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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

#581

Post by yifanl »

fundad wrote: post #525
phkahler wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That has me shaking my head. He fired the BLS person claiming they were reporting inaccurate stats to make him look bad. A claim of partisan bias - could maybe be some truth to that. But to fire them and replace them? Then it will certainly be biased reporting. I suppose that makes sense if all you care about is image and not actually making things better.

I question the president’s cognitive state if he openly stated there would be some “pain” and then when the statistics show he was correct, he attacks the BLA director and claims the economy is booming. The president and his defenders are playing us when they appear to want a growing economy. They don’t.

Thankfully, the president doesn't need to be fully cognitive to be president, they just need to win an election every 4 years.

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

#582

Post by simonh »

buyucu wrote: post #426
AngryData wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does China's growth need to be curbed or opposed in any way? What does that accomplish? The only thing we need to be doing is ensuring our own stability, be decently self reliant, and improve the lives of our citizens. It is in inevitable fact that China will eventually surpass us economically, they have far more people, fighting that is just crabs in a bucket fighting over who gets to stand on top of the others.

Western Elites can not stomach a non-Western country prospering. It goes against everything they believe in.

Japan? South Korea? Taiwan? Singapore? Saudi and the Gulf States?

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

#583

Post by simonh »

anon291 wrote: post #248
ekianjo wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you look at things per Capita in China things look very different from what you describe. Sure, you have pockets of very affluent societies (Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and more) but the majority of the country is not there.

Take a trip to the flyover states or rural oregon.

I have family from the Chinese countryside. It’s nowhere near as bad as it was even just a decade ago, but there’s still no comparison.

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

#584

Post by AlecSchueler »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #427
wood_spirit wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically China is a dictatorship. The constitution of the People's Republic of China and the CCP constitution state that its form of government is "people's democratic dictatorship". The current president has done much to make his appointment for life, so it is a dictatorship that is on the road towards having a dictator. Cue comparisons to what is currently happening in the US.

Yes, 人民民主专政. A socialist state under the people's democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants. I think you're ignoring some of the poetic intention of those words, the idea is that the Marxist collective is the dictator. It's turning the concept on its head to put the people at the forefront. In other contexts such as casual conversation here in the West the term…

Can't edit but also just wanted to add this page of Marxist theory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletaria...

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

#585

Post by simonh »

9dev wrote: post #375
refurb wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

By making the imports needed for domestic production and infrastructure development more expensive through tariffs, before there are domestic alternatives available, and expelling large swathes of the labour force necessary for such construction, no he really isn’t.

It would be possible to develop domestic supply capacity, starting with the inputs necessary to feed that development, and then nurture and encourage the process with a targeted ramp up of tariffs. That’s not happening though, instead domestic investment is collapsing.

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

#586

Post by throwmeaway222 »

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…

There is nothing wrong with being a UFO fanboy - anyone that is not these days is psychotic. There have been so many leaks at this point, if you don't believe that's dangerous.

You're all waiting for Trump to claim it or something? It's already been announced.

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

#587

Post by bigyabai »

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]

Anyone who took macroeconomics knows that stratifying an economy of ~370 million people by ambition ends with the most ambitious employees working the behind-the-counter at McDonalds. None of them ever end up at the fed, or filling white-collar corporate seats, that's been an open secret since the '80s. By the sound of it, you're just regurgitating Tweets you read in 202X while VCs were insecure about China whooping their ass in natsec, AI and robotics.

Support ambition all you want - just don't come crying to us when the B2C market dries up entirely.

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

#588

Post by blackbear_ »

krior wrote: post #558
more_corn wrote: post #4

Because the cost of goods continues to fluctuate wildly due to ongoing tariff wrangling that nobody asked for or needed. Also farmers can’t sell anything because retaliation has destroyed international demand (I’d say decimated but it’s way worse than reduction by a tenth)

> nobody asked for The american public asked for it loud and clear for it last november. We should respect that.

Loud and clear? Trump didn't even get half of the votes (49.8%) and almost 36% of eligible voters didn't vote, meaning that not even one third of the American public voted for this.

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

#589

Post by AngryData »

aurareturn wrote: post #412
AngryData wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's how you become a poor country. Every country that closed itself off to the rest of the world becomes poor.

You don't have to close yourself off to the world to foster local industry.

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

#590

Post by dragonwriter »

hippo22 wrote: post #574
dragonwriter wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not “due to decades of abti-labor practices" but “due to a century of economic progress driving higher expectations”. Now, its true that there have , within that, been a few decades of regression in tax and other policy effecting a worsening of the distributional situation, such that labor gets a smaller share of the returns that are returned. But even with that, basically every segment of society is better off i…

The worsening of the distribution of wealth is exactly the problem. Productivity is increasing faster than wages. That means labor is losing out on economic gains. Your argument is that labor should just accept this because “at least they’re better off than before.” Imagine you invest $1000 in the stock market and the market is growing at 10%. But when you open your brokerage account, you see only 5% growth, and it t…

> The worsening of the distribution of wealth is exactly the problem.

That's literally what I said, and why the solution is to undo the things that produced that instead of undoing the things that fueled the aggregated growth while doubling down on the sources of inequality.

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