Incompetence is way more dangerous than people realize.
These tariffs are China's Four Pests campaign. Mao, a very trump like figure, decided to protect Chinese crops by destroying sparrows that were picking at them. Killing sparrows killed a predator of insects which did more damage to crops. This coupled with reality denying policies and ignoring experts led to one of the most devastating famines the world has ever experienced.
Hand waiving away this policy that denies reality and hurts America as a rational plan that went wrong is absolutely dangerous. Killing sparrows was "rational" in the same way these tariffs are. Authoritarians believe in power over reason. They do not like submitting to the authority of those who have studied problems because it is an attack on their own supremacy, so they fail to predict second order effects, which were likely obvious.
The damage this administration is doing to trust will be felt for generations. An agreement with America will have no value. No world leader will care what we say, they will only look at what we do. They will see power we have not as potentially being used for their own defense, but as a potential attack on their own sovereignty and they will wish to see us weakened so that they can spend less resources trying to determine our intentions.
If we're going full Mao, we'd be remiss if we didn't note that their plan for industry during the cultural revolution was "the proletariat will own small smelting operations next to their house". It checks out ideologically, workers controlling the means of production.. it just didn't work in reality.
Reminds me a lot of the thought process around having more manufacturing in the US by slapping tariffs around.
There is absolutely a Cultural Revolution feel to the communication by and around the president. See e.g. Bill Ackman's fully-prostrated worshipful response on Twitter this morning. The guy is a successful billionaire! And he needs to sound like a literal cult member in public lest he lose influence.
When everyone feels this way instead of fighting for the future they want to make reality... There are journalists, protestors, entrepreneurs, unionists, billionaires, etc, all fighting for what those history books will say. Ukrainians are fighting for what they will say right now.
I think a better question is what do you want them to say. Do you want them to say tyranny triumphed un-resisted?
The obeying in advance and reflexive glazing is scary in a Twilight Zone or slow-start-of-a-zombie-movie sort of way, but the fact that Trump is playing very fast and loose with due process, talking seriously about "deporting" American citizens and is actively applying economic death penalties to people on his bad side (like the EO stripping security clearance not only from Chris Krebs, but everyone who happens to work at his current employer) is scary in a "is the US as we know it actually going to survive this?" kind of way.
And I'm just pulling a few things off the top of Many Very Worrying Things here for brevity.
And don’t forget the Jan 6 types. They are the Red Guards of Trump and he used them on Jan 6 as an experiment. Pray we don’t have to witness a new culture revolution in our time!
Smart Trumpers are the worst of the bunch. Continuously inventing PHD 5D chess rationalizations for his actions that he immediately invalidates with his next erratic action. Better to just be along for the vibes than to pretend its a strategic, well thought out, well executed plan.
That's not the simplest possible explanation. The simplest explanation is that he did this because he believes in it. Trump has been saying the exact same thing about tariffs since the 1980s—there's video of him talking to Larry King about it in 1987, using exactly the same phrasing and logic that he uses today.
Donald Trump fundamentally believes that everything in life is a zero-sum game, and moreover that everyone is as crooked as him: either you're screwing someone else or you're getting screwed. That's why he's so obsessed with trade deficits specifically, because to him, that negative sign screams "you're getting ripped off."
There are other benefits. By imposing the tariffs like this and wielding them through executive power, he can extort countries and corporations to give him what he wants in exchanging for releasing the hostages, so to speak. And I'm sure people in his orbit _also_ used this as a get-rich-quick scheme, because these people are all grifters. But that is all secondary to the fact that he has believed this for forty years and finally got a chance to do it.
He tried to, but his advisors stopped him. Bob Woodward reported that Gary Cohn snatched papers off his desk on multiple different occasions to stop him from starting trade wars at the beginning of his first term.
This time around he has made sure there are no advisors strong enough to stop him. That means he is far more dangerous now than he was in the first term. And not just in the area of the economy.
I usually dismiss conspiracy theories, but if this were a dump and pump, it would be surprisingly clever. 3 hours before he announced easing tariffs, Trump tweeted that it's a good time to buy stocks. If he gave someone insider information, they could use that tweet as a cover.
> 3 hours before he announced easing tariffs, Trump tweeted that it's a good time to buy stocks. If he gave someone insider information, they could use that tweet as a cover.
Got a link to the tweet? I don't have a Twitter account.
Edit: apparently it is true, and it is on Truth social. Someone sent me a screenshot.
To the downvoters: what is wrong with you? It was an honest question.
