China raises tariffs on US goods to 84% as rift escalates
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Back in the real world though, trump voters are explicitly not the kind of people who read, let alone vote based on policy.
They are literally the group of people that people point to in order to say the idea that an economy is actually based on rational actors is one of the most flawed assumptions in the entire field of economics.
There were pre-tremors of this going back decades, but they always seemed far-fetched: surely the business interests in charge of both parties don't wanna fuck up the bag? It turns out that some of them do.
Were they just not paying attention during Trump's first term? Did they just assume everyone shouting from the rooftops really did just have Trump Derangement Syndrome? Did Trump's conspiracy laden post-electoral twitter rampage or Jan. 6th really not clue anyone in?
I mean, the economy improved under Biden but I guess the meme about egg prices just kind of short circuited people's brains.
I didn't vote for him but slightly less than half the voters did (according to best estimates -- one thing MAGA is right about is that our election security is a joke, with a few private voting machine companies and an army of partisan local officials having unauditable sway over a good chunk of elections). In any case, it's not productive to blame voters. The point of a democracy is to court voters. Shaming them and calling them idiots only pushes them away.
I'm not a representative of any political party, nor am I running for office. I'm just another woke libtard cuck who has to live with the consequences of Trumpist malice. So I'll shame them and call them idiots all I like.
These people put up a gallows and noose on the Capitol, but ours is the side which has to remain civil? You don't defeat fascism by capitulating to it.
I think he has, and I know he has very famously called them blindly loyal sheep (not in those words, the exact phrase was: "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?").
If you look at polls and read interviews, the #1 reason voters gave for voting for Trump was that he was a businessman who would lower inflation after Biden had raised it. Now he's doing the polar opposite. This is not what Trump supporters voted for.
Trump promised his voters "vengeance"; that is what they voted for.
But yes, you can clearly see from the market that you have been much smarter, if your company was confident enough to take action to spend a lot of money to hedge against this. You'll make out like bandits if the tariffs remain, so congratulations. Truly, anyone who saw this coming and shorted stocks appropriately is now rich. That's how unexpected this was.
But Trump was promising vengeance on cultural issues and immigration. Not on prices. Again -- voters expected him to follow through on his promise to lower prices. Not to raise them massively.
But he's been saying crazy stuff for a decade now, and didn't implement stuff like this before so I can see how people were surprised.
This is easy to reason through if you just remember that Trump and his cronies are not smart or competent. They have basically no concept of how to follow through on a promise if there’s any complexity to it.
Take a look at the list of kept promises from the first term: https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/list/?prom...
And the list of broken promises: https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/list/?prom...
The kept promises are trivial, while the broken promises include everything that can’t be accomplished by executive diktat. (Such as lower prices, unless he directly puts a price limit on goods in an executive order.)
Basically the only value in reading into his non-trivial promises is in considering “how could he make things worse if he follows through on attempting this?”
At some level being "smart" means having the foresight to predict these things. How smart can you really be if you didn't see this coming? Certainly not amongst the "smartest".
Because it's not like no one predicted it. Yes Trump say contradictory things but it's not at all hard to read the man. People like George Conway have been correctly predicting his moves since 2017, because although Trump is inconsistent in his words, he's actually very consistent in his actions.
Pretty smart. We judge intelligence as the ability to predict thousands of different things in lots of different scenarios, and nobody ever gets everything right 100%.
The idea that you would define intelligence solely by your prediction on tariffs isn't a definition most people will share.
But when you say things like "Even the smartest businessmen who donated money to him didn't think this was coming", I cannot agree because as I said, plenty of people saw this coming. The smartest businessmen did think it was coming, they were right. They got the signal from the noise. They put the puzzle together.
The ones who didn't think it was coming were not among the smartest. They were fooled by the noise and didn't connect the dots.
But as a percentage of smart people, it's miniscule. And people can get things right for the wrong reasons. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, as they say.
