I found out yesterday that the port of LA has a free real-time dashboard (https://tower.portoptimizer.com/) so you can check the stats yourself. While it's interesting that next (week 19) shows a 35% drop YoY, the following week predicts a 25% increase from w19 and "only" 8.7% drop YoY.
The youtuber 'What's going on with shipping?' has a good description in; it includes pointers to loads of sites with the actual data.
Sal Mercogliano who runs "What's Going On with Shipping?" is one of the best informed commentators in the subjects of logistics and shipping. He's also a skilled presenter... enough so that I subscribe to his channel and I've not got any real special interest in subject (but I do recognize it's economic importance).
Also, in a different comment, his work at Campbell is mentioned, but I think that leaves open why he has anything important to say on the subject. His bio at the U.S. Naval Institute is more informative:
"Dr. Salvatore R. Mercogliano is an associate professor of history at Campbell University in North Carolina and adjunct professor at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy. He holds a bachelor of science in marine transportation from the State University of New York Maritime College, along with a merchant marine deck officer license (unlimited tonnage 2nd mate), a master’s in maritime history and nautical archaeology from East Carolina University, and a Ph.D. in military and naval history from the University of Alabama."
Wow I loved this "What's going on with US Ports" video. Subscribed. I love channels like this. People with a deep understanding that just report facts as they are.
I wish more mainstream media did this.
That's the thing. "Mainstream" Media in the US are no longer bound to the fairness doctrine. Thus, we have corporate ownership which steers how a story is written or at all. Independent media beholden only to their viewers (not corporate benefactors) are incentivized to do what you want more effectively.
Thank goodness the alternative media is bound by the fairness doctrine and don't choose how to cover a story, or if at all, and not incentived to reinforce their audience's beliefs and extremify content for views.
At least they ensure they are well researched on the matters they talk about. Right?
I mean media was never fair. Started out with corporate interests at heart in the early days - only kicked off fairness in the 60s i believe.
How do you determine who among independent media are fair?
Been seeing his videos pop up more. Wasn’t sure if it was completely legit or just reactionary takes but I’ll check one out now thanks.
im in the merchant marine and this guy is our god
this guy really blew up after that bridge went down in Baltimore
> The youtuber 'What's going on with shipping?'
The "Youtuber" is actually a professor and Chair, Department of History, Criminal Justice and Politics at Campbell:
You mean the chair of the department of history is actually a YouTuber.
Someday colleges will have Tubers, who outrank Chairs.
Indeed, and some Tubers will be Common Taters, while others will be Gingers, and some will rise to the ranks of Howard Cosell
The job is essentially the same: publish or perish.
I, like Houston Wade, have for years been like, "why don't I see any ships or activity" each time I pass by the ports of LA/LB. But I, unlike Houston Wade, wouldn't be so arrogant to conclude from my observation that shipping has stopped.
[flagged]
We all have LLMs available we can feed things through of we want a machine summary and don't want to read ourselves, please don't choke HN with machine generated content.
Echoing davidw's comments down thread, I would love if HN put a collapsed, expandable LLM summary like this after every Youtube link.
Speak for yourself. I have no such llm as easily accessible as this comment was.
This is pretty useful, actually, downvoters. My friends and I were discussing this video yesterday and I was pretty irritated that it took 10 whole minutes to debunk the social media hyperbole. That could have easily been a blog post that I could have skimmed in 1 minute.
It's a textbook case of why I tend to dislike video as a format.
An HN user that shares their own summary is providing a unique perspective that only they could offer. That's a great contribution to the site that reinforces community and gets encouraged.
An HN user that shares an LLM summary is cluttering the site with the output of a program that anybody could have run. That's just noise that detracts from our community.
HN isn't structured to handle programmatic participation the way Twitter/BlueSky/etc are. It maintains its distinguishing character by being a community of people talking to people instead, and it's appropriate to vote/flag in accordance with that.
Ideally, people posting a video link will include a short summary. HN is heavily text-based and unlike text links, you can't skim/scan and decide whether it's worth to spend 10 mins. It doesn't help that most videos are pretty information-sparse and should properly be a 2-3 min read.
Anyway, I don't mind the downvotes, but it'd be nice if people started including summaries with video links.
Better yet, let’s just add LLM summaries of all articles and links on Hacker News directly. Now I never have to read the linked article.
You might consider using Sponsorblock. It has a highlight feature that often allows you to jump to the main point of the video as determined by user-generated submissions.
> An HN user that shares their own summary is providing a unique perspective that only they could offer. That's a great contribution to the site that reinforces community and gets encouraged.
A user shared a link. Another user provided a summary of that link. I don’t need the second user to provide his own unique take on the link.
> An HN user that shares an LLM summary is cluttering the site with the output of a program that anybody could have run.
You could make the same argument about throwing paywalled links into the Wayback Machine. It does not add a unique perspective to the discussion and anyone could do it themselves, but those links are almost always at the top of the thread.
The problem is that no layman can know whether the summary is correct without watching the video, so it takes 11 minutes instead of 10 to assess the information with the summary.
A few relevant charts from the video in the blog post, with links to authoritative sources is plenty to understand that he's correct, without sitting through an entire 10 minutes of video.
I'm undecided. I hate these llm summaries, and nearly always downvote them. They're rarely helpful, often unpleasant, and very very lazy.
But... I may hate links to videos even more. A summary of a video isn't lazy, it's nearly a requirement. So, an upvote for now, at least.
Be the change you want to see in the world. You can write that blog!
No, I can't. I don't know anything about shipping. But the things I do know about - I sure am not doing drawn out videos about them.
You’re right, but if I want an LLM to summarize a video I can do it myself. I come to HN to talk to humans; talking to AIs makes me depressed. That’s why I downvote immediately every time anyone posts LLM content here.
Gamers Nexus essentially produced a 3-hr doc on how changing tariffs affect the US computer industry: "The Death of Affordable Computing | Tariffs Impact & Investigation" https://youtu.be/1W_mSOS1Qts?si=pBVt65SMqb1p-Zte . Best part is having a product manager show a spreadsheet of costs and margins and explain in real terms ($$$) what tariffs do to their business.
Two interesting things I took away from that were first that the uncertainty and constant changes of mind by the President on the actual rates and lack of reliable communications were almost as harmful as the tariffs. Second, that there is a "snowball effect" in that you often have to pre-pay, so you take out more loans at a worse interest rate to make your order and then if because costs went up, you order fewer items as well as being hit with a higher per-item cost.
The whole thing is a mess and shows how incompetent the current implementation is.
it's called strategic uncertainty :D
Hmm, I’ve been using the phrase a fox in the hen house. Seems apt?
It’s why the government needs to curb and heel billionaires. A bunch of techbros who mistake money for smarts pushes an obviously dumb strategy to a pack of populist clowns and grifters.
That should not be possible. The kickback from this mania is going to be pretty extreme pain for these clowns.
I fear you will be proved wrong.
If history is any indication, then the blowback will be leveraged (successfully) to point fingers at other parties (doesn't matter who), and then the proposed remedy will be to double-down:
"It didn't work the first time around because we weren't strong-willed/determined/patriotic enough, this time We Must Go All In, and stamp out any dissidents with extreme prejudice, for they are the Enemy holding us back from our Finest Hour!"
etc, etc.
"needs to" and "should not" are idealistic words.
What will happen is either a collapse of the US economy or a collapse of the Trump administration.
Even if the administration grows a brain and reverses course, we are on course for a COVID-like supply chain shock that will cause major pain. Not to mention the loss of trust that will absolutely depress the needed regrowth.
They'll blame Joe Biden, immigrants, Democrats, the Woke Mob, DEI, and trans people before they blame themselves.
It’s even farmers and growers -
Seeds sourced from China - which a lot are - have skyrocketed in price.
Maybe I am being foolishly optimistic, the section in the video (~ 4:50) where it is mentioned that some giant seed corporation is staying the course betting that this thing will blow over in a quarter or so actually gives me some hope ?
IMO, which isn’t worth a lot, it’ll go on as long as Trump refuses to eat crow. China hunkered down under extreme duress during COVID and emerged stable. We barely managed to survive much milder restrictions. And that was a global natural disaster of no one’s choosing. In this situation it’s all artificial, but it stokes the nationalism of literally every other country than America. The imperialism and condescension at work, the pure malice towards our allies and partners, it all works against America. China will never bend and nor do they need to or should they. In fact at this point it’s probably a point of national pride to maximize the embarrassment of Trump, and national strategy to push him into a corner hoping he lashes out more and further isolates America from its partners. This is an opportunity for China to break out of the corner America and its partners put it into and flip the roles. Once done, and Trump is neutered and America reduced, China will have a clear path to ascendancy as the primary global super power.
I’m actually not sure this is all bad. A flatter more multipolar world is probably better for everyone, including America. But I think it’ll be a tough time in our history and the people who voted for Trump will be the ones who bear the most pain for his delusional misunderstanding of the way the world actually is vs what he wishes it were.
But if I were to put $5 down, I’d wager this lasts until the GOP political fortunes have been decimated through their hubris and magical thinking and Trump is personally hung out to dry for his strategic blunder in launching a 195 front war.
Except I think as long as the “new world order” built around globalized trade networks of interdependence and agreements with dispute arbitration that China and the EU are leaning into was the framework Pax America built and was built to withstand unilateralism. Global organizations built around mutual benefit are ultimately going to win the day here, and it’ll be without American leadership - which will solidify the power of those organizations independently and through multiple power players rather than one. This is probably better than the prior order, and distinctly different than the pre-WW2 order.
We had a flatter more multipolar world primarily run by the Church and imperialist absolute monarchies. There is no reason to assume a world not dominated by American imperialism but primarily made up of modern democracies and republics must revert to a 19th century status quo.
I've also read that China's leadership really learned from the experience of the tarrifs during the first Trump admin. They made strategic changes that they wouldn't be vulnerable to that again. They spent the last 4+ years preparing, unlike the US which got maybe a quarter to stockpile and prepare. The asymmetry is huge.
... what hope exactly.
The republicans in congress are so lost in the sauce that they won't challenge the great orange hope in the quarter. The soonest I think we can see anyone fighting back, politically, won't happen until the midterms AT BEST.
This is assuming that the republicans/trump don't come up with some issue that they can swing the midterms on and/or don't gut the electoral system to the point that they can't lose.
And even then I'm not sure that congress can actually do anything to fix this issue while trump is still in the white house and impeachment and removal seems unachievable. Say congress reverses it's delegation of tarrif power to the president. What happens if trump just does not obey congress, much like they are not obeying the supreme court. Do the republicans in congress have enough of a spine to actually remove him? How do we assure that removal actually takes place in the event that we can even meet the threshold? The man still, ostensibly, still has control of the military. Perhaps the military, secret service, any other guys with guns just refuses to help him resist congress like they did when he tried to deploy the military after jan 6th.. but they seem to have already cleaned house at the pentagon, with hagseth getting rid of more people who aren't sufficiently loyal enough to do crimes and/or coup the fucking government for trump.
shit is getting scary.
The Republicans are the party of Trump. You're going to get nowhere near 20 out of 53 to convict. They will not let him get thrown out of office.
If they didn't vote for impeachment in the two times he was impeached in his first term, and if they supported him after January 6th then they're not going to vote for impeachment now.
The Republicans under Nixon were the same party in name only, and they did not have the same blind loyalty to Nixon. They had opposing voices. They had separate factions. Now the only faction is Trump-worship.
The retailers need to start showing tariff charge as separate line. People have the right to to see what they voted for. Yesterday Trump frantically called Bezos when Bezos threatened to do it, and Bezos seems to have backed up (probably got some concession for that).
Edit: it is also can be treated as a consumer right to know, by analogy with food labeling), what are the major components of the price they are paying, and thus allowing for informed choice.
Retailers and middlemen typically don't like exposing how much -they- paid for an item. Exposing tariffs would show how much things are marked up from time of landing to reaching the shelves.
Varies based on market. Where middle men actually do things and add lots of value they don't generally care.
When your value-add is fronting the cash for a container of something, doing paper pushing and sending the resultant product to an Amazon warehouse people will ask tough questions like "who are all these parties you're pushing papers to? What is their purpose and should they even exist in 2025" all of which is just a proxy for "if we fixed the system you wouldn't exist" and you can't really fault them for that.
Just that the steps you do to import things ought to be simpler and cheaper and probably could be if not for all the entrenched interests that are mostly not visible to the consumer.
Those with high markup wouldn't get affected that much. Those with lower markup will get affected more, and they need to show the tariff charge.
The tariff charge may also naturally include say the directly related charges like for example the increased insurance premium for the increased, due to the tariff, insured value of the goods while they are being transported/stored. Add to that increased financing required to cover all those costs, etc., and that can snowball to feel significant even for the ones with higher markup.
That's not really how markup works.
Let's say 1 pay x for a product. Gross markup is say 100%. Do I sell it for 2x. Let's say there's a tariff cost of y. That means the cost price is x + y. I mark that up to 2x + 2y. It's easy to up the price by 2y and disclose the tariff as "z%".
But this of course presumes all your expenses remain flat. And they likely don't. As your expenses go up (2nd order effects) that 100% markup starts to not be enough. So the markup goes up a bit.
Plus since things are going up anyway, and since there's uncertainty (which has a cost) we need to bump the price up even more (because hey, free market.)
And when the tariffs go away, we can remove the primary cost, but all the secondary hikes remain. Because that's all just extra profit, and, like, free market right?
This round of inflation is going to make covid look mild. (And as I point out to my Republican friends, just remember, you voted for this.)
The way out of this is to devalue the dollar. That would erode the real value of the outstanding debt (which is delimited in dollars.) Alas the US has worked very hard to make the dollar the world currency, so devaluing it is complex.
The US consumer (voter) is of course the big loser. At least this generation is. Folk born around 2030 may be the big winners.
> Tariffs are in the news and the percentages are known. If I'm selling a wallet made in China, in the US for $80, and list a tariff line item of $2 - people will calculate and easily know that I imported said wallet from China for <$1 and start to question why I'm charging so much.
If they're clever enough to do that math, they're clever enough to infer the result from the quality and fact that it's made in China. The ways of obscuring that would be to have paid more for a higher quality item made in China (make a convincingly costly product), or make it difficult to evaluate the quality in the first place.
But I know you're talking hypotheticals and all. It is maybe worth wondering whether in aggregate it'll become more transparent that the U.S economy is based on adding a negligible amount of value to anything from top to bottom.
I on the other hand think it would be great if they exposed how much they paid.
We need a browser extension that shows estimated tariffs based on "made in" info on the page.
Amazon reportedly threatened that this morning.
They backed down immediately after Trump (or someone at the Whitehouse) called Bezos.
Amazon considered it as a separate line, the White House called it un-American, Amazon stopped considering it.
