This is mainstream US politics today: ..The @catturd2 account, which has more than 3.5 million followers on X, referred to the justice as “Amy Commie Barrett” and complained that “Trump appointed her and gave her her dream job and complimented her and praised her — and she’s been an ungrateful, backstabbing POS since day one.”..
Another bleak day as US democracy comes to a close.
I'm back to my comparison of Trump to a 14 year old Medieval King of England or France wanting to prove that he is the Lord's Anointed by hurting someone, anyone.
Javier Blas @JavierBlas · 2h The sound of the global economy slowing down.
It's better known as a Formula One team, but Hass is also one the world's top-10 machine tools companies, crucial to build new factories. It's now warning of a "dramatic decrease" in new orders from both US and foreign customers.
If anyone believes that low skilled mass manufacturing is going to return to rust belt small towns:
Chinese manufacturing labor isn’t just cheaper. It’s better.
In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The workers don’t storm off midshift, never to return to their job. You don’t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.
Chinese workers much less likely to physically attack each other and their manager. They don’t take 30 minute bathroom breaks on company time. They don’t often quit because their out-of-state mother of their children discovered their new job and now receives 60% of their wages as child support. They don’t disappear because they’ve gone on meth benders. And they don’t fall asleep on a box midshift because their pay from yesterday got converted into pills.
And they can do their times tables. To manufacture, you need to be able to consistently and accurately multiply 7 times 9 and read in English, and a disturbingly large portion of the American workforce cannot do that.
Chinese workers work longer hours more happily and they’re physically faster with their hands; they can do things that American labor can’t. It’s years of accumulated skill, but it’s also a culture that is oriented around hard work and education that the United States no longer has.
All very well but if Chinese imported goods face a 100% tariff it makes more sense to have more US based factories producting manufactured goods for the US market no matter how good the Chinese workforce is
You can already buy US made clothing.
Why is it niche rather than mass production ? Because it costs so much more.
The only way to have mass production from the USA from labour intensive factories is to massively increase the sales price of the output.
If you do that many people will not be able to afford it and will not buy it and many people who could afford it will still chose not to buy it.
What you cannot have is low cost items from a western workforce which has a low skill level and a low work ethic.
There's plenty of people in the western world with a high skill level and a high work ethic and these people get high pay and so the price of their output is high.
No, not if more Americans buy US goods as imported goods are more expensive. Trump's tariffs now make US goods relatively cheaper in the US so likely will increase demand for them.
Trump is enforcing lower costs for consumers for US goods in the US by hammering imports from the likes of China with huge tariffs.
The high skilled workers (and at the other extreme those on welfare) largely voted for Harris, it is the middle and lower skilled workers who voted for Trump
@hyufd that doesn't make sense. The US prices aren't going to come down with tariffs are they? It just means the imported prices will go up. For example:
Pre tariff: China T shirt $5, US T shirt $10 Post tariff China T shirt $11, US T shirt still $10
So the customer now buys a US T shirt rather than a China T shirt, but he is a lot poorer as a consequence. You might get factories opening to make cheap T shirts, but they are never going to match the pre tariff price of China. if they could they would have existed in the first place and the US would not have imported Chinese T shirts. So the consumer is always worse off.
And who the hell is going to invest in a factory currently anyway?
Note : the other day I found a link to a story about a US manufacturer of T-shirts, who in conjunction with WalMart mass sales, simplifying the T-shirts etc got the price down to $12:98 per T-shirt.
I heard a spokesperson from "Statewatch" on R4 this morning. Their "dystopian" claims were very poorly evidenced, and were they were unable to engage seriously with questions from the interviewer.
The government claims that only those convicted of at least one criminal offence are included in the study. It doesn't seem a daft idea to conduct risk assessments in this area - particularly given the criticism government comes in for when parolees re-offend.
“This project is being conducted for research purposes only. It has been designed using existing data held by HM Prison and Probation Service and police forces on convicted offenders to help us better understand the risk of people on probation going on to commit serious violence. A report will be published in due course.”
That's all very well, but tonight I have to eat a actual horse
That's not very impressive (I suspect many of us have eaten horse) unless you are eating the whole horse. If you are that would be very impressive indeed.
Indeed. It is just a steak, but it is alleged to be the best horse-steak in the world
I'm meant to be eating it here, for the Knapper's Gazette
But truth be told I might lazily just nip around the corner to the "Beefeater", which gets the same rating for horse steak minus the enormous cab ride into the mountains
What makes the horse so special? Was it a consul?
Was it correct? Was it arranged in connected rows in such a way as to be described as a "battery"?
it doesn't answer back, and want to put a phone mast outside your house .
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5239461-trump-tariffs-will-help-house-republican-midterms/ ..President Trump told House Republicans on Tuesday that his tariffs will help them ahead of the midterm elections in 2026. “We’re going to win the midterm elections and we’re going to have a tremendous, thundering landslide. I really believe that,” Trump said, speaking at the National Republican Congressional Committee fundraising dinner. “It’s so important that we pass the big, beautiful bill,” he continued. “And I really think we’re helped a lot by the tariff situation that’s going on, which is a good situation,” “It’s going to be legendary, you watch.” Trump’s comments came after he dug in on the matter, and markets erased their small gains, as seen on Tuesday morning. ..
Let us assume for a moment that there are still some adults in the room in the US, and they ultimately wrench control of the economic blowtorch from the Mad King's hand
How much of the rest of his revenge agenda gets rolled back?
I heard a spokesperson from "Statewatch" on R4 this morning. Their "dystopian" claims were very poorly evidenced, and were they were unable to engage seriously with questions from the interviewer.
The government claims that only those convicted of at least one criminal offence are included in the study. It doesn't seem a daft idea to conduct risk assessments in this area - particularly given the criticism government comes in for when parolees re-offend.
“This project is being conducted for research purposes only. It has been designed using existing data held by HM Prison and Probation Service and police forces on convicted offenders to help us better understand the risk of people on probation going on to commit serious violence. A report will be published in due course.”
There have been 19 homicides in London this year so far which is a very low number for a city of almost 10 million people. I think they should be concentrating on things like robbery, theft, burglary.
If anyone believes that low skilled mass manufacturing is going to return to rust belt small towns:
Chinese manufacturing labor isn’t just cheaper. It’s better.
In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The workers don’t storm off midshift, never to return to their job. You don’t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.
Chinese workers much less likely to physically attack each other and their manager. They don’t take 30 minute bathroom breaks on company time. They don’t often quit because their out-of-state mother of their children discovered their new job and now receives 60% of their wages as child support. They don’t disappear because they’ve gone on meth benders. And they don’t fall asleep on a box midshift because their pay from yesterday got converted into pills.
And they can do their times tables. To manufacture, you need to be able to consistently and accurately multiply 7 times 9 and read in English, and a disturbingly large portion of the American workforce cannot do that.
Chinese workers work longer hours more happily and they’re physically faster with their hands; they can do things that American labor can’t. It’s years of accumulated skill, but it’s also a culture that is oriented around hard work and education that the United States no longer has.
The article clearly contains exaggerations such as "In China, there are no people who are too fat to work." WIth 1.3 billion people, I'm sure there will be quite a few people in this category.
If anyone believes that low skilled mass manufacturing is going to return to rust belt small towns:
Chinese manufacturing labor isn’t just cheaper. It’s better.
In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The workers don’t storm off midshift, never to return to their job. You don’t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.
Chinese workers much less likely to physically attack each other and their manager. They don’t take 30 minute bathroom breaks on company time. They don’t often quit because their out-of-state mother of their children discovered their new job and now receives 60% of their wages as child support. They don’t disappear because they’ve gone on meth benders. And they don’t fall asleep on a box midshift because their pay from yesterday got converted into pills.
And they can do their times tables. To manufacture, you need to be able to consistently and accurately multiply 7 times 9 and read in English, and a disturbingly large portion of the American workforce cannot do that.
Chinese workers work longer hours more happily and they’re physically faster with their hands; they can do things that American labor can’t. It’s years of accumulated skill, but it’s also a culture that is oriented around hard work and education that the United States no longer has.
The article clearly contains exaggerations such as "In China, there are no people who are too fat to work." WIth 1.3 billion people, I'm sure there will be quite a few people in this category.
Nah.
The fat get eaten.
It's why Chris Patten - "Fat Peng" - had to leg it out of HK...
That's all very well, but tonight I have to eat a actual horse
That's not very impressive (I suspect many of us have eaten horse) unless you are eating the whole horse. If you are that would be very impressive indeed.
I have (some) horse in the freezer with the pheasants, the pigeons, the (checks) ostriches, and the chuckleberries.
Never heard of a chuckleberry. Looked it up and it sounds fantastic.
Mine came from here wholesale, as very good value compared to blueberries, redcurrants etc. I now have a freezer draw full of them, loose, having bought a 12kg box to get a ludicrous price (£3 per kilo). The other items tend to be £15-20 for 2.5 kilos, depending on timing.
Be warned, the stuff about surprisingly sweet is mainly baloney. They are less tart than a gooseberry, but still quite sharp. Sweetener required.
If anyone believes that low skilled mass manufacturing is going to return to rust belt small towns:
Chinese manufacturing labor isn’t just cheaper. It’s better.
In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The workers don’t storm off midshift, never to return to their job. You don’t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.
Chinese workers much less likely to physically attack each other and their manager. They don’t take 30 minute bathroom breaks on company time. They don’t often quit because their out-of-state mother of their children discovered their new job and now receives 60% of their wages as child support. They don’t disappear because they’ve gone on meth benders. And they don’t fall asleep on a box midshift because their pay from yesterday got converted into pills.
And they can do their times tables. To manufacture, you need to be able to consistently and accurately multiply 7 times 9 and read in English, and a disturbingly large portion of the American workforce cannot do that.
Chinese workers work longer hours more happily and they’re physically faster with their hands; they can do things that American labor can’t. It’s years of accumulated skill, but it’s also a culture that is oriented around hard work and education that the United States no longer has.
All very well but if Chinese imported goods face a 100% tariff it makes more sense to have more US based factories producting manufactured goods for the US market no matter how good the Chinese workforce is
You can already buy US made clothing.
Why is it niche rather than mass production ? Because it costs so much more.
The only way to have mass production from the USA from labour intensive factories is to massively increase the sales price of the output.
If you do that many people will not be able to afford it and will not buy it and many people who could afford it will still chose not to buy it.
What you cannot have is low cost items from a western workforce which has a low skill level and a low work ethic.
There's plenty of people in the western world with a high skill level and a high work ethic and these people get high pay and so the price of their output is high.
No, not if more Americans buy US goods as imported goods are more expensive. Trump's tariffs now make US goods relatively cheaper in the US so likely will increase demand for them.
Trump is enforcing lower costs for consumers for US goods in the US by hammering imports from the likes of China with huge tariffs.