> The smartest businessmen did think it was coming
Prove it. Show us the list of smartest businessmen according to some independent metric in 2024, and then show me how many of them shorted the market because the saw tariffs coming at these levels, because that would be the obvious action to make tons of money.
Unless you can do that, you're retroactively defining "smartest" by this one issue, and hindsight is 20/20 as we all know...
Because the market reaction already proves that the smart money hadn't priced this in. You're the one who needs to demonstrate the contrary here.
Yeah, which makes them the smartest. The top is usually small compared to the whole.
> And people can get things right for the wrong reasons. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, as they say.
Except people have a now decade-long track record of calling Trump correctly. I already gave you a name George Conway. You want a list of people who called this before it happened, look into the people he follows and retweets.
> Show us the list of smartest businessmen according to some independent metric in 2024, and then show me how many of them shorted the market because the saw tariffs coming at these levels, because that would be the obvious action to make tons of money.
That evidence would not prove what I said because as you stated, even a broken clock is right twice a day. WSB is making bank on this event as you must know, but I wouldn't put them in the "smartest" category because someone is always on the winning side of these kinds of events and being there doesn't make them smart necessarily.
> Because the market reaction already proves that the smart money hadn't priced this in. You're the one who needs to demonstrate the contrary here.
All it proves is the market is irrational and doesn't understand the nature of Trump.
Because here's what it comes down to: yes, Trump did say a lot of things during the election, and perhaps people heard what they wanted to. But they key realization that anyone has to understand about Trump is that he's not a sane individual. The smartest people understand this and they can accurately predict his moves. Not as smart people refuse to acknowledge this, and they try to ascribe rationality to his motives, which he continually confounds, because.... he's not a rational individual. The smart move would to stop trying to fit a rational peg into an insane hole.
And so you can be the richest business man, with decades of experience, and huge portfolios, but you cannot be the smartest if you continually for a decade, allow this massive blind spot to infect your reasoning w.r.t. Trump.
The exact mistake these investor made was thinking "gee, I made a lot of money his first term, it wasn't that bad. It should be the same this term. He's crazy like a fox, not crazy crazy."
The error is that this line of thinking ignores the giant gaping insurrection that Trump caused, and the massive distorted reality he created to justify it. Trump does not live in a rational world anymore, he lives in a world he made up to soothe his own ego that he lost in 2020. And because these big brain investors with more money than sense had $$$ in their eyes, they forget to recalibrate their expectations from a president checked by rational institutionalists, to a guy who is clearly on a power trip and supported by a compliant Congress and no one to say "no" in the White House.
So at the end of the day, the people who need to prove they're amongst the smartest business people are those who are blindsided, confused, and disoriented while others are clear-eyed, can explain this whole situation from first principles, and are using the current events to validate their model of Donald Trump to better predict him in the future.
That's my point. The tiny number of people you can identify just got lucky.
> The smartest people understand this and they can accurately predict his moves.
No they can't. You can't predict the behavior of someone who isn't sane, as you put it. Their behavior is random and impulsive, not predictable.
People who predicted tariffs at these levels aren't smarter. Just "lucky". Or maybe not even, since during our exchange, Trump has suddenly and unpredictably rolled back most of the tariffs...
Conway is rare because he's been right for the longest. If you're right for a decade it's not luck; you've built a better model of reality.
The people who clued him in where psychologists who recognized Trump was a malignant narcissist in 2015. People like Elizabeth Mika predicted the insurrection 5 years before it happened, but she faced derision in her field for calling Trump's malignancy out. But it turned out her model of his psyche was the most accurate, and continues to be.
Today, many more people have been clued into him, to the point where you can just find randos who can read him accurately. This isn't luck: https://www.threads.net/@discodonkey68/post/DFnRsCaOAHa
> You can't predict the behavior of someone who isn't sane, as you put it.
Yes actually you can, you have a bad model for how insane people behave. And that's why you're bewildered and others are not. Insane behavior is not always random, Trump actually telegraphs and announces his moves. He often says exactly what he's going to do, and then follows through.
