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Six months into tariffs, businesses have no idea how to price anything

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Re: Six months into tariffs, businesses have no idea how to price anything

#231

Post by ambicapter »

dismalaf wrote: post #205
Refreeze5224 wrote: post #200

[flagged]

The system that allows very wealthy to exist is also the reason the US has the highest class mobility among western nations. Also, on a purely pragmatic note, capital is mobile. If you penalize the rich, they just move, and then the new system will stop class mobility.

The US used to have to class mobility. The completely disproportionate wealth of the current crop of billionaires is evidence instead that that mobility has disappeared, and that the accrual of wealth by the already wealthy is the dominant class "mobility" pattern today.

Re: Six months into tariffs, businesses have no idea how to price anything

#232

Post by analog31 »

monero-xmr wrote: post #204
Refreeze5224 wrote: post #200

[flagged]

That’s fine if you accept that you can’t force the rich at gunpoint to stay, or seize their wealth upon exit. But if they do choose to leave, or at least stop expanding their businesses, you can’t deny the rational self interest

I heard New Zealand is nice.

Re: Six months into tariffs, businesses have no idea how to price anything

#234

Post by NietzscheanNull »

monero-xmr wrote: post #204
Refreeze5224 wrote: post #200

[flagged]

That’s fine if you accept that you can’t force the rich at gunpoint to stay, or seize their wealth upon exit. But if they do choose to leave, or at least stop expanding their businesses, you can’t deny the rational self interest

If a nation's fortune hinges on permitting a handful of extremely rich individuals to extract wealth with impunity, wield their immense hoard to buy up major media organizations and communication platforms, use those assets to continually suppress labor and consumer protections, and fix political elections by way of SuperPACs and other dark-money slush funds... well, that isn't my idea of a robust society or economy.

We've done fine without them in the past, and we'd be better off without them now. At the end of the day, labor and its fruits are the primary origin of value in an economy, not the handful of individuals that have had the immense luck and/or dubious ethics required to capture that value for their personal gain.

Re: Six months into tariffs, businesses have no idea how to price anything

#236

Post by jandrewrogers »

jkestner wrote: post #210
dismalaf wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The system that allows very wealthy to exist is also the reason the US has the highest class mobility among western nations. Also, on a purely pragmatic note, capital is mobile. If you penalize the rich, they just move, and then the new system will stop class mobility.

the US has the highest class mobility among western nations Source? The rankings I see have the US behind most of Europe.

You are thinking of “social mobility”, which is a term of art that doesn’t mean what people assume it means. It is essentially a zero-sum rank of your income compare to your neighbor. You can become poorer and still be “socially mobile” or much richer and not be “socially mobile”.

Social mobility has very little to do with increasing your economic welfare in any absolute sense. It strongly favors countries with highly compressed wages and doesn’t imply much about ease of increasing income since it is only weakly correlated with that.

Re: Six months into tariffs, businesses have no idea how to price anything

#237

Post by defrost »

monero-xmr wrote: post #218
jkestner wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the US has the highest class mobility among western nations Source? The rankings I see have the US behind most of Europe.

The average European is poorer than the average person from Mississippi, the US’ poorest state. It isn’t even comparable

Indeed.

The nation V. nation median ranking of class mobility is hardly the Nation V. {many nations} average of wealth.

Re: Six months into tariffs, businesses have no idea how to price anything

#238

Post by lazide »

jameslk wrote: post #206
lazide wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insurance tends to do really badly in ‘black swan’ type situations. Which pretty much are what Trump is doing.

Isn’t the point of insurance to provide protection against black swan events? If it’s more likely to happen then it’s not really a black swan?

No [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory].

It’s the difference between getting cancer (calculable, but perhaps not high probability), and getting hit by a meteorite (not actually calculable, very severe consequence).

Re: Six months into tariffs, businesses have no idea how to price anything

#239

Post by estearum »

jennyholzer wrote: post #145
pydry wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ironic thing is that tariffs are the right tool to reindustrialize America (over the period of ~a decade) but theyre being wielded with the skill and grace of a crack addled ferret by somebody who thinks it's a magic wand.

i don't see any indication that either republicans or democrats intend to reindustrialize america

Here's private construction of manufacturing facilities in the US.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRMFGCON

Biden was inaugurated in January 2021 and Trump won the election in November 2024.

Re: Six months into tariffs, businesses have no idea how to price anything

#240

Post by jandrewrogers »

nemomarx wrote: post #193
refurb wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean “the rest of the world will take up the slack”? Is the rest of the world suddenly going to start buying something they haven’t in the past? Why? And the US consumer market is 2x the size of the next biggest (EU). How exactly is the the rest of the world going to replace the demand of something several times its size?

It seems plausible to me that growing markets like India could fill that hole over time, yeah.

The “over time” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It won’t happen on anything remotely resembling a time horizon that matters for these purposes. Factories will be closed and gone by then.
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