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Posted by Anon84 4/4/2025

Trump's Trade War Escalates as China Retaliates with 34% Tariffs(www.nytimes.com)
178 points | 204 commentspage 2
ChrisArchitect 4/4/2025|
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43580289
incomingpain 4/4/2025||
When obama brought in his affordable healthcare, one of the big issues he discovered was that healthcare in the usa depends almost entirely on exports from china.

the other issue at the same time for the democrats was that they were losing middle american votes because the globalists shipped those jobs overseas.

There has been bipartisan support to exit globalism since; and it is over obviously. Obama, Biden, and Trump have all be making major changes to exit.

Without the need for global trade, the usa is also no longer world police. They have instead condensed their blue water navies down to super carrier groups that will project power into specific spots like yemen/houthis for example.

The usa rather abruptly switched from trying to sustain stability over the world to the opposite; they benefit from causing chaos elsewhere because backhome stability will be attractive to investors.

Welcome to how trade always was; we usually had our navies trading bullets and not goods.

China isn't ready and these retaliatory tariffs will only punish themselves.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2020/february/chi...

sandworm101 4/4/2025||
>> Trump's Trade War

That might be how it is understood locally, but on an international scale this is quickly moving from "Trump's" to "America's" trade war. Various levels of US government have had opportunity to weigh in, but have generally acquiesced to the recent tariff policies. Calling this a "trump problem" wont fly much longer. This is now American trade policy.

Herring 4/4/2025||
Yeah 1) He won the popular vote. His support actually increased the 2nd time around, and 2) He should be in a tiny jail cell right now, what was Biden doing for 4 years?

This isn’t going away even if he leaves office in 4 years (which is looking unlikely).

kashunstva 4/4/2025||
> He should be in a tiny jail cell right now, what was Biden doing for 4 years?

Not causing a global financial crisis, mainly. But vis-a-vis his predecessor’s recurrent criminality, it’s hard to imagine what his options were, considering the capture of the remaining branches of government. Well, that, and the Constitution.

tim333 4/4/2025||
With hindsight Biden should maybe have encouraged the Jan 6th prosecution to happen less than four years after the event.
jajko 4/4/2025||
[flagged]
ty6853 4/4/2025||
What economist is advising Trump? Can we read their game plan somewhere?
mraniki 4/4/2025|
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Navarro
bamboozled 4/4/2025||
specifically America’s chronic and ever-expanding trade deficit — says that America is the globe’s biggest trade loser and a victim of unfair, unbalanced, and nonreciprocal trade"

Finally the source of “we’ve been treated unfairly” is revealed?

Aloisius 4/4/2025||
Eh. Not really. Trump has been espousing the same mercantilist zero-sum game view about trade since the 1980s.

He simply picked an economic advisor who shares his views.

bamboozled 4/5/2025||
Well that's why I put a question mark on the end of my sentence :) Thanks.
tonetheman 4/4/2025||
Not sure why anyone would trust someone who has bankrupted 6 companies personally and directly to make any choices on the economy.
oldpersonintx 4/4/2025||
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ai_is_great 4/4/2025||
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erelong 4/4/2025||
[flagged]
sgc 4/4/2025||
This has to be a clumsy attempt at a willfully deceptive comment, right? The aggressor starts the war, but the defender will not sit by idly. They must fight back. Do you somehow think only China will do this? The US is about to get its comeuppance in a very painful way.
kashunstva 4/4/2025|||
> Kinda weird to call it this

You do realize how this began?

erelong 4/4/2025||
A growing trade deficit with China not respecting "intellectual property" and other such things?
rjtavares 4/4/2025||
You can't be serious...

It's like arguing against the expression "Putin's war in Ukraine" because Ukraine retaliated with drones.

erelong 4/4/2025||
Wikipedia calls it "China–United States trade war"... would this be thought to be inaccurate?
rjtavares 4/4/2025||
Wikipedia also calls Putin's war "Russo-Ukrainian War". I have no problem with either name. That's the point.
reedjosh 4/4/2025||
34% additional. AFAICT they already charged 34%.

Does that put us at 68%?

boxed 4/4/2025|
How is it retaliation to destroy your own economy by making the same bad life choices? Isn't actual retaliation to just ignore the entire thing and thank the US for the extra percentage points in advantage you got for free?
rjtavares 4/4/2025||
You can't be bullied and not respond - that's an invite for future bullying.

Besides, this isn't at all the same. China isn't adding tariffs on the whole world like the US are.

Trasmatta 4/4/2025|||
I'm continually surprised how many people here don't understand this simple principle. It seems to come up with every thread about Russia too.
boxed 4/6/2025||||
But it's not bullying. It's self harm. You don't respond to self harm by harming yourself.
morsecodist 4/4/2025|||
If you assume the US tariffs are unchangeable then you would be right but the hope of retaliatory tariffs is that they will get the US to update it's tariffs in response to the economic harm caused. It will also harm China of course but I would imagine they hope the harm caused to the US will reduce the tariffs and leave China better off in the long run. This is not totally unreasonable, the US is ostensibly more sensitive to the economic conditions of it's citizens so one could imagine China outlasting the US in this game of chicken.
bitshiftfaced 4/4/2025|||
If the US is consistent with the tariff policy that they've laid out, then I'd expect the opposite to happen. If China increases their tariffs and as a result increases their trade surplus, then that means that the US's tariffs go up as they are a function of the US's trade deficit.
surgical_fire 4/4/2025|||
Nobody is increasing anything.

