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Comment by dave4420 | Hacker News Reader

Any reason why China wouldn’t be able to levy an extra 50% on the US?

Didn’t think so.

Beyond a certain point, the tariffs become meaningless because nobody bothers trading legally anyway.

I don't know where the real cutoff is, but for an extreme example: if the tariffs are 1e6% or 1e7%, nobody's buying anything by lawful channels.

Also, there's not much stopping people from shipping to a country with a 10% tariff, that 10% country taking a 1% cut to slap a different "made in" label on the side and then re-exporting to the US, making it effectively an 11% tariff for whoever originally made it.

Yeah, at some point it’s just willy waving.

I may be wrong but shipping via a third country doesn't work - I believe that Section 301 allows the US to re-assign the correct country of origin. Sure, some product may come in via this trick, but anything at scale would be found out. I doubt anyone in the US would mistake a BYD car from being a product from a country other than China.

I know very little however, so if someone with more knowledge on this can chime in on how this works practically, it would edifying.

BYD, perhaps. Given the politics, even if BYD build a factory clearly labelled "BYD" in, say, Canada, and did everything above-board with all the components traced to mineral origins having and audited to have never even gone through China at any point in the supply chain, I can believe they'd get such treatment.

I was thinking more like how Amazon has a seemingly endless collection of suppliers you've never heard of with suspicious names whose letters look like they might be attempting to form syllables. I expect those to be harder to keep track of, and to find it easier to fly under the political radar.

I am not an expert in global economics but it may be worth mentioning that both Chairman Xi and Donald Trump have very strong personalities and neither wish to be seen giving in or losing so I could envision this dragging out to it's eventuality whatever that may be. China are losing their workforce and I suspect Donald's advisors are betting on that being a stress point that may force Xi to give in to economic pressure. I could even see this situation being intentional and planned in advance to weaken China prior to any proxy wars. The USA are only about 17% of China's global trade output and only 8.6% of their imports so maybe I am incorrect. For what it's worth I am not on anyone's team so I expect all sides will hate my opinions.

There is about zero chance it is thought out and intentional. And by all reports, Trump does not listen to advisors and is surrounded by complete yes men.

As in, beyond sanewashing, this explanation does not pass the basic smell test.

I am not sure I follow. Almost everything Donald has done with tariffs were based entirely on advise by United States Treasurer Scott Bessent and economic adviser Peter Navarro. There are several interviews with Scott explaining how the tariffs will play out. Which part of this specifically has a malodorous emission and why?

Donald Trump was huge fan of tariffs ever since 80ties. And contradicted Bessent multiple times.

Also, if tariffs were meant against China specifically, they would not use the exact same formula on Europe, Penguins, Korea, Bolivia and whole world except Russia. There was no China specific tariff.

And contradicted Bessent multiple times.

How did he contradict Bessent? Genuinely curious, I am only familiar with recent events.

Besset wants him to negotiate, he does not wanna. Besset worry about recession and wants him to calm markets, Trump rhetorics is different.

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