No. of Recommendations: 25
Well, like NYC weather this month, if you don't like the season, wait a day and you'll be in a different one.
Today saw the sudden demise of all but the paltry 10% steady-state tariff for wall but China (Trump’s top trade official wasn’t informed of tariff delay until after announcement). Yaeh, I know it will all come back in three months, but considering the frequency of change over the past couple of months, that's like a lifetime.
OTOH, China's tariff is now set at 125% and China has raise theirs (last I heard) to 84%.
So, other than the obvious inflationary issues, there are a couple of other considerations that come to mind.
China has become a successful manufacturer of all sorts of items by first having the lowest labor rate around and subsequently building highly automated factories requiring fewer employees. An example of the variety of "stuff" they make: www.temu.com, not to mention many of the components which make up a Tesla - the US built car with the highest percentage in domestic content. Even if the Chinese firms came to the US to build factories, they probably would be highly automated and require few employees. I'm guessing it would be too challenging for USians who had never built the custom manufacturing equipment required to build all this crap.
The unspoken risk is that the US has just placed an immense level of sanctions against a country where trade sanctions would otherwise be the most effective leverage to prevent them from taking the errant island of Taiwan. In a world where the US seems to condone the Russian attempt to consume Ukraine because Russia feels it is strategically important and the US craves Greenland for its "protection" and resources, and the US feels it is warranted to dump over a billion bucks of missiles/bombs on the Houthis in support of turning Gaza into a strip of hotels, it seems rational to assume that China has a comparable argument over the fate of Taiwan.
Neither the US or China are likely to lose face by kowtowing to the other over trade and I fea this may have moved the world into a more dangerous orbit.
Jeff