No they didn’t. If anything it was being discussed and most likely only for Amazon Haul, which is not normal Amazon.
That said I wish they would.
That is what Amazon said in their comments disavowing the additional information.
Strange that the White House would get so worked up over potential plans for Amazon Haul.
“Amazon has partnered with a Chinese propaganda arm.”
>the White House called it un-American
If anything, what can be more American than making clear when and how much the government is taxing the people? It is like at the core of this nation’s founding.
A subtle but important point: the people aren't getting taxed, the importer is getting taxed. If the importer passes those cost increases on to their customers, that is their decision.
Of course the importer will pass the costs along, but that isn't the real point.
The real point is that it is _expected_ that the costs will be passed along to the end consumer. The whole _goal_ of a tariff is to make people not want to buy the product anymore because it isn't worth the money.
There is an uproar about these tariffs, and I get that, people hate trump and everyone who supports him, totally get that too, and when he does a thing, people are going to lose their minds about it.
The point of the tariff isn't to tax citizens, it is meant to discourage spending, so the thing isn't imported, so the country of origin loses money and whatever they were selling now has even _less value_ because there is an oversupply.
China needs somewhere to dump their slave-labor made garbage much more than US consumers need to buy it.
Source? I did not see this active anywhere, only mentioned.
Yeah, I watched that last week. Absolutely outstanding reporting, which I had not expected from a gaming channel.
This could get really ugly when the shelves start going empty. This may make the toilet paper incident seem quaint in comparison.
Empty shelves are just one of the symptoms. The real pain will come from companies having to deal with increased taxes (that's what tariffs are) for Chinese components, decreased exports (counter tariffs, anti US sentiments), etc. and then their follow up to that would be using tools like layoffs, price increases, etc. Some of those companies might have to close doors and go bankrupt. If that happens a lot you get the ripple effect on banks via foreclosures of businesses and mortgages (like sixteen years ago).
There are of course quite a few large US businesses being affected directly by this stuff. I imagine that they are not happy with this. And that level of unhappiness will translate into shifts in political donations. Which, I'm sure is something that will get more apparent as next year's mid term elections get closer. That's a stick that can be (and probably already is) wielded that might produce results soonish.
At least, I imagine the CEOs of GM, Ford, Boeing, etc. might have a thing or two to say about seeing China disappear as a market where they can do business to sell stuff or to source key components that they require for their own products. China was not being subtle rejecting delivery of a couple of new Boeing planes. And reductions in container traffic from China (which are the life blood of the US economy) are of course a very visible thing. And since container deliveries are critical for supply chains of most manufacturing that actually still happens in the US, that could get ugly really quickly.
Worst case all this triggers a recession. Those are rarely predicted accurately until after they've happened. But the signs aren't great and wall street is definitely nervous. A few stocks crashing because investors start panic selling could do the job. We're not there yet, but it got close a few weeks ago.
> Worst case all this triggers a recession.
Recession is probably the best case scenario. If only we get through this with just a recession!
The world's economic inter-dependence is one of the things that have kept World War 3 at bay for decades. Nobody's going to start a hot war with their neighbor when they rely on each other through trading. Russia shows what happens when you economically isolate a country with sanctions and force them to rely on themselves economically: It reduces one of the downsides of warfighting. Do we really want an isolated, independent and self-sufficient China?
>Nobody's going to start a hot war with their neighbor when they rely on each other through trading.
World War 1 begs to differ, hell even the Russian invasion of Crimea back in 2014 begs to differ. Economic interdependence dosen't stop authoritarians, it only threatens democracies with a larger margin for dissent.
WWI started in countries (Balkans) with the least economic interdependence, then pulled in more Western European countries through defense alliances. While technically someone could have put the brakes on, it was an autopilot sort of thing. The lesson of WWI is that if you're going to enter into defense agreements that obligate you, be careful to whom you're wedding yourself. In particular, don't wed yourself to someone who has much less to lose than you do.
One of the lessons from the prelude to WWII is to be careful about trade imbalances, as they can breed instability and radicalism. During the 1920s the US enjoyed huge trade surpluses with Europe, which caused all manner of monetary and labor dislocation in Europe. Worse, the US wasn't content with this surplus, so similar to modern China they erected additional barriers to imports to try to have their cake and eat it, too. These effects were amplified by the gold standard, which accelerated deflation and unemployment in Europe, and accelerated (stock market) inflation in the US. And of course all these ill effects were amplified again for Germany.
Toward the end of the 1920s and during the 1930s, the whole system was disassembled as every country, understandably, retreated to lick its wounds. Economic interdependence is critical to maintaining global security, but that interdependence itself isn't self-sustaining. It can fall apart if dislocations aren't managed well across the system. For example, the lessons from the 1990s and early 2000s is, "just go back to college or trade school" is an absolutely horrible approach to dealing with labor dislocation. Significant changes in labor structure need to happen inter-generationally, not intra-generationally.
That isn't the lesson from Russia invading Ukraine.
The lesson from Russia invading Ukraine is that the presence of authoritarians anywhere is a threat to democracies everywhere.
The kind of people who crush freedom aren't content to just do so within their own borders and will eventually do so to others around them.
As such it should be the priority of all democracies to extinguish authoritarians whenever possible.
> From the Russian perspective, the US promised not to expand NATO eastwards in return for allowing German unification.
Myth, refuted by many Russians from different backgrounds, including by Gorbachev himself on multiple occasions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43149963
It is a willful distortion of the so-called 2+4 Treaty from 1990, in which the two German states and the four occupying powers negotiated the terms of reunification. Ultimately, they agreed that only West German military forces would enter East Germany until the withdrawal of Soviet troops, which was to be completed by the end of 1994 at the latest. This is stipulated in Article 4 and Article 5 of the treaty: https://web.archive.org/web/20050222182358/https://usa.usemb...
> "they hate us for our freedoms"
Great point. Also "because of our love of jesus christ" has been thrown at me a few times when I'm trying to provide more nuanced arguments for why people in other countries might not favor us.
I'm not pitching this as a moral crusade, but as a practical one. Authoritarianism is a cancer that invariably spreads and disrupts the global system.
It is simply in our best interest to starve cancer whenever we find it and excise it if possible.
If the goal of buying Russian hydrocarbons was to increase the economic stability of Russia and to foster capitalistic market systems in the country to prevent the rise of authoritarianism then the second they invaded Georgia should have resulted in the cutting of those economic ties.
If the goal of opening trade up to China was to prevent a Chinese-Soviet alliance and to weaken the USSR then the second the USSR fell we should have pivoted to defeating Chinese authoritarianism instead of strengthening economic ties to them which has ultimately provided fuel for an authoritarian economic machine that has grown to surpass the capacity of the US and made the US dependent on it.
We didn't do those things and now we're facing existential economic and military threats.
This is circular reasoning. You are pretty much saying democracies should be aggressors first. If you swap `authoritarian` and `democracy` in your statement, it will also ring true.
However, the parent poster paints a different picture. If people in Moscow were economically threatened by reduced trade caused by an invasion, the elite appetite for such a move would be reduced.
This is the biggest lesson of the first quarter of the 21st century.
There is more than one lesson. The poster above is 100% correct.
russia is absolute reverse of what you believe. putin didnt even blink about all the German gas trade when attacking Ukraine.
https://www.dw.com/en/the-history-of-nord-stream/a-58618313
"In the early 2000s, however, German politicians had developed a contrary, more liberal theory — that more economic interdependence between Russia and western Europe would create peace in the long run. As trade increased, democracy would inevitably prevail."
>Do we really want an isolated, independent and self-sufficient China?
China being cut off from ~15%? of their market does not mean China isolation, it means US rewriting Child labor laws to fill Walmart shelves.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/03/31/us-child-...
https://www.newsweek.com/child-labor-laws-changed-five-state...
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/25/business/florida-child-la...
So what you're saying is, there still won't be a world war, but everyone else might go to war with the US.
No, just for its natural resources, land for settlements and its people as slaves.
> The world's economic inter-dependence is one of the things that have kept World War 3 at bay for decades.
Common misconception that trade prevents war and war prevents trade. Turns out that it is wrong: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501782466/trad...
If trade can persist in war then by definition trade will not prevent war
If
A -> B
not A -> B
B -> not AI think the more pointed question is: will USA aggression be unchecked if the economies disconnected?
China hasn't invaded anyone. USA is conducting an active genocide in Gaza and the Iraq War wasn't that long ago. I could name so many other incidents of unbridled aggression it boggles the mind.
> The real pain will come from companies having to deal with increased taxes (that's what tariffs are) for Chinese components
In a sane world, that's what targeted tariffs are. You don't want to tariffs across the whole board because you might affect exporting manufactures whose prices will go through the roof and might experience disruption. It is kind of what is happening with auto tariffs now that there is a huge blow back but one wonder how many industries out there can't voice their concerns or are not aware of this.
Any assumption that there is targeting or any sort of planning by the chaos goblins we currently have running this administration is long on hope and short on reality.
Well, they’re targeting right at the jugular.
> There are of course quite a few large US businesses being affected directly by this stuff. I imagine that they are not happy with this. And that level of unhappiness will translate into shifts in political donations. Which, I'm sure is something that will get more apparent as next year's mid term elections get closer.
Maybe. It is possible, though, that we are now in a situation like in the third Nolan Batman movie where Tom hardy puts his hand on the rich guy’s neck and says “do you feel in charge?”
I'm already seeing this in the life-sciences. Illumina, who used to own the game of DNA sequencing, has been laying people off left and right. All my contacts within the company are laid off.
Illumina is a special edge case as they've been a victim of souring China-US relations before the tariffs even started: https://www.fiercebiotech.com/medtech/illumina-aims-cut-100m...
> At least, I imagine the CEOs of GM, Ford, Boeing, etc. might have a thing or two to say about seeing China disappear as a market where they can do business to sell stuff....
They largely weren't doing this anyway due to Chinese economic policy. For example:
> Ford's market share in China has declined significantly.In 2024, Ford's market share was 1.6%, down from a peak of 4.7% in 2015. Over the past three years, Ford's average market share in China has been a modest 1.8%.
Ford is a bad example because the Chinese never really liked American cars. Before the EV boom they preferred BBA (Mercedes Benz, BMW, Audi). Right now it's homegrown brands.
Pharmaceuticals would be a slightly better example.
They do seem to love Buick, for some reason I can't wrap my head around.
GM used to sell more cars in China than in the US .Same with VW , Mercedes and BMW
Coincidentally around the same time that the US bailed out its own automakers. The US also heavily subsidizes it's own auto industry, see the billions loaned to Rivian to build their new plant.
Plus China as a country seems more capable of "toughing it out". That's not necessarily a compliment on the situation, but it is what it is.
Why do you say "China was nor subtle by rejecting a plane"?
It was some semi private line, who would have to pay twice the usual price in a unfavorable market.
The part apparatchiks didnt need to order them. They just dont want to overpay.
> There are of course quite a few large US businesses being affected directly by this stuff. I imagine that they are not happy with this. And that level of unhappiness will translate into shifts in political donations. Which, I'm sure is something that will get more apparent as next year's mid term elections get closer. That's a stick that can be (and probably already is) wielded that might produce results soonish.
I sincerely hope you’re right, but all initial evidence is the oligarchs kissing the ring, not pulling the strings. Maybe when it becomes obvious that they’re not getting anything for all that abasement they change tacks, but nothing in the Trump era has suggested to me that these folks have the tiger by anything but the tail.
>all initial evidence is the oligarchs kissing the ring, not pulling the strings.
It was comical how quickly amazon back pedaled on showing tariffs transparently in pricing as soon as the whitehouse complained.
To be fair, life's better when you don't have to rely on the guns. If you're willing to work together to make the pie bigger for everyone, peacefully, you get further.
Which is why you have to occasionally knock the people willing to exploit the peaceful order, off.
Dictionary definition of oligarchy: "a small group of people having control of a country, organization, or institution."
If you're "kissing the ring", you're not in control. The people with the ring are.
To spell it out, the US is not governed by a billionaire oligarchy.
is it not obvious the oligarchs control the globalist politicians and not the nationalists?
Is it controversial to say that if you really wanted to "fight the oligarchy", your policy positions would be pretty similar to the America first agenda (sans social issues)?
Don't confuse the Goldman Sachs branch of the Democratic party with Musk/Bezos/et al bankrolling the Republican party.
[dead]
Recession is the base case. The worst case is ... worse.
Well, now, that depends on when and who exactly is involved in large scale protests against the Trump administration.
If they call out the active duty military against middle-aged, white, protestors, they'll have a problem. If it's against students and minorities,...
I am very much on the fence on this one. I can tell you, without a shadow of a doubt, based on having been in manufacturing across various industries for over thirty years, that the US and Europe have been on a path to loose nearly all manufacturing capacity within ten years, maybe twenty at best.
How do we compare the pain (and yes, some destruction) that we have to endure today against the devastation that is clearly in the horizon for both regions within a decade or two?
To be sure, what's going on today should have been done twenty to thirty years ago. Doing this today is far more difficult and painful.
I think Kevin O'Leary put it best: What we want a reasonably free markets. It isn't just about tariffs. It's about regulatory lockout, intellectual property and more.
For example, India imposes as much as a 110% tariff on US cars and trucks. The list of such actions --which also included non-tariff rules-based restrictions-- is long. From China imposing up to 25% on our cars, autos, chemicals and food to the EU, Canada, Mexico and others following suit. Brazil collected over $800 million in retaliatory tariffs blocking US pharmaceuticals, autos and textiles.
In other words, the relationship with hundreds of countries has been very one-sided for a long time. US industry needs to export to thrive, but if countries like Turkey impose 140% tariffs on our autos and trucks, markets are de-facto shut down.
How long can any country survive this kind of inequity?
So, yeah, this is a rough moment. I hope it is for the best. Everyone benefits from a more open and balanced market.
And then, of course, there's one of the elephants in the room: Intellectual property theft.
Going back to Kevin O'Learly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKkdor6_rw4
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=567065763062114
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGFWWqbDwuw
https://www.tmz.com/watch/kevin-o-leary-china-tariffs-04-09-...
Whatever your hopes and dreams around domestic manufacturing, blanket tariffs capriciously imposed at random are unlikely to get any dream closer to reality, except perhaps the dream of total devastation of all manufacturing.
Let's look at what an actual domestic manufacturer has to say about tariffs[1]?
Oh, looks bad! Turns out, manufacturers import stuff, add value to it, and sell it for more money!
Hopefully we'll get more cast iron plants in Cape Cod. I'm off to the mill!
[1]https://www.vcstar.com/story/news/local/2025/04/09/trump-tar...
But, are you looking at what's going on, with the on-again / off-again tariffs announced on discord or whatever, and thinking, "oh, lordy, I can finally rebuild my dream factory in Missoula!" are you?
