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China is beating the US on pretty much every stage and this only accelerates this.
Gold front runs monetary policy and "economists" aren't the only ones trading that. Look at the gold chart for the past year. I don't think it's really disputed that high inflation is on the horizon due to the debt situation (which Trump has made worse with the OBBB)
> there are benefits to the economy as well when the currency is less strong
Care to list those? I can think of a few but it assumes that we're already in the position of being an export based economy which we're not and not tangibly working towards.
This is moving the goalpost because you know economists (the critics) forecasted major inflation sooner/now, and it hasn't happened.
> Care to list those? [...] it assumes that we're already in the position of being an export based economy which we're not and not tangibly working towards.
You're not making sense or making coherent thoughts. The US is still the #2 exporting country in the world in absolute terms despite importing a relatively higher amount.
Yes, because no one expected him to chicken out as hard as he did. It also came out that people in his cabinet (specifically Howard Lutnick) were betting against tariffs while simultaneously advocating for them. The legal opinion is heavily leaning towards them being illegal after many lower court decisions. Do you care to explain how tariffs wouldn't be inflationary if the actions matched the rhetoric?
> The US is still the #2 exporting country
Are you being intentionally obtuse? Look at how much we import vs how much we export. What would you call an economy that imports more than it exports? A ___ based economy?
It's like you're asking people to explain something that happened as if there's no explanation beyond your hatred of Trump. Why do you choose to dismiss drivers like stockpiling inventory, increased USMCA compliance, broader economic offsets (AI/tech boom, energy production) that could explain how tariffs aren't necessarily inflationary?
> Look at how much we import vs how much we export. What would you call an economy that imports more...
You ask this as if I didn't say the US imports more than it exports.
Okay, so you're admitting that they're inflationary but choose to rattle off a list of random stuff that somehow, magically, offsets the increased costs from tariffs. Please go into detail on one of those, including what you're talking about (e.g. what is "increased USCMA compliance"?)
AI datacenters have increased energy costs in the localities where they're based and raised memory prices by eating up all the supply.
> You ask this as if I didn't say the US imports more than it exports.
So.. you were agreeing with my point then? I don't understand why you'd call my thoughts "not coherent" then agree with it.
Haha! I haven't seen someone try to dismiss counterarguments as "magic." I should've said that more when I got answers wrong on my tests in high school.
> So.. you were agreeing with my point then?
If not "magic," then the objector "actually agrees" with you.
Tariffs definitionally are inflationary.
Huh? You're not reading what I said and instead are relying on accusations. It's also weird to say direct behaviors triggered by tariffs don't play into realized inflation. That's mental gymnastics.
>Tariffs definitionally are inflationary.
No. Weird thing to be confidently incorrect about. Tariffs are price increasing (colloquially "inflationary"), but not definitionally inflationary in the economic meaning. Look it up.
Weird (okay, not all that weird, but ironic, in context) thing to be confidently incorrect about.
Outside of the overtly ideology-over-description Austrian School of economics, which has a different jargon designed to advance their ideology, the general definition of (unqualified) inflation in economics is a sustained increase in general price levels.
And belief that the Austrian School usage is just the “economic meaning” is a pretty good sign that someone doesn't understand even Austrian School economics beyond rote recitation of doctrines and aphorisms.
We agree.
Saying it needs to be a sustained increase is consistent with what I said above.
The introduction of tariffs does, assuming no additional countervailing policy changes, result in sustained general price increases. (Over time, adaptation to the tariffs will, in cases where there aren't hard reasons preventing this, become more diffuse across products than they are initially at introduction, but the net long-term effect is still a general price increase.)
When you add this qualifier who is disagreeing? This is tautological.
It's like you're making a point that doesn't flow from the original discussion and point raised that economists missed the mark on how much Trump's tariffs would cause extreme inflation for everyday US citizens. They still can (TBD), but haven't to the extent predicted.
> When you add this qualifier who is disagreeing?
Anyone who disagrees that tariffs are inflationary. If you enact them, price level increases are produced which are sustained unless some other event unrelated to the tariffs introduces a deflationary effect which offsets the inflationary effect of the tariffs.
I appreciate your good faith approach to discussion.
IMHO, this has devolved into semantics and has fallen astray from the original discussion above.
