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Trump temporarily drops tariffs to 10% for most countries

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Re: Trump temporarily drops tariffs to 10% for most countries

#631
post #215

Congress could end this in 24 hours with a one paragraph/page bill and regardless who is in power next decade the dems should anyway It's like some blackhat is trying to find every loophole in government and exploiting it, like a fuzzer test

Mid term elections are November next year. Some time between now and then, republican house and senator members will start getting more than a little bit anxious about not losing their seats. The current chaos is not great for their chances. The closer that election gets, the more likely it is that something like what you suggest might happen.

The problem of course is that any move like that is going to result in chaos inside the republican party. I imagine that might delay the moment before e.g. Mike Johnson (speaker of the house) puts such a thing up for vote in the house. Because it sounds like that would be a career ending move for him. Until that changes, Trump can do as he pleases essentially unopposed.

Re: Trump temporarily drops tariffs to 10% for most countries

#632

"It’s the T-bills wot dun it." That’s my read on why the U.S. just paused the global tariff hike to 10%. From the beginning, I’ve believed the executive branch's real goal was to push down the yield on the 10-year Treasury. Why? Because Uncle Sam has to refinance a mountain of debt this year, and the cost of that depends heavily on Treasury yields — especially the 10-year. That’s the rate that sets the tone for every…

The yield really isn't that big a deal. It's hundreds of billions of dollars over decades if it moves by 1 percent. Compare that to tax cuts leading to trillion dollar annual deficits.

I mean, it could well be that they are risking the stability of the US economy to save money on refinancing the debt, but that would be a stupid thing to be doing.

Re: Trump temporarily drops tariffs to 10% for most countries

#633

Oh boy, HFTs made a fuck ton of money in the last few days. Probably as much as they make in a year even

Maybe, just maybe, this is all about a secret wealth transfer.

Do you think normal people (think, your average investing American) are trading based on this news? They probably shouldn't be... I would think that by far most of the trading these past few days has been institutions, so, a big transfer from some financial institutions to others?

Re: Trump temporarily drops tariffs to 10% for most countries

#635
post #505
post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If USA keeps 10% tariffs for everyone equally, why should we interfere? Serious question. I believe that Trump is shaking things off, but his goal is to introduce a fixed "tariff" like a soft VAT. He is just testing (and profiting with $$$$$) what happens when you do things like 30% there, 24% there, etc. But his long term goal is a fixed tax. In that context, who are we to judge them? We also have VAT on imports.

You have VAT on more or less everything, imported or not. A “VAT” that _only_ applies to imports absolutely still deserves retaliatory measures.

Not true. VAT is not applied on exports outside of EU.

Re: Trump temporarily drops tariffs to 10% for most countries

#636

"It’s the T-bills wot dun it." That’s my read on why the U.S. just paused the global tariff hike to 10%. From the beginning, I’ve believed the executive branch's real goal was to push down the yield on the 10-year Treasury. Why? Because Uncle Sam has to refinance a mountain of debt this year, and the cost of that depends heavily on Treasury yields — especially the 10-year. That’s the rate that sets the tone for every…

> Instead of being seen as a safe haven, U.S. debt itself started to look shaky There's also a more basic answer to why US debt got more expensive. There is no such thing as a "trade deficit". You cannot import something without exporting something else. That something else, in almost 100% of the situations, is dollars. What do you do with dollars, if there's nothing you want to buy? You buy debt. So, every trade def…

isn't this also kinda opposed to having the dollar as the dominant world currency?

Lots of countries settle trades between each other using dollars.

Making it harder to get those dollars will leave them seeking to use something else to trade.

Re: Trump temporarily drops tariffs to 10% for most countries

#637

Is it just the historical legacy of international trade that tariffs apply only to physical goods, but not to something like software-as-a-service subscriptions, digital media, or intellectual property? As the latter categories are more representative of US exports, it would surely be an interesting escalation if other countries were to start including them in their “retaliatory” tariffs.

>software-as-a-service subscriptions when people in other countries use that at a non-trivial scale, aren't the servers on the other end of the connection still located in their region?

Sure, but when we pay our AWS bills, that money still goes to Amazon which is US-based, even though we servers we rent are in Frankfurt.

Re: Trump temporarily drops tariffs to 10% for most countries

#638

Is anyone sure this is not stock manipulation? Honest question.

The president told his Truth Social followers that it's a great time to buy stock just a few hours before this announcement: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1143082727259...

It's probably many things, but one part of it is for sure stock manipulation.

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