If I had a specific domestic product to protect and foster, I imagine I'd probably be somewhat more nuanced than whatever this process has been.
Over my life, I've seen car assembly leave the Los Angeles area, I've worked in machine tool manufacturing plants, I've seen modest electronic manufacturing companies fail in Massachusetts, I've seen C Beams glitter off the shoulder of Orion, etc. Now I work a bland service sector job managing kafka clusters.
The infrastructure elsewhere was developed by thoughtful and focused government effort to foster the industry domestically. I don't see what's going on now, in any way, focused or thoughtful. I don't see a plan, just arson.
So, I won't speak for you, but I can't imagine anyone looking at the current US Governments' policies and thinking "I'm going to pull assets from elsewhere and build there because that looks really stable and thoughtful and they've got my back."
Balance trade? Trade isn't a single ledger that needs to be in balance.
If you read that article about Haas automation, they say that they import cast iron and PCBs, presumably they import some chips and use some domestic chips, they put these all together and sell machine tools (big machines used to make machines, the exact sort of thing that trump et all are banging on about needing to be made in the usa, which last I checked, Oxnard california counts as "USA").
Nobody in the USA makes cast iron in the volume needed by haas; nobody in the USA makes PCBs at the price point needed by haas. Nobody's going to be able to start domestic production of either now, because they'd need to import all the materials from elsewhere to make the cast iron foundry, and nobody's going to take the chance that their multi million dollar investment isn't going to be ruined by trump changing his mind in a month.
So whatever you think you're arguing for, the world's way more complex than you think it is. And this execution of whatever the plans are, has been so far beyond inept as to land in a different scale altogether.
> I am very much on the fence on this one. I can tell you, without a shadow of a doubt, based on having been in manufacturing across various industries for over thirty years, that the US and Europe have been on a path to loose nearly all manufacturing capacity within ten years, maybe twenty at best.
I've now been around long enough to remember people saying this 10-20 years ago. Seems to be plenty of manufacturing still happening.
This graph of US manufacturing output in gross dollars suggests otherwise: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/uni...
If you could explain why it’s trending to zero when the dollar value of American manufacturing outputs keeps rising, I’d appreciate it.
There are plenty of other charts that contradict you on the St Louis Fed FRED website.
Declining absolutely does not mean “clear trend to zero”. There are a great many things which decline for a long time, but have a lower limit.
The only trend is the amount of labor in manufacturing. the US produces just as much or more than any other year. However we do it on far less labor.
Why would the US and EU losing manufacturing be bad?
> How long can any country survive this kind of inequity?
What worries me more is that the US has been funding global military security through deficit spending funded by foreign investors (who got their dollars from US trade). We're cutting legs off that stool, so we might see more wars and a declining dollar, never mind fewer cheap imports.
> Why would the US and EU losing manufacturing be bad?
Because if they can't make thing you can win a war - just stop all their trade and then invade. When they are limited to stick and stone while you have guns war is easy to win.
Of course in reality the US and EU are not in danger of losing all manufacturing, and their military leaders are will aware of this and so put extra effort into keeping some important manufacturing in the country. Politicians are generally (but not always!) aware of this and try to be friends with others who can make things you don't make locally.
You lost me at Kevin O’Leary. He’s historically been a dishonest and unethical snake oil salesman and I doubt he’s changed.
One of my career highlights was having him explain how much it will do for my career to do his project at a discount (I was helping a friend as a favor) and I told Kevin that it was just as likely to have the opposite effect.
> You lost me at Kevin O’Leary.
That's an unreasonable position to take. What matters isn't who says something at all. It's if what the person says is true. And, in Kevin's case, what he is saying is 100% on point and correct.
Aside from personal experience, I have met many entrepreneurs who got shafted by China's approach to business and intellectual property. One of them had to shutter his company barely six months after introducing their first product. The product was successful enough that it got cloned very quickly. They introduced a cloned product at half his price. Orders evaporated. He had to let go of his employees and close the business.
Whether you like it or not, what O'Leary says in his videos is 100% accurate and true. Your experience with him is absolutely irrelevant and not worth discussing.
> In other words, the relationship with hundreds of countries has been very one-sided for a long time. US industry needs to export to thrive, but if countries like Turkey impose 140% tariffs on our autos and trucks, markets are de-facto shut down.
These comparisons (and conclusions of one-sidedness) always leave the greatest benefit the US has enjoyed: access to a massive labor force willing to do work most Americans aren't[1] at wages lower than are Legal in the US.
[1] https://www.cato.org/blog/americans-think-manufacturing-empl...
Kevin O'Leary is not a credentialed economist.
Thankfully one does not have to be a credentialed anything to be right. All you need is to present evidence for anyone to reproduce your claim. A ten year old kid not even out of elementary school could be absolutely correct if the evidence supports what is being claimed.
I think you do a good job of high-lighting the underlying problem.
Which is not being discussed enough.
And that the current situation can go on a long time but not forever.
My only complaint with China's intellectual property theft is that they don't share.
It's my genuine belief that the vast majority of intellectual property ownership is purely to draw a moat around a country's oligarchs. Copyright does not protect creators and patents do not protect inventors[0].
Trump's thinking is:
- America used to have lots of tariffs in the 70s, and lots of jobs in the 70s,
- But we got rid of the tariffs and the jobs moved,
- So if I put the tariffs back the jobs will come back!
Problem is, we're not in the same market we were in the 70s, and all those tariffs risk turning us into Brazil. More specifically the reason why the intellectual property system we have is fucked is because it's designed to let corporations move jobs to foreign countries while still maintaining maximum control over the end result. It's designed to facilitate neocolonialism.
The "open and balanced" global market you're decrying was, until recently, heavily tilted to favor American ownership over everything. China and Mexico are there to castrate the unions: if you don't work for peanuts, we move the work to another country that will, and we don't worry about any of the business risk that entails because WIPO and Berne ensure none of the goods the other country makes get to compete with us unless we put our stamp on it.
You know what would really break this system? If China, Canada, or some other country were to junk WIPO and DMCA 1201 and start up a national lab to develop and distribute jailbreaks for shitty disposable American tech. Practically speaking, America can't stop knowledge from entering the country, and it would spur a huge explosion of new American businesses to fix the shit our own oligarchs broke.
In a world where you can't rely on intellectual property bullshit, outsourcing becomes a crapshoot, and it makes a lot more sense to pay workers what they're worth and focus on automation instead.
[0] Yes, they can and have been used by creators in the past, but that's not what the system does today.
> Trump's thinking is:
Objection, your Honor! Assuming facts not in evidence!
Manufacturing investment in the US hit all time highs during Biden, by far.
> the elephants in the room: Intellectual property theft.
Yup. China has been systematically stealing the IP of anything made in their country since forever. Companies kept falling for it because the potential market looked so big. Now BYD makes cars as good as Tesla and it's all #ShockedPikachuFace
He has said that, but I haven't seen any legal paperwork to back it up.
Not that is matters. Cars, including electric cars have been around for 100 years. There are very little important patents he could have. Sure there is a lot you can patent, but the vast majority is details that are trivial for any competent engineer to work around just using known prior art.
The important patents are likely in batteries which Tesla doesn't develop. Or chargers, but again the important details come with the battery.
TESLA might have some patents on the NACS connector and similar things. Those are easy to work around, but you wouldn't want to.
Are their shareholders fine with that?
People seem to think, including very disturbingly our secretary of the Treasury, the companies maintain huge warehouses of back stock.
That hasn't been the case since the mid-90s when the PC revolution started pushing out supply chain management software. If I recall correctly, Walmart was the innovator in this space in one of their key ways to gain economic advantage over other retailers was low back stock demand tracking
On top of that the '90s was when free trade agreements came into Vogue and the supply lines and outsourcing of manufacturing cranked up into high gear.
So as we saw with covid, any disruption to this a highly extended optimized supply chain results in massive disruption.
I can't see how any massive new tariffs isn't going to essentially be a covid level or worse disruption to this entire supply chain
> That hasn't been the case since the mid-90s when the PC revolution started pushing out supply chain management software.
I worked on PC software for optimizing warehouse inventory in the mid-1980s. The system was designed by an applied mathematician and used by large national companies. Customers made substantial savings - double digit percentages of inventory cost.
When you trim to the bone it's not entirely dissimilar to the kind of savings that can be achieved in other ways.
In the 1970's, when Nixon launched his recession after an equivalent lead-up, I worked at the University for one semester in a work-study job. They only paid minimum wage, and these were easy jobs like library assistants where you were expected to be able to study about half the time.
But you were working for the State just like all other State employees.
You know, the maintenance people, the professors, highway patrol, capitol admin staff, etc. Career employees.
Like everyone else, you had to wait two weeks after starting work before you would receive your first paycheck.
About halfway through the semester it got so bad they decided to hold paychecks for two more weeks.
:\
You mean everybody who worked for the State just didn't get anything for two weeks until it picked back up again?
Yup.
At the end of the semester I was made whole because my checks still kept coming in for a couple more weeks after I was no longer employed there.
"Just like" the career employees who would be collecting for a couple extra weeks themselves decades later after they retire.
Well, it was a recession, what do you want, prosperity? That ship sailed a long time ago :\
The source of prosperity done receded.
Toyota is famous for inventing Just-in-Time production and logistics system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System
Yeah, it goes back to at least the 1950s. Different companies adopted it at different times, but by the 1980s most already had. Note that Just in time is not a single metric, with one correct level of inventory. Adopting it in 1950 doesn't mean the company isn't still finding more places to adopt it.
FTA: Maybe not empty but less choice and alternatives not necessarily what you're looking for.
“I don’t see a complete emptiness on store shelves or online when we’re buying. But if you’re out looking for a blue shirt, you might find 11 purple ones and one blue in a size that’s not yours. So we’ll start seeing less choice on those shelves simply because we’re not getting the variety of goods coming in here based on the additional costs in place. And for that one blue shirt that’s still left, you’ll see a price hike,” Seroka said.
It takes exactly 1 "bare shelves" post on social media to kick off panic buying which cascades.
In fact it doesn't take much of a change in regular buying habits to cause that it it's all aligned in the same direction.
i.e. a chunk of the toilet paper "shortage" can just be every customer suddenly buying one more pack that day "just to be on the safe side". Your local supermarket isn't expecting that, so the shelves still clear out that day - then the last person snaps a pic for social media....
Yeah, my Great Aunt and her friends would coordinate their purchase of sugar for making preserves each year w/ the local grocer --- while each of them could have bought all they needed at once, his stocking couldn't accommodate that, so everyone would let him know when they would start, and stop, buying a 5 lb. bag each week for each year's preserves.
It's that one person on the highway driving just a little too fast and a little too close to the person in front of them, then they tap on their brakes and it starts the chain reaction of 3 hours of bumper to bumper rush hour traffic.
This guy is not pricing in panic and irrational behavior. People do the dumbest shit when supplies start getting low and the news is non-stop talking about shortages.
Markets don't work that way. Supply is tuned to demand. When the supply is artificially constrained while the demand remains constant, it further strains already limited supplies, leading to empty shelves and rising prices. This is a fundamental principle of market economics. It's important to understand how these dynamics operate to grasp the broader implications of reduced imports from China.
I think the above quote is accounting for both constrained supply and reduced demand from rising prices. Vendors consolidate their product lines to remove redundant (ish) offerings due to reduced demand and the new difficulties in managing supply chains. I.e. a shirt may only come in 3 colors instead of 10, and it may be harder to get the popular color because vendors are less likely to keep a large stock in warehouses.
It doesn't violate market dynamics that I can see, though I'm far from an expert.
One possible complication is that there’s quite a lot of waste that’s tolerated in pursuit of fashion and variety. (For example, Ross Dress For Less specializes in liquidating excess inventory.)
So I wonder how that plays out? My guess is that retailers take fewer risks when ordering, sticking with products that they know they can sell, even if prices are higher.
But they will still guess wrong sometimes.
There's a lot of levers and people to squeeze along the way:
Currency Manipulation to relatively increase Chinese manufacturing income
Relocating manufacturing based on tariffs
Retail margin
US based design & engineering of products
Advertising and other marketing activities
Depending on the product some will be passed onto consumers. But for something like Nike's it's probably more like fewer shoe designers, Footlockers, less advertising, smaller contracts to athletes, more manufacturing in non-China countries, and so on. Everyone is going to take a bit of a bit and it's probably not going to be super noticable to any one part.
No reason to expect empty shelves. Higher prices for stuff that can't be moved out of China. Sure. But it's a tariff, not an embargo.
Currency manipulation - No. Inflation concern.
Relocation of mfg - years long process won't help the shelves or the prices.
Retail margin - yeah... retail will balance price hikes to avoid hitting profits with not pricing too high to further reduce demand. This is just one of the reasons prices will go up. It will reduce the demand to less efficient and profitable levels, but won't increase the supply. Shelves will be sparsely filled with more expensive items.
US based engineering and design -- analogous to mfg. Not a near term solution.
Advertising -- it doesn't matter how much you tell people to go buy shit if they don't have money and/or the prices are too high.
Why are you still apologizing for Trump's absolutely incompetent policies?
In addition tik-tok/insta are having post after post warning people that the shelves are going to be empty which tends to feedback into itself.
If you were going to buy 1 of X normally if you think X may be out for sometime you may end up buying 2-4 of X which will run the shelves out very quickly when 10-15% of purchasers do that unexpectedly. Other people see the shelves emptying and buy more too.
Going to be messy.
All I have to say is imagine if Biden did this, what the news would be saying.
> If you were going to buy 1 of X normally if you think X may be out for sometime you may end up buying 2-4 of X which will run the shelves out very quickly when 10-15% of purchasers do that unexpectedly.
There are enough people who buy 0 of X normally, but if they think there might be stockouts, will visit every store in their area and buy 100 of X so they can scalp them and make a buck off their neighbors.
> All I have to say is imagine if Biden did this, what the news would be saying.
Give it a few years. They'll say he did it.
"Why do you think Barack Obama wasn't in the Oval Office on 9/11?" "That, I don't know. Would like to get to the bottom of that." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPfRGJRMbN8
Ah, yes, the difference between taking two slices at a pizza party because you fear it might run out vs taking none because you fear it might run out.
At least for the 2024 election, I find it difficult to believe one could come to any other conclusion with all the rampant sane-washing that NYT, WaPo, etc. engaged in
Aggregate media bias across TV/Radio/Newspapers is interesting because both the direction and scale matters. Of course bias is only part of the story, do an objectively terrible job and you get more negative stories overall.
As a concrete example a great deal of left leaning media was very critical of Biden running for reelection and especially waiting that long to pull out. You almost never see that kind of thing from right leaning media outlets.
