Bernstein Posits That A 10 Percent Baseline US Tariff On Raw Semiconductors Is "Not Going To Do All That Much," But PCs, Servers, And Smartphones Are About To Get Pricier By ~40 Percent
Ok. The bottom line is, either it "won't do all that much"-- meaning it won't affect prices, it won't affect the economy, it'll be basically useless--or it will be disastrously expensive for ordinary people. There is no other option. The "disastrously expensive for ordinary people" is the only thing that will cause any amount of the change Trump promises: it's the mechanism by which the plan operates.
There is no option where companies just eat the tariff costs, or countries pay them. Maybe a few scattered companies and countries do, but by and large, not a chance.
Every country in the world needs all the other countries more than all of the other countries need it. There's just no real leverage, because we're all interconnected; you can snip one country out, and it'll slightly hurt everyone, but it'll wreck the country that was snipped out.
because we're all interconnected; you can snip one country out, and it'll slightly hurt everyone, but it'll wreck the country that was snipped out
Conservatives will NEVER understand this.
They will if the conservative media machine falls apart and they start actually seeing reality.
It's possible...someday...maybe...
Every country in the world needs all the other countries more than all of the other countries need it. There's just no real leverage, because we're all interconnected; you can snip one country out, and it'll slightly hurt everyone, but it'll wreck the country that was snipped out.
This is just such an absolutely perfect summary. I wish we could American politicians to speak this clearly to explain why this is such a bad idea.
It wouldn't matter. The public doesn't listen directly to politicians, it gets filtered through the media first, and the media picks and chooses which parts they actually report. The people who would actually hear this already know. The people who would need to hear it never will because Fox won't show it to them.
You're very kind, thank you.
That's true if all other things were equal, but they're not. The US is the largest economy in the world, based on GDP, so it has a lot more weight to swing around than others. So theoretically, the US should have more leverage than smaller countries.
That said, I don't think the US has enough leverage to get away with this. Retaliatory tariffs will come and the net result is that trade in all regions will suffer. When you tax something, you get less of it...
The US might be able to get some leverage if we had an economist in power w/ strong diplomacy skills, but we have Trump.
I don't know how we define "enough" in this scenario, but as you allude to: in the end the USA is just some 400 million people buying things from overseas. Absolutely those who buy the most, and that is what drives the economy in many countries. It is what has picked up countries in SE Asia from poverty to industrialization.
Problem is that now when everything is more expensive in the US, the same people will stop spending. They might have spent the same money on products made in America, but those are precious few and just increased in price. So in effect everyone in America can now buy less for the same money and the industry capacity to produce what's demanded doesn't exist in short term. And in real estate, short term is 3-10 years.
The rest of the world? Well, most of the world just lost their biggest market. Of course, the demand that can't be produced domestically in the US will still be seen, but at a reduced rate, which will reduce the economic development world wide, until new markers are found. China still needs to sell, but the market for the high margin stuff is reduced.
In the end? I wouldn't be surprised if this stunt reduces world trade to such a degree it might be viewed as a notable side effect that carbon use went down. Trump might have managed to stop overconsumption like nobody else and with it energy demand. So despite doing the oil industries bidding and go against renewables, the shipping industry stand to loose enough trade that it might affect oil use world wide.
Yeah, the US has a lot of economic weight to swing around, but the world has also spend the decade (!) since Trump was first elected finding other business outlets and generally needing the US less, meaning that the relative weight of the US and the rest of the world has normalized significantly. The EU is stronger, China is stronger, Canada is stronger. The US withdrawing from the world economy would hurt everyone, but it would hurt the US a whole lot more than everyone else.
How surprising is this really, considering we're still paying COVID-inflated prices for most things after COVID came and went, and was gone, and is still gone, and it's a couple years later and it's fucking gone.
Inflation from the Fed helicoptering money around was probably the most predicted thing that's happened in the last 50 years. It should have surprised literally no one.
It's also no surprise that it hasn't gone away. That's called deflation and every central banker on the planet would rather be eviscerated with a rusty spoon than allow deflation to happen.
The internet is about to feel a lot slower for us as more services move offshore to flee the taxes.
And also as net neutrality is gutted and the oligarchs ensure internet fast and slow lanes.
I'm sure corporations aren't going to use this excuse to hike the prices even more, like they did with the energy crisis ...
Do you think he knows that he can go entire weeks without announcing a new tariff?
The evidence shows he clearly can't.
Guys, as a European, does this only affects servers and hardware built in the US right? Isn’t most of it built in china and owned by US companies? So it’s literally only the US this will affect?
Pretty much. Everyone else will be able to trade with the east and southeast Asian countries business as usual. Maybe even more now that the US is making themselves less price competitive. The bad thing for the EU could be the drop in sales to the US not being replaced fast enough outside of the US leading to squeezing existing customers for more cash or possibly some businesses failing
All electronics are made in Asia. So there will be no higher prices for consumers in the EU.
US consumers will get hammered with anywhere from 25% to 55% price increase in electronics.
Maybe reduced demand in USA will lower prices everywhere else...
Not sure how related it is, but in Canada, I'm seeing HDD and SSD prices generally being "on sale" for the regular prices from last year (same specs and everything!)
Anyone underselling the stupidity of this tariff shit is just as stupid as trump.
It's a massive and likely short term government tax increase for all consumers is what it all is.
Extra hundreds of billions of dollars taken from us by our corrupt government. All while I'm sure trumps inner circle bought Puts in the s&p several months ago so they can make even more boatloads of money.
Translation: Stupid Americans Vote For Felon Rapist Traitor To Increase Cost Of Living
I'm already seeing some huge increases on ic chips online here...
I've been looking into producing Semiconductor Grade Silicone Powder but I haven't been able to decide between the Plasma, CVD, or more traditional furnace with reduction agent methods without knowing their operational costs. It would be kind of out of my price range to test each of them.
I can run some basic numbers if anybody knows a good industrial catalogue for the equipment.
lol
Part of me is wanting to put that new PC build I just started saving for on a credit card instead.
He certainly running the country into the ground like one of his businesses
Not just any businesses either, he bankrupted a casino... TWICE
It takes a special kind of stupid to bankrupt a fucking casino, twice
He failed to sell alcohol and beef to Americans
The only thing harder to do is to fail at selling sub-prime mortgages before the 2008 recession
which he also did
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/sep/21/carly-fiorina/trumps-four-bankruptcies/
That was with very clear money laundering too.
This is actually kind of funny. Because his first term is more or less considered successful in financial circles, (COVID aside). But the entire time he was fighting with aides, bureaucrats, etc... who kept either getting in his way or talking him out of his crazy or stupid ideas. Now he's removed all the safeties and we're getting full Trumpism with all the horrible financial decisions it brings.
He wasn't successful at anything.
He slashed the corporate income tax and due to an effective amnesty on repatriation many large MNCs brought stashed offshore cash and cut R&D to register massive earnings for his last 2 years.
Ironically, this started to dry up right around Q1 2020... Then COVID drowned out everything.
His response was to just pump $4T to employers with almost no documentation, thank god we didn't see a massive wave in inflation out of that.
Markets will still consider it a win if Trump does not else good in the next 4 years except for extend the "tax cuts and jobs" billionaire and corporate handouts. He seems to be failing at that and DOGE has only made it harder in for Congress (in a budgetary sense) for them to do it.