The high skilled workers (and at the other extreme those on welfare) largely voted for Harris, it is the middle and lower skilled workers who voted for Trump
@hyufd that doesn't make sense. The US prices aren't going to come down with tariffs are they? It just means the imported prices will go up. For example:
Pre tariff: China T shirt $5, US T shirt $10 Post tariff China T shirt $11, US T shirt still $10
So the customer now buys a US T shirt rather than a China T shirt, but he is a lot poorer as a consequence. You might get factories opening to make cheap T shirts, but they are never going to match the pre tariff price of China. if they could they would have existed in the first place and the US would not have imported Chinese T shirts. So the consumer is always worse off.
And who the hell is going to invest in a factory currently anyway?
Yes so relatively US T shirts will be a dollar cheaper than Chinese T shirts now rather than 5 dollars more expensive on your own figures.
So demand for US T shirts will rise and more US based T shirt factories could open
If anyone believes that low skilled mass manufacturing is going to return to rust belt small towns:
Chinese manufacturing labor isn’t just cheaper. It’s better.
In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The workers don’t storm off midshift, never to return to their job. You don’t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.
Chinese workers much less likely to physically attack each other and their manager. They don’t take 30 minute bathroom breaks on company time. They don’t often quit because their out-of-state mother of their children discovered their new job and now receives 60% of their wages as child support. They don’t disappear because they’ve gone on meth benders. And they don’t fall asleep on a box midshift because their pay from yesterday got converted into pills.
And they can do their times tables. To manufacture, you need to be able to consistently and accurately multiply 7 times 9 and read in English, and a disturbingly large portion of the American workforce cannot do that.
Chinese workers work longer hours more happily and they’re physically faster with their hands; they can do things that American labor can’t. It’s years of accumulated skill, but it’s also a culture that is oriented around hard work and education that the United States no longer has.
All very well but if Chinese imported goods face a 100% tariff it makes more sense to have more US based factories producting manufactured goods for the US market no matter how good the Chinese workforce is
You can already buy US made clothing.
Why is it niche rather than mass production ? Because it costs so much more.
The only way to have mass production from the USA from labour intensive factories is to massively increase the sales price of the output.
If you do that many people will not be able to afford it and will not buy it and many people who could afford it will still chose not to buy it.
What you cannot have is low cost items from a western workforce which has a low skill level and a low work ethic.
There's plenty of people in the western world with a high skill level and a high work ethic and these people get high pay and so the price of their output is high.
No, not if more Americans buy US goods as imported goods are more expensive. Trump's tariffs now make US goods relatively cheaper in the US so likely will increase demand for them.
Trump is enforcing lower costs for consumers for US goods in the US by hammering imports from the likes of China with huge tariffs.
The high skilled workers (and at the other extreme those on welfare) largely voted for Harris, it is the middle and lower skilled workers who voted for Trump
@hyufd that doesn't make sense. The US prices aren't going to come down with tariffs are they? It just means the imported prices will go up. For example:
Pre tariff: China T shirt $5, US T shirt $10 Post tariff China T shirt $11, US T shirt still $10
So the customer now buys a US T shirt rather than a China T shirt, but he is a lot poorer as a consequence. You might get factories opening to make cheap T shirts, but they are never going to match the pre tariff price of China. if they could they would have existed in the first place and the US would not have imported Chinese T shirts. So the consumer is always worse off.
And who the hell is going to invest in a factory currently anyway?
Yes so relatively US T shirts will be a dollar cheaper than Chinese T shirts now rather than 5 dollars more expensive on your own figures.
So demand for US T shirts will rise and more US based T shirt factories could open
US produced T-Shirts are likely to rise in price, in the absence of competition.
If you're a manufacturer of US T-Shirts, or employed by one, you benefit. If you're a US consumer, you lose. There will be individual companies, and some workers, who will benefit from high tariffs, but the typical American will lose.
And, if you're a US company that sources commodities or products from abroad, you can't set up new domestic supply chains overnight. And, some commodities (like Vanilla, or various types of oil), can't even be found anywhere in the USA. You're going to get hammered, which is why the share prices of such companies are plummeting.
Donald Trump is simply a raging Id, without an Ego or Superego.
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5239461-trump-tariffs-will-help-house-republican-midterms/ ..President Trump told House Republicans on Tuesday that his tariffs will help them ahead of the midterm elections in 2026. “We’re going to win the midterm elections and we’re going to have a tremendous, thundering landslide. I really believe that,” Trump said, speaking at the National Republican Congressional Committee fundraising dinner. “It’s so important that we pass the big, beautiful bill,” he continued. “And I really think we’re helped a lot by the tariff situation that’s going on, which is a good situation,” “It’s going to be legendary, you watch.” Trump’s comments came after he dug in on the matter, and markets erased their small gains, as seen on Tuesday morning. ..
If (when?) this catches up with Trump, the Republicans are going to have to use the 25th to get him out the way. It won't be difficult for them to make the case that he has gone completely loopy.
I expect Vance to become invisible and silent.
Vance is a social climber with very few rungs left above him. There are reasons that social climbers were traditionally viewed as untrustworthy. He'll wield the knife
I think he’s incredibly ambitious and not especially wedded to MAGA or Trump. I doubt he’s as stupid as some people think.
If anyone believes that low skilled mass manufacturing is going to return to rust belt small towns:
Chinese manufacturing labor isn’t just cheaper. It’s better.
In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The workers don’t storm off midshift, never to return to their job. You don’t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.
Chinese workers much less likely to physically attack each other and their manager. They don’t take 30 minute bathroom breaks on company time. They don’t often quit because their out-of-state mother of their children discovered their new job and now receives 60% of their wages as child support. They don’t disappear because they’ve gone on meth benders. And they don’t fall asleep on a box midshift because their pay from yesterday got converted into pills.
And they can do their times tables. To manufacture, you need to be able to consistently and accurately multiply 7 times 9 and read in English, and a disturbingly large portion of the American workforce cannot do that.
Chinese workers work longer hours more happily and they’re physically faster with their hands; they can do things that American labor can’t. It’s years of accumulated skill, but it’s also a culture that is oriented around hard work and education that the United States no longer has.
All very well but if Chinese imported goods face a 100% tariff it makes more sense to have more US based factories producting manufactured goods for the US market no matter how good the Chinese workforce is
You can already buy US made clothing.
Why is it niche rather than mass production ? Because it costs so much more.
The only way to have mass production from the USA from labour intensive factories is to massively increase the sales price of the output.
If you do that many people will not be able to afford it and will not buy it and many people who could afford it will still chose not to buy it.
What you cannot have is low cost items from a western workforce which has a low skill level and a low work ethic.
There's plenty of people in the western world with a high skill level and a high work ethic and these people get high pay and so the price of their output is high.
No, not if more Americans buy US goods as imported goods are more expensive. Trump's tariffs now make US goods relatively cheaper in the US so likely will increase demand for them.
Trump is enforcing lower costs for consumers for US goods in the US by hammering imports from the likes of China with huge tariffs.
The high skilled workers (and at the other extreme those on welfare) largely voted for Harris, it is the middle and lower skilled workers who voted for Trump
@hyufd that doesn't make sense. The US prices aren't going to come down with tariffs are they? It just means the imported prices will go up. For example:
Pre tariff: China T shirt $5, US T shirt $10 Post tariff China T shirt $11, US T shirt still $10
So the customer now buys a US T shirt rather than a China T shirt, but he is a lot poorer as a consequence. You might get factories opening to make cheap T shirts, but they are never going to match the pre tariff price of China. if they could they would have existed in the first place and the US would not have imported Chinese T shirts. So the consumer is always worse off.
And who the hell is going to invest in a factory currently anyway?
Yes so relatively US T shirts will be a dollar cheaper than Chinese T shirts now rather than 5 dollars more expensive on your own figures.
So demand for US T shirts will rise and more US based T shirt factories could open
Or India or the Philippines start exporting more t shirts for $7 (factoring in their lower tarriffs) and the US ones are still uncompetitive.
Or we could see how many Chinese t-shirts can be smuggled in using DuraAces cigar tube methodology.
https://x.com/CGasparino/status/1909749419836141961 ...Sources close to the Trump White House say they are pressing on with their tariff plan based on this calculation: That the tumult in on Wall Street in stock market, while significant, will not be matched by a similar tumult in the Main Street economy. That the negative wealth effect primarily targets non MAGA affluent voters; that jobs will be largely retained because of deregulation and tax relief. And soon trade deals will be cut that lessens the tariff impact, so markets will stabilize. Bottom line: They believe that politically they will be just fine and at least for now they’re pressing on. I’m not saying I agree with this; in fact it’s a gamble IMHO and who knows maybe they do a 180. But that’s the thinking as we reach tariff judgment day and markets continue to rattle...
My question is, where is this mythical "Main Street economy". Other than back in the 1950s.
Chumpety-Chump. Hmmm.
He doesn't think that ordinary pensions are exposed to the stock market in the USA? Or that nearly half of Usonians invest in shares?
Or that import duties feed through to the customer in days?
That's all very well, but tonight I have to eat a actual horse
That's not very impressive (I suspect many of us have eaten horse) unless you are eating the whole horse. If you are that would be very impressive indeed.
I have (some) horse in the freezer with the pheasants, the pigeons, the (checks) ostriches, and the chuckleberries.
Never heard of a chuckleberry. Looked it up and it sounds fantastic.
Mine came from here wholesale, as very good value compared to blueberries, redcurrants etc. I now have a freezer draw full of them, loose, having bought a 12kg box to get a ludicrous price (£3 per kilo). The other items tend to be £15-20 for 2.5 kilos, depending on timing.
Be warned, the stuff about surprisingly sweet is mainly baloney. They are less tart than a gooseberry, but still quite sharp. Sweetener required.
Trump's economic chief just revealed plans to TAX foreign holdings of US financial assets. Hidden in plain sight. Miran outlined 5 forms of "burden sharing" for countries benefiting from the US dollar reserve system: Four of these deal with reducing trade surpluses (more US exports, less US imports, etc.) - essentially reducing their net accumulation of US financial assets. But the 5th proposal is the bombshell: Countries "could simply write checks to Treasury that help us finance global public goods." Translation: You can keep holding US Treasuries and dollar financial assets, but you'll now pay a tax for the privilege. It's now almost a slam dunk that the administration's upcoming tax bill (likely in May) will include a provision bringing back the 30% foreign withholding tax on interest income that was eliminated in 1984. We predicted exactly this move in our ‘Dollar’s Dilemma’ and ‘Sovereign Wealth Effect’ reports published in Dec and Feb... https://x.com/michaeljmcnair/status/1909632751306780765
So does that mean the dollar will go up or down?
Probably.
Many people on here are smart and have experience of financial markets, but leveraging that intelligence into actionable insights is proving a chore. The current GBP to USD rate is £1=$1.28. By the end of 2025 will £1 buy i) more than $1.28 or ii) less than $1.28? F you feel you cannot tell me in public you can PM me. I won't blame you if you're wrong. No smarty-pants answers like "Yes", if you could be so kind.