So, yes overall media bias favors Trump not because more outlets favor him but because the ones that do heavily favor him. Far left media is simply a more niche market than far right media. Mother Jones for example is well known but only pulls in ~16 million$ / year and even they where critical of Biden.
I'd imagine they'd be saying, "Why haven't we seen Biden in over 100 days?"
So I look for shirts and only find pants.
Not an empty shelf in the literal way but empty on my demand
Which will cause a significant revenue issue for the retailer.
And depending on how much you’ve thought ahead, a significant supply chain issue for you.
Notably, this is really going to screw everyone using JIT supply chains.
Honestly I doubt that shelves will be empty. Retailers are ordering less stuff from China because they’re predicting that demand will go down when the price is higher. If retailers were marking stuff up roughly 100% and take the same markup (in absolute terms), everything from China will go up about 70%, and people will simply not be able to afford to buy as much stuff.
No. The price insensitive shoppers will buy everything and the shelves will be empty.
HN should have a feature where you can tag a prediction to come back for review after some period of time.
"Show HN: Automatic HN Prediction Market"
we need the reddit remindme bot
No, we really don’t. We don’t need a bot bringing marginally positive value for a single person and shitting the bed, cluttering everything with stupid useless noise and bringing negative value for everyone else. "Be more like Reddit" is really not something HN should aspire to. If you like Reddit, it’s ok to be both there and here.
years of trash flooding reddit comments obviously. Hes got a good point. Not all additional information is good. In fact the majority of data is garbage. Its hard enough to sift through the existing mound and i've tried to scale back my contribution to the noise (its hard).
It's pretty clear that reddit hurt him.
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Trade war isn't real until shelves are empty and black market is blooming, like a regular war.
> the toilet paper
I guess these US manufacturers will need to step it up: Kimberly-Clark, Procter & Gamble, and Georgia-Pacific
The feedstock for toilet paper (wood pulp) comes from Canada.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trumps-tariffs-on-canadian-lumber...
Paper is one of the things one should be least worried about.
We source chips from Canada because it's marginally cheaper to source it from there. It's not like the US doesn't have a ton of sources of wood pulp. Canada just has bigger cheaper sources (comparing like for like quality).
We also burn a lot of "less than ideal for paper" chips for energy rather than feed them into a paper mill, also for marginal cost per result reasons.
Wood chips suitable for paper pulp are also hugely elastic in the same way that recycled metal is. Huge volume is either directed into the supply chain or not based on marginal price. The people making every wood product are choosing what do with their waste based on chip prices and energy prices. Even your local tree service is choosing what to chip and where to dump based on economic conditions and balancing act between relative prices.
If you wanna be worried about something be worried about stuff we don't make much of in the US. Super high volume commodity widgets made from metal, all manner of electronics, etc, basically the kind of stuff where our only domestic capacity is super high dollar stuff to serve defense and aerospace.
It's probably true, because I think wood pulp for paper doesn't have rigid requirements on type of wood, or size, or strength. There are also alternative materials if we had to, like hemp. There's probably a dozen others; I wouldn't be surprised if grass trimmings could be turned into toilet paper.
The threat to lumber for building is a much greater concern because there aren't ready and price-comparable alternatives.
As we learned from COVID-19, manufacturers really don't like building new factories or even changing the tooling to support a different kind of product (such as commercial vs household toilet paper) for a short-lived surge in demand.
An antifragile solution would be learning to use a bidet.
I've seen all three begin short-shipping us, especially on cheaper brands.
Who is “us”? Do you work for a grocery store?
I won't disclose my employer for obvious reasons but I work in supply chain.
With raw material coming from other countries, probably.
let's not forget, "In 2024, China supplied approximately 13.4% of the total goods imported by the United States, with a total value of $438.9 billion. " '
And those are heavily concentrated in certain industries like basic electronics, toys, etc.
in anycase, it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.
This assumes domestic production does not ramp up to meet demand. Yes, prices will increase (pushing down demand).
I work for an org that does packaging (boxes, pallets, etc) for a whole bunch of manufacturing, ag, and retail firms (Tesla, Thyssenkrup, Target, etc.) and we are booming right now.
The "empty shelves" discourse is alarmist and honestly kind of annoying.
Almost all of the food on the shelves is locally produced or, in the very least, not produced in China. Some foods may disappear or become more expensive but there'll really be no disruption in food supply.
This will however affect markets dominated by Chinese goods, particularly clothing. Even here the effects will be somewhat mitigated by existing strategies to avoid China tariffs eg selling through Vietnam.
Certain businesses will be hit hard. And that's really the biggest problem: cascading effects leading to an inevitable recession. Already, truckers who ship goods from ports are sitting around idle. We've cut tens of thousands from the government. More layoffs are to come.
I both agree and have been worried that this is overly reductive.
As far as I can tell, literally nothing that I buy regularly is directly sourced from China. Or anywhere other than the US & neighboring countries. The vast majority of my groceries are locally sourced. And the vast majority of the rest come from expected regions, for instance San Marzano tomatoes from Italy. I do not regularly buy clothes, children's supplies, electronics, etc. Sure, I'll buy them once in a while but not with any regularity. My understanding is that the classic paper products famous from COVID shortages are made in the US.
So with that in mind what you say is 100% true, at least for me. But I'm not so sure. Who makes the containers that my local milk is put into? Who makes the cans that my canned goods are using? What meta-products are being consumed by the local industries, such as the ones making my TP? I have a feeling the answer is scarier than it'd seem on the surface. But I don't know.
Where do the farmers that grow your food get their fertilizer and fuel from? Or the electronics and hydraulics in their tractors?
Most fertilizer and fuel used in US agriculture is domestically produced. We do import some fertilizer from China. For fertilizers manufactured using natural gas as a feed stock, the US is well positioned to expand production because we have cheaper and more abundant supplies.
Daily life is very skewed away from understanding how everything works. Supply chains, power grids, the Internet, large-scale farming - these are all complete mysteries to most people. They see the results but they have no idea how the sausage is made. (Or shipped.)
It's one reason why this is happening at all. People not only don't know what makes a lightbulb turn on, they can't imagine the complexity of a power grid and how it's stabilised.
They don't have the first idea how a phone works, or how much science, engineering, and fundamental research went into making it work.
When they don't know any of this, they can't imagine any of it having a serious problem.
If people can’t buy Chinese tomatoes, what kind of tomatoes do you think they’re going to buy m? the same ones that you do!
That means the prices of your tomatoes are going to go up!
No one is going to be immune from these pricing increases from the tariffs.
Most people don't buy from small local farmers.
When it comes to eggs and vegetables there are opportunities for city farms. So there might be some of that.
But meat animals are much harder to "grow".
> My takeaway has been that the average person has no idea they can buy goods outside of a grocery store.
I’m sorry, but most people live in cities or towns with their only reasonable access to food being via stores. It is one of the wonderful things that civilization has produced and I’m here for it.
My best guess would be China
i grow a couple hundred pounds of tomatoes in my backyard every year. I'd happily sell some to my neighbors.
I haven't seen anyone saying that there's going to be no food. All reporting I've seen is that Walmart/Target shelves are going to be empty because of the glut of consumer goods they sell that are manufacture in China, ie, clothing, toys, electronics, etc.
Isn't most clothing made all over asia? As in: some brands will be affected and others will not?
That's certainly true.
Consider that even for food that is produced locally, there are inputs (tin for cans, electricity, etc.) that is being negatively impacted by the tariff circus, unnecessarily.
I buy dish soap on a regular basis. Not sure where the soap is produced, but I would guess the bottles might be from China -- a lot of packaging is. Sure, there are some US companies that make bottles, but can they expand their capacity? Probably not quickly.
I think there will be a lot of unintuitive effects from things like packaging.
Everyone here is worried about it from the American side, but China has motivation to settle this too, so they can continue to sell their enshitified plastic crap. It's not like most other wealthy countries want it, at least not any more than they are already buying.
>"enshitified plastic crap"
Cut the bull. Generally you get what you pay for. China does both. You can get crap for a penny but you can also get high quality stuff which costs more. Both made in China.
'plastic junk' seems to be the latest MAGA talking point.
No, China doesn’t need us at all. They are going to come out of this without a scratch. Everyone is getting this equation wrong.
Where is China going to sell their exports? There are limits to what Europe is able and willing to absorb.
China is holding pretty much all the cards here.
First, it has a command economy. It's much more equipped to handle this in keeping factories afloat and people employed and housed.
Second, the US is ~15% of China's exports and a lot of those exports will continue even with tariffs. Some by diversified supply chains (eg "laundering" Chinese made goods through Vietnam) or the Chinese goods are so low cost that the tariffs will be paid (eg a milk carton represents a small percentage of the cost of a carton of milk).
Third, the US will feel the inflationary effects. China will not.
Fourth, if China needs to raise funds they can and will sell US treasuries, spiking yields, hitting the ability of the US to issue further debt as well as borrowing costs for homeowners and businesses.
Lastly, the rest of the world is on China's side. This whole tariff fiasco may be the largest self-own in American history. Additionally, it's undoing generations of American soft power globally.
That 15% is not going to go away overnight. Some of won’t be sent to the US will be sold to the rest of the world instead. Possibly at a discount, so it is not ideal from the point of view of the Chinese government, but they are still well equipped to weather a temporary dip of 7% in their foreign trade.
Nobody said that it would be painless for China. Just that
1- it will be less painful for China than the US
2- China is more resilient against this particular kind of stress because they have a command economy and have more control on the population.
If the US blinks and caves, it does not matter whether China got a scratch, it’s still going to win the war. And Covid taught us that something would need to be quite dire for China to blink.
Also, it got lost in the noise, but right now there is still a blanket 10% tariff on anything that enters the US, and presumably these 10% can turn to much more when Trumps feels like it. It’s not the US against China, it’s the US against the world.
China holds only a few percent of outstanding US treasuries. Selling those won't spike yields, nor will it be a sufficient revenue source for them to wait out a prolonged trade war.
US is 15% of China, but China is 40% of US imports.. Maybe you are mixing up the countries?
> China is selling goods to the US because it's good for China. China not selling goods to the US is, therefore, bad for China
In the case of a hypothetical trade embargo or at least punitive tariffs, who would you rather be: the buyer of insulin or the seller of insulin? The seller can be propped up by the government or loans. The buyer? Well, they need insulin. There's a natural imbalance here.
Us not buying Chinese goods has a ton of downstream effects like what if you need parts to repair trucks and those trucks are then out of service so can't haul stuff around?
> China isn't immune to 15% of their economy disappearing.
It won't disappear. It'll diminish. It'll get diverted through third countries. In some cases, the tariffs will be paid. China will have a reduction in exports. The US will have increased inflation, shortages and supply chain issues.
> That's not relevant at all.
It's 100% relevant. Everything is sentiment based. If the world is on China's side, then they'll look the other way when China buys oil and gas from sanctioned countries, for example.
I see commentary like this frequently in the west, then I read financial analysis like this:
> Goldman Sachs in its latest China forecast, reports China's GDP is about to fall off a cliff: the bank now expects China's Q2 GDP growth to crater to just 0.8% QoQ from 4.9% in Q1.
[0]: https://www.reuters.com/markets/asia/view-chinas-q2-gdp-grow...
I'd be fine if cheaply made plastic junk is gone from the shelves. Where are the environmentalists now? The ones who warned us to stop overconsuming? Their tribe conflicts with Trump so their refrain goes mute until a more convenient time.
A Walmart superstore is stacked to the gills with products of all description.
What makes lots of money is not exactly having so many different choices stocked, instead having a good proportion of items "fly off the shelf" can be the focus.
The high-performance store will have numerous shelves completely clear every day, sometimes more than once per day, and they are perfectly geared to accommodate that when it happens without waiting until the more-organized nightly re-stocking.
The store is huge, and if a big shelf stays clear for any length of time it's quite noticeable. But can still represent the tip of the iceberg if that also means that quite a big multiple of inventory is also absent from "behind the curtain" in the warehouses and upstream.
Genuine question but how likely is that to happen?
The media doesn't seem to be doing a good job articulating what the (likely) real world impact is going to be. I keep hearing how other countries are negotiating but when you look into the details, there is nothing of substance actually happening.
I asked a good friend that runs a multi-billion dollar CPG business that relies on China imports. His answer:
> Almost guaranteed.
> There are some categories (toys, pet stuff,computer accessories) where HUGE percentages of goods are made in china. Those shelves will be empty as soon as inventory runs out, which will be soon.
> Shelves would get re-stocked once tariffs are removed and the ships start sailing again.
> If it takes longer than 60 days from now, we're looking at 10s of thousands of bankruptcies. This will make covid look like a weekend at the ritz carlton. Biggest financial crisis since the great depression.
My takeaway: People are not taking this NEARLY seriously enough.
My tinfoil hat interpretation: The US govt knows how serious this is, and they know that if people panic (which honestly, they fucking should) it increases China's leverage substantially.
>GPG business
what does that mean
Thanks! I was super confused, as there are several corporations with generic-sounding names that shorten to GPG.
I agree with your points btw. My friend is a retail director specializing in this area and has been at pains to educate me (and anyone else willing to listen) on the depth and severity of the impending supply dislocation.
This is a good discussion around the supply chain issues that will likely be happening: https://youtu.be/-dgHWv-Dh6Q?t=1370
Ryan runs Flexport which is a supply chain company so its from the "source" if you will.
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It's already happening for certain products, but we don't see it yet. The shelves lag a couple months behind the actual purchases. For example, you are Walmart and buy a bulk order of something from China. The order processes a couple days later, then it sits and waits to be shipped for days lets say. It gets in the ship and takes 2-3 weeks to get here. Then it takes a couple days to be unloaded. Then it needs to get trucked to the main distribution center. Then it's packaged/processed and shipped to intermediate warehouses. Then from there, shipped to the store, sits for a few days-week then gets put on shelves.
Even worse is that depending on the product, you might not even be able to place an order from the importer because they are completely unable to actually price the things with all of the uncertainty right now. A friend of mine is a hearing device retailer/distributor. He tried to order way more than he usually does a month ago to get ahead of this. The order was denied because they said they have no idea how to price any of it. So he's just going to have to wait an indeterminate amount of time which then makes it impossible for him to plan. He has to jack up his prices to cover future potential price increases and to be able to keep the lights on if they run out of stock.
I'm in the same boat as you, trying to figure out the impacts of all this. We're hearing reports that the ports are empty, and we know the CEOs of Walmart, Target, and Home Depot recently visited Trump to warn him of empty store shelves. The fact that these key ports are seeing reduced shipments corroborates their warning.
Meanwhile, Kevin Hassett, Director of the National Economic Council, said just yesterday that he doesn't believe any shelves will be empty due to retailers planning ahead for the supply disruption—directly contradicting what the CEOs of those retailers had warned Trump just a few days earlier.
