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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

#371

Post by 9dev »

seadan83 wrote: post #324
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.

Tariffs are protectionist, does not boost competitiveness. Tends to be the wrong tool, there are better. Tax breaks, grants, physical infrastructure, creation of entire markets - those are better tools. The issue with tariffs is non-competetive companies aren't required to become more competitive. I mean consider it, a tariff is a tax on those buying a specific competitors goods. Even if tariffs were done surgically,…

I doubt explaining economic basics to an administration that seems incapable of understanding what a value-added tax is will be very fruitful

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

#372

Post by 9dev »

foxylad wrote: post #338
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?

As an example, I'm pretty sure I just took up some of the slack here in NZ. I've been looking at installing solar for a while, and a particularly good quote for a Chinese system (Sigen) recently made me go ahead. I strongly suspect the unusually good price and fast delivery were due to cancelled US demand. OT: Solar is awesome ! 18 panels are generating 2/3 of our load, despite it being late winter. And a 16kWh batte…

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

#373

Post by AngryData »

9dev wrote: post #367
AngryData wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pay them a decent wage and they will.

But why compete on factories if that isn’t competitive with foreign factories?

Because the immediate profits of capitalists shouldn't be the sole dictator of our economic activities and policies.

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

#374

Post by georgeecollins »

johnnienaked wrote: post #304
Gigachad wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most global post offices are just suspending packages to the US because they don’t know what the price is or how to pay it.

Makes it hard to believe the administration's claims of hundreds of billions in revenue

The best data I could find* was that tariffs Jan - Jun raised 93b in revenue (or 180b / year if it were constant- unlikely but who knows). For comparison, the 2025 deficit is $1865b, so tariffs could take a bite out of the deficit, but never come close to balancing the budget.

The most positive argument I have heard is that it would be a small consumption tax that is regressive. Small because the US doesn't really import that much compared to most global economies. It's just things we fixate on like cars or steel, which actually aren't that economically important anymore. Maybe strategically? I feel like people are trying to make economic sense of an emotional / populist policy.

* https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/2025/trumps-tariff...

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

#375

Post by 9dev »

refurb wrote: post #166
haunter wrote: post #97

In the end it's the biggest leopard ate my face moment ever: China has very high growth momentum that surpasses American living standards soon, and not long before it will surpass American security standards too. China's purchasing power is probably more comfortable than most western countries, with extensive housing and high speed rail and electric cars etc. When a country becomes rich, inevitably other countries as…

It’s statements like these that remind me to not take social media so seriously. China does not have “very high grow momentum”, in fact growth has been seriously slowing since Covid I’m not sure sure what “growth momentum” is what it has to do with living standards. China’s PPP is not more comfortable than the US because it’s still 1/4th that of the US. China has very serious growth problems, a massive debt overhang…

Well, at least Trump is working hard on implementing an American supply planning model as well, so the damn Chinese won’t be leading on oversupply much longer!

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

#376

Post by astrobe_ »

bongodongobob wrote: post #253
platevoltage wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See this is what I don't understand. Everything you just said about China is a positive. Everything you said about China is achievable in the USA, and we at least HAD a head start on soft-power influence. Instead we should just have tariffs instead of actually making the lives of Americans better while FIGHTING affordable housing, high speed rail, and EVs. We've got an entire team of goons who would rather rack up pe…

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> It's not achievable in the USA because a very large chunk of our population is literally retarded. 70 mil voted for Trump for some reason.

I am not an American citizen so I cannot feel offended by this sentence, but I think it doesn't help to call people stupid.

What you describe looks like a failure of the education system, which have been defective for decades in the US, from what I've heard. This may very well take 100 years (4 generations is even slightly optimistic) to escape this downward spiral.

Meanwhile, a possible strategy is to do like the others: get a popular politician who makes empty promises, while doing the opposite, or whatever they want actually, when in charge. They can inject massive amounts of money in the public school system even though they promised to make private schools more accessible in their programme, and distract people's from this obvious lie with a wrestling showmatch against Putin.

Certainly, if you are smarter than them, you can trick them.

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

#377

Post by mallets »

songqin wrote: post #329
Gigachad wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most global post offices are just suspending packages to the US because they don’t know what the price is or how to pay it.

this isn't true, tariffs are assessed within the US by the receiving firm, not on the sender's side. We run a business with a foreign supply chain and our suppliers have changed nothing, we just get an extra bill to pay to the government when our inventory arrives.

It's more the public postal services with very cheap international shipping, they typically can't or won't handle import customs/tariffs and operate under the assumption that the packages aren't valuable enough. Many of them don't even have tracking.

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

#378

Post by 9dev »

AngryData wrote: post #373
9dev wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why compete on factories if that isn’t competitive with foreign factories?

Because the immediate profits of capitalists shouldn't be the sole dictator of our economic activities and policies.

Im with you on that. But strategically retargeting the economy towards manual labor when you're big on services and digital innovation? That makes no sense. Being entirely self-sufficient is just not a good strategy in a highly competitive world connected by trade relations. Instead, tending to alliances and partnerships, assuring mutual interests and interlinked dependencies would be a lot smarter.

It all comes down to a lot of people in other parts of the world being willing to work for far less, for far longer hours, under far worse conditions, than Americans. Anything you can make in the USA will thus be more expensive, and until you’ve re-acquired all the domain knowledge lost to other nations, these quality will also be worse. As most people don’t want to buy something worse for more, you’ll need to force them to by making it unreasonable to import foreign goods (which is already happening), but that also means you limit the market to domestic. I fail to see how that is a viable strategy, unless you aim to wage war on the rest of the world and can’t trust anyone.

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

#379

Post by neuroelectron »

lazarus01 wrote: post #69

In NYC, for the first 6 months of 2025, 994 new private sector jobs were created [1]. During the same period last year, there were 66,000 new jobs created. Higher cost of doing business from tariffs has frozen hiring. With a frozen job market, there’s less revenue coming in. NYC is a leading indicator for the rest of the country. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/13/nyregion/nyc-jobs.html

Real jobs or government jobs?

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

#380

Post by stinkbeetle »

jmyeet wrote: post #279

If you listen to any oil and gas experts and ask them which president was the best for the oil and gas industry, do you know who they'll say? Trump? Absolutely not. Bush? No. It's Obama. Why? Because policy was stable during Obama. Whatever the policy is, if it's predictable, businesses can work around that. This was a real problem during the Biden term when there was constant policy shifts. We're seeing that now wit…

> If you listen to any oil and gas experts and ask them which president was the best for the oil and gas industry, do you know who they'll say? Trump? Absolutely not. Bush? No. It's Obama.

Hmm, it's not that I couldn't believe it was Obama, but this is like a 2nd-hand appeal to authority. I would be interested in a bit more data to see why this is.

> Why? Because policy was stable during Obama.

Now of course we can see there was a record period of near all-time high high oil prices from 2011 to 2014 which corresponds to US employment boom in the sector. Was that the Obama good times that oil and gas experts would refer to? That started to crash in 2015 though, and petroleum industry employment with it. Was that crash due to Obama policy or just global drop in oil prices behind taht?

Some might argue the high oil prices of 2011-2014 years are related to Obama's presidency, but it would probably be less about stable trade policy and more like references to the Arab Spring, peak of ISIS, capitulation to Russia's annexation of Crimea.

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