The US stands alone in this and the rest of us are fine to keep trading with China while whatever agenda is being pursued by the US regime.

Re: Trump's Trade War Escalates as China Retaliates with 34% Tariffs

#146

Post by yks »

goatlover wrote: post #106
UncleEntity wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're already talking about how he can have a third term, 22nd amendment be damned.

The recent Civil War movie had the president serving a 3rd term leading to 19 states seceding. How would the blue states respond to Trump ignoring the 22nd amendment?

The same way they responded to ignoring of the 14th? The Supreme court will provide some travesty justification and that'll be it.

Re: Trump's Trade War Escalates as China Retaliates with 34% Tariffs

#147

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

surgical_fire wrote: post #119
alephnerd wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manufacturing isn't returning to the US due to these tariffs. Just like before the tariffs, the US is still too expensive. On the other hand, it has killed cost-competitiveness for Chinese exports directly from China or via transshipment from Vietnam. The tariff regime has now made Latin America (Brazil, Colombia), Turkiye, Philippines, parts of the EU (Poland, Czechia, Romania), and India cost competitive. And NAFTA…

> Manufacturing isn't returning to the US due to these tariffs. Even if it did, is it even desirable? Countries that actually tried to keep manufacturing beyond its usefulness typically punch beneath their weight, such as the case of Germany. The US lost manufacturing because it was heavily automated and those jobs don't pay really well. They are great for poor countries, because working in a factory sweatshop is bet…

> Countries that actually tried to keep manufacturing beyond its usefulness typically punch beneath their weight, such as the case of Germany.

Can you explain to me how Germany is punching below their weight?

Like, I personally think that having manufacturing in multiple places is good for resiliency reasons at the very least.

> The US lost manufacturing because it was heavily automated and those jobs don't pay really well. They are great for poor countries, because working in a factory sweatshop is better than plowing fields in rural areas, but advanced economies eventually grow beyond that.

This is a complete myth. The US lost manufacturing because capital controls were removed, and capital went looking for new margins. Like, all of Microsoft's English customer service and technical documentation were in Ireland in the 90's. Is that because Irish people have comparative advantage in these fields? No, it's because wages were super super low compared to the US. We used to have a bunch of clothing factories too, because we were cheap.

Fundamentally, stuff actually needs to be made if you want a modern society. You can outsource that to cheaper countries/Asia for a while, but it's not gonna end well. Like, a large proportion of the population are not cut out to be tech or finance professionals, and if you outsource all the factories that they could have worked at, then they'll get really depressed and angry and vote for Brexit/Trump/Le Pen/AfD.

And given that most of the rich west are democracies, you can't just pretend these people don't exist.

Re: Trump's Trade War Escalates as China Retaliates with 34% Tariffs

#149

Post by surgical_fire »

bitshiftfaced wrote: post #87
morsecodist wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you assume the US tariffs are unchangeable then you would be right but the hope of retaliatory tariffs is that they will get the US to update it's tariffs in response to the economic harm caused. It will also harm China of course but I would imagine they hope the harm caused to the US will reduce the tariffs and leave China better off in the long run. This is not totally unreasonable, the US is ostensibly more sen…

If the US is consistent with the tariff policy that they've laid out, then I'd expect the opposite to happen. If China increases their tariffs and as a result increases their trade surplus, then that means that the US's tariffs go up as they are a function of the US's trade deficit.

Nobody is increasing anything.

When China applies tariffs against the US, the result is that China imports the goods it needs from other countries. For example, now that US soy is prohibitively expensive for Chinese importers, they can buy from Brazil (who China is not applying the same tariffs against).

In the case of the US, the US importers cannot switch to anyone else, since it decided to go full trade war against every single country.

Re: Trump's Trade War Escalates as China Retaliates with 34% Tariffs

#150

Post by heisgone »

ajross wrote: post #74
heisgone wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No doubt Lutnick and Bessent are taking crazy risks with their strategy. If they are to be believed, their plan is to have a recession at the begining of the term to get long term bond price lower and refinance the debt. By their own account, they outright said to Trump things aren't going to be good until 2028. So, I guess we have to prepare for a few years of crap. Let's hope it doesn't trigger a depression that wo…

FWIW, that is 100% a retconned explanation. No one anywhere was talking about this theory until the last week. It's clear that Trump demanded tariffs, tried to do it once early, and got cold feet. What happened with Lutnick et. al. is Court Politics. They saw an opening to improve their own status by selling a creative lie that would allow Trump to do what he wants. So he bought the lie and picked new favorites. But…

$9 trillion of government debt is maturing over the next year. That's around 25% of the US debt.

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-treasury-plays-cat-mou...

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