Tariff Stare Down
 

Looks like China and the EU are the only ones not to blink :)

Stay tuned

And now the EU is warning China not to overflood their markets with China's products and ruin the EU's economy.

EU Capitulated
 

The EU has offered to go the no tariffs route on all industrial goods. It’s just China.

I suspect this was the plan all along.

Islands inhabited with penguins only were 1st in line.

Correction...EU blinked at the last possible moment.
I am not sure if Canada blinked. I can't find conformation.

It took China many years to negotiate a trade deal with the EU and it ended up being pointless. The EU (and UK) economy is already ruined in a sort of retarded suicide pact kinda way.

The penguins import fish, timberland boots and buffalo wings from the USA so they were the first to go "no tariff" ...because they are smarter than Canadians.

I think Trump wants a 10% import tariff and then negotiate a zero/zero tariff with certain countries with "most favored nation" status. That would make sense.

Very naive to think that China would back down

They have the rest of the World to trade with so they certainly don't need to kow-tow to the USA

Losing face is a big no-no to Asians generally

I doubt that.
 

They cannot afford to lose access to the largest economy in the world. They sell us way more than we sell them. In addition, many more companies are moving operations out of China. This will be one giant financial problem for China undoubtedly. This is the art of the deal in action in real time. My money, Itterly, is on Trump and the USA.

Looks like a joke of a deal after tariffs were once again flip flopped yesterday, on Twitter!!!!

Not naive at all. This was a move on the global chessboard thought out well in advance. And yes...the "saving face" aspect plays into the anticipated response.

China's economy simply does not work without the markets in the USA. Period. They have effectively been placed into a box, all alone. We'll see how they respond.

Hope we don't back China into a corner. We could not handle 3 fronts militarily: Taiwan, Ukraine, and the Middle East.

Nothing to do with tariffs. Market manipulation. Those who were in the know before tariffs were announced sold, and avoided the slaughter. Pure market manipulation.

All of these comments are based on speculation just like the stock market itself.

Nope.

About 9.8% of China’s foreign trade in 2024 was with the United States.

It's no longer the 70's.

zzz

Tyrants cannot understand that they don't have the leverage. Yes, China can shut off the few goods imported from the US. Can they sell their cheap stuff elsewhere? We will find out.

About 9.8% of China’s foreign trade in 2024 was with the United States.

What percent of US consumer items are made in China? Check your Walmart.

Someone on this forum will have to explain to me how replacing foreign made goods with union made US products is going to tame inflation. Two weeks ago China was allowing us to purchase real goods and products with freshly printed US dollars that have nothing backing them up. Heavily criticized Walmart has kept more families in middle class than anything I’m aware except for those freshly printed dollars. The old saying comes to mind, “be careful what you ask for”. IMHO

Currency war

Can't negotiate, document, sign +50 country deals in a couple days............it takes time.

:loco::loco:

No "flip flopped"

Especially since we don't manufacture anything anymore.

I agree. Let's not forget prices were to be lower day 1. Day 1 of what ? How long will it take to build a factory, hire, train, modify supply lines, etc. Now how does that compete with cheap labor ? Keep feeding us the smoke and mirror tricks. Eggs down 79%. Well that means they are still higher. So what is the strategy? Prices will dramatically increase fairly quickly then we announce some stop gap plan and inflation rate slows some over the short term chaosis that was just created. At the same time we start selectively removing the new tariffs that were just incorporated. There you go - success. Smoke em if you got em. I have a list of a dozen goods like grocery, gas, auto, etc all from local venders in our area on Jan 19 2025. I'll publish that list Jan 19 2026. Any bets - prices up or down.

Japan
 

Tariffs certainly put Japan in their place back in the early 70s. Thankfully everything seems to be handled well so far. There are too too many microeconomic views here on this forum while our leadership has a much more macroeconomic view that will help us all in the long run. Alas, is instant gratification creeping into our senior population?

They already sell about 90% of their goods elsewhere. The world consists of more than the US and China.

F-35, 155mm shells, Cybertruck...

Yeah…don’t poke the bear!

China's products are all over America. They just got clever and ship them out through different venues.

AI Overview
Some countries, like Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, and Malaysia, have been identified as playing a role in facilitating the export of Chinese products to the US, potentially to evade tariffs, by shifting assembly operations to these countries and then exporting finished goods to the US from there.

The EU has advised China not to plan on dumping their extra product on them and hurting their economy.

Insider Trading

We get such a deal don't we? While we buy low quality stuff from China and save all that money, we then peel out a fortune in taxes at home for the jobless, Medicaid, food stamps, housing/rental assistance and so forth.

No. Not instant gratification. We want to be alive to see our economy & 401K’s get back to where they were a few months ago.

About right
 

Yes, that’s what it amounts to. Walmart and Dollar General will have to establish new supply chains. Actually Dollar General should be named Chinese Mart.

The CHIPs and American Science Act Boondoggle of waste is now being replaced with action and reality. If only we could claw back that 200 billion in waste. Hopefully we get chip manufacturing up and running fast enough here. We actually had great numbers for inflation this month at negative.1 percent.

When factories were closed down and moved overseas, it wasn't because the American worker quit.. it was because of the artificially low priced products being dumped here from offshore manufacturing. Artificially because we all pay out of our pockets for the jobless population, big time.

I miss the high quality products from American hands. Shoes, clothing, machinery, furniture.. you name it. Now we have a lot of disposable cr*p.

If you're over 65 and still at the casino shooting craps, (stock market), you've been exposed to volatility when you should be in safe investments and FDIC insured.

The market will recover, it always does eventually. If you are invested in China, you may be out of luck.

You understand why uninhabited islands were included, right?

Tariffs, which imposed a baseline 10% tax on imports from over 180 countries and territories, included remote and uninhabited locations like the Heard and McDonald Islands, an Australian territory in the sub-Antarctic with no human population. Several explanations have emerged for this unusual decision.

One key rationale, articulated by U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, is the aim to close potential loopholes in trade policy. Lutnick argued that listing even uninhabited territories prevents other countries from exploiting them as conduits to ship goods into the U.S. and evade tariffs. This perspective suggests a deliberate strategy to ensure no region, regardless of its population or economic activity, could be used to circumvent the tariffs, drawing from past experiences where countries like China rerouted exports through third parties during Trump's first term.

In the early 2000s, the U.S. was a much larger destination for Chinese exports, often accounting for 20-25% of China’s total export market. By 2018, this had already dropped to around 19% of exports (still higher than the 2024 figure). Total trade (exports plus imports) with the U.S. made up a larger share as well—closer to 13-15% in the mid-2010s. The decline reflects China’s growing trade with regions like Southeast Asia, the EU, and Belt and Road countries, alongside trade war tariffs and supply chain shifts starting in 2018.

A 70% share would imply an overwhelming dependence on the U.S. market, which never materialized. China’s trade has always been spread across multiple partners—Hong Kong, Japan, Europe, and others—even before its modern diversification push. The U.S. influence was substantial but never approached that extreme level, even in the most U.S.-centric years.