I have serious concerns about the competency of this administration. The CEOs of major retailers have a vested interest in understanding supply and demand and have intimate knowledge of supply chains and retail channels. If they say shelves are going to be empty, then you can take it to the bank that shelves are going to be empty.
Everything is pointing to shelves being empty. What happens after the shelves start going empty is what has me concerned. It could be a minor issue, or it could lead to mass panic. My concern is that I have no confidence in this administration's ability to resolve any issues that may arise due to their actions. They're making the mess and are expecting us to clean it up after them.
the question is which shelves. Not ALL shelves. only 13% of our stuff comes from China. they might run out of toys and electric shavers but there will still be a lot left to buy.
As I've said elsewhere, that's not how markets work. Supply is balanced with demand. Disrupting supply while keeping demand constant will result in an increase in prices and less stock available to purchase. Add in irrational hoarding when people see fewer things available, and we could have a real problem on our hands. This isn't even addressing the fact that not everything coming from China are items available for immediate sale; many are components used in other products. If shelves don't go empty, it's likely to be the result of the price of everything increasing to quell demand.
You didn't cite a source there, but aside from finished products, American companies that make things domestically source many materials from China. I remember a few years ago a news story about a company that makes crab pots being impacted because the steel wire they use was imported from China. There are a lot of secondary impacts.
As long as it isn't food. Heard a quote once (Last of US maybe?): humanity is always about 3 missed meals away from riots." In reality its probably more like 6-10, but the details aren't important. It doesn't seem like there will be food scarcity, but perhaps there could be. I'm sure there will be less food diversity, which stinks, but that is a different conversation. People will still eat.
As for toys, most kids don't play with a plastic toy for more than like, 3-10 hours of its existence and then it rots on a shelf or in a drawer until is eventually ends up in a landfill. I'm not going to miss that. I'm sure that someone will point out important things that china makes dirt cheap and I'm sure they'll be right. I personally don't care if clothing options are limited or plastic toys are scarce. The US will not implode.
It really seems like china has more to lose than we do, but because they're a communist country they can just deploy troops to quell uprisings. Tiananmen Square comes to mind. So we play this game of chicken and the media screams that they sky is falling.
Of course the Walmarts and Amazons of the world care, most of what they sell is plastic shit and clothes. I have little sympathy for them.
I'm not saying things aren't a mess and that some shelves won't go empty.
However, it is worth noting that CEOs also have a vested interest in trying to reduce tariffs. And they would absolutely fearmonger if they thought it would help them.
I don’t think the media really knows what will happen. Trump randomly decides to lift tariffs and any prediction is off.
Even if the future of the tariffs themselves were at all predictable many outlets are allergic to any connecting of dots. I saw an article from The Hill just yesterday that took the line that the RTO mandate for federal workers was an actual attempt to "improve productivity" at face value without an ounce of push back in an article about how poorly the RTO is going.
The big outlets are terrified to get on this admin's bad side because their current business wants to do a lot of mergers which have to be approved and the administration can tie those up for years on a whim so they're already lying down.
More concerning: I don't think the administration really knows what will happen and I lack confidence in their ability to appropriately handle any fallout.
The specifics of predictions may change, but the supply chain shock doesn’t just evaporate. Trump could transform into a 100% rational, economically wise leader today and the impacts of the past few months’ insanity would still be felt for years. Those bullets are already in flight and can’t be recalled.
Or he doesn't lower them randomly, but in response to other countries lowering their own tariffs and other protectionist measures against the US, resulting in the more "balanced" trade which, whether we agree with it or not, has been the goal all along.
But yes, whatever the reason, the situation could change too quickly for safe predictions. In 2020, the US economy had recovered from the massive disruptions of the Covid lockdowns by Q4. There were shortages of toilet paper and eggs for a while, then there were surpluses and sales for a while, and then it smoothed out.
> but in response to other countries lowering their own tariffs and other protectionist measures against the US, resulting in the more "balanced" trade which, whether we agree with it or not, has been the goal all along.
That is just one of the many, often conflicting, goals cited by the administration, and doesn’t make sense on its face: the reason we have a trade deficit with most countries has nothing to do with them tariffing our goods or taking other protectionist measures.
> in response to other countries lowering their own tariffs and other protectionist measures against the US, resulting in the more "balanced" trade which, whether we agree with it or not, has been the goal all along.
If that is the goal, then it’s a terrible way of doing it. And also inflationary.
Well every time they speculate people pounce on them for being wrong, lying, fake news, etc.
We will see!
The smart ones will head to the hardware store instead of rushing to the paper: bidet-washing-tube will makes you free of toilet paper for life.
Cost: 10-30$
Installation: 20min with basic tools on your existing toilet.
Usage: tons and tons of online tutorials because 1/3 of the world already use that daily. But you can also figure it out yourself easely, it’s way easier than managing node_modules on a shared project.
Even cheaper alternative: a simple plastic bottle half-full and half bend. Many cheap labours in my city (Paris, fr) use one at work (cook, night cleaners, construction…). While the bourgeoisie fight for pooping clean during a world crisis, their Pakistani labor do they shit as usual. We should be inspired.
As someone who has used real bidets, I've tried bidet attachments - they suck.
I'm going to remain with my traditional toilet until I move into my "forever home" at which point I will install bidets.
As someone who has used both, I much prefer attachments. Something like https://bidetking.com/products/gobidet-gb-2003c-chrome isn't the usual flimy plastic garbage you get off amazon but lets you clean yourself without shoving your hand in your ass on a fully separate unit that takes up half the bathroom.
You can get a Toto Washlet attachment for ~$300 (who knows what it costs now after tariffs) that as far as I can tell is almost exactly the same model used in Japan. Heated seat, remote control, dryer, etc.
They’re great relative to not having the option. I panicked and bought two more in January for just what seems about to happen.
Should have gotten three.
If you can’t use one of above methods for reason, there’s some « seats attachment » to transform your toilet in a (cheap) Japanese style. Here’s a 79€ one [0] but there’s many alternative brands with less marketing bundled in the price.
Since we got a bidet we use more toilet paper for drying than we used to use for wiping. Perhaps the full-size ones work better, but the fans for add-on bidets are worthless.
Those fans just take nasty air and blow it up into your nostrils. I still haven't figured out how to get any value out of them.
Some people use 1 square of paper to check if they're clean then a normal towel to finish the job.
If it's famine you're worried about, I think we'll be ok as long as the govt doesn't try to set prices/mandate supply [1] (which isn't out of the question I suppose.)
If it's war due to decreased economic interdependence, well yes that would be much worse.
Setting prices seems like it is just one executive order away...
I would imagine the reaction from the white house will be to attack businesses for failing to order product for political reasons, traitors trying to help China avoid paying Tarrifs.
And I imagine this strategy will be more effective than one would first think, since it's nuts. I imagine it will change business behavior, maybe even to the point that business act against their own economic interests, the question is how much? The crazy thing is that will the Trump effect last long enough to negatively impact the next president or the Democratic congress assuming they win in 2026? The presidents numbers wouldn't suggest that it could go that long, but the world is upside down right now.
It's a good thing the United States doesn't depend on China for toilet paper, then.
> The United States primarily sources its toilet paper domestically, with about 90% being manufactured within the country.However, a significant portion of imports come from Canada and Mexico.
In fact, the United States does not depend on China for any essential consumer goods from what I can find.
What do you define as "essential consumer goods"?
American parents would probably put car seats and strollers in that bucket.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/28/business/strollers-car-seats-...
What is the source of wood for that paper? Canada?
> The top 10 softwood lumber producers in the US have a combined capacity of 24.1 billion board feet, representing 50% of the US industry, according to Forisk.
> The U.S. imports a significant portion of its softwood lumber from Canada, with roughly 30% of its softwood lumber needs being met by Canadian exports.Specifically, in 2023, Canada exported 28.1 million cubic meters of softwood lumber to the U.S. This accounts for a large percentage of the total softwood lumber imported by the U.S., with Canada being the primary supplier.
> The United States can potentially supply up to 95% of its own softwood lumber consumption through domestic production.While the U.S. is a net importer of lumber, its domestic industry has the capacity to meet most of its needs.
Retail shelves are a easy personally viewable measure, but a ramping logistics disruption & price increase on all sorts of processes we rely on daily may also be going on in parallel with more empty shelves. Parts for factories, cars, appliances, power stations etc...
Trump will back down and lift the teriffs the second there are widespread consequences. He’ll give some excuse, and his supporters will eat it up.
That or he’ll make so many deals with CEOs for political support and financial contributions that we won’t even notice that a few smaller companies went out of business or pulled out of the US.
It may not matter. The ships that were supposed to be here, aren't. Even if the tariffs were lifted today, it would still take weeks for new orders to be shipped and delivered to the US. We're very much in the FO part of FAFO
Unfortunately, that has only fueled this madness. Because there is a lead time for shipments, things didn't instantly go bad when the tariffs were announced, so many people mistakenly seem to believe there's no problem. A lot of people apparently need instant feedback to understand cause and effect.
Read any of the "let's talk to a panel of people who voted for Trump and see how they feel now" articles that NYT, etc put out and you might be shocked at how short memories can be, and how little critical thinking many people are able to apply to the information available to them.
The flexport CEO, in the video shared in this discussion, predicts a back down on the basis that 80% of small business that rely on Chinese imports going bust if they continue.
Even if they attempt to switch suppliers to avoid tariffs they'll be at the back of the line behind the bigger fish.
This could get really ugly when the shelves start going empty.
Retailers Fear Toy Shortages at Christmas as Tariffs Freeze Supply Chain: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/29/business/trump-tariffs-ch...
In a Toy Association survey of 410 toy manufacturers with annual sales of less than $100 million, more than 60 percent said they had canceled orders, and around 50 percent said they would go out of business within weeks or months if the tariffs remained. … She had placed a large order of scooters to arrive for the summer. But the importer rerouted the shipment to Canada because it did not want to pay the tariff.
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No, we have to back off tariffs because they are a terrible idea.
The idea that China only makes "cheap, disposable junk" and this faux-tough guy "we gotta man up and suffer through" pose is a big part of the problem.
Note that China takes measures to suppress domestic consumption for strategic reasons.
What is wrong with kids getting christmas toys?
What is the upside from the tariffs?
Cost increases from onshoring are more than wage increases from onshoring.
There is no problem with trade deficits. Countries accumulating USD means they have to lend it back at cheaper and cheaper rates.
The real problem is the federal deficit. In 2024 the USA had to borrow $2 trillion to keep the lights on, while foreign countries only had $1 trillion from net trade deficit to lend.
By analogy, the problem isn't that the USA is buying discount goods, it's that it's funding its lifestyle with a credit card. Paying more for the goods and still using a credit card doesn't solve this problem. It makes it worse
Not make it worse?
What problem is tariffs trying to solve?
If the goal is to plug the budget issue, you want imports to continue so that you can extract more tax from the citizens.
Even then, quality of life is less impacted if you just raise general taxes like a VAT or sales tax. That way consumers still get the best bang for their buck.
This is disingenuous even by your usual standards. “cheap Chinese crap for Christmas” was just one example of things that tariffs will make it harder to get, by no means the only one.
It’s not the 90s anymore. Lots of Chinese goods are neither cheap nor crap, nor producible elsewhere.
> Can we at least agree on banning that?
No (why? what's the actual problem with having cheap crap nobody needs?). But I'd at least agree with something like a carbon tax to target the environmental externalities of the type of commerce you're talking about.
Is there a sense of what products are actually at risk of not being in stock?
Anything low cost that requires a significant amount of manual labor to assemble. So clothes, toys, accessories, etc.
There's going to be a lot of that turning up from other cheap countries like Vietnam, either made there of just stuff from China rebranded.
I can see more problems with high tech stuff from China like the rare earths.
Unfortunately the tariffs hit cheap places like Vietnam just as much or more. (while Vietnam is not perfect I still have hope that supporting them will reform them for the better. Until Xi took power in China I had the same hope for them though. Only time will tell)
A lot of packaging is sourced from China.
Things that wouldn't otherwise be a problem will become a problem. Potentially that includes bottles, tins, plastic food packaging, niche carboard boxes.
Imports from China are ~40% of all US imports. Even a 10% drop would be difficult, and at current levels it's going to be more than that.
> Imports from China are ~40% of all US imports
You mean 14%?
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/imports-by-countr...
It is clear what you are saying. It still doesn't make any sense.
If I buy a bottle of wine, a chicken, a cake, and a pint of blueberries, is it correct to say that my diet is 99% fruits? There are more than a 100 of blueberries in the pint after all.
Anything made of cheap plastic, like all kids toys and lower end electronics. Anything you wouldn't really pay double for.
The weird thing is that toilet paper isn’t even a necessity. It’s a convenience. One could do just as well with a damp washcloth. Sure, you have to wash it afterwards, but it’s not that bad.
Or one could use a bidet, but I think most of these are imported from China. Oops.
I made my first trip (of many) to the store to stock up on shelf-stable items this morning.
I'm moving internationally (from China to EU) and the quote is 2.5-3x higher than 3 months ago. Sea freight seems to be inspected at a much higher rate, and they don't recommend it, and air freight is more expensive because of much lower volume overall. Not a good time to ship your stuff. And that's when you think "I'm far away from the US and the madness does not concern me"...
The 2.5-3x higher is probably temporary while people rush to ship stuff before the tariffs. It may get much cheaper shortly.
Good point, but several Chinese freight forwarders say, on the contrary, the shipping lanes are empty. The "ship" costs a fixed amount, if you can make a full load, the cost is shared between parties. With LCL (less-than-container-load), I'm very dependent on the volume.
I've also seen pictures of empty roads to Yantian port circulating on LinkedIn (usually it would be completely jammed during May holidays).
That's also a far different route... Has demand for additional shipping to Europe gone up because of increased demand? Is it seasonal? Does the US army's fairly incompetent police action [1][2] against Yemeni Houthis have much impact?
I'm very curious!
[1] https://www.military.com/daily-news/2025/02/04/commander-of-... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/29/fighter-jet-...
If the quote is higher, doesn't that mean the demand is higher and less empty containers are available? The EU does not have an extreme tariff on most products from china, only some. I guess I'm missing something here.
Begging the question/speaking out of my butt: fewer empty containers may mean they're running fewer ships, not filling up the normal volume.
Same number of ships, but they are skipping the shortcut through he Suez canal (and have been for a year) thus meaning they take longer and so can haul a lot less.
Folks are anticipating increases in shipping due to large companies making last-minute buying decisions for the Christmas holiday instead of starting to ship things now through December. As a result, it will be very hard to find a container toward Q3 (at least this is what I'm reading across news articles)
This is fascinating. I wonder what impacts island nations like New Zealand are facing?
Interesting. Inspected more regularly by who?
