Trump Threatens 104% Tariffs on China as the Mad King Plays Chicken With the Global Economy

He’s 80 years old. He has no horse in the race anyway. His legacy is going to be a urine-soaked grave they’ll eventually have to relocate to an undisclosed location where people can’t piss on it.

Yep, we are watching the active teardown of the global trade infrastructure that has been built over the past 5 decades.

That international trade has been the single largest deterrent to international warfare. Neighbors who actively trade are far less likely to go to war with each other. Powerful nations have an interest in exploiting less powerful nations economically rather than conquer them militarily - it's cheaper, and you can extract value from the exploited nation over an extended period rather than gain some short-term value while destroying the source of that value. The exploited nations benefit by not being attacked, and may have more flexible options for improving their position economically (i.e. Japan in the electronics market in the 1980s).

The Trump administration looks like when a new manager takes over a functional team, doesn't know how anything works, can't be bothered to try to understand, and just starts breaking established processes to prove that they're in charge.

One r two fs in tariff

Since we're apparently going to have to be spelling it all the time now.

Fuck his grandparents for being fertile.

China is getting economically hit in the short term, but the amount of soft power they were gifted by this administation is something they have dreamed for decades upon decades.

Lately the US has been working overtime to destroy its own China-bad propaganda and our good will to go along with it. We're probably gonna go with "fuck the US" this time around.

China sales to US will remain the same as there is no alternatives. This was just a way for trump to tax American but make it look like other countries are being harmed. In fact many companies in china and other countries are making record sales to US due to stockpiling in US.

In truth, Trump Threatens 104% GST tax (tariffs) increase on American for buying imports from China. China is not paying the tax, americans are.

It fucks America a lot more than it fucks China.

Is this a cut off your nose kind of thing again?

The way I see it: US consumer wants Chinese thing, pays China. With tariffs US government goes: "Hey, we don't do that over here, pay me" - US customer also pays US government.

US customer ends up paying more for the same thing.

Now to the tricky part:

If economic theory works and thing costs what it's worth, this means tariffed consumer is overpaying and leaving margin for others to fill. A domestic producer could then make a profit even when not as efficient as the Chinese, cool.

But, a lot of things China does aren't currently made in the US, factories have to be built, some things won't be viable at higher prices (maybe not many enough would pay $99 for a phone cover), and some things will never be able to be produced cheaper (no child labor, expensive adult labor).

So it would take quite some effort to first figure out if it's viable to produce in the US and then to build the production in the US. It also takes quite a lot of time, years probably. Will the tariffs stay that long? If unsure, why risk wasting the effort. If sure, how will the years of punishing prices affect consumers?

The problem is that the US and China are the two largest economies in the world. Everyone else kind of orbits around them. Conflict between them will have a lot of collateral damage.