I very occassionally, during possible crises only, have views on the directions of the stock markets but not really currencies so am limited to smart alec answers to your question unfortunately. FWIW I think Dow bottoms out 30-33k but ends the year around 40k (most of the recovery late autumn).
If (when?) this catches up with Trump, the Republicans are going to have to use the 25th to get him out the way. It won't be difficult for them to make the case that he has gone completely loopy.
I expect Vance to become invisible and silent.
Vance is a social climber with very few rungs left above him. There are reasons that social climbers were traditionally viewed as untrustworthy. He'll wield the knife
I think he’s incredibly ambitious and not especially wedded to MAGA or Trump. I doubt he’s as stupid as some people think.
He has a Summa Cum Laude Politics and Philosophy degree from Ohio State. That is, top 2-5%. And then a Yale Law Degree.
He's intelligent, and I think knows what he is doing. But also imo stupid in his methods, partly because he is an arrogant swine. He is also a liar - see for example his fairy stories around "assault on free speech" in Europe.
I heard a spokesperson from "Statewatch" on R4 this morning. Their "dystopian" claims were very poorly evidenced, and were they were unable to engage seriously with questions from the interviewer.
The government claims that only those convicted of at least one criminal offence are included in the study. It doesn't seem a daft idea to conduct risk assessments in this area - particularly given the criticism government comes in for when parolees re-offend.
“This project is being conducted for research purposes only. It has been designed using existing data held by HM Prison and Probation Service and police forces on convicted offenders to help us better understand the risk of people on probation going on to commit serious violence. A report will be published in due course.”
Such things have been done before. They tend to produce revelations such as “Alex Stabbington, with 47 convictions for stabbing people is highly likely to stab someone in the next 6 months”
I heard a spokesperson from "Statewatch" on R4 this morning. Their "dystopian" claims were very poorly evidenced, and were they were unable to engage seriously with questions from the interviewer.
The government claims that only those convicted of at least one criminal offence are included in the study. It doesn't seem a daft idea to conduct risk assessments in this area - particularly given the criticism government comes in for when parolees re-offend.
“This project is being conducted for research purposes only. It has been designed using existing data held by HM Prison and Probation Service and police forces on convicted offenders to help us better understand the risk of people on probation going on to commit serious violence. A report will be published in due course.”
There have been 19 homicides in London this year so far which is a very low number for a city of almost 10 million people. I think they should be concentrating on things like robbery, theft, burglary.
The research was commissioned by the last government.
I note from the risk assessment: We will ensure that the work’s results are quality assured and peer reviewed. Any significant outputs will be documented in a single source of the truth, which will also include any assumptions, caveats and limitations in relation to the outputs. Be very clear about who the cohort are to ensure there is no expectation for this work to be applied at police level. Set a high expectation for transparency with the steering board. Save all code in Github to enable reproducibility and audit...
Further: The project has very specific aims and its funding is signed off for limited time only. We plan to delete all police data (both raw and any derivatives) once the project is finished. Any further analysis using this data will go through another DPIA process.
A couple of minutes checking by the Guardian reporter would have relegated it to a minor mention.
If anyone believes that low skilled mass manufacturing is going to return to rust belt small towns:
Chinese manufacturing labor isn’t just cheaper. It’s better.
In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The workers don’t storm off midshift, never to return to their job. You don’t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.
Chinese workers much less likely to physically attack each other and their manager. They don’t take 30 minute bathroom breaks on company time. They don’t often quit because their out-of-state mother of their children discovered their new job and now receives 60% of their wages as child support. They don’t disappear because they’ve gone on meth benders. And they don’t fall asleep on a box midshift because their pay from yesterday got converted into pills.
And they can do their times tables. To manufacture, you need to be able to consistently and accurately multiply 7 times 9 and read in English, and a disturbingly large portion of the American workforce cannot do that.
Chinese workers work longer hours more happily and they’re physically faster with their hands; they can do things that American labor can’t. It’s years of accumulated skill, but it’s also a culture that is oriented around hard work and education that the United States no longer has.
All very well but if Chinese imported goods face a 100% tariff it makes more sense to have more US based factories producting manufactured goods for the US market no matter how good the Chinese workforce is
You can already buy US made clothing.
Why is it niche rather than mass production ? Because it costs so much more.
The only way to have mass production from the USA from labour intensive factories is to massively increase the sales price of the output.
If you do that many people will not be able to afford it and will not buy it and many people who could afford it will still chose not to buy it.
What you cannot have is low cost items from a western workforce which has a low skill level and a low work ethic.
There's plenty of people in the western world with a high skill level and a high work ethic and these people get high pay and so the price of their output is high.
No, not if more Americans buy US goods as imported goods are more expensive. Trump's tariffs now make US goods relatively cheaper in the US so likely will increase demand for them.
Trump is enforcing lower costs for consumers for US goods in the US by hammering imports from the likes of China with huge tariffs.
The high skilled workers (and at the other extreme those on welfare) largely voted for Harris, it is the middle and lower skilled workers who voted for Trump
@hyufd that doesn't make sense. The US prices aren't going to come down with tariffs are they? It just means the imported prices will go up. For example:
Pre tariff: China T shirt $5, US T shirt $10 Post tariff China T shirt $11, US T shirt still $10
So the customer now buys a US T shirt rather than a China T shirt, but he is a lot poorer as a consequence. You might get factories opening to make cheap T shirts, but they are never going to match the pre tariff price of China. if they could they would have existed in the first place and the US would not have imported Chinese T shirts. So the consumer is always worse off.
And who the hell is going to invest in a factory currently anyway?
Yes so relatively US T shirts will be a dollar cheaper than Chinese T shirts now rather than 5 dollars more expensive on your own figures.
So demand for US T shirts will rise and more US based T shirt factories could open
And 100% inflation. No issues there.
Not if you are a US consumer and now only buy American made goods, that is the gamble Trump is taking, more US goods will be bought instead of imports and more US jobs created despite the price rise in imports
Trump's economic chief just revealed plans to TAX foreign holdings of US financial assets. Hidden in plain sight. Miran outlined 5 forms of "burden sharing" for countries benefiting from the US dollar reserve system: Four of these deal with reducing trade surpluses (more US exports, less US imports, etc.) - essentially reducing their net accumulation of US financial assets. But the 5th proposal is the bombshell: Countries "could simply write checks to Treasury that help us finance global public goods." Translation: You can keep holding US Treasuries and dollar financial assets, but you'll now pay a tax for the privilege. It's now almost a slam dunk that the administration's upcoming tax bill (likely in May) will include a provision bringing back the 30% foreign withholding tax on interest income that was eliminated in 1984. We predicted exactly this move in our ‘Dollar’s Dilemma’ and ‘Sovereign Wealth Effect’ reports published in Dec and Feb... https://x.com/michaeljmcnair/status/1909632751306780765
So does that mean the dollar will go up or down?
Probably.
Many people on here are smart and have experience of financial markets, but leveraging that intelligence into actionable insights is proving a chore. The current GBP to USD rate is £1=$1.28. By the end of 2025 will £1 buy i) more than $1.28 or ii) less than $1.28? F you feel you cannot tell me in public you can PM me. I won't blame you if you're wrong. No smarty-pants answers like "Yes", if you could be so kind.
It means that there will be a USD collapse. There is no growth incentive to hold US assets and real returns will fall in fact fall to levels reflected with a serious depression. Worse- there is a permanent structural reduction in US earnings capacity. The question is time. If the USD falls fast then there may be some bottom fishing, but if there is simply a long term bear market, then any possible recovery would be slow- and have to contend with permanently higher interest rates.
The US peer group goes from being the EU, Japan and the developed world to being a peer of Brazil, Russia or Indonesia, with weaker growth prospects as innovation business relocates out from the poor, drug-blighted, fat wreckage of the former global hegemon.
What the UK ends up being depends on who we choose now: Farage and the USA or Davey and the EU.
Only small piece of good news is that the oil price fall is going to really kill the Russian economy.
Thank you. Anybody else?
As a rather famous Scottish economist once pointed out, there's a lot of ruin in a nation. For that reason I am somewhat less pessimistic than @Cicero and think that America will survive this as the world's largest economy, if without the power it had before they elected an idiot.
My assumption is that at some point this nonsense will be stopped before the damage gets too catastrophic. This may prove to be a normalcy bias on my part but it remains my working assumption.
If anyone believes that low skilled mass manufacturing is going to return to rust belt small towns:
Chinese manufacturing labor isn’t just cheaper. It’s better.
In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The workers don’t storm off midshift, never to return to their job. You don’t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.
Chinese workers much less likely to physically attack each other and their manager. They don’t take 30 minute bathroom breaks on company time. They don’t often quit because their out-of-state mother of their children discovered their new job and now receives 60% of their wages as child support. They don’t disappear because they’ve gone on meth benders. And they don’t fall asleep on a box midshift because their pay from yesterday got converted into pills.
And they can do their times tables. To manufacture, you need to be able to consistently and accurately multiply 7 times 9 and read in English, and a disturbingly large portion of the American workforce cannot do that.
Chinese workers work longer hours more happily and they’re physically faster with their hands; they can do things that American labor can’t. It’s years of accumulated skill, but it’s also a culture that is oriented around hard work and education that the United States no longer has.
All very well but if Chinese imported goods face a 100% tariff it makes more sense to have more US based factories producting manufactured goods for the US market no matter how good the Chinese workforce is
You can already buy US made clothing.
Why is it niche rather than mass production ? Because it costs so much more.
The only way to have mass production from the USA from labour intensive factories is to massively increase the sales price of the output.
If you do that many people will not be able to afford it and will not buy it and many people who could afford it will still chose not to buy it.
What you cannot have is low cost items from a western workforce which has a low skill level and a low work ethic.
There's plenty of people in the western world with a high skill level and a high work ethic and these people get high pay and so the price of their output is high.
No, not if more Americans buy US goods as imported goods are more expensive. Trump's tariffs now make US goods relatively cheaper in the US so likely will increase demand for them.
Trump is enforcing lower costs for consumers for US goods in the US by hammering imports from the likes of China with huge tariffs.
The high skilled workers (and at the other extreme those on welfare) largely voted for Harris, it is the middle and lower skilled workers who voted for Trump
@hyufd that doesn't make sense. The US prices aren't going to come down with tariffs are they? It just means the imported prices will go up. For example:
Pre tariff: China T shirt $5, US T shirt $10 Post tariff China T shirt $11, US T shirt still $10
So the customer now buys a US T shirt rather than a China T shirt, but he is a lot poorer as a consequence. You might get factories opening to make cheap T shirts, but they are never going to match the pre tariff price of China. if they could they would have existed in the first place and the US would not have imported Chinese T shirts. So the consumer is always worse off.
And who the hell is going to invest in a factory currently anyway?
Yes so relatively US T shirts will be a dollar cheaper than Chinese T shirts now rather than 5 dollars more expensive on your own figures.