He's insane because he lives in an irrational world of his own creation, but the world still has rules. The rules do not follow logic but are more along the lines of "I'm always right". That's not rational, it's not sane, but it's predictable. You just have to learn how to think like him.
> People who predicted tariffs at these levels aren't smarter. Just "lucky". Or maybe not even, since during our exchange, Trump has suddenly and unpredictably rolled back most of the tariffs...
Not unpredictably, he had already done it before with Mexico and Canada.
This shit is so predictable it's been memeified: https://x.com/JoshEakle/status/1909715626232291612
Even the "mission accomplished" response from Magaworld is predicted, as the markets continue to sink today.
Every time I read a comment like this, it tickles my "someone on the internet is wrong" neuron.
In countries whose political systems have devolved into a 2 party system, this isn't true. The two choices will both be a curates egg - some things they want to vote for, and some they want to vote against.
Someone people will agonise over it, trying to weigh every policy. I suspect that strategy is more common among the HN crowd. It's tilting at windmills. It's a huge multidimensional problem, politicians will change their mind or the fine print, and some outright lie. It isn't solvable in any real sense.
At the other end of the scale people will pick the most important issue and vote on that. The issue is nearly always the same, as it how they measure it: it's the economy stupid, do I feel better off now than I did under the previous guy? Because of inflation triggered by the COVID bazooka the answer for Biden was no, so Trump got elected.
Most countries had a COVID bazooka, all them subsequently suffered from the inflation hangover, those that then had elections did the same thing as the US voters - they threw out the incumbents. It had nothing to do with right or left, as nations flipped both ways.
Personally I used to weigh policy. It took me decades to recognise the futility of it. Now I try to gauge the character of the people I vote for, which seems impossibly nebulous but we humans aren't too bad at reading others. The downside is: it seems a lot of other have done the same thing, which is how we got tribal politics - the other kind of voting hell.
If you want to a different outcome, you need a different political system that doesn't yield a barren 2 party choice. MMP does that by giving the voters a range of view to choose from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...
To do this, Trump declared a national emergency so he could use emergency powers that are designed for events like war. Congress is supposed to check this power, but Republicans are bowing to Trump as their all-knowing ruler.
Americans should proceed with the assumption that the Chinese are a co-equal great power. As we are seeing in areas like AI and electric cars, China isn’t cheap foreign labor. They’re at the leading edge or close in our heels in many technologies. Given that, it’s imperative to reduce American dependence on China. In a world where the average Chinese is as prosperous as the average American—which may happen in our lifetimes—isn’t a good idea for China to have 200x of America’s shipbuilding capacity without America trying to rebuild its own? It’s precisely because China inevitably will become America’s equal economically and technologically that America needs to ensure its own independence and sovereignty.
Given how much effort Beijing exerts in suppressing dissent and managing the public conversation about China, how would you or I find out if most Chinese were unhappy with their government?
"we have learned better than most that the longing for freedom and human dignity is not English or American or Western –- it is universal, and it beats in every heart."
I remember several years earlier President George W Bush, when asked about China, said:
“Young people who grow up with freedom in one area of their lives will ultimately demand freedom in other areas"
So it seems sad to me personally today that I see the comment you have made. I am not too surprised though. It feels such sentiments have been making their way to many countries all over the world nowadays. I feel sad because 10 years ago it really felt like freedom, democracy, etc would continue spreading all over the world...
How do people in China feel when they see stuff like this said by American politicians and commenters? Such as the President Obama and President Bush quotations and speeches I posted and linked?
Source for Obama's comments made in 2011:
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2011/0...
Source for Bush's comments made in 2008:
https://thehill.com/homenews/news/13451-bush-reiterates-conc...
It was interesting to read your perspective.
It's not clear to me that there's any link between China's authoritarian government and its harmony/stability. Taiwan is richer per-capita than China and just as stable, without an authoritarian government.
