So when the tariffs can change every day and you don't know if they'll be around in 5 years, do you commit millions to building something that doesn't pay off until 5 years from now?
Nobody's even building them right now. CAPEX and industrial investment have declined in recent months. (!!) They may even drop further. So it seems that if the aim is to revitalize America's industrial base, the present strategy isn't working, but is having an opposite effect.
Talk to anyone in industry and they'll say "we on/near shored because Covid supply chain problems taught us a lesson" or something along those lines. Those investments were just starting to bear fruit in the past few years.
Edit: And before anyone tries to put words in my mouth, this is neither an endorsement of "Trumpenomics" nor a dispute of the prior commenter's statement about them.
Credit should go to all factors, but sorry it's foolish to think orchestration of a trillion dollars into exactly these sectors wouldn't play a huge role.
Of course. I don't think many saw coming that we wouldn't be on friendly trade terms with Mexico and Canada.
> and I'm going to bet the trillion dollars in incentives played a far, far bigger role than the delta in people's resilience estimations
Which have you seen companies respond more swiftly to, opportunities to make money, or disruptions in their existing ways of making money? Which gets the CEO on the phone faster, a potential business deal or a prod outage?
Just about everyone experienced the latter during Covid. "Yeah we'd love to do all the electrical for your covid construction boom fueled McMansion development but switchgear is back ordered 18mo, sorry", and so on and so on across many industries. And they're all real salty about it.
I'm sure the incentives added fuel to the fire, but the way the Chinese economy stayed disrupted for longer really pained a lot of people in the US who depend on stuff from there to make money here.
My point is that near-shoring is the obvious thing to do under the rationale you're talking about, but actually wouldn't show up in that chart.
Here's a comparison of the US vs Europe (which experienced similar China shocks):
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/econographics/the-ira-...
Depends on if the outage impacts the entire industry/sector or just his company. If the former, it's relatively fine because stock performance is going to be similar to competitors and investors won't be asking too many questions. Might be some wailing and gnashing of teeth but not too much action in the form of spending money on the problem.
I don't think many companies in my estimation took too many lessons from the COVID supply chain crises. If they did, the lesson was to simply outwait things. Everyone was having similar problems and you didn't be the single one of your sector to have re-shored production at triple the expense while your competitors simply spun back up once the Chinese factories got back on-line.
If it was such a compelling thing that was already happening we'd be seeing a lot more 'low value base component' manufacturing coming back, such as electronic components like resistors. So far from my basic understanding of the subject it's all the stuff quite high up the value chain instead. At best some things got near-sourced or moved around, with the raw inputs seemingly still coming from China in the end either way.
It would certainly be interesting to find some actual data here though.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-31/us-busine...
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/04/business/china-us-trade-retal...
The issue is that the aim clearly isn’t to revitalize the industrial base. If it were, then the tariffs wouldn’t be removed after negotiating with other countries. Since other countries can make deals to reduce the tariffs on their products, then it’s clear that the aim isn’t to get Americans to build things at home. The tariffs are clearly some kind of brinkmanship game to pressure other countries into making concessions.
But "everyone" doesn't mean everyone because everything on this list is exempt from the global 10% tariff and recriprocal tariffs (https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Annex-...). Categories have been added to the list after influential people called the President. So even the 10% for "everyone" tariff can be negotiated away if you give the President something he values.
So if CAPEX is declining, the downturn has already started. (I mean, I guess the article's headline already told us that...)
US has taken concrete steps in the last 100 days to reduce all three.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollution_haven_hypothesis
A political/diplomatic example is rebuilding the Japanese Steel industry after WWII so they could regain self sufficiency. Until we decide to shoot ourselves in the foot hard enough we’ve had a consistent trading partner in high quality steel ever since.
The current “strategy” is painful because it has the weight of the past 60-70 years working against it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Course
This isn't some retroactive attempt to justify something. This was the actual policy at the time.
And double-digit increases are what they have been working toward the whole time, they know how to do it, that's how they have managed to get by, even though they know it will takes years. These are great business operators, they know they'll make it if they persevere, they just don't know how many years.
And these were the businesses that were shrewdly operating successfully in the USA in difficult markets with slim margins, even if they were leaning to any extent on cheap foreign materials, labor, or even weighted more toward robust domestic commerce in general.
Prevailing in situations that "average" businessmen aren't quite up to.
How do you think the less-skilled operators are going to feel? They know who they are. Lots of times their businesses are totally dependent on the majority of Americans overall being "richer" than most. And in less than 100 days really, that's been brought into question more times than in any other previous decade. With things like over-taxing and currency exchange taking their toll at the same time commerce itself as a source of prosperity is receding, this is going to make them some of them the most nervous of all.
