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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

#401

Post by esseph »

denismi wrote: post #189
mattmaroon wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tariffs this time are far in excess of anything he did previously or promised to do while running for office again and took nearly everyone by surprise though.

This pre-election BBC summary - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwy343z53l1o - pretty clearly spells out what has eventuated, describing it as a "central campaign pledge": > Trump has made tariffs a central campaign pledge in order to protect US industry. He has proposed new 10-20% tariffs on most imported foreign goods, and much higher ones on those from China.

That is not the 40-60-200% tariffs he has placed on things, depending on the day of the week.

That uncertainty makes it very hard to manufacture goods or buy raw materials.

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

#402

Post by VBprogrammer »

monero-xmr wrote: post #264
dismalaf wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beware of rankings that rate perception. Also most easily available statistics are from 2020. The US economy has been a massive winner post-Covid and has diverged a lot from some countries. This website should be a good example. The typical Sr Software dev in the US would be in the top 1% to 0.1% of earners in European countries and Canada. The US has more millionaires than many entire European countries have citizen…

[flagged]

Certainly from an entrepreneurial stand point it's beneficial. On the other side, it's current descent in to an authoritarian police state is kinda hard to ignore.

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

#403

Post by PeterStuer »

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

If you are looking at tarrifs to explain NY small business market collapse, you clearly have not followed Louis Rossmann's struggles to keep his business in NY over the years.

https://youtube.com/@rossmanngroup

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

#404

Post by esseph »

selectodude wrote: post #179
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.

Reindustrializing America requires people that are actually willing to work in a factory.

Even that's not enough, because the tariffs are hitting raw goods as well as finished products!

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

#405

Post by pstuart »

PeterStuer wrote: post #394
macintux wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious whether it’s more the tariffs, or the uncertainty. No one knows what will happen on a day-to-day basis: the chaotic (and illegal) decision-making leaves everyone wondering what’s next.

It is more the volatility for sure. Tarrifs have existed forever and business has always coped with them.

This is different -- the tariffs are being applied and changed chaotically, with no direction on actually serving the point of protecting native industry. The goal of the tariffs is to replace income tax, everything else is a smokescreen.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/22/trump-tariffs-replace-income...

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

#406

Post by esseph »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #221
MiscCompFacts wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Won’t people be willing when the cost of living goes up so much and all the tech jobs are gone to foreign labor that they have to work factory jobs?

Most people don't work in tech. IIRC the most common jobs are retail, food service, healthcare, and education.

And we're decimating retail through tariffs, we're cutting as many people as we can out of food service, and we're ending much federal funding around education. Doesn't seem great.

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

#407

Post by WalterBright »

tombert wrote: post #136
WalterBright wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Thats no theory, thats life. It's inflation, which is caused by deficit spending. The US didn't have inflation before 1914.

That is measurably untrue and it took me about ten seconds of searching to find it. https://www.billmeridian.com/articles-files/inflation.htm and many others. Historically I know you tend to argue pretty dishonestly but this was pretty easy to find and so either you're lying or didn't bother doing any research past reading Ayn Rand. Also, prices spiking up from incompetent threats of tariffs and not coming down are c…

Check out the graph:

https://www.visualizingeconomics.com/blog?tag=Inflation

Scroll down to "US Inflation 1790-2015".

"-0.2% Average Annual Inflation 1774-1912"

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

#408

Post by DocTomoe »

kragen wrote: post #220
breadwinner wrote: post #72

Trump is even using Tariff threats to strong-arm other countries to retreat on their climate goals [1]. If the Supreme Court agrees that the Trump can do this then that means we have a dictator — one that will do way more harm than the one in North Korea. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/climate/trump-internation...

The Paris agreement was very important when renewable energy required state subsidies, but it is no longer necessary. Fossil-fuel power is no longer economically competitive without subsidies thanks to (largely Chinese) improvements in the costs of solar panels and the necessary power electronics. Over a few decades, solar-powered energy superabundance will reduce the costs of atmospheric carbon capture to the point…

Ironically, the Chinese seem to disagree, as they bring online new Coal-powered power plants every other week, with 94.5 GW of new capacity having started construction in the first half of 2024 and another 66.7 GW approved. And that's 'permanently available', not (p) = peak.

"Solar is cheaper than fossil" does not look at the whole picture, it completely ignores that solar is not scalable quickly enough to meet rising energy demands. It also is a dark laugh towards consumers, who do not see prices lowering, but exponentially rising, ironically while the so-called cheap power sources are being rolled out.

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

#409

Post by whimsicalism »

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…

actually, i think it is okay if other countries become rich and i absolutely reject this foolish zero sum way of thinking.

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

#410

Post by WalterBright »

tombert wrote: post #284
alecst wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might have been a little harsh on Walter. Perhaps the answer is more of a "yes and no" depending on your point of view. It does seem like inflation/deflation kind of canceled each other out before moving off the gold standard. https://www.businessinsider.com/chart-inflation-since-1775-2... > It is probable that in 1913, while financial panics were not uncommon, high inflation was still largely seen by the…

I am harsh on Walter because he tends to argue in bad faith in order to support some weird pro-business libertarian world view. He's super active on HN (as am I) so I have argued with him and there are multiple times he has said things that are outright dishonest (like once claiming that incompetent workers immediately get fired from corporations, a post I can't find quickly but is in my history somewhere, or trying…

The Fed is the cause of endemic inflation. Look at the chart I linked to.

By the way, I have never read Rand nor quoted her.

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