Trade, Tariffs, and Tech
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
I guess that's the only plausible scenario they can think of that somewhat eclipses this self-inflicted disaster and makes it seem like a mere bump in the road by rhetorical comparison.
Or more likely China starting a war, which is periodically threatens to do eventually over Taiwan.
And China will win, because it's successfully hollowing out the West, more and more every day: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/business/china-manufactur...:
> Recent data from China’s central bank shows that state-controlled banks lent an extra $1.9 trillion to industrial borrowers over the past four years. On the fringes of cities all over China, new factories are being built day and night, and existing factories are being upgraded with robots and automation.
> China’s investments and advances in manufacturing are producing a wave of exports that threatens to cause factory closings and layoffs not just in the United States but also around the globe.
If the US decided unequivocably that it would militarily prevent China from taking Taiwan, it would succeed.
Also China's cornered the market on the latest military tech advancement: small drones. They've completely changed the battlefield in Ukraine, and my understanding both the Russian and Ukrainian drones are made from kits of Chinese building blocks (motors, frames, control boards, etc) sources from places like AliExpress. In a conflict with China, the US is going to get its AliExpress accounts closed, and probably lacks the manufacturing base to replace it at the necessary scale.
Small drones are irrelevant for a Taiwan invasion. They don't have the range to get to Taiwan, and anything large enough to carry them will get poked full of holes on its way across the strait. The US meanwhile can bomb all of those manufacturing sites, while China is unable to bomb the US mainland.
The best China could do in this situation would be to nuke Taiwan and make the whole thing irrelevant, but why bother at that point.
It's much easier to attack the will of the US to defend Taiwan ahead of time. A US committed to military defense of Taiwan would not be defeated.
Neither was Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. Military prowess doesn't paint the whole picture.
The goal here was stated as "prevent China from militarily taking control of Taiwan". It wasn't "occupy Taiwan/Beijing/wherever and deal with an insurgency".
The US left Vietnam due to lack of national willpower, not due to military defeat. Again, the problem statement here was formulated with "given a nationally united, determined US".
China, attempting to invade Taiwan and being met by the US military, would fare little better than Saddam Hussein's military did either time they went toe-to-toe with the US. The insurgency afterwards is not relevant to the discussion, as the US need not try to occupy China.
China does not have what would be necessary to deny air and sea access to a hostile island 80 miles off its coast.
Ease of borrowing does not force a government to run a deficit, which is entirely a political choice.
I disagree that Trumps approach is "theoretically valid". So do 16 Nobel Prize-winning economists and the entire stock market.
> These tariffs, however, are much more complicated, because they exist (for now anyways), while a war does not.
I think the author means to imply that the tariffs will be short lived here. However, I initially misread it to mean that a war was coming, and found it to be prescient. Republicans lost the house/senate for 50 years the last time they tried tariffs. It's going to take a pretty large distraction to keep the retirees from noticing that cat food doesn't taste as good as it used to.
However, a part of me is curious whether certain political maneuvers (power dynamics etc) are sufficiently captured in modern economic models? Could there be a reason that the Trump administration is continuing to persevere on something that is seen across the board as an objectively bad idea? Is it possible that this is actually smarter than just a poorly calculated ego trip or a means to game the economy for personal profit?
From cofefe to tarrifs there's always someone out there insisting that whatever inexplicable move Trump is making at this moment is actually 4D chess, and ready to explain how this is some convoluted move we just don't understand. In reality I think the answer is no. I've seen nothing to convince me over the years that Trump is operating at this level, and it's telling that it's never Trump whose explaining how these moves are supposed to lead to wonderful outcomes through convoluted paths, but instead some rando on the Internet.
But of course this might just be wishful thinking because the alternative is a pretty hard pill to swallow, so it's less anxiety-inducing to stay optimistic.
The current approach is a mess.
Trump's approach is valid, if the totality of one's goal is "decrease the US trade deficit".
You, and the economists, are adding on bonus goals that the current administration isn't considering, like "and also don't cause an economic disaster"
> I disagree that Trumps approach is "theoretically valid". So do 16 Nobel Prize-winning economists and the entire stock market.
Trump being wrong doesn't mean "16 Nobel Prize-winning economists and the entire stock market" is right if they disagree with him.
Actually, I'd bet "16 Nobel Prize-winning economists and the entire stock market" have a myopic view that misses a lot of important things. Make a tradeoff that favors one of the things they miss for something they're myopically focused on? They'll scream bloody murder, but no one should listen to them until they wise up and expand their view (which they probably won't, because economics is miasma of dogma and numbers).