If the assumed be negative indicators for the US economy come to light, and it’s made clear that the US has committed economic suicide, now with data, there aren’t going to be many safe harbors in the world for the average person.
The Suez canal is very much affecting anyone in the EU and has for a lot longer than Trump has been in office. Almost no ships have been going that way since early/mid last year, preferring to go the more expensive/long way around Africa instead.
Well, I had two quotes: one right before the tariffs at 22 rmb/kg door to door, and one end of April, at 58 rmb/kg door to door. We shopped around quite a bit, everybody say it's crazy right now.
>And that's when you think "I'm far away from the US and the madness does not concern me"
But why would you ever think that?
Knowing someone who imports from China, there are ways around tariffs
https://harris-sliwoski.com/chinalawblog/the-guide-for-legal...
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/07/nx-s1-5318785/tariff-dodging-...
Shady ways as well https://www.voanews.com/a/as-us-tariffs-expand-chinese-firms...
None of these are easy, and none of them are free. Prices are going up regardless.
Ha ha, the ribbon manufacturer is about to get a lot more than they bargained for. Who the fuck is going to buy ribbon in a depression?
It will be interesting to see if retailers choose raising prices or if they lean more towards ... just not offering some things.
Aliexpress is already displaying tariff-inclusive prices.
A curious dynamic: A seller importing a container of cargo to Amazon (or other US warehouse) has to pay the tariffs up front while trusting that dear leader won't lower the tariff amount before they can sell them. A seller that ships directly from China has a committed purchase with cash in hand by the time the specific tariff needs to be paid. I can see this leading to drastically less selection from US warehouses of long tail items that would otherwise sit around.
Speculation: I wouldn't be surprised if Aliexpress (/Choice) charges sellers a fixed fee based on the current tariff rates, but still covers whatever the tariff ends up being when the item arrives at the port, to make it really straightforward for sellers. The kind of eat-it investment you get in a society working to build up institutions rather than tear them down.
For many goods a 145% tariff is a ban for all intents and purposes and no different to a 100% tariff or a 200% tariff. This is just more evidence (as if we needed it) that the administration has no idea what they're doing.
Certain goods are extremely high mark up. For example, clothing is typically 100-200% markup. So if you buy a $5 t-shirt and sell it for $15, the tariffed price is now ~$12. You may find retailers will sell that at $20, absorbing some of the cost on a temporary basis.
Also, many such retailers have already sought to diversify their supply chains (eg buying clothing from Vietnam and other places).
Gilead might be in for empty shelves like Venezuela and Cuba :-D
I'll be sad, but amused, when Trump and Co declare that each state should build factories to fill their needs for basic products ... similar to proposals made during the economic collapse days in Venezuela.
The United States has never had such incompetence in governance. Americans aren't accustomed to this degree of ineptness.
His most die-hard supporters will hang on to the bitter end - and they're the least capable of doing so. I've gone from mocking them => feeling sorry for them => fear them - these people are definitely not harmless.
these are sad/scary times.
Everyone made fun of W about being the least competent, but then the GOP went and collectively said "hold my beer". Twice.
The two party system, forced on us by plurality voting, is the reason people feel they don't have a choice.
Pick one of two very different sides. If a third candidate tries to enter the race, they harm themselves and the person they are similar to, and they help the opposition.
Any form of ranked voting will rid us of this restriction and allow more candidates to run for an office, and allow citizens to vote their true preference.
Yesterday, HR 3040 was introduced by a GOP member from Arizona, which intends to ban ranked choice voting from federal elections. The GOP has already banned it in the state of Florida.
A radical party is terrified of a system that enables more electoral competition and throttles radicalism.
Trump had much superior social media targeting.
Muslims in Michegan were convinced Harris is a genocidal maniac, while most everybody else heard she was in bed with hamas.
Liberal suburban housewives heard she was a merciless prosecutor while others learned she was soft on crime.
> Stepping a level lower even, how, on Earth, could our system possibly have produced Harris, Vance and Trump as the options? Then you step a level lower than that, and even the challengers were like, DeSantis and Haley?
I guess you forgot about the corpse of Biden. Harris belongs in that "challengers" category except she had less support than DeSantis and Haley (from both Democrats and Republicans!). Harris has never received a vote in a presidential primary.
The Democratic party enabled Trump to win by not forcing a clearly incapable Biden out of the race earlier, allowing them to run an actual primary and then choosing a terrible candidate because they backed themselves into a corner with identity politics. Remember, the Democratic party was totally fine with Biden until he was forced in front of the American people and they got as good of a look at him as the party had.
That's how our system produces these horrible candidates. Each party acts in their own self-interest because they have a stranglehold over the electoral process.
> Harris, Vance and Trump
Oh ffs, Harris in charge would've been just fine. If we're talking about economy/stock market only, even Vance as president would've been fine as well, although he'd destroy American democracy way more efficiently than Trump.
I had a conversation with someone who I usually respect, and would say is an intelligent person. He's a trump supporter for the manufacturing support.
He said, "It's just not that hard to get these factories back to the states. We can get that done this month."
The amount of cognitive dissonance and just outright believing the lies is astounding.
Trump won't say that states need to build those factories. He'll tell governors that they're failures for not having done it already.
It's funny you say that, because we talked about literally that. No joke.
No, he does not and would not want to work in a shoe factory, but he remembers when he was 16 and his first job was actually in a local shoe factory. He said it was a terrible job, but taught him how to keep a job. And he appreciated being able to buy shoes that were made by people he knew. . . . "I want that opportunity for my grandson."
It doesn't have to make sense, it just has to exist in quantity.
The US already makes highly advanced goods like cars using robotic manufacturing.
Wouldn't an entrepreneur be able to figure out how to make something as simple as a shoe factory? And wouldn't that also result in fairly high paying union jobs, such as the people to maintain the machines and software?
How is that any different than hourly wage slave jobs now? It's better than being homeless or spending imaginary bucks printed against a debt that will never be paid off
We can build a factory in a month, including permitting, acquiring the land, planning the building and constucting it, as well as procuring or building the machinery and setting it up in the factory, programming it and hiring and training the workforce during high employment? That's very impressive!
It’s not possible without seizing the means of production. An electrical switchboard that can power a factory has a minimum 24 week lead time, probably more like 52 weeks.
In my local construction market everyone is already working. There’s no slack manpower, particularly in the skilled trades (mech, elec, plumbing)
The above also ignores the fact that nobody wants to lend capital for such projects, so the government will need to finance it.
If you have ever been involved in new factory construction for anything that's more than light manual assembly, this statement would be very amusing to you.
I think it will be both. Raising prices for some goods because of tariffs (and adding some percent for good measure and profit) while also discontinuing others. It may go like the car market where cheaper options are slowly being phased out and the focus goes to higher priced vehicles.
Prices never really came down after the COVID shortages, I really don't expect this round of shortage to be any different. Companies have a convenient excuse to jack up prices with the comforting lie that they'll go back down when shortages are over.
A retailer would be irrational to let stock run out instead of continuously raising prices.
For stuff that people need and will buy at heavily inflated prices, sure. But there are a lot of non-essential items that people probably won't buy if the price increases significantly. And for those items, I suspect a lot of stores will just let the shelves stay empty instead of spending a lot of money for inventory they can't sell.
Candy bars for example. They want to charge $3 for a single candy bar now, but no one wants to pay that much so they're selling them 2 for $5.
But retailers have studied that this trick isn't going to last because not everyone wants to buy candy bars in bulk, and they won't spend more than $3 for a single candy bar, which means if it goes any higher they won't by any candy bars at all.
The customer will only bear so much, though, so at some point the businesses that keep buying stock and raising prices will be left with stock that cannot be priced any higher, leaving it to be unloaded at a loss. That can be a far worse situation than not having any stock at all. Either way, it is an uncomfortable gamble.
Not enough greed: Stockpile in a back warehouse and raise prices on the two or three items per day you allow on the shelves.
Depends on the product and if your marketing is low prices do you want to be the one to first crank them up and get Trump all upset?
Not too long ago I tried to raise money for a PCB assembly plant in the US, but couldn't raise the funding and got a "real job". Posts like these really make me wish I didn't give up lol
About a year ago I checked out every US manufacturer I could find. Most don't offer any pricing of any kind, strictly 'call for quote'. The ones that did offer pricing either don't want small prototype runs, or charge 5-10x what China does, and with 2-3x lead time, even counting shipping.
Only one or two I looked at offered an online quote tool, and none of them came even close to the usability and functionality of PCBWay's website. The best one I found was this ridiculously overbuilt system with an embedded 3D engine and one of those shitty 200MB web apps that take 30 seconds to register a click and breaks your back button.
USA is simply not competitive with China on PCBs. For small, cash strapped business, domestic manufacture has never been an option. I expect prices will only go up and up as our entire domestic capacity is absorbed by big corps that can afford the premium. I have no idea how us little guys are supposed to get boards now.
> I have no idea how us little guys are supposed to get boards now.
You're not supposed to. It's a backhanded way to quash all competition.
It’s true US isn’t competitive but what you looked at was hobbyist PCB services which is not representative of the industry as a whole. I get the frustration but i don’t see how you can draw any conclusion from it.
It is not just hobbyist. My friend runs a business of smart stove tops and they do have a lot of R&D which needs small runs as they fine-tune the electronics and test them out. All the R&D is now moving out.
Engineering often needs one off PCBs until their design is trusted enough to work. That doesn't look any different from what a hobbyist wants other than the account type. (final manufacturing will likely be done by someone else)
This is something I am personally mixed about, working in electronics and having had boards made both domestically and in China.
The thing is that China is just really damn good at electronics manufacturing. Their tooling is cutting edge, their workers are career electronics manufacturing workers, and their supply chain is insane.
However I do have a feeling of "if you build it, they will come". But I think it would need to rely heavily on automation. And I'm also not sure how you would deal with the waste in the US. In China the volume is high enough to have local companies that deal with all the byproduct. In the US I would imagine you would have to pay through the nose to dispose of it through some small time contractor 6 states away.
I think there are some things where a lot of the silicone actually comes from the US, or the designs are static enough that domestic manufacturing could make a lot of sense. I was specifically pitching consumer GaN power supplies, which are simple enough that you can build them without your supply chain blowing up every 3 months or without having to always get the newest and greatest machinery.
Something like a smartphone would be borderline impossible to do well in the US and keep up with trends.
These are the king of capabilities, like semiconductor manufacturing, that we want to have (at least some) locally for more reasons than just economics though. It seems like a national security issue.
An on shore competitor to JLCPCB would be amazing. I assume most of the work is automated as well.
You might as well watch the entire process of how JLCPCB works and then tell me if all of that can be "automated": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljOoGyCso8s
That video is amazing. Thanks!
I was going to purchase a shipping container for my property in the US a few days ago, but the company I was talking with has raised their prices 70% over the quote I got 2-3 weeks prior.
Wouldn't there be an excess of containers?
No because containers are in high demand overall. While the US is importing less, stuff to the EU is taking the long way around Africa and that means more containers are needed.
>While the US is importing less, stuff to the EU is taking the long way around Africa and that means more containers are needed.
OK, then the unavailability of containers is actually due to piracy in the middle east.
The US importing less, by itself, decreases the demand for containers.
Right, there are a ton of factors. But it would be wrong to suggest that decreased US exports would push container prices up.
Containers are also manufactured… in China. Container, sea and others, are products in and of themselves so importing them for use even just to transport goods domestically will cost more.
Oh no, I’m in the same situation and was wondering how this would affect the quote.
The port of Long Beach is the most mind blowing thing I have ever seen in my life. Hundreds of trucks stretching for miles, 24 hours a day. I would not wish that job on anyone... but the thought of it being empty is just terrifying.
This Verge Decoder podcast interview with Flexport's CEO is a good take on the situation:
https://www.theverge.com/decoder-podcast-with-nilay-patel/64...
IMO For impact on normal people's day-to-day life, the suspension of the de minimis rule that allowed boxes under $800 declared value (i.e., construction cost) to be imported with no tariff will have more of an impact than any other recent change.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/what-the-end-of-the-de-...
I think you’re underestimating how many products have inputs that come from China and overestimating how many direct-ship packages the average person receives internationally.
The GP sounds more like someone that routinely bought from places like Shein, Temu, etc.
I never shopped Temu / Shein but got lots of electronics from AliExpress. My last purchase was a spectrometer, I would never be able to afford it now with tariffs + de minimus gone.
I think this will hurt the DIY / Maker / IoT community hard.
The DIY / Maker crowd seems the most insulated from this, being in a prime position to recycle and repurpose materials that are already here to make their own tools.
That doesn’t apply to the containers Walmart/ bestbuy/ target/ etc import. They’re going to pay the insane tariffs but spread the cost over all of their inventory to help hide it from consumers. No matter what prices will go up. The locally sourced higher volume goods like food will end up subsidizing slower moving items like TVs.
Taxpayers as a group will pay $1 for each $0.50 collected on that. We are not yet on track for a net savings on spending.
Some of that impact will be positive, as de minimis shipments are a major route for importing drugs and their precursors into the US: https://www.cbp.gov/frontline/buyer-beware-bad-actors-exploi...
And strip searching everyone who enters a school building would have a positive impact on the rate of school shootings.
Over-enforcement creates its own major issues. The cure is worse than the disease.
We don't have 120,000 school shooting deaths a year, but we do have that many overdose fatalities. I'd say the cure is just fine in this case.
I'll refer you to the article I sent, which you seem not to have read. Or this one: https://thecityvoice.org/2024/10/18/de-minimis-the-us-law-th...
There is a good yt channel that deciphers all shipping related news (collisions, cable cuts etc) and makes it more digestible to non-sailors like me here. Definitely recommend.
https://www.youtube.com/@wgowshipping
He pointed out that these stats are week on week so tend to understate how big the drop really is on a more long term scale
[not affiliated, just like the channel]
The Bloomberg podcast odd lots recently had an episode about this. Essentially, there's bubbles in the pipeline now. Expect Halloween and the shopping around that time to feature lots of scarcity.
What's a good/authoritative site for tracking activity of US ports. This tells a little bit of the story: https://www.drewry.co.uk/supply-chain-advisors/supply-chain-...
Longer term trends would be nice.
I looked for something like this yesterday, and came across this dashboard with trends for the Port of LA only: https://signal.portoptimizer.com/ which seems to be a port activity dashboard (demo with real data) for the port of LA via portoptimizer.com
You'll see the trends don't seem so bad yet, but they have a previous-12-weeks graph of current year vs previous year which will be interesting to follow
The general disruption could wind up blocking or delaying even goods that are still viable and profitable or simply only available from China under the tariffs simply because the ships themselves are only viable if they are fully loaded so they'll wind up not coming to the US for long gaps if the broader "reciprocal" tariffs stop other SEA traffic as well.
