This reads to me as "we're doubling-down on 145%+ tariffs for everyone else".
This is getting frighteningly close to a Russian-style economy. As in, a handful of powerful, connected "insiders" will be allowed to operate businesses, and will dominate... while everyone else gets wiped out, by acts of government. The furthest system possible from the free-market paradigm that built the American economy as it stands today.
Russia is not a prosperous nation.
> a handful of powerful, connected "insiders" will be allowed to operate businesses, and will dominate... while everyone else gets wiped out, by acts of government
Note that this is not an exemption for companies, but an exemption for goods:
> A new list of goods to be exempted from the latest round of tariffs on U.S. importers was released, and it includes smartphones, PCs, servers, and other technology goods, many of which are assembled in China.
So all anyone has to do to qualify is produce some of the most complicated electronic devices and components in the history of the world at the largest scale possible, without which there is zero chance of being sustainable or competitive, and then they can benefit from the gifts to the established giants?
What a gift. What a great idea. That'll surely spur innovation and domestic production and have no effect to further insulate the giants from competition.
And if you build your tech in US, well, you are disadvantaged because you have to pay the tariffs on every component you import from China.
So it’s actually an incentive to build in China.
It is incentive to somewhere you can get Chinese components without massive Chinese tariffs, can sell to the US without massive tariffs, and has cheap labour or tax incentives. Several countries will be sticking up their hand, if manufacturers take the gamble that the tariffs will remain for a long enough period.
So is your component in the list from a comment below -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43665766
Then you don't pay the tariff.
Aluminum isn’t a component, but you would pay a tariff on importing it to build with it.
The other benefit of building in China is that you will get unrestricted access to Europe and other markets
Why is this downvoted? This is factual.
Electronic imports, no/low tariffs.
Import material to produce electronics, high imports.
> without which there is zero chance of being sustainable or competitive
It seems like some of these comments are missing how competition works.
Competition happens within the same type(s) of goods, not across them.
That is, the companies making the goods still affected by tariffs aren’t in competition with the companies making goods now exempt by tariffs.
Yes, its true that they will have a better chance at thriving under these exemptions, but whether they thrive or not should have little impact on the other companies.
To be clear, I’m not arguing in favor of this decision — or any of the tariffs, for that matter.
I’m just simply arguing that competition isn’t really the angle to use to argue against this particular decision.
> Competition happens within the same type(s) of goods, not across them.
Not true, for example smart phones replaced home computers for most people. Those are two very different goods, but since they can accomplish the same thing for the average person they end up competing.
It isn’t really cheap or easy to build a PC or smartphone business with name recognition…
Nor is it cheap or easy to build a company that would likely be able to appeal tariff exemptions…
Speaking of which, what are the tariffs for Russia?
Oh, we don't need tariffs for Russia. But we put them in for Ukraine. - the Republican administration
What about penguins? Are they going to get a tariff exemption?
No. This reads as capitulation by Trump who is now finding out his long held, half-baked economic theories are wrong. Trump got spanked by the bond market and realized how weak his position was. He can't walk it all back overnight without appearing even weaker than he already is. He's going to slowly roll back most consequential tariffs to try to escape blame for damaging the economy.
This is it exactly. And all the people who are calling Trump a 4cd chess master and a genius are in my opinion highly influenced by his propaganda.
They have a Trump Derangement Syndrome in a worship sense.
I’m completely over the tech industry falling over itself to bootlick and apologize away everything we’ve seen play out recently. The Cloudflare CEO, Matthew Prince, recently posted on X trying to explain the strategy and likely calm investors fears: https://x.com/eastdakota/status/1909822463707652192
“They’re not stupid. I know enough of the players involved to know they’re not idiots.”
“They’re not just in it for themselves. I get that this has become non-conventional wisdom, but I am going to assume for this that the goal isn’t merely grift.”
TLDR: don’t worry, it’s 5D chess. Keep on bootlicking your way to success while your stock gets trashed by these policies and we double down on anti-science rhetoric which will hasten our decline. I guess most of these leaders will have cashed out before it all implodes.
These excerpts and especially your TLDR doesn’t fairly digest his thesis and is a disingenuous and skewed read. Encourage others to read the whole tweet and form their own opinion instead.
I would hope anyone would do the same and not just take my word for it. That’s why I provided the link. I stand by my reading.
Trump’s next book: “The Art of the Fold”.
“Gambling with your savings”
You don't send 6 casinos broken and remain solvent by gambling with your savings.
He is, and always has, gambled with other people's savings.
I thought this is what happened during covid already. We wiped out a large number of small businesses.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre...
Small businesses die and start all the time.
It's unsurprising that more of them would die during a massive recession and a global pandemic.
