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Comment by cjrp | Hacker News Reader

> This is Russia's and China's liberation day

With the tariffs in Asia (Vietnam: 46%, Thailand: 36%, Cambodia: 49%) it feels like a good opportunity for China to increase their trade/influence in the region as well.

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Sri Lankan here. They just slapped 44% on us (higher than on China). The country is just trying to recover from the economic crisis and the sovereign debt default of 2022, so we have very high import duties on certain items (e.g. vehicles) to discourage dollar outflow. Looks like the US just saw that as hostile and decided to strike back.

> They just slapped 44% on us (higher than on China).

Not true, China's is on top of its existing tariffs.

So 53% on China in total, because the previous rate was 20%

The strange thing I find is that Trump is not going after the companies who were the ones that decided to move production to China in the first place.

The numbers appear to be based on the trade deficit alone, not on any differences in import duties etc.

That is correct. It was empircally proven here: https://www.ft.com/content/c4f9c7f6-0753-4458-840e-bcde1b74a...

To quote Alex Scaggs of FT:

    Take the US’s goods trade deficit with any particular country, and divide it by the total amount of goods imported from that country. Cut that percentage in half, and there’s the US’s “reciprocal” tariff rate.

All countries tested against this theory are correct within 1-2 percent.

This is interesting. I don't know the details of Trump's tariff policy, but if this is correct, it would follow that the policy should have some mechanism to reduce the tariffs as the trade imbalance is reduced.

Not sure why? It’s an irrational policy not based on any kind of sense. I don’t think I’d expect it to be logically consistent. Besides, what do you do with a country where US is a net exporter? Provide subsidies for imports?

It’s all drunk monkeys driving a train… there is no economic theory to expect consistency from.

Unless they think that because it came out of an Excel formula, there's a logic behind it - and honestly, I wouldn't be shocked if these folks have that insight.

> Besides, what do you do with a country where US is a net exporter? Provide subsidies for imports?

In this instance, I believe the thought pattern is: "we're being smart here".

They’re even adding Greek letters, very intelligent. https://x.com/Brendan_Duke/status/1907741651172311353

I'll be damned, I had no idea and I still got it right.

Once people accept that this administration is very much like the Russian regime, where everyone is the type of person playing to an aesthetic, you see this stuff coming miles away.

This is what these sorts of people would do.

It’s not “irrational.” It’s crude, but it’s based on a logic that, on average, trade deficits should generally reduce to zero. And I strongly suspect this is about our large, diversified trade partners (EU, China) and is simply being imposed across the board for appearances.

There is no “logic” that any two country pairs should have an equal trade balance.

“Belief” or “dogma” or even “idea” would work, but there’s no logic in that claim.

There’s not even a policy goal. If the intent is to convert the US from a net importer to neutral or even a net exporter, it means our cost of production needs to be about average. Which means our populace’s quality of life needs to be about average; wealthy countries are more expensive to produce in. Mix in the supposed interest in economic and social liberty, and you’ve got a country trying to destroy its own wealth in the name of controlling what its freedom-loving citizens buy

There is no logic here. It’s drunk monkeys all the way down.

Imagine the classical triangular trade. Three countries can have entirely balanced trade, yet each country has a 100% trade deficit with another country. Everyone benefits, and no one runs a trade deficit. Throw a huge tariff in and a country’s trade, imports and exports, will collapse.

> a logic that, on average, trade deficits should generally reduce to zero.

1. Why do you believe this is true?

2. Why do you believe that 0 trade deficits are a good thing?

Now somebody factor in Services and rerun the numbers.

you can just read the methodology where they published it here: https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations

You're right I think it's MAX(10%,(imports-exports)/imports) as a general tariff plus targeted reciprocal (in some cases, not all)

It does nothing with "hostile". For China, yes, but for most other countries tariff is simply ($USA-import - $USA-export)/$USA-import. That simply, numbers are check for many many countries. I'm sure, USA imports a lot of tea from Sri Lanka and some fruits and wood/furniture.

(Freshly made Sri Lankian tea is the best, IMHO! I mean, proper tea, not all these grasses, berries and synthetic aromas which are named "tea" in modern western world).

I would have assumed it was Sri Lankan textiles that were a major cause of the tariffs.

Any recommendations for tea brands/products?

Unfortunately, no, as I've changed country of living year ago and still can not find way to good tea in new place. Also, I'm not sure, that recommendations from Europe is actual for you even if I have one.

But really best "black" tea of my life (and I spent most of my life in country with strong tea culture, where loose tea and teapots are still very popular, and not, it is not UK!) was bough at random tea factory in the middle of nowhere in Sri Lanka, packed in simple 1kg vacuum bags. No brand, no name, only date of picking (two days ago) and packing (today at the day of bought) :-)

Ahmad Ceylon Tea is a good strong black tea. They mainly trade in Middle Eastern markets I think so check Arab/Indian grocery shops

As a local, the brand called Dilmah is just a regular supermarket brand for us, but I hear it's quite popular in places like Australia and New Zealand.