A surprising amount of LA's economy is just warehouses. This could have an interesting effect on the cost of housing in LA, which would have an effect on Phoenix, which has seen massive growth in warehouses as LA has gotten expensive
The vast amount of warehousing in SoCal is in the Inland Empire, the logistics capital of the country, not LA proper. There's very little warehousing being done in LA and there's still ample land in the IE and high desert areas. It should have zero effect on housing prices in the area, they already moved further inland since ecommerce took off 20 years ago and only accelerated since the pandemic.
Housing won't be affected in LA because the issue is zoning + cost to get started. There are too many reviews blocking housing; it isn't blocked by warehouses being "more valuable" than housing in those lots
What’s the data on exports as well? Some stories of farmers taking massive hits with demand that was only fulfilled by global market.
Depends on the commodity and any reciprocal (actually reciprocal) tariffs that were imposed on US products.
Soybean farmers are hit hard because a lot of their crops went to China. Meanwhile some other exports are basically unaffected right now.
Other countries have generally not been so haphazard in application of tariffs. They don’t want to actively harm their citizens and they try to plan tariffs with more precision and consideration.
It's also worth noting that some of the damage will be permanent.
Trump's mini trade war with China in 2018 (for which he had to bail out farmers) led to US farmers permanently losing market share in soybean exports to Brazil.
> In 2018, during Trump's first term, the U.S. and China engaged in tit-for-tat tariffs that led Beijing to take permanent steps to reduce its reliance on American farm goods.
> The share of China's soybean imports from the United States dropped to 18% in the first 11 months of 2024, from 40% in the whole of 2016, while Brazil's share grew to 74% from 46%, according to Chinese customs data.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/chinese-buyers-s...
Doesn't seem to be affecting prices much. My best quote for moving a household's belongings via container from US (California) to the UK (Northwest) is ~$26k including insurance (which is mandatory).
I don't see why it should increase the costs of shipping. Can you outline a plausible mechanism?
If I haven't bought a ps5 yet, is now the time to do it?
[dupe] More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43843821
Of all the death and terror caused by this administration, at least we might get an American build of Lua
There are two things I want people to remember:
1. The administration has absolutely no idea what they're doing. Don't be tempted to think this is part of some grand plan. Don't believe any narrative about how short-term pain was intentional. There's borderline or actual panic in the administration, going so far as to sideline Peter Navarro to get Trump to back down [1]; and
2. All of this is happening so the wealthiest 1000 people, who already pay almost no taxes, can pay slightly less in taxes. They've already started the rhetoric about tax cuts for average people based on the 2017 tax cuts for people below the top bracket expiring this year. The cut in the top bracket and the corporate tax rate cuts were permanent. So another likely temporary tax cut will be sold while giving away trillions to the wealthiest people on the planet.
[1]: https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-tariff-pause-navar...
>The administration has absolutely no idea what they're doing.
In general, I agree with your sentiment, but there are competent people in the administration. However, all of them are paralyzed because Trump can alter any plan or policy at a whim, and he insists being involved in everything. And you can see that in the interviews Bessent or even Lutnick give - where they hedge everything because they know it could change any minute. For example, there was no plan to set 145% tariffs on Chinese imports, Trump just did it out of nowhere on TruthSocial.
That's also true of foreign policy in general. Rubio and State Department have zero power at the moment. Neither the Russia-Ukraine peace plan, nor Iranian nuclear arms control, nor Gaza-Israel negotiations are going through the State Department.
>All of this is happening so the wealthiest 1000 people, who already pay almost no taxes, can pay slightly less in taxes.
I disagree with that. This all happening because Trump is incompetent but also arrogant and highly opinionated. I don't think there is a nefarious plan here. Trump probably really does think that you can replace income tax with tariff revenue.
interviews Bessent or even Lutnick give - where they hedge everything because they know it could change any minute
The problem with this is they quickly realised it's easier to BS and lie than to be honest and noncommittal. In the latter case they'd have to fess up at some point and say 'well no we didn't have a plan for that/see that coming/whatever' or admit that they simply don't know the answers to relevant questions. Instead they say one thing one day, and when Trump reverses the policy they come on TV a day or two later smirking and saying 'well this was always the plan'. Once their public statements are disconnected from consequences they realize that lying is a way to wield power and of course that quickly becomes intoxicating and addictive.
Right now it might seem to them like it's just some white lies for the greater good/to assuage public anxiety, but in my view that sort of behavior is a one-way street. I think they've already shredded whatever professional credibility they had, and when things get economically bad they'll be incapable of offering leadership or reassurance that would calm markets (in contrast to, say, Lewis Powell at the Federal Reserve). If the economic situation gets sufficiently bad, Trump will throw them to the wolves and hire in some new faces to buy time. We saw this in the first administration, every time he replaced someone the meda and Congress would grant them a honeymoon period and talk about how much better and calmer things were getting, even though this was based on desire rather than outcomes.
Trump is the culmination of the 50+ year Republican project, a project intentionally designed to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich. He's not an anomaly. He's the inevitable end product of decades of consistent insitutional destruction and corruption.
I agree that Trump is delusional about tafiffs but think abou tit: income tax is pretty much the only progressive tax left. There's serious momentum in the conservative movement to get rid of it for that reason: it's further wealth transfer to the ultra-wealthy.
It sounds like you're not seeing the bigger picture here: the wealthy view themselves as inherently better. In tech circles (including Elon and Thiel) transhumanism is popular.
What is transhumanism ultimately? it's eugenics. It's why these weirdos fill the world with their IVR fetishes, spreading their "superior" genes. It's co-opted the conservative movement, which itself is rooted in eugenics (ie white supremacy).
FOR HE IS THE KWISATZ HADERACH!
He isn't actually, if anything he is an empty suit that yells whatever the last guy in the room told him and that guy tends to be the most extreme dumbass on whatever topic it was.
So when you hear him yell about tarrifs, you are hearing him yell whatever peter navaro last told him (plus or minus trumps misunderstanding of the situation, see also trump screaming at the reporter yesterday about how the maryland guy in the el salvadorian prison has literal MS13 tattooed on his knuckles, where it's very clear that the picture he saw had those letters photoshopped onto the photo)
When you hear him yell about immigration/the border/racistbullshit, he's just yelling whatever stephen miller yelled at him.
He is just the avatar for whatever sychophant that is currently in his good graces (ie whoever bribed him or sucked his dick last (see also laura loomer))
Seattle ports are currently empty, will be interesting to see if this holds true . https://seemorerocks.substack.com/p/port-of-seattle-empty-ze...
>Seattle ports are currently empty...
At the time of my response, there are five container ships in Eliot Bay, and a large container ship, along with a smaller container ship that just arrived, docked at Harbor Island (the primary port in question).
https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-122.338/c...
lies, source: I looked out my window
Can't wait to find out...
I am literally looking at a port with many containers and a fully loaded ship waiting to unload more containers at the port of Seattle right this second.
(based on other replies I guess I'm not the only one in Pioneer Square lol)
> Remember what I told all of you about stocking up on stuff and arbitraging it later once the shelves were emptied? Well...we're just about there.
Price gouging is so hot rn…
I hate to be so cynical these days....but if this is true, that would mean a lot of dockworkers/longshoreman are out of jobs or not working right? Truck drivers, and who knows what other jobs are just not doing anything at this point?
But, China itself is automating away most of those jobs. It's a stark difference between Chinese and Western—just look at the phraseology we're using, without thinking about it: "out of jobs"; in China's zeitgeist they wouldn't say they lost jobs to technology, they say they "saved 80 percent of manpower" [0].
[0] https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202312/1304443.shtml ("China’s first self-built fully automated dock enters operation in Qingdao, Shandong Province" (2023))
Pretty sure that the dockworker who is now unemployed, in China or in the US, isn't thinking "we saved 80% of manpower" but is more likely thinking "fuck, I lost my job."
The dock owners, OTOH...
True or not, be aware that "The Global Times is a daily tabloid newspaper under the auspices of the Chinese Communist Party's flagship newspaper, the People's Daily, commenting on international issues from a Chinese nationalistic perspective." (Wikipedia)
They won't because it costs votes. Is it better for the US in long term that these jobs are automated?
Because their centralized government seems to have a purpose other than gaining power and wealth.
Even where power and wealth is the sole purpose, "saving labor" to allow them to move into new jobs with higher meaning to your power/wealth would be your default take. "Job loss" is the position only when you've stopped innovating and can't imagine that there is anything else people can do.
What do you think gaining power and wealth looks like? To me the Chinese central government seem hyper-fixated on it and it is working out well for them. Making strategic dual-purpose investments is directly aligned with gaining power and wealth.
It's just people commentating differently depending on what "team" they think the target of the comment is on - people who think socialism is probably a good idea, but bemoan any automation done by private industry that causes job losses. However they will love China's efficiency doing the same thing.
I think there were already multiple posts on HN about this.
Most recent I remember UPS firing 20 000 people.
This was because UPS let an Amazon delivery deal roll off that was not profitable.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1090727/000109072725...
https://about.ups.com/us/en/newsroom/press-releases/financia...
UPS said it was because shipping volumes at Amazon are down, so it's not-profitable because shipping-volumes are down. lol
Dockworkers, logistics, truck delivery drivers, warehouse workers, etc.
On the other hand, I guess it might be a great time for small shops and businesses that produce low to medium tech stuff- from crafts, clothing and furniture to electronics. Even if the country's going to suffer they should profit handsomely (which is not a bad thing per se).
Except those businesses relay heavily on imported materials. For example, no one is weaving cotton into fabric in the US at any scale.
It’s actually not. If you’re starting a business right now with the goal of selling to customers all over the world, setting up shop in America is not looking good. You’d pay exorbitant tariffs on inputs and machines.
It’s better to manufacture out of the country and let US consumers eat the tariff cost on import while keeping your operations efficient outside of the US tariff zone.
It’s an extraordinarily poorly planned policy.
Who's going to invest in a business that's only profitable as long as we keep these insane tariff level up and will take several years to spin up? (Plus where are they going to get the machines to do the actual work? Those are being tariffed too!)
Unfortunately the largest cotton producing country is china, followed by India.
My grandparents actually worked and met at a denim factory in west Texas which was renowned for its cotton production. Growing up I remember giant cotton fields which have all been replaced with strip malls and sprawl.
It’s going to be a multi-year project at the very least. And even then probably still cheaper to make clothes in Vietnam.
Won't happen.
Takes years, decades to build or rebuild new industries.
Yea, the bank is just going to love to hand out money with the amount of political and economic uncertainty injected into the system....
Even their hats are made in China.
Cool, so in a year or three the fabric factory would be up and running. Oh wait, we need to first build a factory for the machines we need in the fabric factory...
If anything it will be very short term. Nobody knows where this is going so it would be suicidal for small businesses to scale up. Large companies have the reserves but little guys don’t. I am very worried that this will lead to another dying of small businesses like happened during COVID.
> On the other hand, I guess it might be a great time for small shops and businesses that produce low to medium tech stuff- from crafts, clothing and furniture to electronics.
Absolutely not. All of the small businesses I know are getting crushed by tariffs.
Electronics especially. With 125% tariffs on everyone from China, prices just exploded.
Even domestic PCB manufacturers prices and lead times have shot up due to demand.
It’s extremely bad. I don’t think people realize how devastating this is to company that couldn’t amass huge inventories prior to tariffs arriving and can’t lobby the Trump administration for an exemption.
> if you already have a small business in the US making stuff that was hard to sell locally given the cheaper competition from abroad, people will have no choice but come to you.
Not true for many businesses. It’s common to have some inputs or machinery that is imported. Maybe you can win while you’re working through inventory and your machines aren’t breaking down, but if your COGS also go up with tariffs then it might not be a clear win.
>I didn't mean that this is going to be a net positive or even better than disastrous. I'm just saying that if you already have a small business in the US making stuff that was hard to sell locally given the cheaper competition from abroad, people will have no choice but come to you.
Unless those businesses have inputs that rely on China...which many do, those guys are going under.
>Exactly this, I bet those PCB manufacturers are quite happy. Some of their employees might get the idea of setting up a new business, too.
Those US PCB manufacturers didn't care for that business before, they focus on getting fat government or industrial contracts. The reason China was so consumer focused was because they have so much capacity that they must be friendly to my dinky $5 order. Furthermore consider that with 1.4 billion people, there are so many engineers that its extremely cutthroat. You then have a scenario where they assign an engineer to look at my dinky little $5 order because they can.
It depends what sort of demand there is for your product. If it's an essential and you can bring it in at a good price, your business might jump. If it's discretionary and is the sort of thing people postpone buying due to recession, not so much.
Intermodal freight drayage industry, which is largely comprised of a thousands of very small and ineffocoently run mom and pop nepo-companies run dependent upon an open tolerance of very scammy business tactics extending temporary surcharges indefinitely, milking covid business relief loans to the fullest extent possible) in order to survive, is going to experience a mass die-off if this tariff war lasts another 6 to 9 months.
> I hate to be so cynical these days....but if this is true, that would mean a lot of
But since we’re being cynical, is importing stuff just to keep the port workers busy a good idea?
I didn't mean we should keep importing to keep people busy. I'm sure that whatever was coming through those ports was ordered by a large number of companies/individuals.
Sure, if we were in a downturn it would slow but not come to a standstill.
From this article "Even during the COVID nonsense, the supply chain did not experience THIS kind of sudden shut down."
> I didn't mean we should keep importing to keep people busy. I'm sure that whatever was coming through those ports was ordered by a large number of companies/individual
Sure but you were being cynical and presented port workers not having having thing to unload as a major issue to worry about. In the whole scheme it seemed like not the first problem to solve.
It's not a downturn, it's a trade war, complete with effective blockade.
Yes, probably. Lose skilled, trained workers to another industry and it may be tough to get them back later on when you need them again.
Or… undo the change that caused a temporary shock.
By all means, retrain the blacksmiths in the early 1900s… but this isn't that sort of situation. We'll need the port workers again.
Because that’s the only reason things are imported?
I don't think OP was specifically stating we need to save these specific jobs, rather they were pointing out the interconnected nature of the economy. Less importing hurts the workers in those industries. Taking that further, it will hurt businesses near the ports where the workers may have gotten lunch, etc. etc. etc. That's how recessions look at a microeconomic scale.
> just
Well we don’t import things to just do that.
Sure, but it's presented as the major problem here. There are other problems to worry about at that scale
No, but we're not just importing stuff because it keeps port workers busy. We import stuff because there is demand for it, and port workers' labor generates many multiples of profitable business activity downstream.
This SS post is fear porn. The Seattle Times article they link to at the bottom of their post gives actual numbers, not just vibes based on what poster can see with their binoculars.
