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Comment by whoiscroberts | Hacker News Reader

I guess our trading partners should lower their tariffs/margins to a level that makes these US importers and publishers able to take a healthy cut, or we can assume they don’t mind the drop in orders to their factories.

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Very few supplier industries run with a 54% margin such that the supplier can eat that and stay in business, so less orders is better than more orders that lose money on each order. For many products the margins even at the end are in the single to low double digits. This means costs go to consumers, which practically translates to inflation and decreased spending, which leads to stagnation etc. The analysis that this will stifle game makers is pretty likely true, and I see no future where the economics of that moves supply chains state side in our life time.

People always talk about companies having low profit margins. Whenever any tax or expense falls on these companies, folks point to the low profit margins and say the expenses will go to the customer.

And yet these low profit margin corporations have executives and CEOs making millions of dollars a year. It doesn’t make any sense. Why not just pay the executives and finance people less?

(My comment does not apply to the small business board game company the original op thread link was about. My comment is only a direct reply to what this other comment is saying)

I think you are deeply disconnected from manufacturing if you think most of the companies in the value chain have CEO making millions.

Most of the intermediaries are SME. Despite what you might believe from the media, SMEs are the heart of the economy for most actual people. Their share of jobs is far higher than their impact on GDP and they have neither the means nor the know how to optimise their supply chain like large corporations.

Most SMEs CEO earn less than a software engineer. There is absolutely no way they can take the hit without passing it to customers.

Ah alright. I don’t know too much about this which is why I was asking. Thanks for the reply.

> My comment does not apply to the small business board game company the original op thread link was about. My comment is only a direct reply to what this other comment is saying

The other comment is directly targeting companies which are in every points similar to the small business board game companies.

I don’t understand your disclaimer (which I somehow missed when I replied first) nor why my reply is downvoted but so be it.

I don't agree with high CEO pay, but in the general case even with very-well paid CEOs, if you took their salary and divided it out to the other employees entirely it isn't that much. Apple for example, Tim Cook's salary is every employee at the company making about $450 extra a year.

In a company where the revenues are tens or hundreds of billions and the profits are billions, the CEO’s salary is 0.1% or less of the conversation. It’s rounding errors. Then you talk about 54% of revenues, it’s catastrophic multiples of profit (I.e., insolvency threatening losses).

The US is unreliable to do trade with, so I'd simply look to diversify my customer base to not be at the whim of an erratic old man with a narcissistic personality disorder.

In the end I am pretty sure the US can't be avoided, but today the US made sure that those who had good ties to it got punished and the world will remember that. I would like to think the world might ask it self if the USD should be still be the lead currency.

The rest of the world wasn't at fault that US capitalists decided to outsource their manufacturing base to cheaper countries. I guess someone in the US got damn rich doing precisely that. Those are the people you should blame.

Additionally tarrifs cut two ways, if countries react as tou would expect them to. The EU got the biggest single market in the world, and the US just made it harder to sell their stuff there — again, beyond pure costs, reliability is an issue in itself. Why would the EU buy something from the US when products from elsewhere have less tariffs and you don't have to deal with the scenario of an erratic political leader making it up as he goes which makes it somewhat impossible to rely on a plan.

Having bad leadership is a thing that costs a nation dearly. I don't see why the rest of the world would feel inclined to carry that cost.

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