Trump has always been foolish with money, after his first term the US can no longer afford lots of things that were affordable under all previous presidents, you can't make this up.
When a recognized business-bozo-in-chief can remotely do more percentage damage in one day than a business owner can make up for in one year, might as well give up now, or at least take a sabbatical. Trump can't last forever, and anybody who replaces him may not be any wiser or less misguided, but at least would be more stable & trustworthy.
However, doing something like declaring election fraud, having Vance not certify the vote, and then in chaos, remaining in power, its totally doable, granted he has legal immunity.
The things is, they are doing so much illegal shit that they know if Dems get in power, people will go to prison. So everyone around him has as large incentive to go along.
Too much is in flux to make an expensive decision that won't see value for years. There'd need to be grants to jump start construction.
Part of Trump's genius tarriff plan was closing trade deficits.
Except trade deficit is just mostly a measure of how much countries choose to park the returns on their goods/services in your own country as investment in capex, domestic investments, etc. It is the foreigner choosing not to take the dollar or exchanged goods back to their own country, but to invest it in your own country.
You literally kill capex by killing the trade deficit.
So, on practice, you won't find a correlation here.
I'm not sure this small price difference will continue since I assume a reduction in imports might result in greater demand domestically and those factories might not be able to easily scale to absorb the shift.
and unsurprisingly, the imported goods are the goods that are still heavily reliant on labor cost.
If automation was possible, it would be the preference of any business to use that over human labor, simply for the consistency of output and ability to control cost factors. I do believe this to be the case in most instances.
Thats why car companies have long advocated for tariffs on imported vehicles (and is one tariff we have consistently held for a long time).
If people will be happy to buy locally-made furniture for triple the price and having it last longer is a different question.
There is simply no way to speedrun that kind of development.
I am not against repatriating manufacturing, but it's something that needs to be done with thought and strategy. This trade war is worse than Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal.
"Biden's"? That's comparing an 100%-Trump fiasco with an 80%-Trump fiasco.
If we're gonna blame Biden for not breaking the US/Taliban ceasefire agreement and drawing things out... Then we need to talk about how it was Trump who made the agreement abandoning the Afghan government, Trump who negotiated that aggressive May 2021 deadline to land at the beginning of the next term [0], and Trump who had to be stopped by his staff from triggering a far-worse instant "fuck y'all, we bail" just days after he lost the election in Nov 2020. [1]
_____
[0] https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/568154-trumps-...
[1] https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2022/10...
Not a lot of domestic coffee production. I'm pretty sure there would be riots in the streets if coffee was $65/lb.
Well at least it would be a slow moving riot with lots of yawning.
We're sleepy if we need coffee. We're angry when we can't have coffee.
What would it take anyway . . . ?
The most scary thing are medicines, medical equipment etc. Healthcare is going to become even more expensive, no?
Above everything else, why would other countries/allies/trading-partners trust the U.S govt again? I just can't comprehend how this is good for anyone, other than those with spare cash to buy up distressed assets
Is that the most likely resolution? No, I don’t think so, I’m still holding most of my money out of the stock market. But doing lots of business with countries whose current government isn’t trustworthy isn’t an unheard of scenario.
That might be the whole point. Look at Trump's "now is a great time to buy" post.
It's also good for America's enemies. Maybe the goal is just a weakened America overall.
Americans will learn too.
It is not black or white when there is not real [power of] law enforcement.
Personally I'd want one hell of an insurance policy to cover the risk of all that money being wasted when I finally open my doors and have to compete with overseas manufacturing that may no longer be burdened by these tariffs.
This is exactly the kind of short-termism that got us to where we are now. Why is it so hard to think on a 5-10 year timeline? This is country-level ADHD. Anything worth building requires long term investments. People in the past used to spend their life building cathedrals that they knew would never be finished in their lifetime, and now you're questioning whether it's worth investing in something that has an expected ROI in 5 years!
if you want people to think long term you need long term stable policies that won't change the next time someone else sits in the oval office or Congress changes hands. you need to commit to a strategy.
Because the tariff plans have changed every few days. If the tariffs were stable over 5-10 years, businesses would adapt.
> This is country-level ADHD.
Yes, these tariffs are.
It's Risk vs Reward. Anyone who built something great took huge risks, for a huge return.
There is no return here. At best, you've sunk a ton of capital into a low-profit business that is propped up only by government subsidy.
Oh, you meant other people's money.
Trump has control of all branches yet isn't passing any legislation. All he's doing is introducing uncertainty.