So demand for US T shirts will rise and more US based T shirt factories could open
Or India or the Philippines start exporting more t shirts for $7 (factoring in their lower tarriffs) and the US ones are still uncompetitive.
And Trump whacks up tariffs on Indian and Philippine imports further in turn then too
https://x.com/CGasparino/status/1909749419836141961 ...Sources close to the Trump White House say they are pressing on with their tariff plan based on this calculation: That the tumult in on Wall Street in stock market, while significant, will not be matched by a similar tumult in the Main Street economy. That the negative wealth effect primarily targets non MAGA affluent voters; that jobs will be largely retained because of deregulation and tax relief. And soon trade deals will be cut that lessens the tariff impact, so markets will stabilize. Bottom line: They believe that politically they will be just fine and at least for now they’re pressing on. I’m not saying I agree with this; in fact it’s a gamble IMHO and who knows maybe they do a 180. But that’s the thinking as we reach tariff judgment day and markets continue to rattle...
My question is, where is this mythical "Main Street economy". Other than back in the 1950s.
"If Woody Guthrie were alive today, he'd have a lot to write about. High times on Wall Street and hard times on Main Street"
as a New Jersey musician once said
Trump's getting rid of the high times on Wall St bit.
Harris raised more Wall Street donors than Trump so Trump's payback
AIUI our games on WW1 debt was one of the reasons they nailed us to the floor in WW2.
Hadn't heard that but it figures. No free lunches etc. I suspect in 1939 the view was that we were going to lose. That was at least Joseph Kennedy's view and he was very well connected with those who had the money.
If anyone believes that low skilled mass manufacturing is going to return to rust belt small towns:
Chinese manufacturing labor isn’t just cheaper. It’s better.
In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The workers don’t storm off midshift, never to return to their job. You don’t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.
Chinese workers much less likely to physically attack each other and their manager. They don’t take 30 minute bathroom breaks on company time. They don’t often quit because their out-of-state mother of their children discovered their new job and now receives 60% of their wages as child support. They don’t disappear because they’ve gone on meth benders. And they don’t fall asleep on a box midshift because their pay from yesterday got converted into pills.
And they can do their times tables. To manufacture, you need to be able to consistently and accurately multiply 7 times 9 and read in English, and a disturbingly large portion of the American workforce cannot do that.
Chinese workers work longer hours more happily and they’re physically faster with their hands; they can do things that American labor can’t. It’s years of accumulated skill, but it’s also a culture that is oriented around hard work and education that the United States no longer has.
All very well but if Chinese imported goods face a 100% tariff it makes more sense to have more US based factories producting manufactured goods for the US market no matter how good the Chinese workforce is
You can already buy US made clothing.
Why is it niche rather than mass production ? Because it costs so much more.
The only way to have mass production from the USA from labour intensive factories is to massively increase the sales price of the output.
If you do that many people will not be able to afford it and will not buy it and many people who could afford it will still chose not to buy it.
What you cannot have is low cost items from a western workforce which has a low skill level and a low work ethic.
There's plenty of people in the western world with a high skill level and a high work ethic and these people get high pay and so the price of their output is high.
No, not if more Americans buy US goods as imported goods are more expensive. Trump's tariffs now make US goods relatively cheaper in the US so likely will increase demand for them.
Trump is enforcing lower costs for consumers for US goods in the US by hammering imports from the likes of China with huge tariffs.
The high skilled workers (and at the other extreme those on welfare) largely voted for Harris, it is the middle and lower skilled workers who voted for Trump
@hyufd that doesn't make sense. The US prices aren't going to come down with tariffs are they? It just means the imported prices will go up. For example:
Pre tariff: China T shirt $5, US T shirt $10 Post tariff China T shirt $11, US T shirt still $10
So the customer now buys a US T shirt rather than a China T shirt, but he is a lot poorer as a consequence. You might get factories opening to make cheap T shirts, but they are never going to match the pre tariff price of China. if they could they would have existed in the first place and the US would not have imported Chinese T shirts. So the consumer is always worse off.
And who the hell is going to invest in a factory currently anyway?
Yes so relatively US T shirts will be a dollar cheaper than Chinese T shirts now rather than 5 dollars more expensive on your own figures.
So demand for US T shirts will rise and more US based T shirt factories could open
US produced T-Shirts are likely to rise in price, in the absence of competition.
If you're a manufacturer of US T-Shirts, or employed by one, you benefit. If you're a US consumer, you lose. There will be individual companies, and some workers, who will benefit from high tariffs, but the typical American will lose.
And, if you're a US company that sources commodities or products from abroad, you can't set up new domestic supply chains overnight. And, some commodities (like Vanilla, or various types of oil), can't even be found anywhere in the USA. You're going to get hammered, which is why the share prices of such companies are plummeting.
Donald Trump is simply a raging Id, without an Ego or Superego.
If you own one of the minority of US companies that gets most supplies from abroad Trump isn't that bothered about you anyway
Under "collapsing NHS", my GP has just announced new opening hours:
Practice opening times
Please be advised we have had a change in opening times at the practice our new opening times are now Monday 8 am - 18:30pm Tuesday 8am - 18:30pm Wednesday 7am - 18:30pm Thursday 8am - 18:30pm Friday 7am - 18:30pm
That's simpler and regularising some of what existed previously, but I think they will continue to do occasional Saturday mornings.
In Starmer Chronicles, they delivered their promised extra 2m GP appointments early. I'm just not sure that they have told anyone about it.
Their comms. are utterly pathetic.
Johnson would have celebrated with a fanfare, bunting, party cake, and probably a JCB would be involved.
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5239461-trump-tariffs-will-help-house-republican-midterms/ ..President Trump told House Republicans on Tuesday that his tariffs will help them ahead of the midterm elections in 2026. “We’re going to win the midterm elections and we’re going to have a tremendous, thundering landslide. I really believe that,” Trump said, speaking at the National Republican Congressional Committee fundraising dinner. “It’s so important that we pass the big, beautiful bill,” he continued. “And I really think we’re helped a lot by the tariff situation that’s going on, which is a good situation,” “It’s going to be legendary, you watch.” Trump’s comments came after he dug in on the matter, and markets erased their small gains, as seen on Tuesday morning. ..
This is probably the kind of stuff that’s necessary to get Congressional Republicans to flip - they need to accept that nothing is going to stop him ploughing on regardless. But in the short term nothing will change until they see their voters getting hurt.
If anyone believes that low skilled mass manufacturing is going to return to rust belt small towns:
Chinese manufacturing labor isn’t just cheaper. It’s better.
In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The workers don’t storm off midshift, never to return to their job. You don’t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.
Chinese workers much less likely to physically attack each other and their manager. They don’t take 30 minute bathroom breaks on company time. They don’t often quit because their out-of-state mother of their children discovered their new job and now receives 60% of their wages as child support. They don’t disappear because they’ve gone on meth benders. And they don’t fall asleep on a box midshift because their pay from yesterday got converted into pills.
And they can do their times tables. To manufacture, you need to be able to consistently and accurately multiply 7 times 9 and read in English, and a disturbingly large portion of the American workforce cannot do that.
Chinese workers work longer hours more happily and they’re physically faster with their hands; they can do things that American labor can’t. It’s years of accumulated skill, but it’s also a culture that is oriented around hard work and education that the United States no longer has.
All very well but if Chinese imported goods face a 100% tariff it makes more sense to have more US based factories producting manufactured goods for the US market no matter how good the Chinese workforce is
You can already buy US made clothing.
Why is it niche rather than mass production ? Because it costs so much more.
The only way to have mass production from the USA from labour intensive factories is to massively increase the sales price of the output.
If you do that many people will not be able to afford it and will not buy it and many people who could afford it will still chose not to buy it.
What you cannot have is low cost items from a western workforce which has a low skill level and a low work ethic.
There's plenty of people in the western world with a high skill level and a high work ethic and these people get high pay and so the price of their output is high.
No, not if more Americans buy US goods as imported goods are more expensive. Trump's tariffs now make US goods relatively cheaper in the US so likely will increase demand for them.
Trump is enforcing lower costs for consumers for US goods in the US by hammering imports from the likes of China with huge tariffs.
The high skilled workers (and at the other extreme those on welfare) largely voted for Harris, it is the middle and lower skilled workers who voted for Trump
@hyufd that doesn't make sense. The US prices aren't going to come down with tariffs are they? It just means the imported prices will go up. For example:
Pre tariff: China T shirt $5, US T shirt $10 Post tariff China T shirt $11, US T shirt still $10
So the customer now buys a US T shirt rather than a China T shirt, but he is a lot poorer as a consequence. You might get factories opening to make cheap T shirts, but they are never going to match the pre tariff price of China. if they could they would have existed in the first place and the US would not have imported Chinese T shirts. So the consumer is always worse off.
And who the hell is going to invest in a factory currently anyway?
Yes so relatively US T shirts will be a dollar cheaper than Chinese T shirts now rather than 5 dollars more expensive on your own figures.
So demand for US T shirts will rise and more US based T shirt factories could open
US produced T-Shirts are likely to rise in price, in the absence of competition.
If you're a manufacturer of US T-Shirts, or employed by one, you benefit. If you're a US consumer, you lose. There will be individual companies, and some workers, who will benefit from high tariffs, but the typical American will lose.
And, if you're a US company that sources commodities or products from abroad, you can't set up new domestic supply chains overnight. And, some commodities (like Vanilla, or various types of oil), can't even be found anywhere in the USA. You're going to get hammered, which is why the share prices of such companies are plummeting.
Donald Trump is simply a raging Id, without an Ego or Superego.
If you own one of the minority of US companies that gets most supplies from abroad Trump isn't that bothered about you anyway
I'm sure he isn't. But then, he's a psychopathic man-child, who's quite happy to trash his own country's economy, for the sake of personal gain and vindictiveness.
There was chatter on the radio yesterday about some cheap(er) mortgage offers coming soon. Don't see how that's going to happen with gilt yields not really dropping from a month ago and volatility on yields representing real risk to the banks.
If (when?) this catches up with Trump, the Republicans are going to have to use the 25th to get him out the way. It won't be difficult for them to make the case that he has gone completely loopy.
I expect Vance to become invisible and silent.
Vance is a social climber with very few rungs left above him. There are reasons that social climbers were traditionally viewed as untrustworthy. He'll wield the knife
I think he’s incredibly ambitious and not especially wedded to MAGA or Trump. I doubt he’s as stupid as some people think.
He has a Summa Cum Laude Politics and Philosophy degree from Ohio State. That is, top 2-5%. And then a Yale Law Degree.
He's intelligent, and I think knows what he is doing. But also imo stupid in his methods, partly because he is an arrogant swine. He is also a liar - see for example his fairy stories around "assault on free speech" in Europe.
Intelligent ≠ wise, as anyone who has spent time near a university will tell you. Indeed, sometimes intelligence is what allows people to convince themselves of really stupid things.
