Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Trump orders U.S. firms out of China after Beijing sets new tariffs

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 115 posts

Re: Trump orders U.S. firms out of China after Beijing sets new tariffs

#51

Post by zaroth »

bcheung wrote: post #37
mindthegap wrote: post #5

> “Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing your companies HOME and making your products in the USA.” What a weird tone. Is that a thing in the US? Can the president (legally) order companies "home"? Doesn't sound like "land of the free" to me.

If it was feasible for companies to manufacture in the US they would. Effectively blocking China without a concomitant investment in US manufacturing is a lose/lose situation.

Of course it’s feasible. It’s just marginally more expensive. A combination of tighter labor, environment, and safety regulations, and a higher cost of living.

The tariffs are exactly what will spur the investment in US manufacturing, and the marginal benefit of manufacturing in China and then shipping the end product halfway around the world eroded away.

Re: Trump orders U.S. firms out of China after Beijing sets new tariffs

#52

Post by PKop »

hello_1234 wrote: post #14
mindthegap wrote: post #5

> “Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing your companies HOME and making your products in the USA.” What a weird tone. Is that a thing in the US? Can the president (legally) order companies "home"? Doesn't sound like "land of the free" to me.

If he can set 25% tariff on everything imported from China, what's stopping him from setting 2500% tariff on everything? Wouldn't that effectively and immediately stop all trade with China?

No because China will continue to devalue the Yuan like they have been, negating much of the tariff effect.

The only solution, and a much "simpler" one (because it does not involve myriad scrutiny of which products to apply tariffs to and how much, etc.) is devaluation of the dollar. We've been here before, where US domestic manufacturing faced pressures as dollar was too strong. The Plaza Accord [0] involved Germany and Japan taking measures to increase their currencies against the dollar (in some ways successfully in some ways not). But it did result in a few years of dollar devaluation.

A better way currently, given that there isn't the same coordination or appetite for China or others to allow their currencies to rise too much against the dollar (because they don't want to sacrifice their domestic industry) is for the federal reserve to bid for gold, at a much higher price. This will diminish the dollar and treasuries role as reserve and increase (which is already happening) gold's place as premier nuetral reserve asset (see global central banks declining purchasing of treasuries, increasing gold purchases, and decreasing $ fx reserves over the last few years).

The US can either run the global reserve currency or close its trade deficit. They cannot do both [1]. Weakening the dollar and bidding up gold will solve a lot of the trade imbalances affecting the world [2] as well as devalue the massive amounts of debt overhanging the US and world economies.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaza_Accord

[1] https://qz.com/1266044/why-does-the-us-run-a-trade-deficit-t...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/16/opinion/elizabeth-warren-...

Re: Trump orders U.S. firms out of China after Beijing sets new tariffs

#53

Post by jaredhansen »

thrill wrote: post #47
cronix wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"immediately start looking" does not equal "ordering companies home."

"hereby ordered" = "hereby ordered"

"hereby ordered" means exactly nothing without legal authority behind it. The President can't just "order" companies to randomly do things. I mean, he can, but they don't have to comply, and there's no legal penalty if they don't.

Re: Trump orders U.S. firms out of China after Beijing sets new tariffs

#54

Post by pests »

save_ferris wrote: post #23
derwiki wrote: post #2

> It’s unclear what legal authority Trump would be able to use to compel U.S. companies to close operations in China or stop sourcing products from the country By unclear, they mean no legal authority.

Not sure why this is getting downvoted. It was only the other day that Trump was referring to himself as “the chosen one”.

Listen, I'm not a fan of Trump but that was taken out of context. Go read the full quote. The statement was more "no one has done this yet, I'm going to do it" and not claiming any specialness.

Re: Trump orders U.S. firms out of China after Beijing sets new tariffs

#55

Post by lsllc »

umvi wrote: post #3

It's hard to just pick up and switch when you are so entrenched. That said, I would love if more US companies built stuff here in the US. Yeah, prices might be a little higher, but at least we aren't exploiting the labor of vulnerable people in foreign countries anymore.

> It's hard to just pick up and switch when you are so entrenched.

Companies play arbitrage with the costs of doing business in different countries all the time. Union issues at your plant in Mexico? Close it down (taking a "loss") and switch production to India, or China. It happens all the time as externalities change the profit equation, companies will and do react accordingly.

Re: Trump orders U.S. firms out of China after Beijing sets new tariffs

#56

Post by root_axis »

mindthegap wrote: post #5

> “Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing your companies HOME and making your products in the USA.” What a weird tone. Is that a thing in the US? Can the president (legally) order companies "home"? Doesn't sound like "land of the free" to me.

The "order" does not have legal power, but it's not illegal for him to say it.

Re: Trump orders U.S. firms out of China after Beijing sets new tariffs

#57

Post by lsllc »

kombucha11 wrote: post #42
bazooka_penguin wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think pollution is a bigger problem. Even some runoff causes nation wide attention and scandals in the public eye.

That's my question: do the people that want 100pc of the manufacturing to come back to the US have a plan for the inevitable ecological fallout? When we outsourced production to China we also outsourced the pollution produced by that manufacturing.

And that pollution runs more or less unchecked in China. At least in the US, they'd be regulated by the EPA (for what that's worth).

Re: Trump orders U.S. firms out of China after Beijing sets new tariffs

#58

Post by dragonwriter »

ashelmire wrote: post #27
mindthegap wrote: post #5

> “Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing your companies HOME and making your products in the USA.” What a weird tone. Is that a thing in the US? Can the president (legally) order companies "home"? Doesn't sound like "land of the free" to me.

There are probably a few ways the president could do it unilaterally, legally: 1) Raise tariffs to absurd levels (like, 10000% tax on anything from China). 2) Some sort of national defense justification. He could probably put all employees, companies, and executives on terrorism or customs watch lists and make life difficult for them. 3) Use existing sanctions on other nations as a way to forbid doing business with v…

> There's probably also another way to do it that would, presumably, be illegal:

Whether the President commiting acts of war unilaterally is illegal depends on disputed Constitutional questions, such as the scope of Presidential inherent powers and the Constitutionality of the delegation of powers to the President under the War Powers Act.

Re: Trump orders U.S. firms out of China after Beijing sets new tariffs

#59

Post by cronix »

thrill wrote: post #47
cronix wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"immediately start looking" does not equal "ordering companies home."

"hereby ordered" = "hereby ordered"

I was responding to the quote

> Can the president (legally) order companies "home"?

He ordered them to start looking if you want to be pedantic, which still does not "order companies home," as was stated.

Re: Trump orders U.S. firms out of China after Beijing sets new tariffs

#60

Post by ivl »

This article really took the absurdist language out of his chain of tweets. I think it's unfortunate, no need to deny people the depressed chuckle when they read:

> ....My only question is, who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman Xi?

Along with the use of "are hereby ordered" as nothing but bluster.

Post reply on HN