Posted by Leary 4/5/2025
It's utter incompetence and laziness. But when you vote in lazy incompetence, then that's what you get.
There's a list of real tariffs for various countries here https://x.com/ianbremmer/status/1908609257756336239
The circular situation seems not so common but countries like Camboidia don't import much from the US because the people there don't have much money, so the Trump formula makes their 'effective rate' 97% whereas their actual tariffs are 7.9%. The net effect is to hammer the poorest countries.
Ironically the Cambodians don't have much money to buy US stuff because of terrible governments that got in partly as a result of the US destabilizing things by bombing the country. They don't seem to have much luck with the US.
Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Korea, El Salvador, chile, Colombia, Iran and on and on.
Now it seems there is just one country benefiting from their relationship to the States…
he does have a bunch of crypto pump and dumpers as advisors.
So say, ACME is trading at 110. I can buy the right to sell you ACME at 100. You say ok because it's at 110.
But then ACME crashes to 50.
I buy it at 50 and you are on the hook to buy it from me at 100.
https://www.morningstar.com/funds/2-etfs-that-track-congress...
All the numbers on what a country is supposedly charging america appear to be a complete fabrication so we're forced to find other motivation for setting the numbers the way they did.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/04/critics-suspect-...
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/apr/04/revea...
I have three theories, based this article.
1. The administration used an LLM on certain data and it incorrectly conflated the countries.
2. Certain companies listed regions of export to avoid customs, duties, or for other reasons and it now indirectly got exposed. The article alludes to this without saying so?
3. The administration listed what seemed like inconsequential regions for the purpose of preventing Australia, for this example, of just saying it was exported from Norfolk Islands to dodge tariffs. Although, this is giving the administration way too much credit and if they are reading this don’t steal this as reason. :-)
So the conclusion is that the intern failed geography and did not realize that those aren't countries.
Everyone is reacting to this like it's a mystery. The architect literally wrote down the why: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43594549
There are multiple of these explanations and none od them is consistent with actual decisions.
https://xcancel.com/JamesSurowiecki/status/19075591892341969...
(when describing the model) Let ε<0 represent the elasticity of imports with respect to import prices...
(when implementing the model) The price elasticity of import demand, ε, was set at 4.
4 is less than 0, right? Right?!?
> The recent experience with U.S. tariffs on China has demonstrated that tariff passthrough to retail prices was low (Cavallo et al, 2021).
The line that says "sure, tariffs won't cost consumers _that_ much", and they don't even have a bibliographic entry for Cavallo et al. 2021.
I debated doing that. I wish I had, I would have made a bit of money in the last few days.
The details weren't public. You can stop feeling being bad about yourself.
But, fanatics can intimidate and stalk Fed employees, with the executive conveniently withholding law enforcement response.
I mean, I don't doubt that it's true, but it seems more like an opportunity to make some money on the side than a reason to do it in the first place.
I also feel that this is a ripping the band aid off approach to destroying globalism. The Biden administration was already toning down the globalism of Peter Ziehan was correct, as we saw with their tepid responses to the red sea fiasco but now Trump has upped the attacks on the houthis too so I'm not quite sure what to think.
> Hey look, we write US policy, don't mess with Russia or we'll have the US mess with you.
If that's not the case, why not take the zero-cost step to avoid making it look like that's what it is?
Anyone who's trying to make arguments based on the formula itself is the dog being wagged.
Martinique is a region and department of France—and administrative subdivision of the same type as those in the French mainland, differing only in that the the top two levels of subdivision (region and department) are coextensive rather than nested in Martinique and the other overseas region/departments.
The EU shares a border with the UK (island of Ireland) and the UK also has lower rates: just drive a truck over the border.
More 'funny': Diego Garcia (officially British Indian Ocean Territory).
An island in the Indian Ocean whose only inhabitants are UK and US military personnel.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Garcia
* https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/03/5-bizarre-locations-hit-by-t...
It might actually be ha-ha funny if this wasn't creating havoc on international commerce and people's lives.
Also, would MAGA want a new US state from Africa?
I found an article[1] but perhaps someone here knows more or is there in person.
> Lesotho exported $237m of goods last year to the US and imported $2.8m. Agoa[2], which has allowed tariff-free access to the US market for thousands of product types since 2000, created a thriving garment industry, accounting for about 20% of GDP.
