I’d guess Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries got hit the hardest because they will be the easiest to fold since we are their top export market. Case in point, Vietnam is already proposing 0% on US imports in order to ink a deal. Should a deal actually happen, expect it to be a domino effect with other nations. This will be a twofold “win” for the administration. Better trade deal for us and incentivize less China reliance, whether that will be with Chinese companies moving factories or US companies sourcing from other “fair trade” nations. Whether we agree with the approach or not, if this happens which I’d assume it will, everything will look less bleak. I think the whole bring back factories here is more illusory than it is a realistic expectation.
I’ll take that bet. A mill? Shit my money will will be worthless otherwise if every partner pulls out of our markets. Risk reward
Collapse of the company doesn’t count.
The topic was Vietnam, you brought up Vietnam. You claimed the tariffs already forced Vietnam to negotiate and bring down their tariffs which will increase their imports of these supposed “middle class American goods”.
Yet you can’t name a single one of these goods.
I’m willing to argue this topic with any major country you care to name. Unlike you, I actually understand how international trade works. Some of the most egregiously protectionist countries got the standard 10% tariff while some of the most open economies got sky high tariffs. The numbers make zero economic sense.
VAT is not the main cause of European economic problems, and is a complete red herring besides. What does EU unemployment have to do with the fact that VAT isn’t a tariff?
To those who defend this tariffs, will you simply admit this WH Press secretary is lying to you?
This is becoming increasingly clear each day that goes by.
Marie Antoinette didn’t know that they actually had no cake nor the francs to buy les principaux ingrédients to bake one.
They were livres at the time, but nobody had em, anyway.
Protests today were pretty wild. I can’t remember the last time we had something like that.
In the WH’s glorious wisdom they put only a 10% tariff on Hong Kong. China can simply ship their products to HK - which is you know, part of China, do a little “final assembly”, and enjoy the much lower rate.
They literally just took each top level internet domain(not each country) and divided their trade deficit by their exports. As a result many countries with low trade barriers like Switzerland got a way higher tariff rate than countries with massive tariffs and trade barrier such as those in South America.
Even funnier is some countries got multiple different tariff rates as is the case with France and China. Some French islands got 49% while others got 10%, and France itself got a different rate, and then the EU as whole another rate! This is also how penguins got tariffed.
Atlantic
If there’s anything worse than an economic plan that attempts to revive the 19th-century protectionist U.S. economy, it’s the fact that the people responsible for explaining and implementing it don’t seem to have any idea what they’re doing, or why
Summary
“If there’s anything worse than an economic plan that attempts to revive the 19th-century protectionist U.S. economy, it’s the fact that the people responsible for explaining and implementing it don’t seem to have any idea what they’re doing, or why,” Derek Thompson writes. There Is Only One Way to Make Sense of the Tariffs - The Atlantic
On one side, the longtime Trump aide Peter Navarro has said that Donald Trump’s tariffs will raise $6 trillion over the next decade, “making it the largest tax increase in American history,” Thompson writes. “On another, you have pro-Trump tech folks, such as Palmer Luckey, who have instead claimed that the goal is the opposite: a world of fully free trade, as countries remove their existing trade barriers in the face of the new penalties.” Still another claim suggests that “the tariff salvo is part of a master plan to rebalance America’s relationship with the global economy by reducing the value of the dollar and reviving manufacturing employment in the United States.”
“These three alleged goals—raising revenue, restoring free trade, and rejiggering the global economy—are incompatible with one another,” Thompson writes. “There is no single coherent explanation for the tariffs, only competing hypotheses that violate one another’s internal logic because, when it comes to explaining this economic policy, nobody knows anything.” Even Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent doesn’t seem to understand what’s going on.
“If the tariffs violate their own internal logic and basic common sense, what are they? Most likely, they represent little more than the all-of-government metastasis of Trump’s personality, which sees grandiosity as a strategy to pull counterparties to the negotiating table and strike deals that benefit Trump’s ego or wallet,” Thompson writes. “Trump appears to care more about the process of gaining leverage over others—including other countries—than he does about any particular effective tariff rate. The endgame here is that there is no endgame, only the infinite game of power and leverage.”
“Trump’s defenders praise the president for using chaos to shake up broken systems. But they fail to see the downside of uncertainty,” Thompson continues.
Read more: There Is Only One Way to Make Sense of the Tariffs - The Atlantic
: Andrew Harnik / Getty
Well it’s obvious if you don’t know what you are doing it won’t matter what you are hemorrhaging- francs, livres or dollars.
Not sure how you can be at the helm of the most advanced nation in the world and think the tariff plan, alienating allies and cratering the US economy makes sense in any way.
Sounds to me like they’re ready to negotiate. Maybe he gets it. Or he’s going to side with China. Going to be an interesting week.
“Globalisation doesn’t work for a lot of working people. We don’t believe trade wars are the answer. This is a chance to show that there’s a different path,” Starmer said, according to the Times.
“Trump has done something that we don’t agree with, but there’s a reason why people are behind him on this. The world has changed, globalisation is over and we are now in a new era”
It has always been about China. This is a direct shot to show a strong hand and swing the tide back our way. You can’t run a business that has no products…we are perpetual consumers.
