Tbf, all these headlines miss that indexes like the S&P 500 are still far down from pre-tariff-mania. Investors are more or less updating their views for how screwed the markets are, rather than betting that everything is fine.

This is a genuinely interesting article about global politics, but I sorta get the impression there’s this underlying “Does Europe pick US or China as a trade partner?” question at the heart of it.

Seems like this pulls into very 1 dimensional view, and surely the answer is just, Europe should be sceptical of China and USA’s motives, trade wherever it’s beneficial, and push for the things it values (positive take would be workers rights, renewable energy etc).

Trump is trying push a whole pick sides narative on the world, that seems pretty ignorant to actual reality, and just ends up with everyone more fractured and weak.

Yeah I can’t help but think this. I’m in the UK and 5 years-ish ago I bought an ICE, I couldn’t really afford an EV at the rime, but a big part of my thinking was that I didn’t expect the conservative government to do much to support the transition.

EVs require new infrastructure, and people need to trust that’s gonna be built.

Based on me reading wikipedia, in Hoover’s fairness, Smoot-Hawley was mainly a congress led thing and he mainly rubber stamped it. He also introduced stimulus to help industries that he wanted to up their output.

Trump isn’t doing anything stimulus-wise (if anything the opposite by introducing huge government cuts) to aid the new manufacturing processes he’s assuming will spring up overnight, and he also seems to be the mastermind behind rebranding the US as tariff-land.

I don’t know what my point is, that Trump’s policies are a lot worse than Hoover’s? I doubt anyone needed me to reach that conclusion to be fair.

Trump crashes the US economy and deters consimer goods, especially oil. Alternative conspiracy that he’s really an environmentalist? /s

Many observers see the law as the last hope for preventing climate change

I get what this is saying, but I really dislike so much about this kind of framing, which makes up the whole article.

There is no “preventing climate change” - the climate has already changed. Whenever we talk of it in win/lose terms it quickly becomes a “we’re fucked, give up” narrative that only benefits polluters. Like almost everyone, I value human life, and the life of and in the ecosytem we inhabit. Anything that progresses that is a win for me, even if it’s the small win of “thanks to x, less deforestation happened that would have otherwise happened”.

Which is a long way of saying, climate change is a scale, and we should be trying to minimise it as much as possible.

I also really don’t like the idea of thinking of law as “the last hope” because other options haven’t been a silver bullet. No one thing achieved abolition, or civil right, or the woman’s lib movement, just a whole bunch of motivated people doing what they could, when they saw opportunity too.

If there is a silver bullet, it’s just this: value the climate. Do whatever you can to protect it wheb you get a chance. Maybe that’s law, maybe that’s protest. Every person who does something moves the needle further towards what they value.

As a rule of thumb, I feel like replacing things as I normally would, but making sure I replace them with the most environmentally friendly option is the only thing that’s financially sustainable.

Change needs to happen at scale, not from one person suddenly buying a new car, cooker, heater, fireplace all in one go. That said, if your replacing a cooker, choosing an induction hob is an absolute no brainer.

As an aside:

If your dryer runs on gas, consider air-drying your clothes.

What? I’m in the UK and a gas fuel clothes dryer sounds absolutely mental. Have I missed something?

Yes!

1. You can obviously get rid of it and board it up, but even with no fire, you can make a feature of it if you tile it nicely.

2. Other fireplaces exist such as artificial electric ones, log fires and biofuel ones. Those all have their own emissions and benefits.

I live in the UK and did 1 a while back, we have candles in the space and a nice wooden mantelpiece. One thing I didn’t expect is how much warmer the house now is. We obviously can’t turn a fire on for heat, but when it’s not on, not having heat pouring out the chimney makes a big difference.

Yeah, you’re right. Sorry! Although US have definitely been one of the highest GDP per capita for that time (but like you pointed out, not the top which is what I original said)

Go Grey Socks!

Seriously though, this probably won’t affect billionaires because companies like Nike can move most of their operations overseas and avoid paying tariffs during their manufacturing process, and then just pass the cost of to US consumers when they sell to that market.

Even worse, when Trump put tariffs on washing machines (which Biden kept in place) one effect was that US made washing machines (not paying tariffs) jacked up their prices for US consumers simply because there was less competition.

It truly is a sucky world for non-billinaires.

I honestly have no idea, maybe? Deficit isn’t really debt though, it just means you bought more than you sold. The US isn’t in debt to Cambodia any more than you’re in debt with McDonald’s. They just have a one way buy/sell relationship.

I think you’re kind of being unfairly downvoted because it’s definitely underappreciated how much tariffs are used in modern trade deals.