Trump's economic chief just revealed plans to TAX foreign holdings of US financial assets. Hidden in plain sight. Miran outlined 5 forms of "burden sharing" for countries benefiting from the US dollar reserve system: Four of these deal with reducing trade surpluses (more US exports, less US imports, etc.) - essentially reducing their net accumulation of US financial assets. But the 5th proposal is the bombshell: Countries "could simply write checks to Treasury that help us finance global public goods." Translation: You can keep holding US Treasuries and dollar financial assets, but you'll now pay a tax for the privilege. It's now almost a slam dunk that the administration's upcoming tax bill (likely in May) will include a provision bringing back the 30% foreign withholding tax on interest income that was eliminated in 1984. We predicted exactly this move in our ‘Dollar’s Dilemma’ and ‘Sovereign Wealth Effect’ reports published in Dec and Feb... https://x.com/michaeljmcnair/status/1909632751306780765
So does that mean the dollar will go up or down?
Probably.
Many people on here are smart and have experience of financial markets, but leveraging that intelligence into actionable insights is proving a chore. The current GBP to USD rate is £1=$1.28. By the end of 2025 will £1 buy i) more than $1.28 or ii) less than $1.28? F you feel you cannot tell me in public you can PM me. I won't blame you if you're wrong. No smarty-pants answers like "Yes", if you could be so kind.
I very occassionally, during possible crises only, have views on the directions of the stock markets but not really currencies so am limited to smart alec answers to your question unfortunately. FWIW I think Dow bottoms out 30-33k but ends the year around 40k (most of the recovery late autumn).
The enormous unkown is how long this goes on for before a row-back. I don't know about others, but my uncertainty range on that is somewhere between "before evensong tonight" and "never".
The slightly smaller one is how far that row-back goes. But even if Trump is sent away to live on a farm where he is very happy but we can't visit him, even if the formal rules were to go back to what they were before, confidence in the USA's reputation isn't coming back fully.
If anyone believes that low skilled mass manufacturing is going to return to rust belt small towns:
Chinese manufacturing labor isn’t just cheaper. It’s better.
In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The workers don’t storm off midshift, never to return to their job. You don’t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.
Chinese workers much less likely to physically attack each other and their manager. They don’t take 30 minute bathroom breaks on company time. They don’t often quit because their out-of-state mother of their children discovered their new job and now receives 60% of their wages as child support. They don’t disappear because they’ve gone on meth benders. And they don’t fall asleep on a box midshift because their pay from yesterday got converted into pills.
And they can do their times tables. To manufacture, you need to be able to consistently and accurately multiply 7 times 9 and read in English, and a disturbingly large portion of the American workforce cannot do that.
Chinese workers work longer hours more happily and they’re physically faster with their hands; they can do things that American labor can’t. It’s years of accumulated skill, but it’s also a culture that is oriented around hard work and education that the United States no longer has.
All very well but if Chinese imported goods face a 100% tariff it makes more sense to have more US based factories producting manufactured goods for the US market no matter how good the Chinese workforce is
You can already buy US made clothing.
Why is it niche rather than mass production ? Because it costs so much more.
The only way to have mass production from the USA from labour intensive factories is to massively increase the sales price of the output.
If you do that many people will not be able to afford it and will not buy it and many people who could afford it will still chose not to buy it.
What you cannot have is low cost items from a western workforce which has a low skill level and a low work ethic.
There's plenty of people in the western world with a high skill level and a high work ethic and these people get high pay and so the price of their output is high.
No, not if more Americans buy US goods as imported goods are more expensive. Trump's tariffs now make US goods relatively cheaper in the US so likely will increase demand for them.
Trump is enforcing lower costs for consumers for US goods in the US by hammering imports from the likes of China with huge tariffs.
The high skilled workers (and at the other extreme those on welfare) largely voted for Harris, it is the middle and lower skilled workers who voted for Trump
@hyufd that doesn't make sense. The US prices aren't going to come down with tariffs are they? It just means the imported prices will go up. For example:
Pre tariff: China T shirt $5, US T shirt $10 Post tariff China T shirt $11, US T shirt still $10
So the customer now buys a US T shirt rather than a China T shirt, but he is a lot poorer as a consequence. You might get factories opening to make cheap T shirts, but they are never going to match the pre tariff price of China. if they could they would have existed in the first place and the US would not have imported Chinese T shirts. So the consumer is always worse off.
And who the hell is going to invest in a factory currently anyway?
Yes so relatively US T shirts will be a dollar cheaper than Chinese T shirts now rather than 5 dollars more expensive on your own figures.
So demand for US T shirts will rise and more US based T shirt factories could open
US produced T-Shirts are likely to rise in price, in the absence of competition.
If you're a manufacturer of US T-Shirts, or employed by one, you benefit. If you're a US consumer, you lose. There will be individual companies, and some workers, who will benefit from high tariffs, but the typical American will lose.
And, if you're a US company that sources commodities or products from abroad, you can't set up new domestic supply chains overnight. And, some commodities (like Vanilla, or various types of oil), can't even be found anywhere in the USA. You're going to get hammered, which is why the share prices of such companies are plummeting.
Donald Trump is simply a raging Id, without an Ego or Superego.
Even a 50% tariff on Vietnamese or Bangladeshi t shirts wholesale price at the importers would make them cheaper than the USA made ones.
I don't think that the tariffs will impact sales much, just sucker US consumers.
If (when?) this catches up with Trump, the Republicans are going to have to use the 25th to get him out the way. It won't be difficult for them to make the case that he has gone completely loopy.
I expect Vance to become invisible and silent.
Vance is a social climber with very few rungs left above him. There are reasons that social climbers were traditionally viewed as untrustworthy. He'll wield the knife
I think he’s incredibly ambitious and not especially wedded to MAGA or Trump. I doubt he’s as stupid as some people think.
He has a Summa Cum Laude Politics and Philosophy degree from Ohio State. That is, top 2-5%. And then a Yale Law Degree.
He's intelligent, and I think knows what he is doing. But also imo stupid in his methods, partly because he is an arrogant swine. He is also a liar - see for example his fairy stories around "assault on free speech" in Europe.
Intelligent ≠ wise, as anyone who has spent time near a university will tell you. Indeed, sometimes intelligence is what allows people to convince themselves of really stupid things.
Intellectuals can be quite malevolent. Ann Coulter is a good example. You do not get to edit the Michigan Law Review without being in the top 1%, intellectually.
If anyone believes that low skilled mass manufacturing is going to return to rust belt small towns:
Chinese manufacturing labor isn’t just cheaper. It’s better.
In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The workers don’t storm off midshift, never to return to their job. You don’t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.
Chinese workers much less likely to physically attack each other and their manager. They don’t take 30 minute bathroom breaks on company time. They don’t often quit because their out-of-state mother of their children discovered their new job and now receives 60% of their wages as child support. They don’t disappear because they’ve gone on meth benders. And they don’t fall asleep on a box midshift because their pay from yesterday got converted into pills.
And they can do their times tables. To manufacture, you need to be able to consistently and accurately multiply 7 times 9 and read in English, and a disturbingly large portion of the American workforce cannot do that.
Chinese workers work longer hours more happily and they’re physically faster with their hands; they can do things that American labor can’t. It’s years of accumulated skill, but it’s also a culture that is oriented around hard work and education that the United States no longer has.
All very well but if Chinese imported goods face a 100% tariff it makes more sense to have more US based factories producting manufactured goods for the US market no matter how good the Chinese workforce is
You can already buy US made clothing.
Why is it niche rather than mass production ? Because it costs so much more.
The only way to have mass production from the USA from labour intensive factories is to massively increase the sales price of the output.
If you do that many people will not be able to afford it and will not buy it and many people who could afford it will still chose not to buy it.
What you cannot have is low cost items from a western workforce which has a low skill level and a low work ethic.
There's plenty of people in the western world with a high skill level and a high work ethic and these people get high pay and so the price of their output is high.
No, not if more Americans buy US goods as imported goods are more expensive. Trump's tariffs now make US goods relatively cheaper in the US so likely will increase demand for them.
Trump is enforcing lower costs for consumers for US goods in the US by hammering imports from the likes of China with huge tariffs.
The high skilled workers (and at the other extreme those on welfare) largely voted for Harris, it is the middle and lower skilled workers who voted for Trump
@hyufd that doesn't make sense. The US prices aren't going to come down with tariffs are they? It just means the imported prices will go up. For example:
Pre tariff: China T shirt $5, US T shirt $10 Post tariff China T shirt $11, US T shirt still $10
So the customer now buys a US T shirt rather than a China T shirt, but he is a lot poorer as a consequence. You might get factories opening to make cheap T shirts, but they are never going to match the pre tariff price of China. if they could they would have existed in the first place and the US would not have imported Chinese T shirts. So the consumer is always worse off.
And who the hell is going to invest in a factory currently anyway?
Yes so relatively US T shirts will be a dollar cheaper than Chinese T shirts now rather than 5 dollars more expensive on your own figures.
So demand for US T shirts will rise and more US based T shirt factories could open
US produced T-Shirts are likely to rise in price, in the absence of competition.
If you're a manufacturer of US T-Shirts, or employed by one, you benefit. If you're a US consumer, you lose. There will be individual companies, and some workers, who will benefit from high tariffs, but the typical American will lose.
And, if you're a US company that sources commodities or products from abroad, you can't set up new domestic supply chains overnight. And, some commodities (like Vanilla, or various types of oil), can't even be found anywhere in the USA. You're going to get hammered, which is why the share prices of such companies are plummeting.
Donald Trump is simply a raging Id, without an Ego or Superego.
If you own one of the minority of US companies that gets most supplies from abroad Trump isn't that bothered about you anyway
Is it a minority? Those that don't, will buy stuff from those that do. That is: What they sell has stuff from overseas in it.
Clothing, electronics, anything with Aluminium in it, MAGA hats. I doubt any large machine, plane, boat, car etc is 100% American. I'm guessing a large amount of stuff has something in that comes from overseas even if put together in America.
If anyone believes that low skilled mass manufacturing is going to return to rust belt small towns:
Chinese manufacturing labor isn’t just cheaper. It’s better.
In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The workers don’t storm off midshift, never to return to their job. You don’t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.
Chinese workers much less likely to physically attack each other and their manager. They don’t take 30 minute bathroom breaks on company time. They don’t often quit because their out-of-state mother of their children discovered their new job and now receives 60% of their wages as child support. They don’t disappear because they’ve gone on meth benders. And they don’t fall asleep on a box midshift because their pay from yesterday got converted into pills.
And they can do their times tables. To manufacture, you need to be able to consistently and accurately multiply 7 times 9 and read in English, and a disturbingly large portion of the American workforce cannot do that.
Chinese workers work longer hours more happily and they’re physically faster with their hands; they can do things that American labor can’t. It’s years of accumulated skill, but it’s also a culture that is oriented around hard work and education that the United States no longer has.
All very well but if Chinese imported goods face a 100% tariff it makes more sense to have more US based factories producting manufactured goods for the US market no matter how good the Chinese workforce is
You can already buy US made clothing.
