If the Trump tariffs are based on country of final assembly, then yes, final assembly will just occur somewhere else, but it will take a couple of years to setup, and the inflation shock by that time will have done a lot of damage to the economy (recession likely, depression possible). It makes sense that it took Trump forever to find a treasury secretary willing to go along with this.
You can bribe officials in Vietnam/Mexico. So they'll be your country of "final assembly".
I doubt the Americans will let them do that so easily.
They already are. Just one tiny well-explained example, although it's utterly rampant:
https://www.npr.org/2024/08/23/1197961495/the-trade-fraud-de...
No bribery required though, at least in most cases.
They tried stockpiling aluminum in Mexico during the Trump ban and that was shutdown quickly. I guess they just have to be more convoluted about it. I wonder if Trump will do something like “tariff China and any country that doesn’t tariff China itself (transitive)”, but it feels like it might be futile to do that.
So they will have to bribe officials in Vietnam or Mexico and bribe officials in the US.
A quick google search of "BYD Mexico" tells me it is already starting.
BYD can build cars in Mexico, they already build buses in SoCal, that’s not an issue. The question is if tariffs are going to apply just to final assembly and will they be easy to avoid by assembling elsewhere.
Couple of years for a western enterprise maybe, but in the east, things move fast. Really fast.
It depends if Trump tariffs just China or everyone. He promised high tariffs for China, but tariffs on all imports besides.
The last time he did tariffs against China, he put a tariff on raw materials but not stuff made with that raw material.
It was cheaper to build your excavator outside the country than pay the tariffs on importing the materials to build the excavator here.
It was an objective failure. It also resulted in very smartly targeted payback that caused serious financial distress to a bunch of blue collar American food producers who sell a lot to China because the American market is literally not big enough (my state sells millions of pounds of lobster to China, those lobstermen still vote for Trump).
This is because Trump is objectively a fucking moron, and if you tell him "No, your idea is wrong because you don't know what you are talking about", he gives you the same "You're fired" speech from his damn television show, replaces you with a sycophant, and then does the stupid thing.
Any prediction that starts with "Trump will do the Tariffs in the way that requires second order thinking" is doomed to failure.
The Trump tariffs will turn the entire world to China. America may no longer be interested in free trade and go full isolationism but many smaller countries can not. A painful truth is that for Europe the millions of containers with goods from Asia are a lifeline.