But a sudden drop in jobs would be a pretty good indicator of the collapse of those businesses.
Thing is, it's not even the tariffs themselves that's the issue; it's the uncertainty. Are the tariffs legal, or not? Are they just a bargaining chip or not? How can a company invest without any idea if the tariffs will be around in a year?
It's much easier for huge, established companies to do this (easier to absorb because they already have huge teams of procurement specialists, lawyers, etc). I think that's at least part of the point in the first place.
This tariff thing - to quote Dirk Gently - utterly misses the fundamental interconnectedness of everything.
Worse, it's not even "honest" uncertainty, the people in charge of the policies are profiting from keeping everyone else uncertain.
Not only in the crass sense of insider-trading or market-manipulation, but also in terms of the landscape it creates.
For example, look at Trump's Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. While he goes on TV as the administration's tariff-mouthpiece, in the background, his family company [0] is going to US companies and saying: "Wow, those tariff-taxes suck, right? How about we give you a little money to keep you afloat today if you agree to give us any money the government might end up owing you back for illegal tariffs?"
It's hard to see how this will change until Republican federal legislators decide they no longer want to be accomplices [1] to the Executive branch's high crimes and misdemeanors.
[0] Cantor Fitzgerald, Lutnick owned ~50% and was CEO for decades before giving it to his sons.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/09/trump-tariff...
> When the authors look only at the preferences of average citizens, it appears that they do have a pretty big effect on policy change. But when they add the preferences of economic elites and interest groups to the analysis, the impact of average citizens vanishes entirely. Basically, average citizens only get what they want if economic elites or interest groups also want it.
They can invest in methods that will lower costs in a way that will outlast tariffs, like replacing/reducing domestic headcount with the more physical automation (for manufacturing work) and more AI-enhanced workflows (for white-collar work).
In the short term, it could help offset the cost of the tariffs. In the long term, it lowers the need for human labor.
Yes, but they will fire many workers in the interim to save costs, and put more load on those who remain. That's happening now across many industries, including tech. That doesn't require much capital, just a transfer of time/energy from (now fearful) workers to corporations.
We are already seeing billionaire execs extolling the virtues of 60 hr workweeks and the rise of "996" culture. Labor is getting squeezed.
But if wages continue to fall, due to the looming recession, your automation may be more expensive than headcount.
Either way, more automation is coming sooner than later, and manufacturing workers probably aren't going to get the return of jobs that they were promised.
The US administration's epileptic tariff policies are a serious but short term problem for corporations, teaching them how to be resilient against this sort of thing in the future (i.e. by thinning payroll).
Corporations are also winning rhetorically via the administration's hamfisted bungling of tariffs (by making them so broad), giving them fuel to argue against any future administration (esp. a left-leaning one) from using tariffs at all, even if used surgically.
Let's not forget that there are effective uses of tariffs - if narrow and paired with industrial policy to build domestic capacity for strategic industries.
Has the United States ever had an effective tariff policy though? All I’ve ever seen is a lengthy history of bumbling fuckups that make things worse for the consumer for no benefit. The Jones Act has not saved American shipbuilding from a moribund, barely-alive state; the chicken tax just makes people buy stupidly huge and overpriced trucks which can’t be exported and contribute to the international effectiveness of the US auto industry; sugar tariffs make us all unhealthier by giving bailouts to corn farmers to put HFCS in everything, and so on.
I can’t think of a single case of the United States surgically using tariffs to build a healthy domestic industry that benefits American citizens— I don’t think even competent adults could pull this off, never mind the clown circus we have now.
Maybe some better-run country could use tariffs well; when you have doofuses like ours it’s probably best to stick with the safe route of free trade and friendshoring.
The primary point of narrowly applied tariffs coupled with industrial policy is to help critical domestic industries become domestically and internationally competitive, not to to immediately reduce consumer costs.
An example of this is the Biden Administration's 100% tariff on Chinese EVS, coupled with the industrial policy that was part of the inflation reduction act.
The goal of that tariff and the IRA was to prevent domestic auto manufacturers from being pushed to bankruptcy by the clearly superior and more cost-effective EVs from China, while making the necessary investments in domestic supply chains and manufacturing efficiency to allow domestic industry to catch up to China.
With the new administration, the EV tariffs have stayed in place, but more have been levied against the supply chains for all cars, not just EVs, and the domestic investments have stopped, all but guaranteeing higher prices and lower quality for US consumers for all cars (ICE and EV), while also all but guaranteeing and uncompetitive US auto industry globally.
Thanks to this, the world is going to be buying BYDs, not Chevys.