If you're gonna use historical analogies, it pays off to be accurate. Marie Antoinette very likely never said "let them eat cake" and she wasn't particularly more detached than aristocrats at the time were generally (which, to be fair, is quite a lot, but not all aristocrats were killed in the revolution).
Marie Antoinette was not killed because she was particularly detached but for treason after plotting against the Constitutional monarchy of 1791 along with Louis XVI and many aristocrats at the time.
wow, fuck. unbelievable crap, but true, nonetheless:
after implying I should be accurate, you go on to make your own statements using weasel words like "very likely never said" and "wasn't particularly more detached" and more on the same lines in the rest of your comment. where is the proof for your weasel words, bro, just like you ask me to be accurate?
weasel words are not accurate words, bro, rather almost the opposite.
”physician, heal thyself” - before you fuck around advising other people what to do or not do.
i see a lot of trends of this on hn too. pathetic.
here is a similar excerpt from your same comment above, with different highlighting by me, which shows even better, your "weaselness" (for lack of a better word - maybe weaselishness or weasel(ish) nature? ):
>wasn't particularly more detached than aristocrats at the time were generally (which, to be fair, is quite a lot, but not all
laughable comment.
iow, what is evident to someone who sees beyond the surface meaning of the words you used, like I can, is that you want to attack someone verbally, without being held responsible for the consequences of your attack. in other words, you are a weakling and a coward.
that is why you waffle or equivocate.
and that is true of a lot of people, not just here but in the world. i have seen enough over my lifetime to know that that is the case.
for a very relevant and important current example, check out the news about the SignalGate scandal involving the topmost echelons of the US govt., how they fucked up, made a fool of themselves in front of the whole world, and then tried, unsuccessfully, like you, to cover it up.
jokers, and beggars, all such people.
update: wow, fuck, again.
proof. some time after writing this comment, on a whim, I thought of googling for the term signalgate, and what was my surprise, to see this Wikipedia page:
It just goes to show the notability of it, because Wikipedia only allows what they consider notable pages (according to their criteria, of course). iow, the topic is considered important by them.
It’s scary to think that the reality is as simple as “Trump is just an idiot that is incapable of understanding even the fundamentals of global trade and has been obsessed with what he thinks tariffs are for 30+ years and is too stubborn to listen to non-stupid people”, while the rest is just hopeless attempts to rationalize his stupidity. But when you’re in a billionaire bubble isolated from reality, and a dumb grifter who rips off every party in every deal you’ve ever done, it makes sense to assume that global trade is just countries ripping each-other off.
The people around him with zipped mouths who know better could very well be treating it as a pump and dump however.
Not clever, or justified, or well though out, or based on any solid evidence. But there's probably a rationale behind it.
Now, ideally, we shouldn't have to care what the rationale was if there was any way of just getting back to "normal", but the same way Mao wasn't a flash in the pan, I assume we're looking at a few decades of it for the US as well.
Or this is like the long history of American tariffs which gave it world class industry. We are in the midst of a 4th industrial revolution and all this insane manufacturing tech being developed just gets shipped over to china because nobody in the US wants to touch it for fear of failing.
For every four pests Mao had 100 successful projects that nobody talks about. Harm reduction is not an optimal strategy for any game.
The Great Chinese Famine was a famine that occurred between 1959 and 1961 in the People's Republic of China (PRC). It is widely regarded as the deadliest famine and one of the greatest man-made disasters in human history, with an estimated death toll due to starvation that ranges in the tens of millions (15 to 55 million).
That's 3% to 10% of China's population starved to death at the time.
Both you and OP are not looking at this from the right angle. The goal here is to decouple US from China. In the meantime, tariffs are raised on every country to gauge which side they are on. Once US knows who the allies are, they will negotiate to have those allies put up massive tariffs on China as well to prevent transshipping.
US wants nothing to do with China. As the biggest consumer economy in the world, the have that right.
And China has shown that agreement with them has no value. Remember that China promised trump in term 1 to massively import US goods and reduce fentanyl, in part to slow trumps tariff down. They did neither of those things. Trump hasn’t forgotten that.
Decoupling from China will lead to China annex Taiwan sooner. China will have the USA and the world by the balls then, so not sure we want that to happen quicker.
And I don't think anyone is calling themselves allies of the USA right now. The whole world is looking to decouple from the USA. Europe is completely over the USA, they can't rely on them for leadership, protection or for trade.
