LoL

"Donald Trump’s presidential administration has exempted smartphones and computers from the 125% levies imposed on imports from China as well as other “reciprocal” tariffs, which experts had cautioned might cause electronic consumer prices to spike dramatically in the US.

The announcement was made late on Friday in a US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) notice that said the devices would be excluded from the 10% global tariff that Trump recently imposed on most countries, along with the much heftier import tax on China.

The CBP’s notice follows concerns from tech companies that the price of electronics for US consumers might surge with many of them manufactured in China. The notice also contained exemptions for additional electronics and components, such as memory cards, solar cells and semiconductors."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/12/trump-administration-smartphones-computers-china-tariffs

Made in Germany - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_Germany
#Protectionism

"In short, the U.S. economy will suffer enormously in a large-scale trade war with China, which the current levels of Trump-imposed tariffs, at more than 100 percent, surely constitute if left in place. In fact, the U.S. economy will suffer more than the Chinese economy will, and the suffering will only increase if the United States escalates. The Trump administration may think it’s acting tough, but it’s in fact putting the U.S. economy at the mercy of Chinese escalation.

The United States will face shortages of critical inputs ranging from basic ingredients of most pharmaceuticals to inexpensive semiconductors used in cars and home appliances to critical minerals for industrial processes including weapons production. The supply shock from drastically reducing or zeroing out imports from China, as Trump purports to want to achieve, would mean stagflation, the macroeconomic nightmare seen in the 1970s and during the COVID pandemic, when the economy shrank and inflation rose simultaneously. In such a situation, which may be closer at hand than many think, the Federal Reserve and fiscal policymakers are left with only terrible options and little chance of staving off unemployment except by further raising inflation."

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/trade-wars-are-easy-lose

"There is no universe in which Apple snaps its fingers and begins making the iPhone in the United States overnight. It could theoretically begin assembling them here, but even that is a years-long process made infinitely harder by the fact that, in Trump’s ideal world, every company would be reshoring American manufacturing at the same time, leading to supply chain issues, factory building issues, and exacerbating the already lacking American talent pool for high-tech manufacturing. In the long term, we could and probably will see more tech manufacturing get reshored to the United States for strategic and national security reasons, but in the interim with massive tariffs, there will likely be unfathomable pain that is likely to last years, not weeks or months.

The truth is that, assembled in the U.S. or not, the iPhone is a truly international device that is full of components manufactured all over the world and materials mined from dozens of different countries. Apple has what is among the most complex supply chains that has ever been designed in human history, and it is not going to be able to completely change that supply chain anytime soon.

We can see how the iPhone is made today by looking at numerous reports that Apple puts out every year, which outlines its current supply chain and workforce requirements"

https://www.404media.co/a-us-made-iphone-is-pure-fantasy/

"The big, long-term question: what does the global trading system look like? The thing to watch for is whether the kind of deals Vietnam and others are making with the US end up destroying the most-favoured-nation principle underlying the World Trade Organization by giving the US special treatment. I’m moderately optimistic on this one. Label these deals as preferential trade agreements (which is pretty dodgy under WTO rules, but there are plenty of weak PTAs about already), recognise that many won’t make much difference to US exports anyway and move on. It strikes me that, if anything, attachment to the multilateral system, particularly in open trading economies like the south-east Asian nations, has increased as a result of the US threatening it. If countries are looking for a framework of international trade law, the WTO provides it. Unfortunately, though, I don’t see much sign that India is going to stop playing its spoiler role and paralysing the negotiations part of the WTO (as the US tried with the dispute settlement system)."

https://www.ft.com/content/3a6c0561-0628-43e4-86f0-bd3db881667b

"Trump’s erratic tariff actions, alongside his reversal of the former bipartisan policy on Ukraine, has already had indirect results. In alleged defense against the American turn, Europe and Canada have both donned the nationalist mantle of sovereignty and given Trump one of the main changes he has called for: an increase in their military expenditures so as to correct America’s disproportionate share of NATO’s military costs. Since American firms will also get a good share of the increased military expenditures abroad, the bloated US military-industrial complex will get a further boost.

As well, it may be that the uncertainty created over access to the US market likewise has method in its madness: corporations may now bias future global investments and supply chains to locate in the US “just-in-case.” This is of general concern but hits home especially in Canada since it is so close, so already integrated, and with costs relatively comparable.

