Tariffs explained
Seems like a few people in the US administration could have done with a primer like this last week...
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evil_andy Stick stick stick stick sticky sticky stick stick, Mon 7 Apr 2025, 15:37,
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Options:
1. This is some tremendous fuck-up by some over-promoted fucktards.
2. This is a deliberate strategy by some dangerous fuckheads.
3. Yes.
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wheresthefish Partly filled with wrong, Mon 7 Apr 2025, 22:05,
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It's basically a game of economic Chicken.
The tariffs aren't intended to be in place long (or even medium) term. The problem is that Trump is hedging his bets on China swerving out of the way first.
(, Tue 8 Apr 2025, 19:09, Reply)
I don't get what he's trying to achieve though.
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evil_andy Stick stick stick stick sticky sticky stick stick, Tue 8 Apr 2025, 20:09,
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Well well wellity well well well
www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgrggqydxv5o
If only I'd known the timing of the announcement i could have made a killing. I wonder if anyone did and did.
(, Wed 9 Apr 2025, 22:48, Reply)
I bought a few grands' worth of Amazon and Google shares just before the announcement.
Figured they couldn't get much lower, and they're both reasonably safe investments.
Not going to retire early on the proceeds, but a nice little discount nonetheless.
(, Fri 11 Apr 2025, 13:33, Reply)
He probably thinks the world is still on the gold standard.
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jonbob loves you, Tue 8 Apr 2025, 20:41,
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Well, to play Devil's Advocate a little:
The previous US trade deals arguably weren't really favourable to the US (depending on who you ask). Their average external tariff worked out at something like 3.5% whilst some of their export partners were imposing 4-5 times that rate on their imports of North-American goods.
America's over reliance on imports has also been partially responsible for the substantial drop off in US domestic manufacturing which is sitting about 40% lower than it was at the beginning of the '80s.
I suspect that Trump genuinely believes that significantly increasing the cost of goods coming into America will force more companies to set up shop domestically and bolster production/employment rates in the USA. It won't. But he thinks it will.
I don't think for a second this is his brainchild, though. I'm fully convinced that this whole thing is a distraction/diversion for something far more sinister. Trump clearly isn't the brightest, and somebody whispering in his ear that these new tariffs will cement him in history as America's greatest economic hero is all he needs to hear to start throwing numbers around, confident that he's holding all the cards.
The firing of Timothy Haugh has all been swept under the rug by the last few days' economic hysteria and deserves far more scrutiny than the short-term disruption caused by completely unsustainable import taxes.
(, Wed 9 Apr 2025, 7:52, Reply)
Yes, something more sinister.
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FeralCatMan Unusual disease collector., Wed 9 Apr 2025, 16:36,
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there was a run on the bond market and he pussied out in less than three days.
He'll try and spin it, and blokes like you might buy their talking points, but he's now been exposed as weak sauce
it's not tariffs that were responsible for the decline in US manufacturing. Nobody believes that. Most of it was instigated by American companies themselves with republican law makers. Reagan and Bush created Nafta so the car industry could shift to cheap mexican labour, and Trumps usmca that replaced just accelerated that loss. It's because none of them give a fuck about american workers, just multinational profits, and that's still true (and mostly true of democrats as well with a few exceptions like Sanders). America is full of shitty poor towns full of mutants, and the only thing that makes life bearable is that you can go into walmart and buy dirt cheap chinese shit, and that's going to be taken away. Who the fuck would make a long term capital investment in plant on the basis of a tariffs that are gone in less than a week?
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cumquat may will not be commenting further on the allegations, Tue 15 Apr 2025, 0:20,
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