From a tech perspective, expect Europe to decouple from the USA from an economic and cultural perspective in the next decade. Smartest thing Europe can do is to create alternatives to US services, build its own defense industry and stop looking at the USA for any leadership.
is TSMC not currently building a plant in the US? and ASML are Dutch, so they're not at risk. I’m not saying that China taking Taiwan wouldn't be a massive strategic boon, but I don't think it would be "having the world by the balls" by any means
TSMC has not committed to a US plant that applies their most advanced technology. Currently, they are going to produce chips with larger slower features, some generations behind their state of the art -- that's commercially very useful, and a good idea, but in no way replaces the state of the art chips that they produce in Taiwan. Alas.
do you not think that if China invaded Taiwan, the top minds there would just leave and go elsewhere? the machines they use are built in the Netherlands. I know it's not quite as simple as that, but I don't think it'd be the end of the world like people are saying. I think worse would be the precedent it would set.
Other companies have the same EUV machines. TSMC also made the good decision in hindsight to make an early bet on those machines.
We know TSMC is dominant - the real knowledge of how they are doing that is in the heads of people working at TSMC. Or maybe better to say that something is missing from the competitors? Process? Management? Everything?
Cadence and Synopsys are US companies that need to know many of the technical parameters of TSMC processes. They might know more.
America only cared about Taiwan because it warehoused the exiled American friendly government that had a historical claim to power and could potentially be reinstalled.
As time goes on that becomes less and less relevant. Might be time to cut and run.
> Decoupling from China will lead to China annex Taiwan sooner. China will have the USA and the world by the balls then, so not sure we want that to happen quicker.
That seems to be over-rating the importance of Taiwan. If Taiwan sank into the sea tomorrow that'd be a catastrophe and the world would be worse off. But not that badly worse off. Life would continue. China's main global lever comes from the power of their unparalleled-in-history industrial strength and the aura of leadership they are building up internationally because they are substantially more peaceful than the US.
The peacefulness is probably not going to last, unfortunately, but until they change tack it is what it is.
No need, the United States of America already has more surface and underground nuclear test locations than any other nation on earth (IIRC), even more if atmospheric tests are included as those drifted fallout onto US ground surface.
There have been 2,121 tests done since the first in July 1945, involving 2,476 nuclear devices
has been called "the most irradiated, nuclear-blasted spot on the face of the earth".
In March 2009, TIME identified the 1970 Yucca Flat Baneberry Test, where 86 workers were exposed to radiation, as one of the world's worst nuclear disasters.
"The goal here is to decouple US from China. In the meantime, tariffs are raised on every country to gauge which side they are on. Once US knows who the allies are, they will negotiate to have those allies put up massive tariffs on China as well to prevent transshipping." You literally made this up. There has been no announcement about this from the admin. Its all just speculation.
Seeing as there is near total disconnect between what this admin says and what it demonstrably does (let alone the disconnect from reality entirely), why would anyone take anything they say at face value?
There is zero signal coming from any of these folk's mouths.
>>> US wants nothing to do with China. As the biggest consumer economy in the world, the have that right.
Yes, they have the right, but it doesn’t mean this is the right way. Consumers don’t suddenly stop consuming, and factories in the world don’t immediately start producing. This is like a slow flywheel; had we been almost spinning and ready to jump, it would make sense. This is not that.
Also, China is a super power which controls more than factories today. I agree they need to be checked, but sudden changes are not the way. I wish we did it by building trust with allies and then pushing China. Right now, even our allies are wary of us.
Isn't this bit naive? Because in order to decouple, one would expect that there would be policies to actually prepare for production inside US and then apply tariffs. Not other way around.
If the goal was to decouple from China then tarrifs would only be on China and we would encourage trade to move from China to other countries. The administrations actions have the opposite effect. It says the US is untrustworthy even to it's allies and maybe siding with China is not so bad. Note I don't like or trust the Chinese government and don't think other governments should try to get closer to them but Trump's actions make such moves much more likely
At the very least any nation that depends on the US for goods should probably be looking to other sources where possible and increasing support for them since even if the US is useful for now, we're clearly unstable and incompetent which makes us unreliable and risky.
> In the meantime, tariffs are raised on every country to gauge which side they are on
Why on earth would you be on the side of a country like this? Why we should be an ally of the US right now, if Trump can't even uphold agreements he signed himself 5 years ago? What guarantees do we have that, as soon as we decouple from China, the US won't treat us as a vassal because we gave up our only alternative? The only rational choice is to either be neutral or ally with China.