Underlying all this lies the primary question at the core of Trump’s agenda. Paraphrased, it asks: “Why, if America is the world’s dominant power, does it accept such a disproportionate share of globalization’s burdens and receive such an unfair share of the benefits?” The framing of America’s status in these over-wrought terms adds a further method-in-madness: misdirection."

https://socialistproject.ca/2025/04/man-who-would-be-king/

"Other sources close to the president and two GOP mega-donors on Sunday continued to express increasing alarm that Trump’s commitment to his tariff warfare, including against longtime allies of the U.S., was not merely a negotiating tactic and that the president was in the process of tanking the American economy for little reason beyond his grudges and his long-running obsessions.

Confronted With Administration's Allegedly Faulty Tariff Math
“I am not willing to go public yet but I will say this: I don’t know if I would be this worried about what will happen to the economy if Bernie fucking Sanders were president,” one big Trump and Republican Party donor says. “That’s how bad this is, and there’s very little time to fix the situation and turn the ship around.”

Trump — in his own words and actions — appears determined at this moment to steer the ship straight into widespread economic pain, in the hope that the American people will somehow thank him for it."

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-tariffs-market-crash-take-medicine-america-1235311613/

The guardian writes: "Era of globalisation ‘at an end’, says UK minister, as countries mull tariff responses“.

I don’t get it. A single country decides to leave globalisation. 191 countries don’t. Why does this end globalisation?

Yes, the USA are a big country. But resigning instead of adjusting and going on without them fully "in“ is not a good idea. They will see on their own that it is disadvantageous to not participate in the global market.

"Take a look at this iPhone 16 Pro. Your cost, for the 256GB version, is $1,100. The cost of all the hardware inside—aka the bill of materials—was about $550 to Apple when the phone was introduced, says Wayne Lam, research analyst at TechInsights, which breaks down major products. Throw in assembly and testing and Apple’s cost rises to around $580. Even when you account for Apple’s advertising budget and all the included services—iMessage, iCloud, etc.—there’s still a healthy profit margin.

Now factor in the newly announced tariff for goods from China, which currently totals 54%. The cost rises to around $850. That profit margin would shrink dramatically if Apple didn’t up the price. And you don’t become a trillion-dollar gadget company by charging for things at cost."

https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/iphone-apple-tariffs-china-bb20c7a3?st=uZeNUf&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

That's what you get when you put a total stooge as the leader of the (soon to be former) most powerful country in the world.

"Not long after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the administration’s economic staff went to work on a daunting task: determining tariff rates for dozens of countries to fulfill the president’s campaign pledge of imposing “reciprocal” trade barriers.

After weeks of work, aides from several government agencies produced a menu of options meant to account for a wide range of trading practices, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Instead, Trump personally selected a formula that was based on two simple variables — the trade deficit with each country and the total value of its U.S. exports, said two of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to recount internal talks. While precisely who proposed that option remains unclear, it bears some striking similarities to a methodology published during Trump’s first administration by Peter Navarro, now the president’s hard-charging economic adviser. After its debut in the Rose Garden on Wednesday, the crude math drew mockery from economists as Trump’s new global trade war prompted a sharp drop in markets."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/04/trump-tariffs-reason-advisers/

"Mr Trump called it one of the most important days in American history. He is almost right. His “Liberation Day” heralds America’s total abandonment of the world trading order and embrace of protectionism. The question for countries reeling from the president’s mindless vandalism is how to limit the damage.

Almost everything Mr Trump said this week—on history, economics and the technicalities of trade—was utterly deluded. His reading of history is upside down. He has long glorified the high-tariff, low-income-tax era of the late-19th century. In fact, the best scholarship shows that tariffs impeded the economy back then. He has now added the bizarre claim that lifting tariffs caused the Depression of the 1930s and that the Smoot-Hawley tariffs were too late to rescue the situation. The reality is that tariffs made the Depression much worse, just as they will harm all economies today. It was the painstaking rounds of trade talks in the subsequent 80 years that lowered tariffs and helped increase prosperity.

On economics Mr Trump’s assertions are flat-out nonsense. The president says tariffs are needed to close America’s trade deficit, which he sees as a transfer of wealth to foreigners. Yet as any of the president’s economists could have told him, this overall deficit arises because Americans choose to save less than their country invests—and, crucially, this long-running reality has not stopped its economy from outpacing the rest of the G7 for over three decades. There is no reason why his extra tariffs should eliminate the deficit. Insisting on balanced trade with every trading partner individually is bonkers—like suggesting that Texas would be richer if it insisted on balanced trade with each of the other 49 states, or asking a company to ensure that each of its suppliers is also a customer."

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/04/03/president-trumps-mindless-tariffs-will-cause-economic-havoc

Hey, JD! This you?

"President Donald Trump on Thursday contradicted his top aides on the purpose of his sprawling new global tariff regime, adding to the uncertainty over the trade war that has sent markets reeling.

