2w ago

Trump threatens extra 50% tariff on China unless it drops retaliatory levy

www.bbc.com

Trump not considering pausing tariffs despite global turmoil

US President Donald Trump says he will impose additional tariffs on China, from Tuesday, if Beijing does not withdraw its 34% retaliatory tariffs on the US.

The additional tariffs on Beijing would be of 50%, Trump says.

As a reminder, China announced on Friday that it would be imposing such tariffs on Washington after the White House said that from 9 April it'd put 34% levies on all goods from Beijing.

48 comments

absolutely incredible. I hope nobody blinks and we get up to like 1000% tarrifs, to the point that trafficking in black market Chinese stuff becomes a whole ass enterprise and Americans make knock off Chinese stuff because it becomes a status symbol for wealth.
let's completely lose our collective shit on this one.
- Nascar 2: boats (possibly planes)
  EDIT: or drones?
  
  Subs.
  
  EDIT: or drones?
  We love our Big, Beautiful Droners - don't we folks.
- temu's slogan "shop like a billionaire" coming true when all the products cost $900,000 after import taxes

At this point just agree that you would rather completely destroy American dollar hegemony than make one single compromise and be done with it. Sanction China completely and fully and end the last vestiges of the unipolar world. I double dog dare you

jdpon don to all maoist third-worldists: patriots in control!
- God that would rule so hard if it were real.

INFINITE TARIFFS ON THE WESTERN WORLD

but I said "No Backsies"! You can't retaliate to my tariffs with your own tariffs!

truly, the sun in the sky is red
long live the great unity of the peoples of the world
we will wage a 10,000 year struggle against American imperialism

American Millennium of humiliation
- whoever is around in 1000 years will be talking shit about us the way we talk shit about medieval peasants in europe

no more half measures walter

I hope Bejing instates a perpetual No You Plus One policy.

apple must be having a lot of fun rn

Sure we could speedrun the end of US financial hegemony but what about my treats?

Oh please God yes, please let this happen, let the US keep hitting itself in the face and increase tarrifs on a key importer that'll further collapse whatever industrial base we have

Do it!

"it's not about the economy, it's about sending a white nationalist message"

Time to find out how deep the rabbit hole goes
- "Actually, I’ve been thinking it ever since I got here. Why, oh why didn’t I take the blue pill?"
  
  Uphold Ralphist-Cypherettoist Thought

Live Wall Street reaction
- looks like the markets need some laxative
- lmao, my man clenched at both ends.

In "my specific thing" news, it turns out that China is the world's biggest producer of cheap, high quality corundum gems, including the kind commonly used for lasers
- Hell yeah, unlimited laser genocide on the first world
- In "specific thing" side news, it turns out the only way to produce modern high-performance semiconductors is through extremely high-powered megawatt lasers.
- My company specializes in laser based air analysis machines, and our largest clients are all in China. This is going to be a rough year…

Trump can dish it out but can't take it, huh?
- 🔝

Do it fucker

At this rate, I'm expecting that after tariffs fail to intimidate China that he'll start posting hog.

Time to show him the original zappruder film boys

This is a jam even ole' Donny Boy can't wriggle out of.

They said "hard decoupling with China, no way, never happen, Americans buy too much stuff, are too big on treats, would never be allowed". And yet... here we are.
Once it's done Chinese factories will close. It won't happen in a week or a month, but within 3-6 months they're going to close factories because the demand just vanishes, unless the government of China starts handing out checks to keep the lights on this will have impacts on China. They can't just route all this stuff to the EU or Africa or whatever, the US is a huge, huge market with specific specifications for power supply and connectors and safety stuff and so on so things would need to be retooled but even after that that's a bunch of demand that's just gone for a while and Trump and co seem to be betting the US can hold out longer than China.
More interestingly for me someone stuck in the US it'll have impacts in the US. In that while companies don't want to move their production from China because it costs money, if they are already bleeding money from lost/no-sales they have little choice. They'll move it to Vietnam, to India, to Mexico, wherever at great expense and the prices will never return to the pre-tariff levels but they'll have production and some people will be able to afford some amount of it. The economy will implode but that doesn't particularly matter because it's just another chance for the capitalists to profit and buy up all the pieces at rock bottom prices while absolutely fucking cost of living, destroying the hopes most people to have any kind of quality of life, etc but that's fine they think the proles have it too good anyways and need disciplining.
I always thought that they'd use Taiwan like Ukraine as a pretext to force decoupling but now maybe they figure they can just make Trump do this, assign all the blame to him while he and a subset of the tech companies hold down wall street and force it to do this "for its own good". It's an interesting kind of disciplining of international finance capital by another segment of the bourgeoisie and by empire planners. If it all goes well they achieve their wants, if it all blows up then they blame it on Trump.
- There was a post here recently about Chinese economics. The value of Chinese exports as a percentage of Chinese GDP is quite low compared to the majority of countries in the world. There will be an adjustment for sure, but it's not going to send the Chinese into catastrophe
- It will definitely have an effect on China, but they’ve been working on decoupling for years already. That’s exactly what BRICS and Belt and Road are facilitating. BYD is the largest EV brand in the world despite not selling in the US, Huawei still one of the biggest phone brands despite being banned. It’ll slow things down there, but it’s hardly an existential crisis.
- Sorry but you're way off base. China's exports to the US only account for ~3% of their GDP.
  USA could halt all Chinese imports overnight and China would barely notice.
  
  I feel that number has to be telling less than the full story using some clever calculation. I get they have a policy of domestic consumption but you can only do so much of that. More than that I think the GDP number you cite doesn't really reveal how many jobs would be lost which is an actual problem. You can't just take a hit of your sales halving to a big market like the US and keep all the factories open, some are just going to close entirely and others will eliminate shifts. Because that's what we'll see if 50% tariff rates stick or even worse get up to 80% or higher from Trump retaliating on China's retaliation.
  China can probably take if far better than the US but I have to wonder if the US even cares. If at this point we're not at a take the toys and build a high fence around the yard and go home and this is less about hurting China as opposed to autarky at home and setting that up and attempting to transition from capitalism to some sort of barbarism with the belief that robotics and AI will make enough proles redundant that the bourgeoisie or a group of them can just rule as aristocracy over the result. It won't work in the long-run but they'll kill an awful large amount of us before they ever realize that. And that worries me more than China surviving the US attempting to beat on it economically using this.
- This might shock you, but there are in fact more places in the world than just the US and China.

48 comments