We regret but have to temporary suspend the shipments to USA

Across EU and Asia packet shipments into the US are being shout down until the things are resolved. This is bullshit that hurts everybody, but Americans the most.

> This is bullshit that hurts everybody, but Americans the most.

Price I pay is not getting my $20 fairy lights that made my backyard look cute. The price foreign factory workers pay is that they’re out of a job. I don’t think Americans pay the most, but they do pay.

Edit: Clearly people are missing the point Im trying to make here. I’m trying to address the viewpoint that Americans will somehow lose the most, which i don’t think is the case. This isn’t a pro tariff argument. American consumer is the biggest market there is on the planet. Pretending we can just find other buyers is ludicrous. Yes, there will be some jobs affected domestically, but that number will be much higher elsewhere.

The foreign factory workers will still have jobs making the same products, except those products won't be exported to the US. Luckily for them, 95% of humans live outside the US.

Longer term all trade will just be rerouted to exclude the US.

The EU is making moves right now to position itself as the preeminent center of world trade.

Losing that position will hurt Americans more than anyone else.

Can we try to not fall victim to this sort of "us or them" rhetoric. It's obviously exactly what this is being framed as officially, but it's way worse than that.

Yes, the the cost of (at least) some foreign workers is that the jobs they had creating good exported to America will go away. That's true. The trade-off though isn't just that the Americans don't get their stuff. The real trade off is that the good those factory workers buy (whether they be physical or immaterial, cultural or financial services) will not get bought. Americans making those good will therefore ALSO be out of a job.

In the end, nobody gets what they want and everybody loses employment. It's a lose/lose for everybody involved.

Listening to friends that are connected with the manufacturing industries in China, it sounds like most factories didn't struggle that hard to find alternative markets. In some cases, the Chinese government has been stepping up to help factory owners find alternative markets.

In this case, though, I would imagine that lightly waterproofed decorative outdoor lighting would sell about equally well to any first or second world market.

> Price I pay is not getting my $20 fairy lights that made my backyard look cute.

That is all of your imports that are impacted by tariffs? Whatever it is that you are smoking is some good stuff.

> Can we try to not fall victim to this sort of "us or them" rhetoric. It's obviously exactly what this is being framed as officially, but it's way worse than that.

I read it more as decentering the United States, which frankly I'm completely, 100% for. America's (lack of) culture has been our biggest export. We've sanitized vast swathes of the globe into our hollow consumerist self image at great cost to interesting and beautiful places. All products are designed with Americans in mind, because Americans were the center of global trade. If you wanted to make money, you had to sell your thing to Americans.

And, worse, Americans have grown accustomed to this deference and preferential treatment. It's time we got a reality check: that the world doesn't need us anymore. That we've become as old, dumb and worthless as the shitty president that so perfectly embodies our culture of consumption, waste, and useless greed.

But it really is an 'us or them' situation.

The US is treating everyone else like shit and isolating themselves from the world.

The world is slowly esponding accordingly and reconfiguring to the new reality where the US is unreliable and unfriendly.

While it's a lose/lose this will ultimately hurt the US more than everyone else.

The world isn't going to come to the aid of the US and prop them back up to their place of hegemony when this all goes to shit. The rest of the world is going to pick at the carcass of what was once an inspirational empire.

Well.. Way more than 5% of consumption happens in the US. The majority of those 95% is also very poor and can’t afford a lot of of goods (let alone expensive ones).

Meaning that for a lot of businesses, especially those that manufacture goods US is often a very important and hard to replace market.

e.g. What do you think will happen to the profit margins of EU drug companies if Trump actually imposed his tariffs on pharmaceuticals? Besides the size of the US market they also generally charge much higher prices there.

> The EU is making moves

The EU being what it is considering to start planning to make a plan to take moves to plan these moves.

Then it will have to align those plans with all its members etc.