Those numbers are meaningless without a similar count of small businesses opening.
I gather you haven't started your own business, or did yours start and die repeatedly?
People die all the time, and every year, more people are dying than any prior year in history.
Without context for how many people are born every year, one might read that and conclude that we're about to all die out.
It opens up avenues to all sorts off oligarchy style bribery and lack of market competition. ultimately, the country will be looted, since the most successful businesses will not thrive on its merits
His crypto coin also allows anyone to bribe him anonymously. It's incredibly corrupt.
Exactly. I hope our government can survive the next 4 years for criminal investigations into this era. We can't become Russia.
What crimes were committed and could be prosecuted under the Supreme Court's immunity ruling?
It's very clear that the system of Constitutional governance has been intentionally broken. It is very common for authoritarian regimes to have compliant judiciaries and broad legislative control.
Effective restoration and reconstruction of Constitutional governance will necessarily be dramatic. It's still doable, but optimism is more of a survival strategy than an obvious conclusion at this stage.
Market manipulation?
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/well-timed-options-...
(Besides, at this point I wouldn't be surprised if Trump's Russian oligarch friends were among these traders.)
Pausing tariffs was an official act. The Supreme Court ruled courts could not consider presidents' motives for official acts.
But what about leaking information about it?
It’s not “insider” trading if you post about it publicly on Truth Social, the same way it’s not “insider” trading if you took out an ad in the New York Times.
The government is allowed to announce policy before doing it! Even if it affects stock prices!
Yeah, I'm not on that social media, nor do I read NYT. The same holds for millions of others.
Too bad! Insider trading, as a crime, requires that the information be nonpublic material information. You can join Truth Social and follow Donald Trump, so that makes the information public.
It actually is that broad. Futures traders often rely on industry-specific periodicals, which are “public”. Same for anything in the (high monthly cost!) Bloomberg terminal. So posting on a specific social media platform, where subscribing is free? That’s 100% public.
Except he didn't announce anything. He said "a good time to buy" which may be code language that his friends understand.
… are you hearing yourself? “It’s a good time to buy!” has the plain english meaning “you should buy stock”. Everyone, you included, understood he was talking about US company stocks. Which, if you did, you would have profited. This theoretical code would be “when i say it’s a good time to buy stock, we should all buy stock!”. That is, well, not a code.
He should have announced the policy, and said something like "we will pause the tariffs". But instead, he said something vague, which can be interpreted as a hint, and which will open the road for investigations.
“Now is a good time to buy” isn’t vague.
The point is that this text is not the official policy. It is a hint to investors.
A public hint to investors.
Leaking is vague. What part of what law?
It's not vague. I'm not a lawyer but usually cases of trading with insider information are taken very seriously. It's theft, basically. And the scale here is enormous.
Leaking, insider trading, and theft are different. And laws contain specific definitions.
There is evidence of him tweeting insider information.
Again I'm not a lawyer, and I don't care what law is applicable here. But surely this warrants further investigation.
Trump won the popular vote. I don't think this is going away without a major demographic shift, time probably measured in decades.
He won by a single point, when 30% of the population didn’t vote. It’s not good for the future of the country that he got anywhere as many votes as he did but we should remember that an emboldened minority is still a minority.
A large minority is still large. And not voting is a signal of apathy. Not opposition.
Might be true, but a president is a president for all, not just those who voted for him.
How would this platitude apply to this discussion even if Trump believed it?
Because of the way that the Electoral College works, it doesn’t matter if 2 million more people voted in California or everyone voted in Texas. It wouldn’t change anything. Only the swing states mattered
Sure, and in the swing states he won by small margins. I’m not saying it’s good by any means – much of the damage internationally seems irrecoverable – but anyone opposing him should remember that they have a lot of allies.
He won the popular vote in a year when incumbents across the world ate shit at the polls because of COVID inflation.
The US had the smallest drop in support for an incumbent party.
And yet he still won
It's a winner take all two-party election where a 3% swing in sentiment results in a complete blowout.
Generally one of the two participants wins those.
There's a really serious systemic problem with the party that chose him in its primaries, and there is nothing to prevent it from happening again, but my point is that a 49.8% mandate given the circumstances is... Well, it's not one of overwhelming sentiment.
Tinfoil hat time, I don't think the man claiming everyone else cheated and who got caught cheating in a previous election got all his votes in a legal manner
All the data suggests the opposite. He wasn't in a position of power at the time; the federal government was controlled by the democrats. Elections are run at the state level and are so disparate procedurally that Russia gave up trying to flip them directly. There has been no discrepancy between exit polls and the results. We have to face the fact that this is who the United States chose, and this is who a significant portion of the electorate is ok with.
Elections are, in many if not most states, run electronically.