(waves from across Lake Beira)

It's mind-boggling because the US has been trying very very hard to pull Sri Lanka away from China for a decade now

I would be surprised if the current US administration even knows where Sri Lanka is, let alone our pre-Trump foreign policy with them.

> it feels like a good opportunity for China to increase their trade/influence in the region as well

influence for sure. But trade? Vietnam/Thailand/Cambodia already have ~40% of their imports from China and 5% or so from the US, I don't think this tariff can realistically increase trade between China and SEA countries much.

What about the inverse though; Vietnam/Thailand/Cambodia increasing their exports to China?

China has been trying to build up domestic markets for the past several years. With the US imposing high tariffs on Chinese goods it stands to reason that they’re not in a position to import from Vietnam, etc. because there will be domestic overproduction.

"because there will be domestic overproduction."

Is that from a decrease in demand, or an increase in supply from other countries? I'm curious what the price elasticity of demand looks like for Chinese imports.

My interpretation is: it’s domestic overproduction because China isn’t exporting as much to US so it will consume domestically and then not have need for imports from the other SE Asia countries.

My question is more about where the US is then importing from. I assume some goods are more elastic than others. So will the US simply stop buying, or will it shift to buying elsewhere with lower tarrifs?

Could be, but China's imports from the US where not much (6% of their total) and cannot be easily substituted from SEA countries, as they were mostly importing a ton of agricultural stuff (soybeans, corn) plus fossils.

I understand 6% of china may be a much higher percentage of, say, Vietnam's export, but I just don't think Vietnam can produce that much more of that, quickly.

https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/explore/treemap?exporter=count...

Would it reduce the share of exports that US sells? If they decide to buy directly from China over the US given the higher price of everything in the US (keep in mind the raw components dont all appear out of nowhere).

I checked these numbers for Thailand: China: 24%, US: 6.73%

For Vietnam: China: 32.79%, US: 4.04%

I did too, from the Atlas of Economic Complexity (2023 data).

Cambodia's top 3 is China 42%, Thailand 20%, Vietnam 12%

Thailand's is China 28.7%, Japan 10.2%, US 6.3%

Vietnam's is China 40.8%, South Korea 15.9%, Japan 5%

https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/116/export-basket

https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/764/export-basket

https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/704/export-basket

Non-monetary tariffs: - Regulatory hurdles that prevent import (eg. CE requirements) - Currency manipulation (eg. RMB) - Domestic industrial subsidies (eg. export tax credits). ... you have a lot to learn about international trade.

The Chinese don't want to buy anything, except raw materials. Their idea of trade is to sell products to you, not buy anything from you.

What about fashionable Brand stuff?

That will continue to exist but less popular than they use to, as local fashion brand is catching up fast.

The CCP maybe, but the Chinese people for sure want to buy products from other countries.

No, they used to, but less and less now, bc Chinese goods are getting better, plus economic is tighter in recent years.

For most things, they already produce better and cheaper products. And they can buy from obter countries, It is just in US that Trump tarifs are applied.

And what’s wrong with that?

Did not turn out too well the last time they sold tea, silk and porcelain and accumulated the vast majority of the world silver reserves.

You don't want to buy anything? You don't need anything? The British had one thing the Chinese "needed".

Eventually, you are no longer producing goods domestically and they can raise prices or deny your ability to purchase.

Not to mention 29% tariffs on Norfolk Island. Who hasn’t exported anything to the U.S. in years.

And a 10% tariff on the Macdonald Islands, which has a population of zero (not including the penguins).

Perhaps Trump thought he was taxing a fast food competitor?

Fun fact: these are all internal territories of Australia. Why they get separate tariffs is weird.

> Not to mention 29% tariffs on Norfolk Island. Who hasn’t exported anything to the U.S. in years.

Should have set that to 99% then eh?

Well, you know, you can go even higher, you don't have to stop at 100% :) Infinity is the limit here ;D

Tax the 99% seems pretty accurate.

It's a tariff, it could be infinity percent

10% on British Indian Ocean Territories, whose sole inhabitants are US soldiers at the Diego Garcia base.

It's what you get if you let people which don't know what they are doing make decision about things they don't really understand without being open for consulting because they know better using only oversimplified statistics which often don't tell even half the story.

Or at lest it looks a lot like this, honestly from its patterns it looks a lot like the decision making done at a previous employee where someone who was expert in one field got a lot of decision power and decided they now know better in every field and dear anyone says otherwise.