The issue with politically-controlled tariffs is that politically sensitive industries (the ones that get tariffs in the first place) are happy to play chicken with politicians to keep them in place.
To wit, the Jones Act is a bit over 100 years old and the chicken (aka light truck) tax lasted for 30 years!
It'd make more sense to hand tariff policy to an independent entity.
Anecdotal reports from Europe (one insurance company, two banks, one systems integrator, one consulting firm; all multinational): All values in the risk assessment systems must be reassessed if an American partner is involved. For two companies, this must be done on a monthly basis.
A chancellor in Germany once proclaimed a ‘policy of steady hands’ when the opposition accused him of unsettling the economy with his many reforms.
Very similar to what I'm coming across, including parties that are out of nowhere tasked with making everything they've got as cloud agnostic as they can with budgets available that they could not have dreamed of less than a year ago. As long as it gets done, not so that they will move out tomorrow morning but so that they could move out if they wanted to. I'd love to see some internal figures from AWS or MS about their serverless offerings and other such lock in mechanisms, what the trend in adoption is.
IME in Cybersecurity/Enterprise SaaS, F1000s largely eschewed serverless capabilities and control plane lock-in features (eg. Fargate, Autopilot) because they wanted to be able to reduce single vendor risks as well as negotiate better contracts.
Most firms I've dealt with that size tend to have at least 2 hyperscalers used internally, plus an on-prem footprint that is increasingly being reduced.
The firms I've seen use serverless and lock-in features the most tended to be smaller shops (eg. Mid-markets, hyper scaling startups) that simply don't have the bandwidth to invest in a large DevSecOps org but are also technical enough to not get locked into an MSSP contract.
Also, OCI is on an absolute warpath right now - a LOT of very large tech-first F500s are getting and signing OCI sweetheart deals as we speak. They've replicated GCP's GTM approach, which is ironic because Thomas Kurian is ex-Oracle and was the de facto "keeps the lights on" guy there, until Catz and Ellison pushed him out.
It's pretty clear now that it was foolish of them to not have.
There's also a lingering hope that the tariffs will be struck down and disappear, so companies are waiting as long as possible before taking the tariff hit on new orders.
- Which manufacturing jobs? All of them? We'll have Americans sewing t-shirts and making every widget?
- How much would those jobs pay? More or less than China pays their workers now?
- If it's more, where does the extra money come from? If it's not more, who's going to do those jobs? If the answer is automation, then there aren't going to be a whole bunch of jobs created.
Also fundamentally, if American in general can work in positions higher up in the value chain. Shouldn't we be pushing for more jobs in healthcare, tech, finance etc vs low value manufacturing?
To help bring manufacturing back to the US, the tariffs should have been fixed, in legislation, with 2+ years of advanced notice before implementation, to allow companies to plan for them and implement something.
The ad-hoc approach taken by the current administration ensures 100% that neither of those will happen.
(Note I am not saying I 100% agree with the near-global tariffs, but I can see why they cover so many regions.)
Then China should setup factories in the USA. Problem solved.
It's idiotic to claim the tariffs on the rest of the world are because of China. CBP has real, non-idiotic ways to deal with incorrect country of origin labeling, and illegal transshipments. See: United States v. Akua Mosaics, Inc. and Kenneth Fleming
Trump's tariffs aren't any lower on countries that have already cracked down on use of their ports for illegal transshipments from China.
Next month, those tariffs might be gone and your investment with it.
That's too subtle and long term for Trump. The subsidies have been torn up and the tariffs tripled. Now it'll be far more expensive to build the manufacturing capacity in America.
There's a fair argument to be made that surgical application of tariffs could potentially raid in restoring manufacturing jobs in the US. However, the ham-fisted manner in which Trump's tariffs were applied can at best be explained by incompetence and at worst deliberate economic sabotage.
Truly just masterstrokes of policy from the current administration. Well maybe people will finally start paying attention when what's left of American manufacturing eats shit. You'll have to forgive me if I'm skeptical though. Huge swathes of the American public are so utterly underwater in propaganda that they've lost the ability to reason entirely.
And they're they employ 30k people, many in manufacturing in the US.
They're right here on HN as well.
And they're accusing the rest that they are the ones that are drinking the kool aid. It's a pretty weird time, tbh, I never ever thought it would get this bad. But I've seen some glimpses of it, a Dutch guy I know emigrated to the USA, got married to a woman in one of the heartland states and within a short few months he was completely on the Trump bandwagon and saying and writing stuff that his previous incarnation would be horrified at.