I don't know about you, but I certainly don't trust all the companies that make the voting machines. For instance, does Musk own stock in some of them? Do their owners vote Trump?
Voting machine integrity was litigated in the election trump lost. Fox, trump's propaganda organ, had to pay $781 million because they could not substantiate claims of electronic fraud. There are adversarial reviews of voting data at all levels, and audits done at the physical and electronic level. 60 lawsuits found no evidence of fraud. You can't just say, "I think this might have happened because it sounds sinister." There is a ton of legal, procedural, monitored, and reviewed data that overwhemingly makes the case that electronic voting fraud did not happen. If you have evidence to the contrary, present it. Otherwise, its just vibes.
Conflicts of interest are not evidence of fraud.[1]
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/mattblaze.org/post/3lmgt4ufllc26
> Trump won the popular vote.
He did not, he got <50% of the total votes at final tally. People who parrot this are under-informed, or lying to claim a mandate his administration lacks.
74,749,891 v 77,168,458 for Trump. Last time I checked, thats winning the popular vote
The US economy was not built on a free-market. US private capitalists have been built on a free market; now that their profits are under attack because they are being outcompeted by China, so they are running away with the ball. American economy real growth, where most white Americans gained wealth, came after World War II, where it was government led and controlled. It was the same for Europe, where they had to rebuild all that was destroyed after the war. It was all mostly government controlled and financed.
The problem today is that US and European capitalists are in power and do not want to admit that the Chinese economic model of government-controlled economic direction, though not perfect, would work better and help all the world's people rather than the select few. As China becomes the dominant economy, the rest of the world has to follow to stay competitive. So these are the death knell of a dying economic and government system. The US had the chance to bring real change for the people with Bernie Sanders, but that was scuttled by the capitalist non-democratic forces, allowing for the rise of Trump. US citizens have been hoodwinked by linking socialist thought, where caring about your fellow man is undemocratic, i.e., socialism.
>>Chinese economic model of government-controlled economic direction, though not perfect, would work better and help all the world's people rather than the select few
Is it better? For some reason average European lives better then Chinese, inequality is also not so huge
"For some reason", really?
The US reconstructed Europe after WW2 using its own funds mostly and has subsidized its defense spending for the past 80 years and counting.
Europe also has enormous amounts of resource wealth expropriated from its many colonies around the world, plus significant ownership stakes in resource supply chains in those countries that persists to this day. Every single Russian oligarch, plus dictators in Asia and Africa have stashed their wealth in European banks.
>the Chinese economic model of government-controlled economic direction, though not perfect, would work better
You want the US government to provide more subsidies to US tech companies so they can stay competitive? Because that is what China is doing for its tech sector.
You only look at the surface China is subsidizing everything but at the same time forcing the companies to share the wealth created with all of its populace not just the company and company share holders.
Subsidizing companies is not the problem not sharing the wealth with the workers is the problem. US not subsidizing it companies is bullshit fed to you. As Boeing, Tesla, SpaceX, Microsoft from the tel-cos to the power suppliers to banks and hedge fund all have been subsidized by American tax payers or are still being subsidized with and you get share buybacks. Americans are being bullshitted into loosing their social and healthcare subsidies in favor of giving it to corporations but the sharing back of the wealth in conveniently forgotten
>You only look at the surface China is subsidizing everything but at the same time forcing the companies to share the wealth created with all of its populace not just the company and company share holders.
Do you have in mind any examples that make your case the strongest? In particular, examples caused by subsidy to the company, and not to the population[1].
[1] like this one: https://www.gov.cn/zhengce/202501/content_6997459.htm
The US already subsidizes these companies, sometimes more severely.
The problem is these companies are thieves, mostly. They just take the money and pocket most of it. Infrastructure be damned.
And when the house of cards inevitably tumbles down, they don’t pay the price. The gains are private, but the losses are public.
US companies always favor tomorrow, not next week. They look to enriching themselves NOW. But in doing so they take on a debt. They put everything on a metaphorical credit card. Eventually the competition is too hot and they have to pay their debt very quickly, and they shutter despite their subsidies and long-running success.
Why not if it brings long term benefits to the country?
Better than putting that money in the military, isn't it?
> US private capitalists have been built on a free market; now that their profits are under attack because they are being outcompeted by China, so they are running away with the ball.
You're acting like the tariffs are a big conspiracy by the "private capitalists", but the "private capitalists" are the most opposed, if you look at the reaction of the market.
Not sure why you mentioned Bernie Sanders, but he has been one of the most pro-tariffs politicians in America for many decades. That's one of the reasons the left has been caught so flatfooted by this and seems to have no response: the policies they have supported forever have been shown to be disasterous.