"Data from the Marine Exchange of Puget Sound, an industry association, shows the number of arriving container ships berthing at Seattle and Tacoma terminals from April 1 to April 24 was down 12% compared with the same period in 2024."
Make no mistake this is bad, but "Port of Seattle EMPTY - ZERO Inbound Ocean Container Ships" is some straight up bullshit.
Trump only announced the tariffs on April 2, and the crossing takes weeks, and some traffic will left later than that having gambled that it'd be undone in transit. (Some of it was!)
The stat for "April 1 to April 24" is likely to be different than the stat on April 27th alone. Both may be true.
The port does look pretty empty on https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-122.373/c...
Your stat also includes Tacoma, a close but different port. The Port of Seattle isn't quite empty, but numbers... aren't awesome.
https://www.king5.com/article/news/verify/what-we-can-verify...
> Northwest Seaport Alliance Port of Seattle Commissioner, Ryan Calkins, said the future does not look as good. "The last forecast I saw was forecasting out over the next three months, and each month was forecasted to be down around 25% per month,” Calkins said. The Seaport Alliance said some ships are coming in with less cargo than anticipated. In some cases, it is 30% lower.
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Less traffic means less pollution, i guess it's good.
It’s Trump’s plan to save the environment
2025, in which Americans realize Greatness is never achieved alone.
good sick of all the cheap Chinese products that break in a week and have to order another. Even the clothing seems to fade and be useless in 6 months.
You could always buy more expensive clothing, now you’ll be forced to
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People in the cult are over the moon about this. They think the guy is basically Jesus.
They would deport Jesus if they saw him.
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In other words, a pretty obvious example of a "false idol".
> miracle
Running government like a business... Theranos.
Or Trump University or Trump Taj Mahal or Trump Castle Hotel & Casino or Trump Plaza Casino or Trump Plaza Hotel or…
(How do you even possibly bankrupt a casino, much less multiple casinos a decade? Is it money laundering or is it being so terrible at running a business that you can't even run a business with the House Advantage of a casino?)
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good. we have too much shit. too much noise. i grew up without most of it, and life was fine. inb4 trump ballwasher: i’d applaud regardless of party or personality.
That’s what winning looks like!
Stopping the flow of Chinese products, often made with child or forced labor, is a good thing: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ilab/reports/child-labor/list-o.... Weren’t we upset about the Uyghurs five minutes ago?
Trade with China is bad. It means a race to the bottom with a foreign country that doesn’t have our labor protections or environmental laws, and whose “comparative advantage” is cheaper labor. This was a widely accepted belief among the left until recently: https://youtu.be/kHRZnz5oHsE?si=A3QViVdPHISAP6qI. It’s insane to give up on beliefs-especially when you’re right—because you’re mad the “wrong people” have finally come around to agreeing with you!
What would the tariffs be if you made them only high enough to offset China’s looser regulation and cheaper labor? The current tariffs probably are in the same ballpark.
Stopping the flow entirely would collapse western society as we would have no access to technology. I don't think anyone sane disagrees the geopolitical impact of dependence on China is a bad thing, but the mechanism by which this flow of goods is being disrupted is going to have a very negative impact on people's quality of life.
>Stopping the flow entirely would collapse western society as we would have no access to technology.
That is a wild exaggeration!
(Not that I want the flow to stop.)
I don't think anyone is advocating for incentivizing forced/child labour.
Given that the ILAB link you posted itself is maintained by EO 13126 signed by the Clinton Administration, I think there can be nuance in the discussion around whether or not the blanket application of certain foreign policy instruments is the right way to induce a change in the domestic policy of another country to solve the problem of bad labour practices.
We can do this without it becoming an argument about whether trade is "good" or "bad" depending on what "side" you are on.
The Republican party is eagerly dismantling labor protections and environmental regulations as fast as it cand in as many jurisdictions as it can.
I remember you used to complain about the degree of corruption in your country of origin and contrast it unfavorably with the solid institutions and procedural safeguards in the US. How times have changed.
China is not only cheaper but in many cases better at manufacturing.
I sometimes deal with a Canadian vs a Chinese supplier for a component of a consumer product, and the difference in customer service, quality, and speed is stark. AND it’s cheaper. The only issue from a logistics point of view is that China is far and shipping is slow.
Is Canadian quality bad? As a European I don't have much experience with stuff made in Canada, I think. At least I can't think of any...
No it's usually great, for the things that are usually made here.
But the item I in question is low-cost and plastic.
There are other, higher-margin things we buy from Canadians and the experience is very different. But these aren't the things people typically want to onshore with tariffs.
If it was only China being tariffed, instead of including all the allies we need to stand against China, you would start to have a point. If they were based on something other than a 1600s child king's understanding of trade balance, maybe focused on particular kinds of manufacturing, or even just explicitly based on morals instead of this fantasy of manufacturing returning to the US, you would have a point. But none of those things are true. Trump is at best a stopped clock with gears poking out through the casing.
That might all be true, but Trump is also the only one in decades to move the needle in the direction it needs to go. Even Obama was pushing us in the direction of even more free trade with TPP.
Perhaps so, but that doesn’t mean he’s free from criticism. It’s important not just to fix problems, but also make sure you don’t break other things that were previously working when you do. We don’t applaud the plumber who successfully unclogs a drain and then causes a catastrophic water leak in the fixture.
No points for messing up evey single detail, not to mention discrediting the idea with his abominable implementation. It will most likely have the opposite of the (ostensible) intended effect. Most people don't want to make multi-year investments in manufacturing in a country run by a mad king who has already changed the policy multiple times. And again, China is the only part that I can agree is even vaguely in the right direction. Tariffing Europe was profoundly self-defeating.
> It means a race to the bottom with a foreign country that doesn’t have our labor protections or environmental laws
But even then "better labor laws" or "stronger environmental protections" aren't among the demands being made to China.
This is so disingenuous a defense of the circus going on right now for so many reasons.
First of all, nobody in the current administration would give a shit if somehow China made a deal. The Tariffs would go back down again. The Tariffs are not contingent upon good labor laws in China or anything like that. Like seriously. Yes, the left wants better labor power and yes the left continues to understand that offshoring reduces labor power. But Trump et al are not credible as champions of the working man and this policy is not even really directed that way.
Second, even if this were a policy goal, going about it this way is, and I really can't put this any other way, fucking stupid. Even your dumbest leftist can understand that if you want to make changes to your economy you do so with some lead time and in such a way as to, you know, not empty shelves and drive up costs for the regular working people.
By all means, we should pursue a humanist trade policy that pressures developing countries to improve labor rules, human rights, democracy, etc. But to characterize this present circumstance as that is ridiculous.
> By all means, we should pursue a humanist trade policy that pressures developing countries to improve labor rules, human rights, democracy, etc. But to characterize this present circumstance as that is ridiculous.
But nobody besides Trump is going to do that, because everyone is addicted to the short term boosts of free trade. Obama talked a big game and then in office became a free trader that was pushing TPP before Trump killed it.
The reason Trump happened is because the grownups have been rowing in the wrong direction for 40 years.
"We have to like Trump throwing a tantrum and fucking everything up because liberal politicians suck." is such an incredibly lame rhetorical thing. We don't have to like it, we don't have to pretend "maybe its good?"
Trump clearly has zero interest in the human rights of people who are not American, and even Americans don't seem to rate too high if they don't support him. Just because liberal politicians did too much free trade we do not have to pretend like this is a good policy or that Trump cares about International Labor.
One of the main points of TPP was to put pressure on China. Trump killing it helped China.
Unpopular opinion: this isn't that big of a deal for most people.
Gdp, consumer index scores, all that stuff is a measure of how much poor people are willing to spend and how hard they're working. What really matters is, can these people buy a house? Can they buy eggs?
I don't know how many of them will be all that caught up that they can't buy some disposable flip-flops on Temu anymore. We need to focus more on how hard it is to live than how hard it is to import stuff.
It's an unpopular opinion because it's wrong.
No single aspect of the economy exists in a vacuum. Tariffs and lower shipping volumes portend thousands of small businesses potentially going under, translating to many more thousands of people losing their jobs and incomes. This has many unforeseen knock-on effects in declining economic activity.
Are we really subscribing to Reaganistic trickle-down economic theory now? How sure are we that those imports aren't mostly just lining the pockets of the rich?
We're measuring the wrong things. We need to measure cost of living instead of how empty or full a Port is. We don't know if these two things are correlated yet.
That's not what trickle-down economics mean.
Trickle-down is the idea that giving tax breaks or benefits to the wealthy or big corporations will eventually benefit everyone else through increased investment or job creation. What I’m talking about here is the basic flow of goods and services in an economy—when that gets disrupted, the effects hit workers and consumers directly, not eventually or indirectly.
When imports slow down, businesses have fewer goods to sell or face higher input costs. That leads to higher prices for consumers and layoffs for workers. It doesn’t just impact “the rich.”
This isn’t about trickle-down economics; it’s about how supply chains work. The impact of these tariffs will show up in lost jobs, higher prices, and reduced access to everyday goods. Those are real effects for regular people, not just abstract economic concerns.
Reduced shipping volumes immediately mean less work for truckers—thousands of people taking a hit to their income right off the bat, which in turns leads to less economic activity. This is exactly what people mean when they say no part of the economy exists in a vacuum. It’s all connected.
Yes. The port traffic data discussed in this thread is one such example.
I'm not an economist or supply chain expert myself, so I rely on actual subject-matter experts to interpret and contextualize the raw numbers for me. So far, they're all painting a pretty gloomy picture.
Good people to follow on this are CEO of Flexport Ryan Petersen [1], Jason Miller from MSU who had a great podcast with Derek Thompson [2], CEO of FreightWaves Craig Fuller [3], etc.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/small-businesses-buying-impo...
[2] https://www.theringer.com/podcasts/plain-english-with-derek-...
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/video/2025/04/28/its-about-to-get-much-...
No, that's all just normal "this is how an economy works" stuff. It has nothing to do with Reagan or what people refer to as "trickle down economics".
Well, if their business relied on reselling those flipflops they won’t be buying many eggs.
Same if they were transporting them to the store, or delivering them to a home, or…
A decent share of US food [1] and construction materials [2] are imported. So yes, this is going to impact everyone.
[1] https://www.traceone.com/resources/plm-compliance-blog/foods...
[2] https://www.nahb.org/advocacy/top-priorities/building-materi...
These things are being talked about in the context of predicting a future recession, in which case it may be very difficult for people to afford housing and other essentials.
[^1]: Of course, the whole "eggs as an economic indicator" was far right propaganda to conflate the bird flu with the broader economy
People care immensely about having a job. If tariffs mean that businesses don't hire as much or do layoffs then this is a big deal for most people. The unemployment rate doesn't even need to go up that much to have a huge effect on people's general feeling about the economy.
i agree. but i think most people are worried about second order effects (the impact of supply chains on the whole economy) rather than whether or not you can buy 3$ shoes on temu.
the people this impacts aren't buying eggs let alone houses. You and I are addicted to cheap flip flops; many poor people require cheap goods - including household and food - to survive.
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I think its: https://volumes.portoptimizer.com/ ?
That number for w20 will probably change. For example, when https://youtu.be/2GgcIuQ4X5k?t=324 was produced w20 was predicted to be up 0.84% YoY.
This site is obviously a "hostile and political act" by the Port of LA.
Turns out reality itself is a hostile and political concept if your political leadership is incompetent enough.
That's why there's such a strong push towards "alternative facts"
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Reality loses elections? What a surprise! How many politicians have so far sold bullshit lies like greatness again, which the desperate voters keep buying? Freaking planet has double the people (4 extra billions) compared to the 1970's and effects of burning the resources are now more and more apparent, but oh hey, that politician promises a return the prosperity of those times when you didn't even need condoms to fuck, do I want to face reality or do I want to vote for fake hope?
> proves not to be true
Perhaps. It's not black and white of course, more like black and grey.
Majority of all things Cheeto says are either outright lies or just incoherent rambling which is too hard to decipher.
I mean you do have a point about tribalism and the danger of blindly supporting anyone. However that's almost entirely tangential in this specific case. Just stating the fact that Trump and his cabinet are extremely (purposefully or not) incompetent and corrupt is not partisan in any way whatsoever.
Russiagate.
"Reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Stephen Colbert
Could it be similar to weather forecasts where the further out the forecast goes the more it relies on seasonal averages?
I think two weeks is pretty much the low end of transit time for a container from China to US, so I wouldn't expect needing much modeling within that window.
Ships can be rerouted while in transit. I bet it is extremely unusual for a container ship, but we do live in interesting times.
The tariffs are based on departure not arrival date.
It happens all the time but it’s more useful to think in terms of container flows getting rerouted. Container ships sail in fixed loops so have containers on board for multiple ports. It often happens that the order in which the ports are called (the rotation) is changed, or a particular port gets skipped all together. Reasons can be congestion, delays in previous ports, etc. etc. The line can choose to transship the cargo, so pick it up with a second ship to carry it to destination, have the customer pick it up in the new location (possibly with a rebate) or truck/rail it to the final destination themselves.
But these ships are carrying containers for many different companies, right?
If some companies want the goods now and other companies need to hold off, how does that work?
Just whoever's shipping the most goods wins?
But that’s “same port, different route” rerouting right? Here you would have to have “different port” rerouting (or some really weird weather making the Pacific intransitable”
Yeah I was wondering if those models try to smooth those bumps.
Week 9->10 2025 had a 35% drop too. And Week 9->10 2024 had a 45% drop and a 26% drop Week 16->17 2024.
Starting to wonder how significant this news really is?
That is Chinese New Year, it has always a very large drop. It's very impactful but expected and yearly.
My companies reporting needs to correct for it since the date shifts on western calendar and if would mess up all reporting otherwise, so yes, this is extremely significant.
Thank you for the details. I've no doubt that tariffs are having impacts. Was looking at that specific data and finding it hard to conclude with just that data. Does CNY also explain the Week 16->17 drop in 2024?
Chinese New Year falls between 21 January and 20 February. This would be somewhere between week 3 and week 8.
Some ISO 8601 week numbers for CNY:
2022 CNY fell on Feb 1 , which is Week 5
2023 CNY fell on Jan 22, which is Week 3
2024 CNY fell on Feb 10, which is Week 6
2025 CNY fell on Jan 29, which is Week 5
It’s sad that these posts of relevant facts - that are only presented as such, with no judgement - are being downvoted, apparently because they don’t supportive a narrative. One of the things I’ve always loved about Hacker News was how the community was so curious about truth. I guess all good things come to an end at some point.
I would love to have conversations with folks about the details and learn more about it. The CNY mention was helpful.
There's probably an effect of people who tried as hard as they could to get their goods loaded under the wire before the tariffs took effect, and so the following week would be less, but the following week would be closer to normal.
Predictions are based on historical data which isn’t relevant in this case.