Here's an example to demonstrate semantics:
1. Trump put tariffs.
2. USMCA (read: NAFTA 2.0) exemptions, pre-existing policy, started to get used more to avoid tariffs.
They are unrelated in that the policies are different. However, they are related because companies became more incentivized to use the exemptions as a result of the tariff. Nothing new (AFAIK) was "introduced" on just this combo alone.
No one can continue discussing with you if base facts can’t be agreed upon.
Yes or no? No quibbling about other shit.
Does the price increase?
No one ever judges economic health by the stock market which you seem to be doing. You judge it be things like median wealth (currently below 2007 levels in the USA) and employment figures.
>median wealth (currently below 2007 levels in the USA)
This is outdated -- it surpassed 2007 levels in 2022. https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/table...
*SPX and no, it's down 2% when denominated in Euros while up 15% when denominated in dollars. I wouldn't say the USD has fared well so far.
This is demonstrably false? Long-term average US inflation since 1913 is 3.1% [0]. Long-term nominal average US stock returns since 1928 are 9.94% [1]. A nearly 7% advantage compounded every year for roughly a century is not "slightly above", it is absolutely enormous. Over 60,000% enormous.
Furthermore, when inflation is high, interest rates go up, and interest rates act like gravity on stock prices. See any number of Warren Buffett shareholder letters. See also: the year 2022. Stock market returns are mildly negatively correlated with inflation (with a coefficient of -0.229 [2]).
[0] https://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation_Rate/Long_Term...
[1] https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2025/01/historical-returns-...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/rmiller/2024/06/20/90-years-of-...
The best way to see how inflation and stocks are linked is to look at economies where inflation is not intentionally slowed by rate rises. The stocks go up more or less with inflation (and some small % of gains they may have on top as you say). When you have rate rises that slow inflation you do indeed slow stock growth. But this is also inline with the link between inflation and stock price.
> The stock market is mostly just an inverse of currency health
> The stock market [] tends to be inline or slightly above inflation on average
Now, you're saying the following, when there's no strong positive link.
> The stocks go up more or less with inflation
Just to add onto your point, bad employment numbers can actually be bullish for stocks due to a higher chance of Fed rate cuts. Obviously there is a threshold there because if too many people are unemployed then no one can buy stuff, but it just highlights how disconnected stocks are from the economy.
On the news stations they do, and it was a bunch of FUD about the stock markets tanking.
Tesla, too. "Look what he's done to his brand, let's hit him in the wallet" blah blah.
That was while things were in a downtrend. It was going to be the biggest recession ever, Trump was so stupid he couldn't possibly understand the ramifications, etc.
Then it just never happened. Things went up.
What benefit have we gotten from the chaotic tariff policy? Any trade deals?
I buy a lot of groceries for my business, so I have decent records. Beef is way up, though.
Gas is way down as well.
Oil prices down isn't necessarily a good thing for an oil exporter like the US though. In aggregate.
If the US had actually applied tariffs on Canadian oil your gas pump prices would be up very significantly.
Canadian crude imports are about 20-25% of crude feedstock for gasoline in the US. Put a 10% import tax on top. Keeping things the same, that's <5% increase in domestic wholesale prices.
Also wasn't there some BLS figure which was pushed by the Administration to try to have good numbers or similar. I mean speaking from a different countries pov, Personally I wouldn't trust the numbers the current administration gives.
I don't know if this is the same belief that Americans within America also hold though.
That and people were expecting the tariffs to be consistently applied as stated, instead we got... this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr7OVWgqDIM&t=27s
So yeah, the tariffs are still a net negative on the economy, but have been so erratically and poorly implemented that they're not nearly as bad as they could have been. It's like a plastered drunk guy swinging a knife at you. It's a lethal threat, but he's tripping over himself constantly and can barely stand so it's easy to dodge for now. Could be a more serious issue if he ever sobers up.
Trump's a lethal threat that is too incompetent to be lethal? Okay. So quit with the FUD then.
FUD stands for fear, uncertainty and doubt. If you didn't feel any of that in the previous year you haven't been paying attention or don't have any serious responsibilities.
Now I'm rethinking my position.
People are fleeing to gold.
I don't know shit about tariffs, except what everyone said in the news. It was going to tank the economy. Everyone's retirement was going to poof into smoke. Everything was going to cost 2 or 3x previous prices. None of that came to pass.
I bought gas at 2.27 a couple hours ago. Groceries are cheaper than last year. I'm personally making more money than I was a year ago. My business depends on other people having entertainment/spending money.
