In today’s i paper, there are two articles, one about about cheese producers and one on car companies in the UK who have anywhere from 10% to 50% of their international exports going to the USA.
It dawned on me, that seeing as every other country in the world (apart from Russia) are going to have levies forced on them – and are going to reciprocate – could the UK ‘fill the gap’ by sending, in my example, cheese to countries that would normally import cheese from the US?
This would remove the US from the export equation, and mitigate the massive losses that would otherwise happen. Other countries’ exports could follow suit. Or have I significantly underestimated the complexity of the situation?
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China, South Korea, and Japan just had a joint press conference yesterday announcing this. Countries that are historic enemies that truly hate each other and all have intense racist attitudes about the others are teaming up.
Donald Trump is a uniter!
They can’t.
Even Russia and China rely on US dollar as a reserve currency, despite all their desire of not having to.
You can’t just instantly start making something you never made before in sufficient quality for your needs. factories don’t spring up overnight.
Impossible, everything is already intermixed. Demands are different for each country, can’t just flip the switch and move it all else where.
On the cheese, looks like USA is the 3rd highest purchaser of english cheese at $78.3M in 2023. The problem is finding a market for the cheese that they aren’t already in that is big enough to fill that demand gap.
Do you have any idea how much of the world absolutely depends on trade with the USA to survive? They don’t have the option to just “stop” at this point.
Love him or hate him…but Trump is right that they need the USA more than the USA needs them. I think that is prob 1 of the few things everyone can agree on even if they don’t agree on how he is addressing it with tariffs.
The US wouldn’t impose these tariffs if we didn’t know we were irreplaceable. They only work because we know people aren’t gonna stop buying our shit. Everyone is so reliant on the US you might as well think of this as a tax on oxygen.
One thing to consider is some countries can’t afford to completely cut off trade with the USA. Looking at the UK as an example, they import a lot of military equipment from the USA, such as the Trident submarine launched ballistic missile. If they suddenly lost the ability to buy Trident, they’d have to start looking for a new missile system very quickly or lose their nuclear deterrent. Some countries still depend on the USA for trade, and so they don’t want to completely cut them off until they have a guaranteed replacement for whatever it is they import, either another international supplier or domestic manufacturing.
They will, where possible. During the first Trump administration, China shifted to buying a lot of soybeans from Brazil due to the tariffs.
That’s market share that the US will not recoup.
There are (at least) two problems…
The first problem has been countries (many countries) exporting 10% to 50% of a product (any product) to the U.S. with little or no tariffs being imposed by the U.S., but discouraging U.S. products to be imported by imposing 25% to 200% tariffs on the U.S. products. The U.S. is now matching the other countries’ tariffs in an attempt to get both countries to drop (or lower) their tariffs. The ideal solution is for both countries to have little or no tariffs.
The second problem is that Mexico has been allowing (even encouraging) illegal immigration into the U.S. and not doing enough to prevent illegal drugs from being imported to the U.S. Since Mexico sends a huge amount of it’s products to the U.S., a large tariff on those products is an incentive to negotiate with the U.S. concerning ways to reduce the illegal immigration and drug traffic to the U.S.
What do you think BRICS is trying to do ? but its not that simple because lots of international trade is already set up with US and dollar, and to change all that will cause a disruption that is difficult to justify. All in all the US and NATO are still a powerful trading option that its foolish to ignore
One problem is that no one knows what the tariffs will be next week, let alone next month.
They are going to do exactly that lmao. Loving the suprised pikachus blaming the democrats not explaining this over and over again while they ignored them.
“But I wasn’t inpsiiiiiiiiiiired”
We can’t even get all the countries to agree to how many countries there are. How do you expect them to all agree to boycott trade with the largest economy on the planet?
I’d say they will where they can, or they’ll move more of their production to the US to avoid the tariffs.
About the car thing, Volvo said they may move more of their production to the USA to avoid tariffs.
This is absolutely what is going to happen. But it doesn’t happen overnight.
It’s what’s gonna happen over time naturally. In the long term, tariffs are gonna do what tariffs are supposed to do, which is isolate US from the world market and make everyone trade between each other instead of US more.
It’s just that any interference with the market of that scale is gonna create large disturbances, especially short term. Some sectors are gonna have goods they overproduced and can’t sell anymore. Some sectors are gonna have shortages they can’t meet in time. Production takes time to meet the demand, so it’s gonna cause everyone to suffer for a bit. And long term, even if demand meets production, it’s still gonna increase overall prices compared to what they were.
Could you survive with a 20% pay cut? That’s how much of the world economy you’d take out of commission if you boycotted the United States.
They have already started the process.
Usa is too big of a marlet to abandon.
But rest asured: entire wolrd will now negotiate better trade deala between themselves and as long as trump is in power, usa is left out.
We’re trying. But it’s not an overnight thing. We spent decades building pipelines from our oil patch to the US because they were our biggest customer. Now we have to build new pipelines to the coast, new facilities to store the oil or refine it ourselves, and new port infrastructure to get it shipped, AND suck up the cost of shipping it elsewhere.
Long term investment strategy right now seems to be to move the easy trade elsewhere, and then wait for Trump to die.
Read the statement from Canada yesterday. This is what they and the rest of the world are gearing up for. It can’t happen overnight but the world’s reliance on the U.S. is over.
Regardless of what happens going forward, trump being forced to rescind the tariffs or being forced out of office or whatever, the world now knows they can’t rely on the U.S. anymore. Look at the EU’s pivot on weapon development and purchases.
South Korea and Japan teaming up with China is not something I ever thought would be possible. No, trump broke America and by doing so he broke the world and there is no going back.
A French politician said it best ““We cannot leave the security of Europe in the hands of voters in Wisconsin every four years.” (see: The American Age Is Over for an interesting and scary take on where we are now).
From the same article:
“There are only three possible explanations as to why Americans voted for this man:
Pick whichever rationale you want, because it doesn’t matter. Whatever the reason was, it exposed half of the electorate—the 77 million people who voted for Trump—as either fundamentally unserious, decadent, or weak.
And no empire can survive the degeneration of its people.”
Hang on we’re in for a very tough time.
Id like to see China, Europe, UK etc drop all tariffs between each other. And then each match Trump’s tariffs right back at the USA.
It’s the same reason Europe continued buying natural gas from Russia after it invaded Ukraine. Countries still need those imports, and new supply just doesn’t come out of nowhere.