Why is it niche rather than mass production ? Because it costs so much more.
The only way to have mass production from the USA from labour intensive factories is to massively increase the sales price of the output.
If you do that many people will not be able to afford it and will not buy it and many people who could afford it will still chose not to buy it.
What you cannot have is low cost items from a western workforce which has a low skill level and a low work ethic.
There's plenty of people in the western world with a high skill level and a high work ethic and these people get high pay and so the price of their output is high.
No, not if more Americans buy US goods as imported goods are more expensive. Trump's tariffs now make US goods relatively cheaper in the US so likely will increase demand for them.
Trump is enforcing lower costs for consumers for US goods in the US by hammering imports from the likes of China with huge tariffs.
The high skilled workers (and at the other extreme those on welfare) largely voted for Harris, it is the middle and lower skilled workers who voted for Trump
@hyufd that doesn't make sense. The US prices aren't going to come down with tariffs are they? It just means the imported prices will go up. For example:
Pre tariff: China T shirt $5, US T shirt $10 Post tariff China T shirt $11, US T shirt still $10
So the customer now buys a US T shirt rather than a China T shirt, but he is a lot poorer as a consequence. You might get factories opening to make cheap T shirts, but they are never going to match the pre tariff price of China. if they could they would have existed in the first place and the US would not have imported Chinese T shirts. So the consumer is always worse off.
And who the hell is going to invest in a factory currently anyway?
Yes so relatively US T shirts will be a dollar cheaper than Chinese T shirts now rather than 5 dollars more expensive on your own figures.
So demand for US T shirts will rise and more US based T shirt factories could open
And 100% inflation. No issues there.
Not if you are a US consumer and now only buy American made goods, that is the gamble Trump is taking, more US goods will be bought instead of imports and more US jobs created despite the price rise in imports
There is no obvious rational way that any of this leads to "more US goods".
Lets assume for a moment that manufacturing actually gets created again in the US for all these sectors where it was lost previously. That a MAGA industrialist makes the leap of faith and builds a factory and partners with other MAGA industrialists to create a MAGA supply chain for this MAGA factory.
So we now have MAGA Inc making iPhones or Tshirts or Laptops or whatever. In the US. For the US market.
Who is going to buy their items? The cost will be prohibitive. The reason that production was outsourced to cheaper labour markets is because Americans cant afford to pay other Americans to make the stuff they can afford.
If (when?) this catches up with Trump, the Republicans are going to have to use the 25th to get him out the way. It won't be difficult for them to make the case that he has gone completely loopy.
I expect Vance to become invisible and silent.
Vance is a social climber with very few rungs left above him. There are reasons that social climbers were traditionally viewed as untrustworthy. He'll wield the knife
I think he’s incredibly ambitious and not especially wedded to MAGA or Trump. I doubt he’s as stupid as some people think.
He has a Summa Cum Laude Politics and Philosophy degree from Ohio State. That is, top 2-5%. And then a Yale Law Degree.
He's intelligent, and I think knows what he is doing. But also imo stupid in his methods, partly because he is an arrogant swine. He is also a liar - see for example his fairy stories around "assault on free speech" in Europe.
Intelligent ≠ wise, as anyone who has spent time near a university will tell you. Indeed, sometimes intelligence is what allows people to convince themselves of really stupid things.
Indeed. Universities are full of apparently intelligent people who nonetheless decided that a career in academia was a wise move
Feeling quite smug my meagre life savings are not in the stock market (am hoping to buy a house soon, so I de-risked a few months ago).
Now my pension, on the other hand... well, I haven't looked and don't intend to.
The gap between those who have final salary type pensions (typically public sector) and those with fixed contributions or self funded (typically private) is, once again, in danger of being an unsustainable chasm. How many more years is it reasonable for the latter to work to pay for the former? In my cul de sac the answer seems to be between 5 and 7 at the moment but that is about to increase.
There was chatter on the radio yesterday about some cheap(er) mortgage offers coming soon. Don't see how that's going to happen with gilt yields not really dropping from a month ago and volatility on yields representing real risk to the banks.
2 and 5 year money market rates were dropping last week - haven’t looked since
If anyone believes that low skilled mass manufacturing is going to return to rust belt small towns:
Chinese manufacturing labor isn’t just cheaper. It’s better.
In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The workers don’t storm off midshift, never to return to their job. You don’t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.
Chinese workers much less likely to physically attack each other and their manager. They don’t take 30 minute bathroom breaks on company time. They don’t often quit because their out-of-state mother of their children discovered their new job and now receives 60% of their wages as child support. They don’t disappear because they’ve gone on meth benders. And they don’t fall asleep on a box midshift because their pay from yesterday got converted into pills.
And they can do their times tables. To manufacture, you need to be able to consistently and accurately multiply 7 times 9 and read in English, and a disturbingly large portion of the American workforce cannot do that.
Chinese workers work longer hours more happily and they’re physically faster with their hands; they can do things that American labor can’t. It’s years of accumulated skill, but it’s also a culture that is oriented around hard work and education that the United States no longer has.
All very well but if Chinese imported goods face a 100% tariff it makes more sense to have more US based factories producting manufactured goods for the US market no matter how good the Chinese workforce is
You can already buy US made clothing.
Why is it niche rather than mass production ? Because it costs so much more.
The only way to have mass production from the USA from labour intensive factories is to massively increase the sales price of the output.
If you do that many people will not be able to afford it and will not buy it and many people who could afford it will still chose not to buy it.
What you cannot have is low cost items from a western workforce which has a low skill level and a low work ethic.
There's plenty of people in the western world with a high skill level and a high work ethic and these people get high pay and so the price of their output is high.
No, not if more Americans buy US goods as imported goods are more expensive. Trump's tariffs now make US goods relatively cheaper in the US so likely will increase demand for them.
Trump is enforcing lower costs for consumers for US goods in the US by hammering imports from the likes of China with huge tariffs.
The high skilled workers (and at the other extreme those on welfare) largely voted for Harris, it is the middle and lower skilled workers who voted for Trump
@hyufd that doesn't make sense. The US prices aren't going to come down with tariffs are they? It just means the imported prices will go up. For example:
Pre tariff: China T shirt $5, US T shirt $10 Post tariff China T shirt $11, US T shirt still $10
So the customer now buys a US T shirt rather than a China T shirt, but he is a lot poorer as a consequence. You might get factories opening to make cheap T shirts, but they are never going to match the pre tariff price of China. if they could they would have existed in the first place and the US would not have imported Chinese T shirts. So the consumer is always worse off.
And who the hell is going to invest in a factory currently anyway?
Yes so relatively US T shirts will be a dollar cheaper than Chinese T shirts now rather than 5 dollars more expensive on your own figures.
So demand for US T shirts will rise and more US based T shirt factories could open
And 100% inflation. No issues there.
Not if you are a US consumer and now only buy American made goods, that is the gamble Trump is taking, more US goods will be bought instead of imports and more US jobs created despite the price rise in imports
That makes no sense. In the example used the price was $5 if bought from China. American company produces for $10 so American company can't compete.
Tariff raises price to $11 for China produced goods so Americans can now buy US goods which are cheaper than the China products,
However previous price $5. New price $10. 100% inflation.
China has the upper hand in this battle. Why? Because China is NOT reliant on exports to the US. China learned very quickly that being too reliant on one country (especially a one that continuously attacks, sanctions, and tariffs you) would be way too risky. So what did China do? They diversified.
China trades more with SE Asian countries than the USA. China has close relations with 52 nations in Africa, China leads trade in the Middle East and vast majority of developing countries around the globe.
Meanwhile the US is screwed without Chinese manufacturing. Walk through your house and see how many products are Made in China. If Trump doesn't swallow his pride and immediately reverse positions (he won't his ego is WAY too big) then this is the end of the US economy.
The first 100 days of Trump's presidency couldn't have gone any worse. Absolute disaster for the United States
There was chatter on the radio yesterday about some cheap(er) mortgage offers coming soon. Don't see how that's going to happen with gilt yields not really dropping from a month ago and volatility on yields representing real risk to the banks.
Yes. Similar chat this week about there being four rate cuts this year. can't quite see how that concurs with 10 year and 30 year gilts rates.
There was chatter on the radio yesterday about some cheap(er) mortgage offers coming soon. Don't see how that's going to happen with gilt yields not really dropping from a month ago and volatility on yields representing real risk to the banks.
2 and 5 year money market rates were dropping last week - haven’t looked since
Looks like the 2 yr is below 4 now whilst longer yields are going up so I assume any sub 4 deals will be 2 yr.
Once you get past a certain percentage its irrelevant how high it goes. ~35% for China to US trade on most thing is about the max to make it worth sending stuff unless you are willing to put price up incredible amounts or it is a necessity rather than a luxury.
If anyone believes that low skilled mass manufacturing is going to return to rust belt small towns:
Chinese manufacturing labor isn’t just cheaper. It’s better.
In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The workers don’t storm off midshift, never to return to their job. You don’t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.
Chinese workers much less likely to physically attack each other and their manager. They don’t take 30 minute bathroom breaks on company time. They don’t often quit because their out-of-state mother of their children discovered their new job and now receives 60% of their wages as child support. They don’t disappear because they’ve gone on meth benders. And they don’t fall asleep on a box midshift because their pay from yesterday got converted into pills.
And they can do their times tables. To manufacture, you need to be able to consistently and accurately multiply 7 times 9 and read in English, and a disturbingly large portion of the American workforce cannot do that.
Chinese workers work longer hours more happily and they’re physically faster with their hands; they can do things that American labor can’t. It’s years of accumulated skill, but it’s also a culture that is oriented around hard work and education that the United States no longer has.
All very well but if Chinese imported goods face a 100% tariff it makes more sense to have more US based factories producting manufactured goods for the US market no matter how good the Chinese workforce is
You can already buy US made clothing.
Why is it niche rather than mass production ? Because it costs so much more.
The only way to have mass production from the USA from labour intensive factories is to massively increase the sales price of the output.
If you do that many people will not be able to afford it and will not buy it and many people who could afford it will still chose not to buy it.
What you cannot have is low cost items from a western workforce which has a low skill level and a low work ethic.
There's plenty of people in the western world with a high skill level and a high work ethic and these people get high pay and so the price of their output is high.
No, not if more Americans buy US goods as imported goods are more expensive. Trump's tariffs now make US goods relatively cheaper in the US so likely will increase demand for them.
Trump is enforcing lower costs for consumers for US goods in the US by hammering imports from the likes of China with huge tariffs.
The high skilled workers (and at the other extreme those on welfare) largely voted for Harris, it is the middle and lower skilled workers who voted for Trump
@hyufd that doesn't make sense. The US prices aren't going to come down with tariffs are they? It just means the imported prices will go up. For example:
Pre tariff: China T shirt $5, US T shirt $10 Post tariff China T shirt $11, US T shirt still $10
So the customer now buys a US T shirt rather than a China T shirt, but he is a lot poorer as a consequence. You might get factories opening to make cheap T shirts, but they are never going to match the pre tariff price of China. if they could they would have existed in the first place and the US would not have imported Chinese T shirts. So the consumer is always worse off.
