471–480 of 1001 posts
This doesn't have to be the case though, right? It seems very weird that when you jack up tariffs, some middleman in America is seeing their profit jump.
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> US will find itself in the same position the UK is in now The thing is .. there's a point here, but it's not at all tied in with physical products. People are obsessed with one side of the ledger while refusing to see the other. Most of the stuff the UK is struggling with (transport, healthcare, energy) are "state capacity" issues. Things where the state is unavoidably involved and having better, more decisive lead…
>Most of the stuff the UK is struggling with (transport, healthcare, energy) are "state capacity" issues. None of those are state capacity issues. Those are "State is pointing a gun at anyone who would fix them" issues. Friendly reminder that 95%+ of the UK railway system was built by private for profit companies, with state involvement being primarily limited to not preventing it from happening. All of these issues…
They've had 30 years to make it work, and have failed.
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This is either a joke that flies over my head or there are a few zeroes missing. Which is it?
It's priced in a similar way to Lego.
Americans need to get over their view of “Asia” as being about making shoes. When I was working in engineering in the early aughts, we mocked the Chinese as being able only to copy American technology. Today, China is competitive with or ahead of America in key technology areas, including nuclear power, AI, EVs, and batteries. We need to anticipate a future where China is equal to America on a per capita basis, but f…
Average American would be shocked to see a city like Shenzhen. It's like living in the future.
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The free traders also need to accept the reality that the UK’s decline started long before Brexit and disputes about fishing. In terms of per capita GDP, the UK lost its edge over the rest of Europe in the 1970s, and then simply never recovered from the 2008 global financial collapse. Without the empire, the UK’s “competitive advantage” in financial and legal services wasn’t worth shit. I strongly suspect the US cann…
I think Germany is a bit of a special case due to what happened after the war, I think a more objective comparison might be say France.
Also, even after the marshall plan, Germany kept its existing advantages in industry in large part simply by actually encouraging them to exist. The UK has no industrial policy and actively shed most industries in the 1980s, relying instead on direct investment and deliberately not growing domestic companies.
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Yeah this is arguably the tail wagging the dog - Trump is a reaction to the end of US hegemony, not the cause
Trump has zero to do with previous level of US hegemony. He represents what large part of Americans are - for internal reasons that have nothing to do with geopolitics.
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A precision injection moulding factory can (I assume) relatively quickly start producing other plastic parts for military use. Post-Brexit, there's now increased incentive for Games Workshop to build their next factory in the EU. (Games Workshop is one company, but this applies to every manufacturing company in the UK.)
Brexit is mad, driven by nostalgia etc. However, if we got a free trade agreement with the US would the inverse be true, EU companies are better off moving to the UK due to brexit? What about just a FTA with all commonwealth countries (why haven't we done this??)?
And then today all the tarrifs are suspended (down to 10%) so it's hardly like there's a reliable advantage there.
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> US will find itself in the same position the UK is in now The thing is .. there's a point here, but it's not at all tied in with physical products. People are obsessed with one side of the ledger while refusing to see the other. Most of the stuff the UK is struggling with (transport, healthcare, energy) are "state capacity" issues. Things where the state is unavoidably involved and having better, more decisive lead…
> Fishing is less profitable for the whole UK than Warhammer. This sounded completely insane to me. I tried to look up numbers and found that Games Workshop brings in > 0.5 billion in revenue (!!), compared to all of UKs fisheries at 1 billion-ish (profit margins are, as you'd expect, pretty favorable for the plastic figurines that they don' even paint for you). Thanks for this interesting fact.
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Trump is unpredictable. He made a new free trade agreement with Canada and Mexico in his previous term, but has put tariffs on some Canadian goods this time round. That isn't going to reassure investors. A FTA with the USA would come at a significant price — the UK would be pressured to accept low-quality American agricultural produce, and lower many other standards from their current European level. If it does this,…
Hard to say that's the exact compromise he'd want, as you say he's unpredictable.
iirc Trump did say he wanted EU to accept our livestock to reduce the trade deficit, leading Lutnick to memorably proclaim "They hate our beef because our beef is beautiful and theirs is weak!"
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Yeah this is arguably the tail wagging the dog - Trump is a reaction to the end of US hegemony, not the cause
Trump has zero to do with previous level of US hegemony. He represents what large part of Americans are - for internal reasons that have nothing to do with geopolitics.