Trump 2.0 official thread

zyklon

Junior Member
Registered Member
I mean very soon tariffs on Mexico will happen not that factories will be built. :p

That's a fair take. :)

However, I don't know how sustainable tariffing Mexico will be.

I spend a good amount of time in both Texas and California these days, and like many American states bordering Mexico, we get a lot of produce from down south. There are certain products Americans can do without, but affordable groceries isn't one of them.

If Trump's tariffs against Mexico are poorly calibrated (and there's a reasonable chance they will be given his track record), the GOP will get slaughtered during next year's midterm elections, which will make Trump significantly more vulnerable to impeachment.

Trump is a fool destroying US economy. So, I dont expect he will succeed on anything. But he will not stop trying since this is his last term and he thinks he is invincible after surviving the assasination.

TBF, Trump's desire to reinvigorate American manufacturing makes a lot of sense.

Problem is that not only is the US ~20 years late, but the man at the helm, Donald J. Trump, is too disorganized, impatient and unpopular to make it happen.
 

dingyibvs

Senior Member
China's own port fees against whom? Reciprocal port fees against US made ship is useless because US shipbuilding industry is practically non-existence (I'm not against putting one up anyway just to bury the very idea of US shipbuilding industry though).

What the US port fees does is essentially increase the competitiveness of SK and Japan shipbuilding industries against China. But not by much, I predict major shipping companies will magically shit out a bunch of subsidiaries to exclusively handle shipping route to US where they concentrate all their non Chinese made ship.

Again the american overestimated their importance in global market, US bound shipping route is just a small fraction of global shipping volume much less than China's shipping volume in fact. If they keep this up it will just further shrink their volume and destroy their port business. At this point it will be cheaper to just unload cargo in Canada and Mexico and move those cargo through land route into US.
I don't believe that's even necessary. The final draft is watered down and no longer includes port fees for simply owning Chinese ships, as the fees only apply to ships built by China. Shippers can just use non-Chinese ships for US routes, and since shippers are in alliances (e.g. COSCO is in an alliance with Evergreen, a Taiwanese shipper which has no China built ships) it won't even be much trouble to do so. In addition, since American ports cannot handle the biggest and most advanced container ships, it'll on average move the Korean and Japanese shipyards down the value chain. Building more container ships is already moving down the value chain for them, this'll do it even further.

To me, this whole port fee thing is just stupid, at least as it stands right now. It'll raise the cost of trade for the US a little bit while being not even a scratch for China. I can't even call it a bad move by Trump because it'll barely make a difference one way or another.
 

enroger

Senior Member
Registered Member
I don't believe that's even necessary. The final draft is watered down and no longer includes port fees for simply owning Chinese ships, as the fees only apply to ships built by China. Shippers can just use non-Chinese ships for US routes, and since shippers are in alliances (e.g. COSCO is in an alliance with Evergreen, a Taiwanese shipper which has no China built ships) it won't even be much trouble to do so. In addition, since American ports cannot handle the biggest and most advanced container ships, it'll on average move the Korean and Japanese shipyards down the value chain. Building more container ships is already moving down the value chain for them, this'll do it even further.

To me, this whole port fee thing is just stupid, at least as it stands right now. It'll raise the cost of trade for the US a little bit while being not even a scratch for China. I can't even call it a bad move by Trump because it'll barely make a difference one way or another.

Apparently the idea was floated by the Trump's team before and got shut down by opposition. Now that this thing is on again, this really solidifies the picture that Trump pretty much does whatever the last person he talked to tell him to do, who knows maybe he will cancel it again. Who gives a fuck anymore, just enjoy the shitshow
 

manqiangrexue

Brigadier
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zbb

Junior Member
Registered Member
Everyone online keeps talking about USD falling. It hasn't? At least not in any real world terms. Everything being purchased online for the everyday consumer is still denominated in USD and our local currencies are as they were against USD before Trump. Outside of the blip a couple of weeks ago, I don't see for example 1 AUD trading for 0.8 USD yet or something of that effect.

When a crisis causes a flight to safety, prices of safe assets are pushed up while prices of risky assets drop. USD and US government bonds are traditionally considered the safest of the safe assets. Every time there is a crisis, the US gets to sell its "safe" assets (which are just paper that it prints) at elevated prices to foreign investors seeking safety in exchange for risky foreign assets whose prices have collapsed. This even happened during the Great Financial Crisis in 2008-2009 despite that crisis being caused by the US subprime collapse. This exorbitant privilege of the USD means that the US benefits tremendously from every crisis, even ones that it caused. (Incidentally, I suspect that Trump started this trade war in part to cause a global economic crisis thinking that the US safe haven privileges would once again allow the US to harvest the rest of the world like in past crises.)

However, this time things are different. Since the beginning of April, USD has fallen by as much as 8% against the other so called safe haven currencies, the Swiss Franc, the Japanese Yen, and the Euro. The week of April 7-11 was the worst week for 30-year US treasury bonds since 1982 while German government bond prices rose dramatically. This is what led to Trump's 90-day pause in tariffs against the rest of the world aside from China. USD exchange rates vs AUD and other risky currencies remaining about the same while falling against safe haven currencies such as the Swiss franc means that the USD is now basically just another risky asset and have lost its privileged position as the safest of the safe havens. This is terrible timing for the US as $6 trillion in US treasury debts are coming due in June and will need to roll them over to newly issued debts.
 

daifo

Major
Registered Member
The Navarro was a false propagandist who fantasized about returning to the classical mercantilist era.
The most serious problem is that Trump seems to want to use tariffs to coerce the world into paying for America's massive debt, which is too arrogant. He is on the verge of publicly proclaiming that the world should serve America for free.

Trump is not doing anything abnormal, he is just doing it too publicly and in a non strategic way. The US (and some european alliances) see the world as colonies that it extracts wealth from and in return it provides "security." With the modern era, better connectivity, China/Russia etc, the world is breaking away from that old order so the US is trying to "suffocate the babies before it learn to walk"
 
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