Earlier in the day, top Trump aide Peter Navarro and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the president was not looking to strike deals over the tariffs. “This is not a negotiation,” Navarro told CNBC.

White House officials also circulated internal talking points telling surrogates that the tariffs should not be characterized as a starting point for negotiations, according to three people with knowledge of the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal matters.

But after markets closed down sharply, Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he would be open to striking deals with individual countries."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/04/03/tariffs-trump-global-trade-talks/

"A trade war triggered by President Donald Trump applying a 25 per cent tariff on all imports could cause a $1.4tn hit to the world economy and dramatically drive up US prices, according to a new study modelling the fallout from a retaliatory spiral.

Econometric analysis of a worst-case scenario, where US trade partners hit back against Washington, shows a Trump-inspired tariff war would cause widespread trade disruption, rising prices and falling living standards.

The study by economists at Aston University in the UK examines how a tariff tit-for-tat forces complex shifts in global commerce, starting in North America between the US, Mexico and Canada, before spilling out into Europe and then the rest of world.

It remains highly uncertain at what level Trump will set “reciprocal” tariffs this Wednesday on what he has called “Liberation Day” — and how affected nations and trade blocs will respond.
To depict the potential fallout, the model examines six escalating scenarios, using bilateral trade data from 132 countries in 2023."

https://www.ft.com/content/c21f29d6-f8c5-4596-8652-42c0be96a269

US relationship will ‘never be the same again’ after Trump’s trade war – POLITICO https://www.byteseu.com/892679/ #Americas #Canada #China #DavidLammy #DonaldTrump #Europe #France #Imports #Japan #Protectionism #taiwan #tariffs #trade #TradeWar #UnitedKingdom #UnitedStates

"Trump’s crusade to rebalance trade is occurring because the vicious cycle propping up the FIRE sector at the expense of the American people is breaking down. The rise of the multipolar world order disrupts the American oligarchy’s interests. The modernization and economic development of the rest of the world reduces the need for other countries to rely on American imperial hegemony. There are more trade opportunities than ever outside America. Other countries are less reliant on access to American markets, weakening the dollar’s status as reserve currency.

Any gains for the productive economy from Trump’s tariffs will likely be sabotaged by the FIRE sector’s malinvestment of capital and the foreign-policy establishment’s unwillingness to withdraw from the world. America can’t have its cake (of maintaining the dollar as the global reserve currency) and eat it too (bringing back manufacturing and resolving trade imbalances). The oligarchy cannot be expected to act in America’s best interests, because that is at the expense of its interests.

Ending the rule of the American oligarchy would require reductions of military spending, ending proxy conflicts, closing bases, and embracing diplomacy. For the FIRE sector, this would entail taxing financial transactions, using central bank window guidance, and establishing a national development bank to direct investment into productive sectors and not to asset price inflation. Tariff policy wouldn’t be used as a retaliatory action, but as a targeted and measured policy tool for incubating critical domestic industries."

https://www.compactmag.com/article/liberating-america-requires-more-than-tariffs/

"Now, just because some tariffs are beneficial, it doesn't follow that all tariffs are beneficial. When the "Asian Tiger" countries were undergoing rapid industrialization and lifting billions of people out of poverty, they did so with tariffs – but also with extensive industrial policy and direct investment in critical state industries (Biden was the first president in generations to pursue industrial policy, albeit a modest and small one, which Trump nevertheless dismantled).

Trump is doing mirror-world tariffs: tariffs without industrial policy, tariffs without social safety nets, tariffs without retraining, tariffs without any strategic underpinning. These tariffs will crash the US economy and will create calamitous effects around the world:
(...)
But the fact that Trump's tariffs are terrible doesn't mean tariffs themselves are always and forever bad. Resist the schizmogenic urge to say, "Trump likes tariffs, so I hate them." Not all tariffs are created equal, and tariffs can be a useful tool that benefits working people.

And also: the fact that tariffs can be useful doesn't imply that only tariffs are useful. The digital age – in which US-based multinational firms rely on digital technology to loot the economies of America's trading partners – offers countries facing US tariffs a powerful retaliatory tactic that has never before been seen on this planet. America's (former) trading partners can retaliate against US tariffs by abolishing the legal measures they have instituted to protect the products of US companies from reverse-engineering and modification. Countries facing US tariffs can welcome US imports – of printers, Teslas, iPhones, games consoles, insulin pumps, ventilators and tractors – but then legalize jailbreaking these devices:"

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/02/me-or-your-lying-eyes/#spherical-cows-on-frictionless-surfaces