And who the hell is going to invest in a factory currently anyway?
Yes so relatively US T shirts will be a dollar cheaper than Chinese T shirts now rather than 5 dollars more expensive on your own figures.
So demand for US T shirts will rise and more US based T shirt factories could open
And 100% inflation. No issues there.
Not if you are a US consumer and now only buy American made goods, that is the gamble Trump is taking, more US goods will be bought instead of imports and more US jobs created despite the price rise in imports
That makes no sense. [snip]
I feel like this might be the point where one of us has to step in and remind you who you're debating with here and - adopting a faux-London/Essex accent - say "leave it, it ain't worth it mate!"
Once you get past a certain percentage its irrelevant how high it goes. ~35% for China to US trade on most thing is about the max to make it worth sending stuff unless you are willing to put price up incredible amounts.
To rational econs sure. To toddler Presidents it will be bigly important that China stops at a lower number than the US.
China has the upper hand in this battle. Why? Because China is NOT reliant on exports to the US. China learned very quickly that being too reliant on one country (especially a one that continuously attacks, sanctions, and tariffs you) would be way too risky. So what did China do? They diversified.
China trades more with SE Asian countries than the USA. China has close relations with 52 nations in Africa, China leads trade in the Middle East and vast majority of developing countries around the globe.
Meanwhile the US is screwed without Chinese manufacturing. Walk through your house and see how many products are Made in China. If Trump doesn't swallow his pride and immediately reverse positions (he won't his ego is WAY too big) then this is the end of the US economy.
The first 100 days of Trump's presidency couldn't have gone any worse. Absolute disaster for the United States
To add to the above the one part of the world economy that might have aligned with the US vs China was the NATO alliance. Trump has shafted Ukraine, threatened the rest of Europe and gone further than that with Canada. So all those countries no longer have any incentive to align with Trump.
Once you get past a certain percentage its irrelevant how high it goes. ~35% for China to US trade on most thing is about the max to make it worth sending stuff unless you are willing to put price up incredible amounts.
Yep I have been saying that for the last few days. I did wonder whether trade would continue via third party countries, but I noted the other day that a UK supplier of drink to America was having to apply the tariff depending upon the rate applicable for the country of origin of the drink.
That is a real mess and although easier for spirits and wine I can't see how that is possible for complex manufactured stuff. God knows what the rules are. I doubt there are any currently.
As mentioned before the NI/Eire border will be fun re exports to USA.
The USA is pushing other countries towards China so the total reverse of what it wants to see . China is now seen as a more reliable trade partner .
This looks like the biggest of own goals by the USA .
Not if the US wants to largely ignore the rest of the world and just produce its own goods and services for its own consumers and stay out of foreign wars and deport illegal immigrants too ie America First as Trump says.
If Trump's tariffs do increase US manufacturing jobs then nationalist parties across the West will also grow further including on a policy of raising tariffs on cheap Chinese goods
If anyone believes that low skilled mass manufacturing is going to return to rust belt small towns:
Chinese manufacturing labor isn’t just cheaper. It’s better.
In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The workers don’t storm off midshift, never to return to their job. You don’t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.
Chinese workers much less likely to physically attack each other and their manager. They don’t take 30 minute bathroom breaks on company time. They don’t often quit because their out-of-state mother of their children discovered their new job and now receives 60% of their wages as child support. They don’t disappear because they’ve gone on meth benders. And they don’t fall asleep on a box midshift because their pay from yesterday got converted into pills.
And they can do their times tables. To manufacture, you need to be able to consistently and accurately multiply 7 times 9 and read in English, and a disturbingly large portion of the American workforce cannot do that.
Chinese workers work longer hours more happily and they’re physically faster with their hands; they can do things that American labor can’t. It’s years of accumulated skill, but it’s also a culture that is oriented around hard work and education that the United States no longer has.
The article clearly contains exaggerations such as "In China, there are no people who are too fat to work." WIth 1.3 billion people, I'm sure there will be quite a few people in this category.
The Chinese aren't supermen or robots.
To the extent this is true, it's because they have to work like this to survive - as Britons did in the mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire in the 19th Century.
As soon as society became more affluent, quite rightly there was a demand for social and employment reform.
The most stupid thing the UK did was having seen that China doesn't act in the global interest during COVID, Boris set up a taskforce to investigate what crucial elements of the supply chain are wholly reliant on China and how could we onshore / do deals with our allies to try to reduce that dependance.
Then he scrapped it.
The premise of the taskforce is what actually what Western countries should be doing.
China has the upper hand in this battle. Why? Because China is NOT reliant on exports to the US. China learned very quickly that being too reliant on one country (especially a one that continuously attacks, sanctions, and tariffs you) would be way too risky. So what did China do? They diversified.
China trades more with SE Asian countries than the USA. China has close relations with 52 nations in Africa, China leads trade in the Middle East and vast majority of developing countries around the globe.
Meanwhile the US is screwed without Chinese manufacturing. Walk through your house and see how many products are Made in China. If Trump doesn't swallow his pride and immediately reverse positions (he won't his ego is WAY too big) then this is the end of the US economy.
The first 100 days of Trump's presidency couldn't have gone any worse. Absolute disaster for the United States
If anyone believes that low skilled mass manufacturing is going to return to rust belt small towns:
Chinese manufacturing labor isn’t just cheaper. It’s better.
In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The workers don’t storm off midshift, never to return to their job. You don’t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.
Chinese workers much less likely to physically attack each other and their manager. They don’t take 30 minute bathroom breaks on company time. They don’t often quit because their out-of-state mother of their children discovered their new job and now receives 60% of their wages as child support. They don’t disappear because they’ve gone on meth benders. And they don’t fall asleep on a box midshift because their pay from yesterday got converted into pills.
And they can do their times tables. To manufacture, you need to be able to consistently and accurately multiply 7 times 9 and read in English, and a disturbingly large portion of the American workforce cannot do that.
Chinese workers work longer hours more happily and they’re physically faster with their hands; they can do things that American labor can’t. It’s years of accumulated skill, but it’s also a culture that is oriented around hard work and education that the United States no longer has.
All very well but if Chinese imported goods face a 100% tariff it makes more sense to have more US based factories producting manufactured goods for the US market no matter how good the Chinese workforce is
You can already buy US made clothing.
Why is it niche rather than mass production ? Because it costs so much more.
The only way to have mass production from the USA from labour intensive factories is to massively increase the sales price of the output.
If you do that many people will not be able to afford it and will not buy it and many people who could afford it will still chose not to buy it.
What you cannot have is low cost items from a western workforce which has a low skill level and a low work ethic.
There's plenty of people in the western world with a high skill level and a high work ethic and these people get high pay and so the price of their output is high.
No, not if more Americans buy US goods as imported goods are more expensive. Trump's tariffs now make US goods relatively cheaper in the US so likely will increase demand for them.
Trump is enforcing lower costs for consumers for US goods in the US by hammering imports from the likes of China with huge tariffs.
The high skilled workers (and at the other extreme those on welfare) largely voted for Harris, it is the middle and lower skilled workers who voted for Trump
@hyufd that doesn't make sense. The US prices aren't going to come down with tariffs are they? It just means the imported prices will go up. For example:
Pre tariff: China T shirt $5, US T shirt $10 Post tariff China T shirt $11, US T shirt still $10
So the customer now buys a US T shirt rather than a China T shirt, but he is a lot poorer as a consequence. You might get factories opening to make cheap T shirts, but they are never going to match the pre tariff price of China. if they could they would have existed in the first place and the US would not have imported Chinese T shirts. So the consumer is always worse off.
And who the hell is going to invest in a factory currently anyway?
Yes so relatively US T shirts will be a dollar cheaper than Chinese T shirts now rather than 5 dollars more expensive on your own figures.
So demand for US T shirts will rise and more US based T shirt factories could open
And 100% inflation. No issues there.
Not if you are a US consumer and now only buy American made goods, that is the gamble Trump is taking, more US goods will be bought instead of imports and more US jobs created despite the price rise in imports
That makes no sense. In the example used the price was $5 if bought from China. American company produces for $10 so American company can't compete.
Tariff raises price to $11 for China produced goods so Americans can now buy US goods which are cheaper than the China products,
However previous price $5. New price $10. 100% inflation.
Of course it does, just don't buy Chinese goods buy American is the Trump message so no inflation
The USA is pushing other countries towards China so the total reverse of what it wants to see . China is now seen as a more reliable trade partner .
This looks like the biggest of own goals by the USA .
Not if the US wants to largely ignore the rest of the world and just produce its own goods and services for its own consumers and stay out of foreign wars and deport illegal immigrants too ie America First as Trump says.
If Trump's tariffs do increase US manufacturing jobs then nationalist parties across the West will also grow further including on a policy of raising tariffs on cheap Chinese goods
American workers aren’t going to produce products at Chinese levels of pay so that will add to inflation. And it takes years to develop new manufacturing.
The USA is pushing other countries towards China so the total reverse of what it wants to see . China is now seen as a more reliable trade partner .
This looks like the biggest of own goals by the USA .
Not if the US wants to largely ignore the rest of the world and just produce its own goods and services for its own consumers and stay out of foreign wars and deport illegal immigrants too ie America First as Trump says.
If Trump's tariffs do increase US manufacturing jobs then nationalist parties across the West will also grow further including on a policy of raising tariffs on cheap Chinese goods
Trump's policy (if not his intent), is to strengthen rival nations at the expense of his own.
China has the upper hand in this battle. Why? Because China is NOT reliant on exports to the US. China learned very quickly that being too reliant on one country (especially a one that continuously attacks, sanctions, and tariffs you) would be way too risky. So what did China do? They diversified.
China trades more with SE Asian countries than the USA. China has close relations with 52 nations in Africa, China leads trade in the Middle East and vast majority of developing countries around the globe.
Meanwhile the US is screwed without Chinese manufacturing. Walk through your house and see how many products are Made in China. If Trump doesn't swallow his pride and immediately reverse positions (he won't his ego is WAY too big) then this is the end of the US economy.
The first 100 days of Trump's presidency couldn't have gone any worse. Absolute disaster for the United States
The most stupid thing the UK did was having seen that China doesn't act in the global interest during COVID, Boris set up a taskforce to investigate what crucial elements of the supply chain are wholly reliant on China and how could we onshore / do deals with our allies to try to reduce that dependance.
Then he scrapped it.
The premise of the taskforce is what actually what Western countries should be doing.
Along with the vaccines task force. I think the blob just reasserted itself.
For about the 20th post Electoral Calculus is worthless in this scenario. It is not designed for it. You might as well make up numbers. For instance the LD have a significant increase in support yet lose 8 seats. I would think the rest are out by even more. It is not designed for Reform's existence as a major party and the consequential low vote for Lab/Tory.