Ok, I'll bite. If boosting the economy isn't the goal of his economic policy what is it?
You can sort of count me among this number. Not this wild tarrifs everyone strat, but I've long thought we should have tarrifs on goods from countries like China that are happy to exploit their workers to steal market share. 54% doesn't seem crazy to me. The thing is to actually encourage investment they'd need to a) phase in over time to give companies a chance to react, and b) be something more permanent than an executive order.
If it was the legislature putting in place something more targeted and gradual I'd probably find myself arguing for the Republican position on something for the first time in a long time.
1) The barrier needs to be imposed and removed under specific, transparent criteria that are under the control of the party you are negotiating with. Specifically what I have in mind are that the barrier would apply to industries that don't meet specific environmental and human rights standards, but my reasonableness criteria extends to anything that is under the control of such an industry or its regulators.
2) The initial implementation must be telegraphed years in advance, and there must be some sort of assurance that it won't be removed on a whim. In a system like the U.S., this means it cannot be an executive decision, and must come from Congress.
3) Barriers must be phased in over time. Don't go from zero to 30% at once.
4) There needs to be a coherent theory of how one might source the thing we're taxing without paying the tax. Otherwise it doesn't accomplish very much.
The current policy violates all four of my conditions. Which doesn't matter a ton -- there is no good reason for anyone in power to listen to me -- but that's just how I'm thinking about it.
The tariffs hit American companies hardest - it is companies in the USA actually paying the tariffs, and it's paid on every step of importing in the supply chain.
People are acting like Ford and GM will bring back the factories and make America great again, but it's just as likely that the other countries lower their trade barriers and while Ford is stuck dealing with the hit from tariffs, BYD etc. just take all of their market share internationally - as they aren't affected.
This might actually accelerate the decline of US industry, as manufacturers cannot move their entire supply chain to the US overnight (and wouldn't keep the same profit margins even if it were possible), meanwhile they become much less competitive in foreign markets. E.g. when OpenAI is stuck paying tariffs on GPUs, then DeepSeek will be even more competitive. Same for Boeing vs. AirBus and COMAC.
> Third, there are a lot of other things the Trump administration could be doing, particularly in terms of relieving regulation, ensuring equal opportunity throughout the economy, etc. It seems like a missed opportunity to be burning political capital on deficit reduction and trade rebalancing when there are major pro-growth opportunities still available. This seems particularly pertinent given the rise of AI, which has very high variance in terms of potential outcomes.
I agree with this completely, I'm surprised Trump didn't couple it with a bonfire of NIMBY regulation to help jump-start domestic growth that way too.
Everyone just assumes that bringing manufacturing back would be a good thing. I can't see why. It will make everything cost more, and our unemployment was already as low as it could be. Our problem was inflation, not a lack of low paying jobs.
Similarly, our naval yards are inefficient because we're fucking with last minute change orders, because there's no effective oversight. (And, due to DOGE, none, now.)
China produces vast amounts of manufacturing output because it's a huge country. So does the U.S. So does India.
"Email jobs" are disdained as valueless. Hawley compares manufacturing to God's Creation in his book on masculinity and concludes that men must carry on this legacy of creation to fulfill their purpose. That's not an economic argument but a moral one, which concludes that it is better to be paid less pressing steel into sheets than to be paid more teaching undergraduates.
While there's definitely an "ugh, not everything has to be about gender studies" reaction to some of these ideas I personally can't stop seeing it over and over and over in the new administration and social reaction to it. Zuckerburg saying that we need more "masculine energy" in tech and rebranding his image. Mel Gibson saying that Trump is "daddy" returning home and taking off his belt to beat us back into shape. Vance and Musk's obsessions with childless women.
I hate everything you just said, but feel like you're at least partly correct. The metaphors we live by might be eating us alive.
I would not be surprised if there is a general resistance to this sort of framing among some HN readers, but I'm not going to take snap decisions of one or two people to mean much.
"When you sit behind a screen all day, it makes you a woman" with the chyron "Trump's Manly Tariffs."
> Our problem was inflation, not a lack of low paying jobs.
Emphasis on "was". Inflation had largely been tamed by the time Trump started this recession.
Reading this article and/or trying to apply any logic to these actions will only make you dumber. Don't waste your time reading this.