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Someone figured out that the new tariffs are just our trade deficit with that country divided by the country's exports. I think more and more we see lots of ev
by VectorLock 1y ago
Someone figured out that the new tariffs are just our trade deficit with that country divided by the country's exports. I think more and more we see lots of evidence they don't know what they're doing.
- cycomanic 1y agoIt's even worse, into the calculation they only counted goods, not services (where the US typically runs a large trade surplus).
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- VectorLock 1y agoI was wondering if this was the case.
- zombiwoof 1y agoI think the Trump Crime family shorted the market last week and made millions today and this week
- jmeyer2k 1y agoElon Musk directly benefits from this also, so...
- tonyedgecombe 1y agoI'm not sure about that, he will be importing a lot of parts for his cars.
- vkou 1y agoIf you think Trump won't have exemptions for his friends, I have some of his memecoins to sell you.
- lawn 1y ago"These specific parts from these companies from these countries receive 0% tariffs".
- aredox 1y agoHe doesn't care about Tesla anymore. He's making some fat money out of AI, SpaceX is a money printing machine now that he's got the ear of Trump and he's spending almost all his daytime (and nightime) hours shitposting and boosting racists on twitter.
- lostlogin 1y ago> he will be importing a lot of parts for his cars. How doesn’t need to make as many of them anymore, so that’s a saving.
- ohgr 1y agoI hope you’re right as I’m betting on the short as well. Made a crap load on TSLQ a while back. I went from a low risk investor to betting on US doing stupid stuff and stated making real money. Cognitive dissonance investment I think.
- aurareturn 1y agoNow control the SEC so the privileged won't get investigated for insider trading. That's how you devolve into a 3rd world country by the way. I've lived in 3rd world countries and seen this over and over again. That's why 3rd world country stock markets don't go up - because locals and international investors have a distrust in them. Locals know insider trading is rampant. Once this kind of corruption is accepted in society, everyone will need corruption in order to stay ahead.
- Freedom2 1y agoSo I'm guessing it's not important to tariff the penguins of Antarctic Island?
- sandworm101 1y agoPenguins are a myth. They are all too identical. Clearly cgi.
- xanathar 1y agoAnd they run Linux
- CoastalCoder 1y agoPenguins are just mascots. You're probably thinking of that one dead badger.
- gpderetta 1y agoOf course, penguins are birds and birds aren't real.
- sandworm101 1y agoOh, birds are very real. They just run on batteries.
- dragonwriter 1y ago> Someone figured out that the new tariffs are just our trade deficit with that country divided by the country's exports. Note that the White House has both (1) officially denied this, (2) provided the formula they assert was used as support for that denial; but the formula is exactly what they are denying but with two additional globally-constant elasticity factors in the divisor, however, those elasticity factors are 4 and 0.25, so...
- jmeyer2k 1y agowait seriously? can you provide a source? That is some serious denial of reality by the administration
- stingrae 1y agofor reference, the Deputy White House Press Secretary's tweet (providing evidence of (2): https://x.com/KushDesai47/status/1907618136444067901 https://x.com/KushDesai47/status/1907618136444067901
- dragonwriter 1y agoIt also proves (1), since it is a response (QRT, rather than a comment) to a tweet describing the trade deficit/exports approach, and starts with "No we literally calculated tariff and non tariff barriers.", and then presents the formula proving (2).
- 1y ago
- pesus 1y agoTo give further evidence that they don't know what they're doing, it's easy to generate this tariff plan using a fairly simple LLM prompt that gives back that same ratio: https://bsky.app/profile/amyhoy.bsky.social/post/3lluo7jmsss2w https://bsky.app/profile/amyhoy.bsky.social/post/3lluo7jmsss...
- gota 1y agoJesus Christ.
- dmos62 1y agoThis is cosmic-level hilarious.
- pera 1y agoThat might explain this then: > Trump Tariffs Hit Antarctic Islands Inhabited by Zero Humans and Many Penguins https://www.wired.com/story/trump-tariffs-antarctic-islands-heard-mcdonald/ https://www.wired.com/story/trump-tariffs-antarctic-islands-...
- seszett 1y agoIf anyone needed any more evidence that they don't know what they're doing, what I find interesting is that the various French overseas territories that are part of the EU are tariffed at different rates than the rest of the EU (treating those as separate countries is traditional for any US company, which is sometimes a headache when you want to order something). Réunion is at 37%, which isn't a problem because any company in Reunion could just use an address on mainland France, but there's more: Guadeloupe, Martinique and French Guiana are tariffed at 10%. Does that make an easy loophole for any EU company wishing to export things to the US at a 10% tariff? If these published rates actually going to be enforced this way, it seems like the whole EU has a very easy way to use the 10% rate.
- xyzzy123 1y agoIf exploitation of the "loophole" got to the point where it starts affecting trade balance then presumably the rate would be revised fairly quiclly.
- anon373839 1y agoWho needs more evidence? I watched the man with my own eyes as he seriously floated the idea of injecting disinfectants to treat Covid-19. That was five years ago. His mental faculties have not improved since then.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- gblargg 1y agoThe Drinking Bleach hoax: https://americandebunk.com/2024/07/01/the-drinking-bleach-hoax/ https://americandebunk.com/2024/07/01/the-drinking-bleach-ho...
- flohofwoe 1y agoA bit strange that this surely totally objective and unbiased site seems to lean heavily into one direction when looking through the other 'debunks'.