What you are perceiving as slowness can also be perceived as institutional stability - the very thing the US is lacking and that is leading to all of this in the first place.

3.5 Billion people in the world make less than $7/day. People may live outside the US, but they don’t have the same consumer appetite.

If the alternative markets were easy to find they should have been selling into them before.

I’m wondering if some of them are wide but shallow, and that they have a much smaller total consumption quotient available.

Unfortunately Europe has to pick between actually taking decisive actions and doing something or another 20 years of stagnation (i.e. institutional stability).

You can’t have both..

It's also the price you pay for being unable to purchase specialized equipment.

That tiny German company making lab equipment which happens to be absolutely essential for your company? Their shipments aren't getting through customs anymore, and dealing with the additional paperwork is way more than the two-and-a-half people in charge of shipping can handle on top of their regular duties. The US is only 5% of their market, so rather than drown in an attempt to serve the US they'll just suspend shipping until the US fixes itself, and serve the other 95% of the world instead.

Can't do your job without a replacement MacGuffin? Oh well, sucks to be you! Not our problem that your company is going to lose millions, take it up with your government.

Yes, negotiating take time. Consensus takes time. That’s fine. It’s one thing to move fast and break things with a website, it’s another to do it with the economy. The EU is not universally loved, far from it, but it is a predictable and reliable partner.

It generally punches below its geopolitical weight, but that’s because it was happy to follow the US when American policies were decent (not great, but good for trade and mostly good for stability). But that’s not a law of nature, things do change, even if it is slow compared to the modern news cycle.

A period of economic stagnation that has lasted for almost an entire generation at this point seems like a rather high price to pay for that stagnation. Surely there must be some balance?

I wonder if the Chinese government goes to small countries and say "We'll give you a loan, in return you're going to buy x million 那个啥's"...

EU will probably tax some theoretical outside lights sustainability tax which will be way higher than what US does with metals. At best, EU would be sustainable center of sustainability trade.

I can’t wait to see what will happen when German auto industry crashes. It will be a very very interesting domino fall. Unfortunately I’ll watch it from inside, so it won’t be fun, but it will be interesting nonetheless.

And those decisive actions will probably end up being bottle cap style.

There are some Swiss manufacturers of high precision machinery that said they don't really care about the 39% tariff as there are no alternatives that exist. The buying party will just have to pay for it.

I highly doubt these kinds of companies will reduce their prices once the tariff is gone resulting in a permanent higher cost of products made with these machines in the US.

I hope I made it clear that the us decision make does seem to be driven by an "us or them", sometimes called "transactional" mindset. It's accurate to describe (at least the stated) rationale as "us or them".

What I don't like is when we start using the terminology if "winning" a trade war. A trade war, like an actual war, has no winners. We are all going to be poorer, both materially and culturally, from hurting each other.

So yes, the current American administration (which is currently a legitimate democratic representation of the American people) has started a trade war meant to inflict pain on everybody that doesn't align with them. The answer to that isn't "well actually the trade war is going to backfire and the whole world is going to be stronger than you" its "you're going to pay for this too. However much you hurt us, and it is non-zero, you are also going to hurt yourself. Not because I'm going to hurt you, but because we are all part of one system of trade".

Sometimes alternative markets have lower margins, as they need different products and lower prices.

America's average net salary is $53,000 and Portugal's is US$19,000.

If your TV factory can't ship to America for the time being, you might need to retool and make more 43" screens and fewer 85" screens. You'd prefer to be making the higher margin products, but at least you keep work coming in and keep your workers fed.

> The rest of the world is going to pick at the carcass of what was once an inspirational empire.

Yes, I've read that inspiration in the Mein Kamph. Hitler cited the US's hatred, slavery, and Jim Crow for how Germany responded to the Jewish problem.

If you were a WASP - white anglo-saxon protestant, you were fine. Elsewise, yeah, not so much.

US size in international trade does not match the size of its consumer economy. When the US cuts it's own dick off, trade between everyone else compensates.

