Anyone underselling the stupidity of this tariff shit is just as stupid as trump.
this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2025
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I've been looking into producing Semiconductor Grade Silicone Powder but I haven't been able to decide between the Plasma, CVD, or more traditional furnace with reduction agent methods without knowing their operational costs. It would be kind of out of my price range to test each of them.
I can run some basic numbers if anybody knows a good industrial catalogue for the equipment.
I'm sure corporations aren't going to use this excuse to hike the prices even more, like they did with the energy crisis ...
Translation: Stupid Americans Vote For Felon Rapist Traitor To Increase Cost Of Living
He certainly running the country into the ground like one of his businesses
Not just any businesses either, he bankrupted a casino... TWICE
It takes a special kind of stupid to bankrupt a fucking casino, twice
He failed to sell alcohol and beef to Americans
The only thing harder to do is to fail at selling sub-prime mortgages before the 2008 recession
which he also did
That was with very clear money laundering too.
How do you bankrupt a casino while also running a money laundering scheme and still fail? Someone should turn his life into a movie it'd be like anti breaking bad
Yeah but what’s the moral to the story? Keep failing over and over again and you’ll end up being the most powerful man in the world twice? Not a story that can be told without realising that the world is corrupt cesspool.
Bankruptcy is a strategy at the corporate level.
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This is actually kind of funny. Because his first term is more or less considered successful in financial circles, (COVID aside). But the entire time he was fighting with aides, bureaucrats, etc... who kept either getting in his way or talking him out of his crazy or stupid ideas. Now he's removed all the safeties and we're getting full Trumpism with all the horrible financial decisions it brings.
He wasn't successful at anything.
He slashed the corporate income tax and due to an effective amnesty on repatriation many large MNCs brought stashed offshore cash and cut R&D to register massive earnings for his last 2 years.
Ironically, this started to dry up right around Q1 2020... Then COVID drowned out everything.
His response was to just pump $4T to employers with almost no documentation, thank god we didn't see a massive wave in inflation out of that.
lets not forget browbeating the fed to drop interest rates before covid hit.
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So glad I built my pc last fall. Fuck all this bullshit and everyone that voted for it.
Or didnt vote against it
And who is eligible to actually vote in the election
Yes I'm not blaming people in New Zealand or something
The internet is about to feel a lot slower for us as more services move offshore to flee the taxes.
And also as net neutrality is gutted and the oligarchs ensure internet fast and slow lanes.
How surprising is this really, considering we're still paying COVID-inflated prices for most things after COVID came and went, and was gone, and is still gone, and it's a couple years later and it's fucking gone.
Inflation from the Fed helicoptering money around was probably the most predicted thing that's happened in the last 50 years. It should have surprised literally no one.
It's also no surprise that it hasn't gone away. That's called deflation and every central banker on the planet would rather be eviscerated with a rusty spoon than allow deflation to happen.
Except that's not what happened, companies used the slowdowns in shipping from Covid shutdowns as an excuse to raise prices, then never lowered them. This isn't inflation, this was intentionally planned, don't belive me? Listen to their fucking earnings calls specifically saying it out loud.
Companies deciding to raise prices (for any reason — justified or not) is what inflation is made of.
Inflation just means “prices went up.”
That is an extremely simplified take of what inflation is.
Here's a fun example as to why just saying "inflation means prices go up" doesn't make sense, what happens when a group of companies conspire to raise prices simultaneously? Is that inflation or is that price fixing? https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent
I’m not saying “inflation means prices go up” I’m saying “inflation means prices went up”. There can be many things that cause prices to go up, inflation is one result of any such cause and of course then causes many things itself including further inflation.
In your scenario that’s inflation caused by price fixing. You seem to be saying these things are mutually exclusive but I don’t understand why you would say that.
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Look at the money supply compared to inflation. Inflation went up due to supply shocks, central banks printed money as supply shocks eased, and we're left with stable, higher prices.
If central banks didn't print money during the inflationary period, we would've seen a period of deflation as prices returned roughly to where they were.
Seriously, look up the numbers. Here's UK money supply, for example.
Ok. The bottom line is, either it "won't do all that much"-- meaning it won't affect prices, it won't affect the economy, it'll be basically useless--or it will be disastrously expensive for ordinary people. There is no other option. The "disastrously expensive for ordinary people" is the only thing that will cause any amount of the change Trump promises: it's the mechanism by which the plan operates.
