Six months into tariffs, businesses have no idea how to price anything

I don't understand the point of this comment. If you consider the most important target to be China, so important that it's worth a 10,000% tariff unless certain demands are met, shouldn't you be furious that the tariffs the source article describes on copper and India and Turkey are distracting from the important things?

Putting aside the idea that American companies can hold their own and China doesn't pay the tariffs, it really wasn't necessary to tank the entire economy and kick off a depression to do this.

I guess they can't steal IP if we have no IP to steal, so there is that.

That’s kind of the sad thing with this tariffs stuff, isn’t it? That it can actually be a sharp and effective weapon to set some things straight that badly need to be set straight, but this whole execution feels… suboptimal.

No because it's obvious those countries don't have the leverage to negotiate. Trump hasn't even started discussing h1b with India.

So what you want is extortion, not trade. It's a worldwide version of the mafia.

Trump has all of his grifty garbage made in china. Trump uses H1Bs. None of this is to make you or anyone you know's life better.

I just realised for the first time in my life I’ve decided to delete my comment/reply because I’m concerned with how it’ll be used.

I will say this; different countries wield different powers at their disposal.

It’s unfair how China conducts business, but other countries can be equally exploitative.

Then the US is doomed.

It is a global market. https://www.molsonhart.com/blog/america-underestimates-the-d...

Sorry, I'm imposing my personal tariff on this conversation. You obviously don't have enough leverage to be worth my time, you'll need to pay me $100 or accept my general boycott of Trump supporters.

Maybe we should just lay down and let the world do whatever they want. I would hate to be accused of negotiating from a position of power.

Chest thumping false bravado will mislead you every time.

If I go to a restaurant, wait an hour for a table, get very hungry, and then see on the menu that the restaurant has tripled prices, is the restaurant "negotiating from a position of power" ? Sure, once.

What exactly do you think happens to our power after Trump squanders it to extract one-time concessions that mostly flow into his own pockets?

Trump is killing freedom of speech.

I don't understand how any supporter can claim to love our country.

The entire post-WWII world order was deliberately designed by clever Americans who knew how to use the situation to its full advantage. Enshrining the USD as the world's reserve currency, a network of military bases around the world to protect trade lanes, a combination of propaganda and economic incentive to bring the best and brightest to work in the US, while deliberately transforming the economy from a manufacturing economy to a service and finance economy, always putting itself in a position to be able to extract rent from everyone else.

The last vestiges of this world order was the TPP. The US negotiated a trade deal that would cement its top position in the Pacific region, while curbing China's growing economy and influence.

And then Trump axed it, because he didn't understand it.

China understood perfectly what an opportunity that was for them, and they have been quietly become less and less reliant on trade with the US since.

The current US regime is now hell-bent on dismantling the remaining alliances, relationships, and trade agreements that actually kept the US on top, the ones that actually kept the US powerful.

...while baselessly claiming that the existing world order was somehow "unfair" or "a bad deal", and that whatever the hell they're doing now is restoring some kind of lost power. They clearly have no clue what the source of America's power really is.

And here you are repeating their talking points.

What do you mean, exactly, when you're saying that the US shouldn't "let the world do whatever they want" ? What specific trade policies do you think are unfavourable to the US?

The world for 50 years: "hey let's use China as a factory. We can move all of our technology and production there and make things for cheap!"

The world now: "oh wow these dirty Chinese thieves stole everything from us how did it happen?!?"

This whole situation really is a mystery... A single variable equation the globalist brain cannot comprehend

Yes, Trump is destroying it. But this order was crumbling already. The reason is that the "smart" people from the past believed they could always count on being the middlemen of the world. They believed that other countries would always be happy to send their best people and products to the US so that American companies would trade their branded versions around the world for a high markup. The reality is that other countries slowly understood that they had everything they needed to start trading among themselves without the need of a middleman. And once this realization sinks in it is difficult to go back to the status quo of depending on a single country.

Weird. For the first time since 2020 I feel like I can speak freely without someone successfully destroying my career or getting me fired.