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Comment by pkulak | Hacker News Reader

Trump will back down and lift the teriffs the second there are widespread consequences. He’ll give some excuse, and his supporters will eat it up.

That or he’ll make so many deals with CEOs for political support and financial contributions that we won’t even notice that a few smaller companies went out of business or pulled out of the US.

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It may not matter. The ships that were supposed to be here, aren't. Even if the tariffs were lifted today, it would still take weeks for new orders to be shipped and delivered to the US. We're very much in the FO part of FAFO

Unfortunately, that has only fueled this madness. Because there is a lead time for shipments, things didn't instantly go bad when the tariffs were announced, so many people mistakenly seem to believe there's no problem. A lot of people apparently need instant feedback to understand cause and effect.

Which is quite surprising, because we went through several stress tests for globalised logistics in recent years with Covid, the Red Sea situation, and the Ukraine invasion. You’d think people would remember what happened 3 years ago.

Read any of the "let's talk to a panel of people who voted for Trump and see how they feel now" articles that NYT, etc put out and you might be shocked at how short memories can be, and how little critical thinking many people are able to apply to the information available to them.

The flexport CEO, in the video shared in this discussion, predicts a back down on the basis that 80% of small business that rely on Chinese imports going bust if they continue.

Even if they attempt to switch suppliers to avoid tariffs they'll be at the back of the line behind the bigger fish.

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