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Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

I believe the idea was "Very High Tarrifs" and the formula was some kid in MS Excel . They are definitely not reciprocal. They don't need to be, since the plan was to use the high tarrifs as negotiating tool to somehow reduce the US national debt

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I'd put my chips on the formula being $(LLM_OF_CHOICE), given the lack of attention paid to details like, say, uninhabited islands near the Antarctic.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/04/critics-suspect-...

I think this is really interesting and would be fun to find out what really happened.

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

I have three theories, based this article.

1. The administration used an LLM on certain data and it incorrectly conflated the countries.

2. Certain companies listed regions of export to avoid customs, duties, or for other reasons and it now indirectly got exposed. The article alludes to this without saying so?

3. The administration listed what seemed like inconsequential regions for the purpose of preventing Australia, for this example, of just saying it was exported from Norfolk Islands to dodge tariffs. Although, this is giving the administration way too much credit and if they are reading this don’t steal this as reason. :-)

Lesotho, a small mountain within South Africa punished with a sudden 50% tariff, disproves #3 is evidence of an intelligent carve out.

All the "weird" countries on the list have internet domain names .nf .tk .gi .io The "penguin island" has the domain .hm

So the conclusion is that the intern failed geography and did not realize that those aren't countries.

I don't think it's LLM, not everthing is AI, just because that's the hot topic of the day. This forumla is too simple, it's essentially 0.5 * (their_portion_of_trade_deficit / total_trade_deficit_with_country) % . It's not complex at all and that formula fits all the % calculated by Trump's board of "liberation" too closely to not be essetially what he and his cronies came up with. Likely one of the DOGGie boys

But how do you explain an uninhabited semi-independent (as i understand it) island with no trade with the US getting higher tariffs than Australia, the country it's broadly part of?

Because the intent of the tariffs is to prompt currency exchange rate moves and/or defense deal reevaluation.

Everyone is reacting to this like it's a mystery. The architect literally wrote down the why: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43594549

That island did actually trade with the US as Australia did a couple mil of trade through it for some reason

I think that is just sane washing. Original idea was that tariffs are good and America is being ripped off whenever it buy stuff. The rest are mutually exclusive rationalizations by Trump loyalists trying to make it sound reasonable.

There are multiple of these explanations and none od them is consistent with actual decisions.

I believe the forensic credit should go to James Surowecki:

https://xcancel.com/JamesSurowiecki/status/19075591892341969...

Article links here which explains how they did it, with reasoning and references: https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations

Yea that's even more ridiculous. Epsilon*phi equals to 1 because i guess that's the best mathiness they could do.

Gotta love these two sentences in that article:

(when describing the model) Let ε<0 represent the elasticity of imports with respect to import prices...

(when implementing the model) The price elasticity of import demand, ε, was set at 4.

4 is less than 0, right? Right?!?

My favorite citation is curiously missing from the references (as of Sat April 5, 6:40 EST):

> The recent experience with U.S. tariffs on China has demonstrated that tariff passthrough to retail prices was low (Cavallo et al, 2021).

The line that says "sure, tariffs won't cost consumers _that_ much", and they don't even have a bibliographic entry for Cavallo et al. 2021.

The only thing that fixes the Budget deficit is higher taxes (likely on the upper middle class and on up, especially the wealthy and corps) and lowered spending. Nothing else will fix it. It's not because of trade deficits. Any moron can see that but that says a lot about Trump and his toadie circle.

i don't think Trump cares about US national debt.

Numerous times, he conflates debt and budget deficit. He has even confused the direction his budget goes in. These terms are just backdrops for the things he wants to talk about: immigration, lack of loyalty to whites from other races, etc.

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