If anyone believes that low skilled mass manufacturing is going to return to rust belt small towns:
Chinese manufacturing labor isn’t just cheaper. It’s better.
In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The workers don’t storm off midshift, never to return to their job. You don’t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.
Chinese workers much less likely to physically attack each other and their manager. They don’t take 30 minute bathroom breaks on company time. They don’t often quit because their out-of-state mother of their children discovered their new job and now receives 60% of their wages as child support. They don’t disappear because they’ve gone on meth benders. And they don’t fall asleep on a box midshift because their pay from yesterday got converted into pills.
And they can do their times tables. To manufacture, you need to be able to consistently and accurately multiply 7 times 9 and read in English, and a disturbingly large portion of the American workforce cannot do that.
Chinese workers work longer hours more happily and they’re physically faster with their hands; they can do things that American labor can’t. It’s years of accumulated skill, but it’s also a culture that is oriented around hard work and education that the United States no longer has.
All very well but if Chinese imported goods face a 100% tariff it makes more sense to have more US based factories producting manufactured goods for the US market no matter how good the Chinese workforce is
You can already buy US made clothing.
Why is it niche rather than mass production ? Because it costs so much more.
The only way to have mass production from the USA from labour intensive factories is to massively increase the sales price of the output.
If you do that many people will not be able to afford it and will not buy it and many people who could afford it will still chose not to buy it.
What you cannot have is low cost items from a western workforce which has a low skill level and a low work ethic.
There's plenty of people in the western world with a high skill level and a high work ethic and these people get high pay and so the price of their output is high.
No, not if more Americans buy US goods as imported goods are more expensive. Trump's tariffs now make US goods relatively cheaper in the US so likely will increase demand for them.
Trump is enforcing lower costs for consumers for US goods in the US by hammering imports from the likes of China with huge tariffs.
The high skilled workers (and at the other extreme those on welfare) largely voted for Harris, it is the middle and lower skilled workers who voted for Trump
@hyufd that doesn't make sense. The US prices aren't going to come down with tariffs are they? It just means the imported prices will go up. For example:
Pre tariff: China T shirt $5, US T shirt $10 Post tariff China T shirt $11, US T shirt still $10
So the customer now buys a US T shirt rather than a China T shirt, but he is a lot poorer as a consequence. You might get factories opening to make cheap T shirts, but they are never going to match the pre tariff price of China. if they could they would have existed in the first place and the US would not have imported Chinese T shirts. So the consumer is always worse off.
And who the hell is going to invest in a factory currently anyway?
Yes so relatively US T shirts will be a dollar cheaper than Chinese T shirts now rather than 5 dollars more expensive on your own figures.
So demand for US T shirts will rise and more US based T shirt factories could open
US produced T-Shirts are likely to rise in price, in the absence of competition.
If you're a manufacturer of US T-Shirts, or employed by one, you benefit. If you're a US consumer, you lose. There will be individual companies, and some workers, who will benefit from high tariffs, but the typical American will lose.
And, if you're a US company that sources commodities or products from abroad, you can't set up new domestic supply chains overnight. And, some commodities (like Vanilla, or various types of oil), can't even be found anywhere in the USA. You're going to get hammered, which is why the share prices of such companies are plummeting.
Donald Trump is simply a raging Id, without an Ego or Superego.
Even a 50% tariff on Vietnamese or Bangladeshi t shirts wholesale price at the importers would make them cheaper than the USA made ones.
I don't think that the tariffs will impact sales much, just sucker US consumers.
It would be a 100% tariff if necessary a la on China
One of the biggest moves and probably with more thought out plan more sensible angle to Trumps current moves is the de minimis rules. But of course Trump just went banned next week....
Chinese companies like Shein and Temu (but also all the dodgy sellers on Amazon, Ebay, etc) absolutely abuse both the subsidised postal rates and de minimis rules, knackering genuine importers of products to a country.
Comments
@JavierBlas
·
2h
The sound of the global economy slowing down.
It's better known as a Formula One team, but Hass is also one the world's top-10 machine tools companies, crucial to build new factories. It's now warning of a "dramatic decrease" in new orders from both US and foreign customers.
https://x.com/JavierBlas
https://www.walmart.com/ip/American-Giant-Unisex-USA-Tee-Shirt-Men-s-Sizes-XS-3XL/5549559106
Bet that includes undocumented labour…
Their "dystopian" claims were very poorly evidenced, and were they were unable to engage seriously with questions from the interviewer.
The government claims that only those convicted of at least one criminal offence are included in the study. It doesn't seem a daft idea to conduct risk assessments in this area - particularly given the criticism government comes in for when parolees re-offend.
“This project is being conducted for research purposes only. It has been designed using existing data held by HM Prison and Probation Service and police forces on convicted offenders to help us better understand the risk of people on probation going on to commit serious violence. A report will be published in due course.”
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5239461-trump-tariffs-will-help-house-republican-midterms/
..President Trump told House Republicans on Tuesday that his tariffs will help them ahead of the midterm elections in 2026.
“We’re going to win the midterm elections and we’re going to have a tremendous, thundering landslide. I really believe that,” Trump said, speaking at the National Republican Congressional Committee fundraising dinner.
“It’s so important that we pass the big, beautiful bill,” he continued. “And I really think we’re helped a lot by the tariff situation that’s going on, which is a good situation,” “It’s going to be legendary, you watch.”
Trump’s comments came after he dug in on the matter, and markets erased their small gains, as seen on Tuesday morning. ..
How much of the rest of his revenge agenda gets rolled back?
https://www.murdermap.co.uk/victims/murders-london-2025-total-how-many/
The fat get eaten.
It's why Chris Patten - "Fat Peng" - had to leg it out of HK...
https://x.com/bobgoochman/status/1907287156491477150
(Serious Q. I'm probably inclined to slow cooked or seared, with horseradish sauce - obviously, and a dark gravy or rice and topping.)
The US defaulting on bonds would be an interesting new step.
He doesn't think that ordinary pensions are exposed to the stock market in the USA? Or that nearly half of Usonians invest in shares?
Or that import duties feed through to the customer in days?
He's intelligent, and I think knows what he is doing. But also imo stupid in his methods, partly because he is an arrogant swine. He is also a liar - see for example his fairy stories around "assault on free speech" in Europe.
I note from the risk assessment:
We will ensure that the work’s results are quality
assured and peer reviewed. Any significant outputs
will be documented in a single source of the truth,
which will also include any assumptions, caveats
and limitations in relation to the outputs. Be very
clear about who the cohort are to ensure there is
no expectation for this work to be applied at police
level. Set a high expectation for transparency with
the steering board. Save all code in Github to
enable reproducibility and audit...
Further:
The project has very specific aims and its funding
is signed off for limited time only. We plan to
delete all police data (both raw and any
derivatives) once the project is finished. Any
further analysis using this data will go through
another DPIA process.
A couple of minutes checking by the Guardian reporter would have relegated it to a minor mention.
My assumption is that at some point this nonsense will be stopped before the damage gets too catastrophic. This may prove to be a normalcy bias on my part but it remains my working assumption.
https://fortune.com/2024/09/21/kamala-harris-campaign-finance-wall-street-silicon-valley-elon-musk-crypto-donald-trump/
https://www.ft.com/content/2941e79d-cdc0-457e-a7a3-9c08f1f6e635
https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2024/10/30/kamala-harris-has-more-billionaires-prominently-backing-her-than-trump-bezos-and-griffin-weigh-in-updated/
Johnson would have celebrated with a fanfare, bunting, party cake, and probably a JCB would be involved.
The Guardian"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wf0xC2JzlM
Retirement plans postponed indefinitely.
Hey ho. Quite like working anyway.
Now my pension, on the other hand... well, I haven't looked and don't intend to.
The slightly smaller one is how far that row-back goes. But even if Trump is sent away to live on a farm where he is very happy but we can't visit him, even if the formal rules were to go back to what they were before, confidence in the USA's reputation isn't coming back fully.
Has more bad news come out in the last few minutes ?
I don't think that the tariffs will impact sales much, just sucker US consumers.
Clothing, electronics, anything with Aluminium in it, MAGA hats. I doubt any large machine, plane, boat, car etc is 100% American. I'm guessing a large amount of stuff has something in that comes from overseas even if put together in America.
Lets assume for a moment that manufacturing actually gets created again in the US for all these sectors where it was lost previously. That a MAGA industrialist makes the leap of faith and builds a factory and partners with other MAGA industrialists to create a MAGA supply chain for this MAGA factory.
So we now have MAGA Inc making iPhones or Tshirts or Laptops or whatever. In the US. For the US market.
Who is going to buy their items? The cost will be prohibitive. The reason that production was outsourced to cheaper labour markets is because Americans cant afford to pay other Americans to make the stuff they can afford.
Tariff raises price to $11 for China produced goods so Americans can now buy US goods which are cheaper than the China products,
However previous price $5. New price $10. 100% inflation.
China trades more with SE Asian countries than the USA. China has close relations with 52 nations in Africa, China leads trade in the Middle East and vast majority of developing countries around the globe.
Meanwhile the US is screwed without Chinese manufacturing. Walk through your house and see how many products are Made in China. If Trump doesn't swallow his pride and immediately reverse positions (he won't his ego is WAY too big) then this is the end of the US economy.
The first 100 days of Trump's presidency couldn't have gone any worse. Absolute disaster for the United States
https://x.com/thecyrusjanssen/status/1909273667852267825
This looks like the biggest of own goals by the USA .
That is a real mess and although easier for spirits and wine I can't see how that is possible for complex manufactured stuff. God knows what the rules are. I doubt there are any currently.
As mentioned before the NI/Eire border will be fun re exports to USA.
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/fcgi-bin/usercode.py?scotcontrol=N&CON=23&LAB=24&LIB=17&Reform=24&Green=7&UKIP=&TVCON=&TVLAB=&TVLIB=&TVReform=&TVGreen=&TVUKIP=&SCOTCON=&SCOTLAB=&SCOTLIB=&SCOTReform=&SCOTGreen=&SCOTUKIP=&SCOTNAT=&display=AllChanged&regorseat=(none)&boundary=2024base
If Trump's tariffs do increase US manufacturing jobs then nationalist parties across the West will also grow further including on a policy of raising tariffs on cheap Chinese goods
To the extent this is true, it's because they have to work like this to survive - as Britons did in the mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire in the 19th Century.
As soon as society became more affluent, quite rightly there was a demand for social and employment reform.
Then he scrapped it.
The premise of the taskforce is what actually what Western countries should be doing.
Ed Davey doing well by calling out Trump, plus Local Election campaigning.
Unlike the Mad king, who is currently finding out...
Tariffs are now at the point where they could gum up all trade
Which would be bad
Chinese companies like Shein and Temu (but also all the dodgy sellers on Amazon, Ebay, etc) absolutely abuse both the subsidised postal rates and de minimis rules, knackering genuine importers of products to a country.