Isn't this just common sense? I mean, if there are no people/production/imports in a certain territory, it doesn't mean that all of this won't appear there literally tomorrow, especially when tariffs on goods from these territories are zero.

If that’s the thinking, they forgot Antarctica, the Marianas trench, and the Moon. Someone could, theoretically, take advantage of the lack of tariffs.

I’m all for being charitable but at some point Occam’s razor says it’s just ChatGPT mistakenly including these places.

That doesn't seem likely, because they separately listed parts of France that are wholly in the EU (Martinique, Guadeloupe, Réunion and French Guiana, separate tariffs there are as meaningless as having separate tariffs for Berlin and Munich) but they also did not list those that are NOT part of the EU (EDIT one list I found does list French Polynesia, but not New Caledonia[0]) even though they are the ones where a separate rate would make the "most" sense (if any of this makes sense anyway).

There is trade today between New Caledonia, or French Polynesia, and the US. They are probably going to be tariffed at the rate for France, which is probably going to be the one for the EU, but who knows, neither New Caledonia nor France itself are listed.

It is really apparent that there is no understanding behind this half-assed list.

[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/mollybohannon/2025/04/02/heres-...

If there are no people there is no government to trade with, no customs, no regulations.

It takes a lot longer to set all of that up than it takes for Trump to just raise another tariff if that happens. So nobody would invest in that. It would only be a loophole for a week or so.

So why bother doing this pre-emptively (even if that was the reason)?

Where is this list posted by the US Government? These countries aren't in Annex I of the Executive Order.

It's like they pulled a list "All Countries the US Trades With" off wikipedia and used that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa...

Same clowns who made blanket cuts to every Federal dept and then had to walk a bunch of them back. There's no nuance or forethought, or realization of the long term damage they're doing.

Very likely that is literally what they did.

Strictly speaking it also includes some British military and contract staff from other countries (cleaning, landscaping etc, whatever they need).

It has British in the name of course. Gotta tariff those leeches. /s

Seems like a business opportunity to set up an import company on the Macdonald Islands and sell the goods to the poor folks in Norfolk Island.

> these are all internal territories of Australia. Why they get separate tariffs is weird.

Probably because they had separate entries in a "list of countries" which they picked as a base for their list? I don't really think there was more thought put into that, especially not for the countries who "only" got the "baseline" tariff of 10%. Interestingly though, Russia seems to have been completely left out, while Ukraine gets 10%.

, while Ukraine gets 10%.

The Orange Emperor has a huge hard on to make Ukraine suffer ever since it led to his first impeachment. Zelenski didn't kiss the ring so down they go.

10% is the hard minimum, nobody has less than 10%, so ergo 10% is actually the most favourable rate.

Even the UK gets 10% which is truly mad given we have balanced trade and tarrifs (if anything the US tariffed the UK more than they did them).

^So essentially MAX(10%,(imports-exports)/imports)

If you look at the full list (available e.g. here https://www.newsweek.com/trump-reciprocal-tariff-chart-20545...), some countries (most prominently Russia) are not on it. Whether that means anything is debatable, but Mexico and Canada, who were explicitly "spared" from these tariffs (but have other tariffs "tailor-made" especially for them), are also not on the list.

Russia is a interesting catch, but you can easily imagine why now is an inoptune time to piss them off.

The others make sense since they have worse tarrifs (though different, yes)

Russia is already subject to sanctions and high tariffs. What is the balance of trade like?

Also imposing high tariffs now would reduce the power of the threat to raise tarrifs: https://www.ft.com/content/ec99b3c2-9f4d-4f34-9a01-f97d98131...

> Russia is already subject to sanctions

So is Iran, and yet Iran is still on the list.

Is it possible the Newsweek list is wrong?

The EO and Annexes are not on the Federal Register website yet but on the Whitehouse website it has EO[1] and Annex I[2] and Annex II[3].

I do not see Russia or Ukraine mentioned in any of those so I would assume both get the base "10 percent" under section 2/3.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/regu...

[2] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Annex-...

[3] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Annex-...

Well, the reasonable explanation would be that Russia is sanctioned and thus already has an infinity effective tariff.

But then, I have no idea if the reasonable explanation applies. Are the other countries not in the list Iran and Cuba?

Then that list is wildly inaccurate. Norfolk Island hasn’t been an external territory of Australia for some time (about a decade) - it is literally part of the Australian Capital Territory and they vote in the electorate of Bean.

The Trump admin couldn’t arrange a pissup in a brewery.

I've seen a suggestion that they're using ccTLDs.

Which might explain why the British Indian Ocean Territory - population, one US military base - has such a high tariff. The BIOT, aka Diego Garcia, has the ccTLD .io.

In that case, where is the tariff rate for USSR (.su)?