The EU is the top trading partner for 80 countries. By comparison, the US is the top trading partner for a little over 20 countries. The EU is the world’s largest trader of manufactured goods and services.

Indeed. That's why it's making moves to aggressively rearm right now - so it can move as its own entity on the geopolitical stage.

Once that's complete and the dependence on the US is broken, expect more dramatic moves.

You’re comparing 27 countries with 27 governments and a combined population of 450m with 1 country, population 340m.

One economic area against another economic area.

The EU is a single market.

Yes, there must be some balance and things should be streamlined. It’s counterproductive to have a country like Hungary stall completely on some subjects despite an otherwise unanimous agreement, for example (mostly on defence in this case). And defence is a weak spot. So is the pitiful diplomatic weight outside of technical trade discussions.

At the same time, there are things to keep in mind:

- this is asking member-states to delegate some of their sovereignty, which is never all easy and always involves quite a bit of horse-trading

- the member-states are perfectly happy to fuck things up on their own and things like growth figures for the eurozone actually mask very different realities depending on the country and its government

- stagnation is a very western point of view, things are still changing quite a lot on the eastern side

- the reference point should be the same situation without the EU. I am not sure, for example, that things would be improved with a trade war between Germany and France, the baltics fending off for themselves, or each country having its own import requirements and sets of tariffs.

At some point that becomes a Pahn Zee scheme …

Poland's GDP has increased by 500% since 2000.

They have the appetite. They mostly don't live in economies that enables them to earn money.

The US was a unique money-making machine... Although the gears seem to be getting looser and the machine is being broken. Personally I think the US economy is flexible enough to mitigate much of the damage, however I worry about the future impact of political changes.

I'm in New Zealand which is quite wealthy although the demographic timebomb will go off in next decades: and our economy is also fucked because our voters hate businesses and business people.

One strong signal of how fucked a country is economically, is how well small businesses can survive.

If the US starts screwing its businesses more, that is the time to worry.

It probably won’t crash i.e. they will retain enough market share domestically if the EU enacts sufficient protectionist policies.

Export markets will of course collapse outside of the very high-end. But that has been slowly occurring over the last few years anyway.

The single market and tariff free trade existed long before the EU was technically a thing. I do certainly agree about east vs west, though.

I do also strongly believe that the Eurozone or a rather a monetary union without a fiscal union hasn’t been the best idea as far as south-north goes.

And then you have countries which are doing quite well despite retaining their free-floating currency.

Well yes and Italy is still below its 2008 peak. It’s rather implicitly obvious that when someone is talking about stagnation they mean Western Europe.

Poland is an interesting case in that you can retain a free floating currency and your own monetary policy and still do quite well.

It was very strange when Germany was one of the countries blocking protectionist policies for car industry. If they keep going for short profit avoiding retaliatory policies, it may get awry.

I think there will be even stronger trend of european brands put on Chinese made cars. Like Renault is already doing with Dacia Spring. Brands themselves will survive, even companies themselves may survive, but many of them may be just headquarters. Moving production means supply chain follows. And that's where most of the jobs are. Over time R&D will follow factories. So for the job market it could be pretty close to full-on crash.

> The single market and tariff free trade existed long before the EU was technically a thing. I do certainly agree about east vs west, though.

They existed long before the EU was called the EU, but that is misleading.

Both the customs union and the common market were created in 1957 with the European economic community, which got a new name and a coat of paint to become the EU in 1993. Both are fundamental parts of the European project. They would not exist without the EU and the EU would not exist without them.

> was very strange when Germany was one of the countries blocking protectionist policies

Because they believed the actually had a chance of remaining competitive in the Chinese market.

Turns out that was highly delusional in hindsight.

That was a year ago when the writing was already on the wall. I guess they accepted defeat and just want to cash out in Chinese market as much as possible before the inevitable hits.