There is no option where companies just eat the tariff costs, or countries pay them. Maybe a few scattered companies and countries do, but by and large, not a chance.
Every country in the world needs all the other countries more than all of the other countries need it. There's just no real leverage, because we're all interconnected; you can snip one country out, and it'll slightly hurt everyone, but it'll wreck the country that was snipped out.
That's true if all other things were equal, but they're not. The US is the largest economy in the world, based on GDP, so it has a lot more weight to swing around than others. So theoretically, the US should have more leverage than smaller countries.
That said, I don't think the US has enough leverage to get away with this. Retaliatory tariffs will come and the net result is that trade in all regions will suffer. When you tax something, you get less of it...
The US might be able to get some leverage if we had an economist in power w/ strong diplomacy skills, but we have Trump.
I don't know how we define "enough" in this scenario, but as you allude to: in the end the USA is just some 400 million people buying things from overseas. Absolutely those who buy the most, and that is what drives the economy in many countries. It is what has picked up countries in SE Asia from poverty to industrialization.
Problem is that now when everything is more expensive in the US, the same people will stop spending. They might have spent the same money on products made in America, but those are precious few and just increased in price. So in effect everyone in America can now buy less for the same money and the industry capacity to produce what's demanded doesn't exist in short term. And in real estate, short term is 3-10 years.
The rest of the world? Well, most of the world just lost their biggest market. Of course, the demand that can't be produced domestically in the US will still be seen, but at a reduced rate, which will reduce the economic development world wide, until new markers are found. China still needs to sell, but the market for the high margin stuff is reduced.
In the end? I wouldn't be surprised if this stunt reduces world trade to such a degree it might be viewed as a notable side effect that carbon use went down. Trump might have managed to stop overconsumption like nobody else and with it energy demand. So despite doing the oil industries bidding and go against renewables, the shipping industry stand to loose enough trade that it might affect oil use world wide.
I agree with most of that.
The thing is, other countries don't want to see a slowdown in trade, so there's absolutely a chance that they'll be more willing to make deals with the US in exchange for reduced tariffs. In the short term (again, like you said, could be years), there will be reduced demand, which will hurt markets, and I wouldn't be surprised if conservatives get slammed in elections in the next 2-3 years since the pain will likely still be fresh. I don't trust Trump to actually make those deals though, especially since so many other countries seem to hate him.
We'll see though. It's going to suck if he sticks to his guns and keeps tariffs going in his apparent plan to revitalize US industrial capacity. I'm not sure why we want that, but that seems to be what he wants.
Unfortunately i think it's the same old extortion we've seen before. Trump Jr already posted "I wouldn't want to be the last country to cut a deal", so I guess we will see more if this. Ukraine stood up against it, I hope the rest of the world does to, but I'm afraid most wount.
They probably won't, but I guess we'll see. Trump is certainly playing with fire here, and that doesn't make me feel great as an American.
Yeah, the US has a lot of economic weight to swing around, but the world has also spend the decade (!) since Trump was first elected finding other business outlets and generally needing the US less, meaning that the relative weight of the US and the rest of the world has normalized significantly. The EU is stronger, China is stronger, Canada is stronger. The US withdrawing from the world economy would hurt everyone, but it would hurt the US a whole lot more than everyone else.
Maybe, but I think you're overselling the EU a bit. Yeah, there have been some high profile changes (in terms of stuff that makes the media), but I wonder how much that actually matters.
The EU hasn't really ever been a big importer of US goods anyway, at least not for decades. The biggest importers of US products are Mexico, China, and Canada. The US imports a fair amount from the EU, so if they retaliate with tariffs of their own, the US will just buy less from them, which will hurt the EU more than the US.
The US will have a bunch of negatives in the short term too, but I guess we'll see if those are permanent or just represent a shifting in trade partners.
because we're all interconnected; you can snip one country out, and it'll slightly hurt everyone, but it'll wreck the country that was snipped out
Conservatives will NEVER understand this.
They will if the conservative media machine falls apart and they start actually seeing reality.
It's possible...someday...maybe...
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Every country in the world needs all the other countries more than all of the other countries need it. There's just no real leverage, because we're all interconnected; you can snip one country out, and it'll slightly hurt everyone, but it'll *wreck* the country that was snipped out.
This is just such an absolutely perfect summary. I wish we could American politicians to speak this clearly to explain why this is such a bad idea.
You're very kind, thank you.
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Do you think he knows that he can go entire weeks without announcing a new tariff?
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