We're building a hybrid of Italian Fascist and a Argentinian Peronist like state.
The desire for transactional wins and power overshadows all. Trump will unironically ally himself with a turd like Elon, or a turd like the UAW dude who glazed him on "Liberation Day". The state control of business is missing... perhaps we'll see that develop with Tesla.
It's a weird movement, because the baseline assumption is that the country is ruined. So any marginal win is celebrated, any loss is "priced in" politically.
Well these tariffs are a great opportunity for state control and corruption, companies are bribing him already.
Every dictatorship is unhappy in its own way but they all involve:
Myth of the strong man dictator
Erosion of rule of law
Undermining independent judiciary
Arbitrary detention and arbitrary enforcement of laws
Separate paramilitary groups
There are signs of all of this in the US just now.
This reeks "pay to play" very typical for banana republics.
Donations to presidential inauguration fund to get access to the president was already tradition in the US. Trump government just exploits it without shame.
This is a populism move, not pay-to-play. The imminent reality would have been this: many Americans will want to take a vacation to Canada to get a deal on their phone. That just doesn’t make sense.
Where do you see the populism in favoring Apple, Nvidia, Dell ?
The exclusion is by category: Smartphones, laptop computers, memory chips, machines used to create semiconductors, flat screen TVs, tablets and desktop computers. Apple, NVidia, and Dell are simply examples of some companies that will “benefit” (be harmed less).
> many Americans will want to take a vacation to Canada to get a deal on their phone. That just doesn’t make sense.
If they’re following the law they’d have to declare the purchase when they come home.
Let me explain how that works in the real world — you drop all the tags/boxes/receipts for the merchandise, maybe apply some dirt, then you can claim that it's not new and you brought it with you from your home country originally. Also in the airport there is a rather high chance you get to go through the green lane where your bags aren't checked. There are certain manners that help with not being singled out for the bag check. How do regular people learn these? When you live in the corrupt country, you quickly learn how to look ordinary and not interesting to the authorities.
> then you can claim that it's not new and you brought it with you from your home country originally.
And then they can ask you for your Form 4457 that you filled out and presented to CBP before you left the country. Don't know what that is? Oops. Full duties owed on that iPhone then, thanks.
Yes, but people don’t always follow the law. CBP reported a spike in people smuggling eggs last month, and the margin on iPhones is a lot more tempting.
Of course, I would declare the purchase, but I imagine not everyone would.
It's not the furthest thing from the American economy as it stands today, but the inevitable conclusion of the "free-market" capitalism we've been practicing over the past number of decades.
Donald Trump is the poster child of American capitalism gone right, he's an aspiration for wealthy capitalists across the nation. Generally people have felt that if only we could get an American businessman like Trump in charge of the country, running things the way a true capitalist would (as opposed to how those dirty awful communists/socialists tend to run things), then the country would start going right for a change.
Well now we have that, and in short order the country has Russian-style crony capitalism from the top. This would not happen in a country that actually cares about free markets. But we don't. Everything we consume is owned by like 10 companies. If you want to get a start in the market you have to get access to capital they control, or meet regulations they set, because they've captured the government regulators through bribes.
Trump is just taking this whole system of favoritism we've been living under and making it official. I for one am for it because honestly people pretending there is no corruption is worse than the corruption at this point.
> Donald Trump is the poster child of American capitalism gone right
This is the same guy who went bankrupt 3 times, including a casino?
The same guy who'd be as rich as he is today if he had invested the funds bequeathed by his father?
The one who had a TV show based on him that was incredibly manipulated to make him appear richer and wiser than he really is?
The prevailing school of economic thought in America, until Nixon, is actually what Trump idealizes. Protectionism from outside “threats”, on the basis of security and sufficiency, and a loosely regulated internal market. In comparison, Russia has a lot of regulatory capture and straight up corruption that stifles the internal market.
The Russia comparison is the corruption, not the protectionism.
I’d understand if these exemptions applied to companies and not industries. For comparison, Putin unilaterally nationalizes and sells off companies to benefit his inner circle. The US isn’t nationalizing AMD and selling it to Nvidia at the behest of Jensen.
Yet. They are still in the process of consolidating control over the government, the law, and universities. Once that's done, they will move on to corporations. It's been 2 months and change, give them time.
> I’d understand if these exemptions applied to companies and not industries.
Same thing, these companies essentially run these industries and nobody else can get in.
If you want to make a competitor to Nvidia it would take you 20 years if you started RIGHT NOW. Hope you have a few hundred billion dollars lying around :P
The distinction between domains and companies fully disappears in an oligarchy.
There's no "regulatory capture and straight up corruption" in the US, that's for sure /s
I didn’t know HN was coming around to how regulation and bureaucracy are anti-competitive.