In fact, I suspect that China will be rich and harmonious as long as it's not at war (with itself or a foreign power). The authoritarianism is just a historical coincidence.
Not saying that as trying to start a flame war but their comment history is clearly and openly in line with incredibly partisan and pro authoritarian views and so if you’re looking to understand what they are saying I’m pointing out that it’s not a particularly deep and nuanced view they are trying to make
If the point is to reduce dependence on China, why is Trump starting a trade war with everyone? Also, as many people have pointed out, there's little point in applying tariffs without also providing some kind of boost to the relevant industries - this is just hooliganism by Trump.
This was the Thiel pitch. We’re instead driving our allies and trade partners into China’s arms.
> Americans should proceed with the assumption that the Chinese are a co-equal great power
America basically has been. Coëqual great powers compete. (And China is a regional power on the verge of becoming a great power. It doesn’t yet have demonstrated force-projection capabilities, though it’s building them.)
Just as an analogy: If you were to detonate all nuclear weapons in the US inside the US you would also reduce dependency on China. Doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. The path matters.
This is political incompetence fueled by social media polarization & former political incompetence.
The best time for rebuilding our industrial capabilities in an orderly way was the 1990s. The second best time is now.
The entire theory is also based on inequality. We build nothing and we ship all the low paid / environmentally disastrous industries abroad.
What I disagree with is the methodology, which is simply idiotic.
I do not buy that the only answer to the recent incompetence of the US (and western in general) political system is to shock it with even more incompetence.
This is a direct effect of electing a president who deeply, firmly believes that having a trade deficit means we're getting "ripped off", and who has succeeded in dismantling most of the checks and balances around this sort of thing.
There's no 4d chess here. Trump has been both serious and literal about tariffs his entire career.
What Trump doing is not that. It's tariffs on everything, without any distinction on whether something is important for our national security or not.
Every successful tariff that I've read about through history has been:
1) Targeted on a segment.
2) Accompanied by subsidies.
3) A plan for developing competence in the segment through education and training.
Sounds a lot more like the half measure than whatever this is.
You're right in that this is a big hammer though, but that's more often used for tearing things down rather than building.
I never thought the ~leopards~ hammers would ~eat~ smash MY ~face~ thumb!
Which is itself ideological, being based on a theory of conflict. The giving up of those capabilities was a result of times of peace.
Effectiveness of drones and advanced missiles in the war was also a wake-up call that semiconductors and batteries have a strategic military importance, and the rest of the world is quite dependent on China and Taiwan for these.
I assume that all the talk about trade deficits and unfair competition from Chinese EVs is bullshit, and the US and the EU are having an "oh shit" moment realising they're unprepared for the world where wars are fought with drones and robots.
There is an element in that the US protects Taiwan. When China was content to make stuff and not invade places things were fine but now it's building up it's military and saying it will take back Taiwan things are more awkward. It's bad for the US in a war situation with China if all their stuff is imported from China.
Can you tell me more about Chinese invasions?
> saying it will take back Taiwan
Should the world cancel the USA because it is saying something about annexing Canada\Greenland?
Of course, how is that even a question?
During the Chinese Communist Revolution the previous government of China retreated to Taiwan. The official name of the Taiwanese government is “Republic of China”, demonstrating that their legitimacy stretches back to this time period.
While Chinese settlers in Taiwan dates back further, China claimed the island in the 17th century. The island was under Japanese rule for about 50 years, before being returned to China in the post WW2 treaties.
The history is deep, and Taiwanese independence is a relatively new thing.
It is based on a manifest destiny ideology that the PRC is the only legitimate heir of Chinese culture and history, and sole rightful ruler of all people of Chinese descent.
From a security standpoint it would be like if a group of US politicians and other elites took over Cuba and called themselves The Republic of The United States. Yeah, an island nation wouldn’t win a fight, but their intentions are in the title.
ROC is not going to conquer or invade PRC. The is ideological and presented by ROC merely existing.
Not the world, but If I were Canada\Denmark, I would think twice about if I rely on the US for defense and arms.