It looks like the consensus response is other countries embracing more multilateralism. This is a huge opportunity for proponents and governments that promote multilateralism to take charge and make it happen. Ex: China has restricted trade with Aus since 2020 because they, essentially, insulted China/didn't restrict their speech in ways that China wanted. This provides an opportunity for this to be rolled back, which is economically win-win (as most free trade is). Expect to see this sort of thing many times over between many countries in the world. Of course this is rooted in the fact that having ex-US trading partners is no significantly more valuable.
There is the second point to mention too though, which is that China is not exactly an exemplar of open markets and free trade, which is why you are not seeing many countries ally with China and form a united front against the US's trade rampage. Looking beyond the deranged policies, there are some truths in saying that China is a currency manipulator, has imbalanced trade to such a degree it causes problems in other economies, and even the somewhat more "far fetched" points about the unsustainability of a permanent trade deficit do have some truth on some level.
That is why, yes, you are seeing the EU normalize trade relations with China, but there are important caveats, like discussions about China having an expert quota and even internally capping production numbers within their own economy are on the table front and center. This would have never happened before, because China's strategy was to peg a low currency, export, and extinguish industries ex-China. Wish to some level is part of free trade, but it is underpinned in China with state sponsorship to a higher degrees in most trading partners are comfortable with (which is of course countered by the allure of cheap goods).
So another view would be that parties like the EU have new leverage against China that they can use to cut trade deals that strip out some of the abusive practices that made them uncomfortable in the past. If China is then willing to move on a bit from these approaches then the net outcome should be beneficial for the world of course.
I think that many players see the dangers of taking binary sides now more than ever. And indeed, skilled negotiators should see the advantages of playing these forces against each other to get what is best for them. In the face of the recent outrageous events, I would expect a sudden outburst of pragmatism elsewhere.
As an Australian who has spent decades watching the trade and resources markets it was notable that Australia, NZ, UK, Canada, and much of the world started taking calls from China and meetings with ambassadors.
The Trump plan to "decouple from China" was verging on dividing the world into the US and everybody else .. a large reason behind the partial rollback.
Countries are now openly rejecting China's offer to join hands .. but still sitting on the possibility of further deals with China should the US tariff insanity continue.
> Remember that China promised trump in term 1 to massively import US goods and reduce fentanyl
China stopped selling unlicensed fentanyl to the USofA, it later stopped supplying fentanyl to both Mexico and Canada.
The problem was that criminals in the USofA and Mexico purchased precursor chemicals in bulk and made their own fentanyl. Restricting precursors led to pre-precursors being purchased in bulk for drug labs to make their own precursors in order to make fentanyl.
The fentanyl problem continued under Trump and rapidly grew in size during his first term.
In 2021, Mr. Biden issued an executive order imposing sanctions on individuals and companies engaged in the illicit opioid trade. His Treasury Department put sanctions on more than 300 individuals and entities, freezing entire networks of fentanyl suppliers and traffickers out of the international financial system.
In 2023 and 2024 he identified China as a major illicit drug-producing country for its role in the synthetic opioid trade — a blow to the reputation of China’s chemical industry.
Simultaneously, the Biden administration pushed U.S. law enforcement agencies to conduct aggressive investigations and build indictments against dozens of Chinese citizens and companies that were trafficking fentanyl precursor chemicals into the United States.
[..] Biden secured a personal commitment from President Xi Jinping to restart counternarcotics cooperation in November 2023
[..] And we made progress. International fentanyl supply chains showed signs of disruption, forcing traffickers to change sources and tactics.
Together with other diplomatic initiatives and an expansive public health campaign, the number of lethal fentanyl overdoses in the United States has dropped.
In the 12 months ending September 2024, overdose deaths were down an estimated 24 percent from the year prior.
What has Trump done now he's back in office? Destroyed any cooperation with China on counternarcotics cooperation.
Tariffs alone will not push China’s government to help reduce drug overdose deaths in the United States. In fact, with Beijing already imposing retaliatory tariffs and proclaiming that it’s “ready to fight till the end,” Mr. Trump’s blunt-force tactics might drive China to cooperate less on fentanyl, not more.
With the stakes as high as they are, American communities cannot afford a miscalculation.
> And China has shown that agreement with them has no value
Unfortunately they still have much more value than agreements with the US and Trump specifically. Which Canada and Mexico found out the hard way.
