White House: China now faces up to 245% tariff | Hacker News Reader

White House: China now faces up to 245% tariff

whitehouse.gov

31 pointsclumsysmurf20 comments

I'm at a compete loss to understand the rationale behind these blanket-coverage tariffs.

Even if one does not agree with tariffs one can understand putting a tariff on foreign goods that one wants manufacture locally—goods of strategic importance etc. but to penalize local consumers on low-tech day-to-day items that local industry could tool up for at any time without much effort seems counterproductive.

If tariffs must be implemented then they should be very carefully tailored.

You'd think for trade you'd start with negotiations, even if things go bad then you turn to targeted tariffs.

Rather we get scatterbrained tariffs, and we piss everyone around the world off so that we have no friends in this fight...

Honestly though I'm not even sure there is a strategy outside a sort of "government capture". Trump and is cronies break as much as possible regardless of ideology, and now if you want to legislate and fix it, you have to go through them and pay the bribe. Trade, etc, all through them.

Every dictarship has some incompetent nephew doing the mr.tenpercent on all imported goods. up next police checkpoints seezing money and demanding "favors" from beautiful woman . Oh and cant have a govoffice without the clueless spending a buisness day waiting for processing of some form, missing the "pay up for speed" signal .

I'm not in the US so watching this play out is like watching episodes of The Three Stooges. — one's not sure whether to burst out into hysterical laughter or cry.

Right, not only is most of the world pissed off but we're just gobsmacked in disbelief.

We keep pinching ourselves just to check it's not some mad dream.

It’s like a random number generator at this point.

No rhyme or reason just shouting larger numbers at the clouds.

None of it is based on rational policy or analysis. Hire a clown, expect a circus. Just make sure you have plenty of popcorn.

The Chinese people are suffering from this

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43703166

It’s going to hit everyone. I’m seeing anecdotal reports from local small businesses of businesses / leads drying up, some VERY dramatically.

Yup, my startup is on the verge of bankruptcy due to various gov fuckups, including simply not paying for our completed contract.

Uncertainty is terrible for business. How does anyone make plans more than 60 days out? Even that far out is too uncertain. Many will just hunker down and go into low risk survival mode

How do you make plans one hour out?

That's the whole point. Make it hurt so their government has to comply.

Lol the Chinese government will make out like bandits. "Corrupt" party members will be paid to look the other way as import/export business forge paperwork and wash the point of origin through proxies. The tariff differential between China and proxy countries is basically a corruption bounty.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com