According to the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/03/donald-trump...):

> Despite this, according to export data from the World Bank, the US imported US$1.4m (A$2.23m) of products from Heard Island and McDonald Islands in 2022, nearly all of which was “machinery and electrical” imports. It was not immediately clear what those goods were.

In the five years prior, imports from Heard Island and McDonald Islands ranged from US$15,000 (A$24,000) to US$325,000 (A$518,000) per year.

Maybe someone has accidentally uncovered some kind of tax evasion scheme here?

Bizarre, tax/tariff evasion or "Mistake" does seem like the most likely explanation - yet US$1.4m is too little to bother evading tax on really. I mean that could be a refit on a boat or something -- $1.4Mn is literally nothing.

Now it is 1.4 mln, in future this could be 1000 more, if this will help with overcoming tariffs. Check what happened with Germany export to Kazakhstan in 2022.

Of course, several of these islands with 10% tarrifs are ex-colonies of various EU countries. Of course any french manufacturer will send goods to the islands (0%) then from there to the US (10%) rather than pay 20%. It's obvious, then the US will notice and the island will go to 20% and so on. It's all completely hateful.

> Check what happened with Germany export to Kazakhstan in 2022

Can you elaborate? Tried searching for it, all i found is that Kazakhstan reported 500M exports to Germany, when it was actually 7B. But you were talking about Exports from Germany to Kazakhstan, which I wasn't able to find.

gp implies that those are goods which ended up in Russia after the EU war sanctions.

oh, that would make sense, yes. AFAIK Turkey was also used a lot to accidentally ship goods to Russia.

Pity the Faulkland Islands, population 3,200 and about a million penguins. They have a 42% tariff.

Are you feeling great again, Americans?

Yet they also are a British territory and the UK has a 10% tariff. What bonehead came up with that.

This is to protect domestic penguin manufacturers. Well thought!

The Guardian has investigated further: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/apr/04/revea...

In the case of Norfolk Island, it was apparently some mislabeled shipments from Timberland (based in New Hampshire, NH <-> NI) and from two companies based in Norfolk, UK.

For Heard & McDonald Islands, it was mislabeled machinery that actually originated in Austria and Germany.

It could be a clerical error — intending to choose Haiti or Honduras, or maybe Hong Kong, and clicking or typing HM by mistake.

Or maybe OCR is used somewhere and has made the error.

That may be the stupidest explanation I have heard yet.

It must be the correct one then. :-)

The Guardian are reporting essentially this, it's clerical errors of some kind:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/apr/04/revea...

Probably because the tariff table was put together by an ignorant acolyte. They are not serious people.

I saw a post on X which said it was "vibe tariffing" and I think the person was speculating that the tariffs were probably generated using an LLM and saying "make me a tariff chart with ALL the countries and each one about 25% but randomize them."

That's the only plausible explanation I can see. A human with any brains wouldn't put tariffs on islands only populated by penguins.

Doge should look into this inefficiency.

But some of those places aren’t even countries. As already stated - weird.

It’s almost like it wasn’t well thought out.

> It’s almost like it wasn’t well thought out.

Joke of the month.

Thankfully this is the only thing which this administration hasn't thought out as well as it should have.

Only barely four years left, yaaaay!

I think it's basically reciprocal adjusted for trade deficit, with a floor of 10%.

So obviously you'll end up with 10% on all sorts of places where you actually have a trade surplus and no tarrifs on your goods, or, yes, islands inhabited only by penguins.

For many countries patter look like ($USA-import - $USA-export)/$USA-import.

I'm not saying they make sense but according to the US Trade Representative this is the equation used to calculate the tariffs:

https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations

This is to stop the practice of shipping things to a place, making a small change, then re-exporting from there to avoid tariffs.

Is that commonly done on uninhabited islands? Wouldn’t the shipping cost offset any gains? Where do you even make these small changes if there’s nobody there? And what does the export paperwork look like?

The problem is that the truth, that this was some haphazard nonsense thrown together at the last second using some ChatGPT prompts, is hard to believe, so people try to insert rationality where it doesn’t exist.

It probably already exists and I just can’t find it, but there’s some kind of law here about how some actions are so insane that they compel people to invent elaborate explanations to avoid the discomfort of recognizing insanity.

Funny thing is the assumption that having ChatGPT run a country is worse than elected politician is not as obvious as you might think.

That doesn’t hold water if you’re talking about uninhabited Antarctica territories.

If this made any sense to begin with, then not excluding any region at all would make sense. Why leave some area which would become a theoretical middleman in trade just for purpose of tariff evasion? At least they'd be covered from the simple workarounds.

They knew what they were doing. They created a meme, a dead cat.

Then you waste time discussing the unimportant, "funny" topic, while the big picture is ignored.

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