- coldtea 1y agoA bit strange that you sidestep the video and transcript (which supports the debunking) because it doesn't fit your confirmation bias
- knowaveragejoe 1y agoThe strange thing here is that you've chosen to defend the indefensible on the grounds of trying to "both sides" something that really is only from one side.
- coldtea 1y agoNot only it's not "indedensible", but the full unedited transcript proves it was perfectly sane.
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- davedx 1y agoIt's not: in the formula they posted, phi is the "passthrough from tariffs to import prices". That's where the country's own tariffs are factored in. Or am I reading this wrong?
- agf 1y ago> Parameter Selection > ... The price elasticity of import demand, ε, was set at 4. > ... The elasticity of import prices with respect to tariffs, φ, is 0.25. ...
- javcasas 1y agoThose two letters are Greek! Tariff them! Substitute them with superior American letters, like... you know what you have to do!
- shawabawa3 1y agoYou're reading it wrong because it's nonsense None of the values are related to their names in any way
- aredox 1y agoIt is AI-generated slop. They did no work on this at all.
- Devilspawn6666 1y ago[flagged]
- Symbiote 1y agoCan you provide an example, especially for the EU? From what I read, the average tariff applied by the EU is under 1%. Other comments say Trump has just divided imports by exports to calculate his tariff rates.
- pembrook 1y agoOn a trade weighted basis it’s more like 3%-4%. The US is indeed lower on average, but marginally by like 1-2% on average. But I think the concern is more key industries for the US like autos, tech (EU never ending fines are essentially tariffs), etc. where the disparity is more dramatic. But it’s still not a 20% difference. Another concern is the devaluation of the Euro vs the dollar due to certain economic policies. Which again is a defacto tariff. Anyways, my guess is this is a negotiating position since 20% seems excessive, but I could be wrong.
- orwin 1y agoI mean, if you respect the law, you don't get fined. How hard it is?
- gman83 1y agoThis whole "the EU fining us for breaking EU law is a tariff" narrative is such BS. The big tech companies just don't like the privacy & consumer protection laws in the EU so now they're getting the US government to help them bully the EU into submission.
- orwin 1y agoYes, criminals get fined, I don't understand why part of the HN crowd support criminals that much.
- anigbrowl 1y agoHave you considered the possibility that they know perfectly well what they're doing and they're just lying about it? Lutnick, the commerce secretary, has been CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald for over 2 decades. The treasury secretary has a similarly stellar resume. There is no way these people don't understand the difference between expressing a trade deficit as a ratio and actual tariffs laid by other countries. Trump personally may or may not understand it (I think he does) but his political superpower is his willingness to stand up in public and say complete bullshit knowing that it's bullshit, knowing that some people are fools who will uncritically believe the bullshit, and other people are cynics who who will nod along with the bullshit either to make money out of the rubes or because they think it serves a strategic purpose. You can waste years wondering which side of Hanlon's razor someone is on, but it's important to remember that obsessing over such dilemmas can lead to paralysis. Just like there are a lot of street hustles and cons that depend on confusing/misleading the mark before tricking or mugging them out of their money, there are a lot of political gambits that depend on inducing analysis-paralysis in opponents. Manufacturing dilemmas is also a key element in military strategy. My advice is to stop worrying about whether these people are such fools that you owe them some sort of empathy and an effort to save them from themselves, or you will end up like Charlie Brown having the football pulled way by Lucy yet again. It is OK to cut them off and treat them as bad actors, for the same reason you should often round off quantitative values instead of obsessing over precision.
- mullingitover 1y agoLet’s not forget Congress could assert its authority over tariffs at any time. This isn’t just the executive branch unilaterally creating the biggest, most regressive tax hike in our lifetimes, it’s a coordinated GOP operation.
- vkou 1y agoI wonder what kind of phone calls their donors are having with them.
- nemothekid 1y ago>Have you considered the possibility that they know perfectly well what they're doing and they're just lying about it? Politicians are just pretending to be dumb? Why? >There is no way these people don't understand the difference between expressing a trade deficit as a ratio and actual tariffs laid by other countries. I don't think most people deny that these are capable individuals. The problem is - I think the people in Trump's inner circle now are sycophants first. They know what Trump is doing is destructive, but they are just choose to be yes men. Remember, this isn't Trump's first go-around, and the majority of people who stood up to Trump the first time (Pence, Barr, Perry, Price, Rex Tillerson) are gone. Funny enough wikipedia has an article[1] about this that is so large that it has many sub articles. Ultimately, I can't trust that his appointments are exercising any sort of discernment because a large number of his 2016 appointees were fired for doing so. In short, Fitzgerald could be a genius, but all signs point to him being a yes-man that would rather sink the ship than stand up to Trump. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dismissals_and_resignations_in_the_first_Trump_administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dismissals_and_resigna...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- 2muchcoffeeman 1y agoWhat about Australia? We’re in surplus. Is 10% just the minimum?
- KaiserPro 1y agoYup.
- generalizations 1y agoDoes the exact percentage of the tariffs matter? I suspect it doesn't - these look like approximate numbers to obtain concessions, and a complex formula doesn't really help anything. Far as I can tell, the ideal would have been to simply double incoming tariffs, but that would be infeasibly large. This was a way to generate a plausible smaller number that can be increased later on an individual basis depending on how the country responds.
- coffeefirst 1y agoYes. These are College Freshman Essay economics, where you know just enough to declare it's time to go bold and are still stupid enough to believe it will work. It's not that there's no strategy, it's that it was designed by reckless amateurs who haven't done the reading, haven't consulted with anyone that understands all the trade-offs, and have an uncapped appetite for risk. The TV version works out perfectly, since the writers control the ending.