When China applies tariffs against the US, the result is that China imports the goods it needs from other countries. For example, now that US soy is prohibitively expensive for Chinese importers, they can buy from Brazil (who China is not applying the same tariffs against).

In the case of the US, the US importers cannot switch to anyone else, since it decided to go full trade war against every single country.

bitshiftfaced 4/4/2025||
I'm not following. If China buys soy from Brazil instead of the US, and the US imports the same amount overall from China in either case, then doesn't that increase China's trade surplus with the US?
morsecodist 4/4/2025|||
> If the US is consistent with the tariff policy

This is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The US can say it's tariff policy is whatever it wants but the administration is under constraints. If there was some extremely compelling data that the economic effects caused by the retaliatory tariffs would cause an overwhelming democratic victory at the midterms that would have a much bigger effect on policy than the formula for tariffs the administration wrote down. I am not predicting this definitely will happen but it is the kind of thing I am sure people are considering when they are imposing retaliatory tariffs.

UncleEntity 4/4/2025|||
I asked the google and it appears a big chunk of Chinese imports are agricultural products. Farmers not having a market to sell their products into isn't such a good thing for any administration so they seem to have a bunch of leverage on this point alone.
bitshiftfaced 4/4/2025||
China can hit American farmers, but their overall trade surplus is $295 billion. The US has much more leverage.
n4r9 4/4/2025|||
The USA accounts for 15% of China's exports. That's big. But the US is facing retaliatory tariffs from not just China but also Canada and the EU and others, accounting for over 35% of US exports. China is betting on the rest of the world being tough to the US, and it might well pay off.
morsecodist 4/4/2025||||
Trade surplus is not sufficient to analyze the issue here. It is about commitment. What you want is something closer to the probability that the trade surplus will lead to a policy change. Even if it is true that the average Chinese citizen will be more negatively impacted than the average US citizen that negative impact doesn't equally translate to policy change. The US congress is fairly evenly split. It doesn't take that much to cause a policy shift.
UncleEntity 4/4/2025|||
There simply isn't a whole lot of alternatives to Chinese imports to the US.

So while tariffs will stop some importation of Chinese goods due to costs others are just going to cost more for consumers until the proposed US manufacturing capacity is build up.

Same with auto parts, even the US car makers rely on foreign made parts and have no real alternatives.

bitshiftfaced 4/4/2025||
Until there are alternatives. When the price of a given product increases, it becomes more attractive for competitors to invest in making that product.
rsynnott 4/4/2025|||
Even if companies are convinced they need to manufacture stuff locally (ie they believe these tariffs are never going away, whereas in practice you'd expect that, at absolute most, they're gone within four years, likely two, and maybe within weeks), you're talking about years to build up production capacity. China is likely taking the (reasonable) view that US consumers won't put up with years of higher prices.
UncleEntity 4/4/2025|||
Sure, unless they flip-flop on tariffs and make your investment not as attractive as it initially seemed.

People assume there's going to be massive investments into what is essentially an uncertain market. A reversal of the capital outflows of the previous decades or something, dunno?

Why, exactly, would people from other countries chose to invest in the US when they could just keep their investments at home and/or engage with more reliable trading partners like the EU, South America or Asia?

n4r9 4/4/2025|||
Not if this doesn't actually destroy their economy and gives them even more percentage points. Also the USA has imposed tariffs on almost everyone whereas China has specifically targeted the USA with tariffs. They have much more scope to re-source their imports.
rsynnott 4/4/2025|||
They likely expect Europe and the other big economies to join in. US attacks every country in the world, most of those countries retaliate by attacking the US (at this point, the US, which has a trade war with the world, is in a worse position than everyone else, who only have trade wars with the US), US capitulates, would be the theory. The intent is to make the problem go away, quickly. Of course, the flaw there is that this requires borderline-sane leadership.
happytoexplain 4/4/2025|||
"Be the better person" is a good rule of thumb, but it's a bad strategy when somebody attacks you materially.
guerrilla 4/4/2025||
It's not about that. It's about China imposing tarrifs being harmful to China. The US shot itself in the foot. Should we also shoot ourselves in our feet? No, we can just stand back and let them bleed to death.
twixfel 4/4/2025||
The us has shot itself in the head, china is shooting itself in the foot.
eCa 4/4/2025|||
One idea is to increase incentives to buy non-US goods. And I really hope the EU puts similar incentives on services.
Spooky23 4/4/2025||
It’s a war, man. You inflict pain on your enemy. Trump has a pattern of tucking tail when confronted.
dr-smooth 4/4/2025|||
Amazing that anybody can look at that guy and think he's "strong". It's so obvious that he's a chicken shit at heart. I mean I guess he talks big, although his language and vocabulary is so stunted, I can't even see that. I guess he was really brave after getting "shot" (probably nicked his own ear with a fingernail when he was pulled to the ground by secret service).
boxed 4/6/2025|||
But tariffs are a pain on YOURSELF. It's self harm.