Not at all. We were light years ahead of China economically until Mao really made China actually become China in the late 1940s and early 1950s with the USSRs help (until the late 1950s with Khrushchev giving up on them and Stalin’s Communism).
When China then moved all in from agrarian to manufacturing in the 1950s, the US had become a late-stage manufacturing economy after almost 100 years of industrialization. China of course would catch up with a seemingly unending amount of natural resources, slave labor and a totalitarian run country and economy.
By the time Nixon went to China this was in full swing, and the US was rapidly maturing into a service based economy. This also coincides with businesses in the US being deregulated, shareholders running corporations demanding profits and labor costs going through the roof with wage and benefit costs and the advent of robotics, technology and other economies now coming online with consumer demand.
A service based economy like the US is a mature economy with a far higher standard of living in general than a manufacturing based one. This is part of the progression in the 20th and 21st centuries.
As was said elsewhere:
How is it the Top 10 highest standard of living counties in the world are not at all known for manufacturing in almost any sense?
In order: Luxembourg, Netherlands, Denmark, Oman, Switzerland, Finland, Iceland, Austria, Norway and Sweden.
Most of them import (like the US) a ton of goods and have a strong service economy for the most part.
The manufacturing jobs you speak of are not coming back on any large scale as this is not China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Bangladesh, or Mexico. When some jobs are created down the road, they will be automated with robotics and AI far beyond what they are now and the labor component will be minimal.
This fascination with “fixing” the trade imbalances by becoming a production-sided economy once again is a fool’s errand.
Basically they’ve done what economists call “moving up the value chain”. Some industries require more infrastructure, technology, education, and just plain ole experience than others, and as a result these industries have bigger profit margins and each worker generates more value.
Making t-shirts is very low on the value chain - it’s very easy for a poor country with an uneducated workforce and little infrastructure to start a t-shirt factory. Building jumbo jets and making new AI models is very high on the value chain - only extremely advanced economies with a highly educated workforce backed up by an extensive modern infrastructure network can attempt them.
Wealthy net import countries including the US focus almost exclusively at the top end of the value chain. Other than industries protected by tariffs, we focus on high value manufacturing like building planes and computer chips, high value services like complex financial products and tech.
Google generates over a million dollars of revenue per worker and has a 60% gross profit margin. A shirt factory generates somewhere around $10-20k per worker and has a 5% profit margin. It makes no sense for an advanced economy to abandon its high value creation economic sectors and force workers into low value sectors like making shoes.
Your answer is a fine one, but I was only quoting you for effect as my question was for @anon27376261. 
JLR now pausing imports to the USA entirely. It turns out negotiations take time, which is why it would have been nice for the tariffs to be advertised well in advance so those negotiations could happen. Maybe Vietnam’s going to get rid of its average 5% tariff on US imports, but was that worth throwing the country into chaos over?
These large population countries have no choice but to negotiate. If they lose the us markets their unemployment skyrockets and their people revolt.
We export high cost items. Import cheap. This has nothing to do with bringing tshirt factories to America. It has to do with getting better trade deals for the high dollar items we export which in turn will boost our economy so we can continue to buy shit we don’t need from low income, large population countries. AI is here. The world is going to change drastically. Getting ahead of that change is paramount to position ourselves the best we can. Massive job losses are coming one way or another. Countries have a lot of mouths to feed, mainly people that won’t be able to adapt as they have little or no skills. Even many high skilled people will be left behind.
UBI will be the talk of the town next election cycle I think.
I will respond as politically friendly as possible but the countries you listed are all ethnocentric. They have put the people of their country not immigrants above all else. They have locked their borders unless you have a specific skill the country is looking for. They put immigrants and asylum seekers into encampments forcing you to learn the language and culture or get out. It goes way deeper then this but as I mentioned to the other poster…there doing exactly what Trump is doing here by locking down the borders and protecting the citizens, they just did it silently.
Bar I worked at while in college had a sign that said no jerseys, hoodies or work boots. These countries essentially did the same.
Was coming here to post this. Unfortunately some people have to go down the political rabbit hole in discussions. I understand it’s a fine line, but let’s try to keep this about policies direct auto impact. Honestly, mods should just ban those that can’t keep it about policies and auto market impact because they need to discuss their political opinions from being in these conversations.
This to me is the first real auto impact we’re actually seeing from these tariffs, and flat out, it’s bad for everyone. There’s no spinning manufacturers not importing cars here as good for us or them, it’s bad all around. Bad for consumers who want JLR, bad for JLR.
I add Stellantis’s factory shutdowns as harm caused. I believe an Audi broker also posted that Audis are now being held at port.
Here’s what will happen: They will offer a pyrrhic victories, Donald will sell it as a win, and people like you will claim victory while the high price we’re paying will stay and those countries will NEVER reach parity in their US trade since they don’t have the money & needs to buy what US are selling.
What MAGA don’t understand, US as developed countries have enjoyed low cost of living because of the cheap labor provided by those ‘illegals’. But hey, it’s easier to blame them for all their problem.