Putting selective import tariffs on certain goods (like say car manufacturing) might be a wise move if you want to encourage the US to develop a manufacturing base. It’s worth noting that the US, and most other countries have been doing this selectively for years.

This is reeeaally far from the tariffs that have actually been anounced though, which are the highest rate the US has had in around 100 years, and applied pretty indescriminately. There are some goods that the US just can’t produce itself (like certain rare earth minerals that aren’t in the USA) but even worse, because of the insane logic of applying them to countries as they have been done, it opens up this type of event:

• A comany like Apple might assemble laptops in the US, but import parts like chips from, say, China.
• They now have around a 40% tariff on all chips, which is really going to drive up cost, and leaves them with two options.
• Option one, they bring all manufacturing into the US, which would take a long time to build up the infrastructure, and still really ramp up the price because wages in the US are so much higher than they are in China
• Option two, they outsource everything to say Mexico or Canada who don’t pay the tariffs on Chinese chips, and just pay the wholesale import tariffs are needed to bring things from Mexico/Canada to the US. They also get to skip out all the reciprocal tariffs that other countries are placing on the US in retaliation for the recently announces ones when they import out to, say, Europe.

Even option one is bad, because Apple might sell laptops internally, but the newly increased price makes them super uncompetitive with rival firms overseas, so it might still lead to a loss in overall jobs for US workers.

I’m not pretending this doesn’t suck - but US based international companies like Apple have a clear incentive to just forgoe the US as much as possible now. This kind of risk is why countries have traditionally been very conservative with changing tariffs.

I think you’re probably right that there might be an argument for countries to be less conservative than they have been, but the US government just cranked up the dial from 0 to 11 and we’re all about to find out what that might look like in real time.

In case anyones looking at this and asking question like “Why has Cambodia been dunked with 49% when they’re clearly not a competitor to the US” or “Why is Trump claiming that the European Union has a 40% tariff on the US when the actual mean tariff on US goods into the EU is less than 5%”, here’s your answer to how these figures have been calculated.

• Take the US trade deficit with a given country (eg. China is $292bn)
• Take the total good imported by US (for China that’s $439bn)
• Divide the first figure by the second! Why? Who knows! It’s a number! Less talk more first grade arithmetic (if you’re still following that gives us 67%)
• That gives us a random number which we’ll pretend is that country’s tariff of US goods even though it’s completely unrelated in every way. We’ll divide it by two to get the new tariff rate for imports from that country. Why? Honestly if you’re still expecting there to be an answer to that question I’m wondering if you’ve been following. (that gives us 34%, well actually it gives us 33.5% but I’m not sure the Trump administration understands the idea of fractions so we’ll just round it up from there)

The “reason” behind this is that Trump seems to think trade deficits are really bad, which is bad news for the US because it’s had a trade deficit for the last 50 years. We’ll ignore the fact that based on GDP it’s been the wealthiest country in the world for that time though.

Anyway, just to give everyone an idea of how completely, utterly unrelated to anything meaningful that figure is, let’s take Cambodia. The country is very poor compared to the US so can’t afford to buy anything that the US manufacters (Cambodians aren’t driving round in Teslas or IMessaging each other). Some US companies use it for clothing manufacture because labour is cheap in Cambodia (see the previous bit about Cambodia being much poorer than the US). This means that Cambodia imports close to nothing from the US compared to what it exports, giving it a close to 100% trade deficit, so we wind up with a 49% tariff on Cambodia.

I genuinely don’t understand the mindset that looks at the US’s explotation of cheap labour in Cambodia and interprets the US as the victim in that relationship, but hey-ho maybe I’m just not biggly-smart enough to understand the 4d chess moves at play here. . .

Reference (because unfortunately none of what I said was made up and that geniunely is the calculation): https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/03/trumps-idiotic-and-flawed-tariff-calculations-stun-economists

Edit: After making fun of Trump for not understanding the enconomy, I went and conflated per capita GDP with GDP. Doh! Now corrected.

There’s technically no upper limit, why not make it 10000% and really see what happens!

I’m not very knowledgable on Canadian politics, but agriculture is a sizable part of their GDP[1], seems like a fair enough view to value the jobs and industry it provides over having lower priced dairy?

More importantly, it seems like a choice that’s down to the voters of Canada, and if the USA doesn’t like it, they should negotiate to find something that worksfor both countries, rather than trying to use their economic heft into bullying the world.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/594293/gross-domestic-product-of-canada-by-industry-monthly/

I think this is how Trump phrases it. In reality almost all countries have tariffs of some kind to protect key industries. Trump’s demands/bullying/tarrif-mania normally amounts to him wanting specific tarrifs removed to benefit the US.