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Comment by avazhi | Hacker News Reader

Are you European? I ask because this seems like a very European thing to say.

Countries are buying less from America for sure, especially of particular goods, but neither Mexico nor Canada nor anybody else are 'boycotting' American goods lol. I'm not in America either (so don't accuse of introverted jingoism), but I work in the international trade sector. If you're gonna use the term boycott, use it properly.

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Indeed European. I'm surprised to hear that Canada is no longer though, I thought the protests and avoidance were very much still ongoing. I only have international news to go by, and I've no way to be certain but I do know that nobody I know deliberately buys American now and will actively search out alternatives for brands that are based in the US. I could live in an anecdotal bubble though, but it sure does look like there is a bias against US-owned business. I'm sure your data is more accurate.

There's definitely a large group of consumers that are all about buying Canadian goods, and obviously the Canadian and American governments are having their scrap, but my point is that a genuine boycott on a global scale that would be concerted enough to harm American companies just isn't feasible. Even the Chinese, who have very obvious reasons to hate the US/Trump admin, and have the industrial sector, labour force, and local raw materials sourcing (rare earths for example) to build their own shit simply can't and haven't tried to completely decouple from all American goods. It just isn't possible. (Ditto the Americans being unable to decouple completely from the Chinese, despite all the threats to do so). It'd be true also to say that no country could boycott Chinese goods either at this point - they are too established into the global supply chain and making the economics work isn't feasible even if a country could find a way to source an entire production line somewhere else.

All very good points. How do you think this has impacted Nike specifically? I know my reluctance to purchase takes maybe tens of dollars of the table, but do you think state-level friction has impacted the sportwear sector?

Certainly no bias against US Oil [1].

If you take exports / inflation there is a trend downward starting in 2024 [2] but 2025 is Trumps 2nd term so it's kinda been increased exports since then. Maybe at a retail level there's less demand for US but not in aggregate.

[1]: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=M...

[2]: You have to edit graph by hand to do `a/b` after adding inflation as `b`- https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EXP0015

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