Of course the probability that Trump actually forgot that he was the one who no signed USMCA and none of his “advisors” dared to tell him is not insignificant..
to be fair, I also made quite a lot of profit in stocks in the last few days without any inside knowledge of the whitehouse. it was a fairly safe bet that these tariffs were not going to last forever, and even if they were, there'd be reprieves
My opinion on this is that the damage has already been done. Successive administrations have already loaded up debt massively and participated in a Ponzi scheme with the Fed to pretend asset valuations in the US make sense. Sooner or later the chickens will come home to roost, and valuation multiples in the US will come to resemble those that have existed throughout history, and those which exist in all other parts of the world currently.
When this happens, there will be a big recession, and that is exactly the moment companies will start deploying AI in earnest to save money. This will create a downward spiral.
Yes, the Trump administration is incompetent. But, if you insist on blaming an administration, I would propose Obama and Biden as more reasonable culprits. It was Obama who presided over the massive Fed intervention into markets that enabled unbridled government spending increases. It was Biden who presided over the most problematic parts of the Covid response. Trump is just an idiot. Obama and Biden are actually bad guys.
> that is exactly the moment companies will start deploying AI in earnest to save money.
Companies are already deploying AI everywhere they possibly can as quickly as they possibly can. They aren't waiting for anything. AI just isn't up to the task of replacing most workers just yet. It's still unclear if it ever will be, but they're shoving AI into everything they can to see how it holds up, to see what it breaks, and to give it more data to work with so that it can hopefully be improved.
I strongly disagree with this point. History shows that most companies don't deploy cost-reduction technologies until forced to by economic conditions. When there's a recession, deployment of AI will be next level.
History shows that companies will do whatever they think will make them the most money. They aren't going to hold off on replacing workers with AI if they think that they can just because it wouldn't be nice or because it isn't recessiony enough. The very instant they think they can get away with firing you and replacing you with software they will do it.
Oh? Then how do you explain massively increased adoption of such technologies right after the financial crisis? You're assuming the world works the way people say it does in a business textbook. The real world is messy, and people don't like replacing employees unless they have to
When the economy slows down companies start getting rid of workers regardless of any technology. It's one of the first levers they pull.
Some companies looking to get rid of even more workers might search for new technologies that they hadn't considered before but which could enable them fire more people, or they might accelerate existing plans to replace workers with technology to get rid of them even sooner.
AI is different though because companies are fully aware of it and they are already moving as fast as they can. They have been salivating at the thought of using AI to fire their workers for years now and they're already making every effort to replace workers anywhere it seems feasible to do so. They are in such a hurry that it sometimes results in embarrassing failures like this one: https://www.motorbiscuit.com/airline-ai-chatbots-refund/
Like you say, the world is messy, which means there is no rule saying that companies must leave massive piles of cash sitting on the table until the economy gets bad enough for them to reach out and take it. Shareholders won't accept that. Any company that sleeps on firing their workers when AI can do the job will get absolutely crushed by their competitors who don't sit on their hands.
The Fed intervention was under Bush.
The vast majority of the "COVID response" was under Trump.
If you look at deficit spending by administration, you will also see that you have things backwards.
Yeah, I mean people love playing political games with this stuff. But the actual crime was what happened between 2009-2012. Trump is just a symptom. Yes, he's a bad guy, but what do you expect people to do?
I expect people to not vote for obviously bad guys.
Obama too had to clean up a mortgage crisis from his predecessor's careless deregulation. Not an excuse for his own crimes, like say drone striking US citizens. But Trump is just openly corrupt, inept, praising autocrats and aspiring to be one.
Obama didn't endorse ZIRP. He wanted to do more stimulus but Congress wouldn't let him.
In that environment ZIRP was the only solution. Ben Bernanke (a Bush appointee, re-appointed by Obama) devoted his academic career to how the Fed could have prevented the Great Recession. He was right.
These tariffs are China's Four Pests campaign. Mao, a very trump like figure, decided to protect Chinese crops by destroying sparrows that were picking at them. Killing sparrows killed a predator of insects which did more damage to crops. This coupled with reality denying policies and ignoring experts led to one of the most devastating famines the world has ever experienced.
Hand waiving away this policy that denies reality and hurts America as a rational plan that went wrong is absolutely dangerous. Killing sparrows was "rational" in the same way these tariffs are. Authoritarians believe in power over reason. They do not like submitting to the authority of those who have studied problems because it is an attack on their own supremacy, so they fail to predict second order effects, which were likely obvious.
The damage this administration is doing to trust will be felt for generations. An agreement with America will have no value. No world leader will care what we say, they will only look at what we do. They will see power we have not as potentially being used for their own defense, but as a potential attack on their own sovereignty and they will wish to see us weakened so that they can spend less resources trying to determine our intentions.