> There are about 30,000 garment workers in Lesotho, mostly women, with 12,000 making clothes for US brands including Levi’s, Calvin Klein and Walmart in Chinese- and Taiwanese-owned factories.
> “(…) If we lose our jobs here, I’m almost certain that many of us will end up sleeping on empty stomachs.”
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/apr/04/l...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Growth_and_Opportunity...
A sane tariff policy would be set up to penalize these very low wage exporters to give competitive advantage to exporters and local producers with higher wages but also to incentivize higher wages in a way that set rates make producers more profitable if they paid workers more (and likewise other human development and environmental etc issues)
How does that help them? Oh, right. You don't care about them, actually. You just have this vague ideal that people should earn more money. Maybe not even that. You just want tariffs for some inexplicable reason. Because tariffs cannot give these people higher salaries. That's not how any of this works.
The part about giving a competitive advantage to local producers is true, though…
for countries that pay a worker $15 dollars a day put a tariff on the goods produced by that work to total $4
therefore someone importing goods produced by one worker in one day from the lower wage country would spend $20 for the goods from the lower wage country but only $19 for the goods for the higher wage country giving a competitive advantage for higher wages
obviously that is a simplistic example but that's what i mean using tariffs to incentivize better behavior and level the playing field so the most exploitation doesn't make the most money
But now you see that the low wage manufacturer has a third option, $10 labor + $1 markup + 10 tariff ($21), which would maintain their competitive advantage and in this scenario only cut their daily per employee profit by $2, as opposed to the $5 hit they would suffer by raising their employee wages to $15 day from $10.
What I'm saying is set a minimum wage on imports. Set a global minimum wage. Anyone importing something from somewhere that doesn't meet that minimum wage would have to pay a tariff greater than the amount saved with low wages.
The goal is to increase competition and improve fairness between locations. You wouldn't want to do it all at once at first, rather a gradual increase. You wouldn't want to distort the local economy too much so don't insist somewhere pay 10x the median local wage. Lots of things you would do which are more complex with an eye for fairness and competitiveness and definitely not trying to raise everyone by force to American levels of wages, but always measured amounts of pressure.
How do you expect them to magic higher salaries?
I feel that conflating tariffs with some sort of negotiation tool to bring about positive global change is disingenuous, because the real aim is clearly protectionism.
This would mean, of course, that the people who happen to work for an export-oriented factory become much more wealthy than most people in Lesotho. So you might reasonably wonder whether it's better to make twice as many workers half as wealthy. Labor advocates believe the answer is no: paying some people genuinely good wages both creates and encourages further development, while paying a larger number of people "good enough" wages encourages poor countries to race to the bottom competing for the lowest standard of "good enough".
Putting tariffs on places that have a 20x factor difference in wages is something else.
And protectionism isn't necessarily a dirty word. It's often valuable to save your local industries from being wiped out and to not have a foreign country have complete control of a necessity.
A truely laughable suggestion.
Whether that works out better for the exploited is uncertain. But the alternative argument is effectively "these poor countries should be happy to let themselves be exploited" it is their only way out of poverty. And that really doesn't sit right with me.
But it is clear that the reasoning here is "I want tarrifs, how do I easily get them". And then they found the easiest possible way to say something about 'countries putting a tarrif on the US'.
The stupid theory behind this is effectively: not having a minimum wage is equivalent to putting a tarrif on the US. Which would suggest that the low US minimum wage is actually already a tarrif on the EU.
The current administration is like... if you're being charitable you can imagine at some point someone had a reasonable set of ideas that got filtered through a long string of fools in a game of telephone so now we have an angry toddler with a gun destroying the global economy on the basis of ideas which very well may have been interesting at the beginning of the chain but have long since descended into incoherence.
That sounds amazing..how would that work?
Yeah, but the last large piece of it (there are still some amall remnants) got wiped out with the most recent push for eliminating large scale non-penal slavery in the US.
And, no, I don’t mean abolishing formal chattel slavery with the 13th Amendment, I mean the push to eliminate the informal de facto slavery that persisted in the US territory of the Confederation of the Northern Mariana Islands around the turn of the millenium.