I'm just a dummy though, so I can't glean some expert insight into the differential. I don't have a model for you, just the real world.
How do you think the economy is doing? What do the differential impact models, that aren't a waste of time, say about it?
> I bought gas at 2.27 a couple hours ago. Groceries are cheaper than last year. I'm personally making more money than I was a year ago. My business depends on other people having entertainment/spending money.
Comparing Metric(t=0) to Metric(t=1) is a tempting but incorrect way to assess the quality of an intervention. Lots of people think this way, but it is a flawed heuristic that should be avoided whenever possible. Instead, one should compare: PredictedMetric(action=A, time=1) to PredictedMetric(action=B, time=1). This is obvious when one thinks about it, but people get lazy.
To state in another way: when assessing economic policies, it is smarter to compare the observed outcome against the counterfactual outcome. Forgetting or overlooking this is common, but I won't defend or excuse such sloppy thinking.
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The problem with stating it that way is that I don't think it really drives the point home. Think about someone in a hurry or someone who doesn't know what "counterfactual means... will they stop and _think_? I wouldn't bet on it. So, I'm a fan of hitting people over the head. Show a table:
Intervention: A (no tariffs) B (tariffs + retaliation)
time=1 time=1
-------------- --------------
GDP: .... ....
prices: .... ....
income: .... ....
unemployment: .... ....
sectoral growth: .... ....
fiscal effects: .... ....
Will people agree on the models? To say it bluntly (using the "hit them over the head principle"), asking the question like that is bone-headed. Asking it like that is the wrong question, and it misses the whole f-ing point. How on earth we claim to have an educated society when people pose questions like that? We really need to step it up a notch. We've all heard "good journalism gives equal weight to both sides". Fine. But in practice this doesn't get us very far. First, there are more than two sides. Second, hearing out all sides is only the beginning, not the end. Third, practically speaking, if we actually want to make sense of the world in real situations, we're going to discount and possibly completely toss out a whole lot of extraneous, uninformed crap. (Very few serious economists take Trump's economic plans seriously, and there are good reasons for throwing them in the trash! Once one understands what is happening, even mentioning them is usually a waste of time.)
But I digress.
A better question is: on what bases do reasonable people agree and disagree? Using quantitative and substantive models, how can we move forward on making actual testable predictions? Assessing the error in a prediction must not be a matter of opinion. Unless there is a tie, someone is going to be less wrong than the other person. There is no wiggling out of it due to vague language or "miscommunication". That's one key advantage of models. People that care and seek the truth are more likely to share their models. Done right, this will shift the discussion into model specifics and people will have to show their work. This tends to weed out unserious people pretty quickly. (Unfortunately, in many cases, closed models are valuable and so are not shared openly.)
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I don't often find mainstream journalism that covers any technical topic very well, and this includes economics. I'm not here to blame anyone -- many journalists operate in contexts where time constraints and audience expectations are unlikely to meet my quality bar. Sometimes I will give business analysts a bit more credence, but not much. The world lacks good systems for (a) disseminating clear, testable predictions that (b) lay out their counterfactuals. Heck, I'm surprised when I find even one of the two.
Here's my unsolicited advice. Don't bother reading what "most people" say about economic issues. Ask various friends and network for high quality sources and explore on your own. On this topic, I suggest starting with "When Are Tariffs Optimal?" by Thomas Lubik [1].
Once you have an understanding of what economic models predict, then you can dig a bit deeper. I put close to zero weight when reading mainstream writing on technical topics. If you don't go to the primary sources, you are delegating your thinking. It doesn't take that much work to read the summary from the source material.
[1]: https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/economic_b... Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond - Economic Brief - May 2025, No. 25-21
But as one Wall Street executive put it, "Trump also chickens out", so Wall Street learned he would backdown on any tariffs that had too much negative economic impact.
These tarrifs were the absolutely dumbest thing imaginable, and have brought the post WWII period of US economic prosperity to a point it can never recover.
It's only down from here. We pissed off our friends.
When will we start seeing the downtrend?
Did you miss the thread about us losing 10,000 PhDs already because of these policies?
Or the threads about people looking for and starting to build alternatives for US tech?
These are wounds that will take a long time to play out, but your kids generation will feel it, though they may never realize what we lost.
Also, we already are: https://www.kielinstitut.de/publications/news/americas-own-g...