That said Taiwan is a red herring.
Im not sure the US policy has a coherent strategy. If there is one, it is that US economic and military hegemony is waning with global economic growth.
Negative sum strategies are valid in war and power competition. If a global recession hurts the rest of the world less than US, that could be a strategic win.
And "content to make stuff"? You mean back when they were underpaid workers doing low-complexity manufacturing and not actually competing with the U.S.?
> but now it's building up it's military and saying it will take back Taiwan things are more awkward.
Maybe it's building up its military because it keeps hearing things like "pivot to Asia" and "we need to prepare for war with China"—for about 8 years now. If I were China, and knowing how the U.S. has violated international law by invading other countries (like Iraq), I’d be ramping up my military even more.
> not invade places
Which country did they invade?
A civilized compromise might be a union like the EU with both governments continuing on an equal basis.
Not only do Western governments not actually oppose this, they have orchestrated the overthrow of democratic governments and installed dictatorships numerous times when it suited their interests.
The actual Western perspective is not to give a damn who runs Taiwan or how many locals they kill as long as we can do favorable business with them. Although the Red Menace rhetoric does play well at home.
If this was about industrial capacity, we wouldn't be attacking education, chilling investment, attacking energy innovation, attacking science and research, and creating a historically unstable economic environment, all without a whisper of any logical industrial policy.
Stop trying to rationalize the destructive foolishness of this leadership.
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan began implementing Neo-conservative / Neo-liberal policies in the 80s. This shifted the UK and US economies to high margin things like pharma, finance, technology, and services. Those things stayed in the US. Everything was outsourced to developing countries.
It sounded great. Through free-trade, developing countries would improve their standard of living. Also, democratic countries didn't go to war with each other. So, this led to the conclusion that improved trade between wealthy nations and developing nations would lead to global harmony. Everyone's standards of living would increase, and we'd all be one happy globe.
The US kept trying to push democracy, often through force and by destabilizing governments. But, for some reason countries weren't adopting it. The reason was that academics and political leaders didn't account for the impact of culture. That is, a lot of countries didn't want democracy and free-trade.
A lot of areas of the US eventually got wiped out economically. But, for a long time, they didn't notice. Things stayed relatively stable for a few decades because prices kept falling from all of the incoming cheap goods. Meanwhile, they faced 'brain drain' - the next generation started getting college degrees and moving to the wealthy cities. Some areas became wealthy - the rest became poor.
The US became a powerhouse of tech, services, and finance. But, they didn't have enough skilled labor in the cities. So, the US opened the door to immigration. As GDP increased, salaries went up. People started flocking to the US both for high-end jobs and also low-end jobs to support all of the urban areas. The poor areas of the US became enraged - new immigrants had more money than them, and they had less.
Trump (and I assume the think tanks behind him) believes these tariffs are a last ditch attempt to fix the system. Otherwise, the US dissolves.
Oh come on, everybody knew what was going on since the 90s but greed was just too strong. The next quarter's results were just too good to walk away from all of it. Everyone who needed to know, knew exactly what was happening, but they were getting rich in the process, so they didn’t care.
I'm not arguing I just need help connecting the dots from "poor rural people don't want to compete with immigrants for the high or low paying jobs" to total country collapse.
A lot of people have pointed out that they have a similar "trade deficit" with their grocery store and don't feel even a little taken advantage of.
The personal-finance analogy would be that it's fine for me to have a "trade deficit" with my grocery store, just as long as I'm not spending more dollars than I have coming in, overall.
Largely, China is a threat to the US politically, and they are a threat to our industry and global economic dominance.
We know how this will go, why prolong it with these tit-for-tat increases?
Wow what a cunt. It's almost impressive.
I hear a lot from my friends how we need to boycot USA, don't buy iphones etc...
Now, most people would probably still buy iphones, but people changed their favourable view of USA pretty quickly.
And I am talking about Poland, which was probably one of the most pro USA country in EU