My small business produces a niche consumer electronic device. Anyone watching us operate would say that our product is Made in the USA. But the components of our product are sourced and pre-processed all over the world and our COGS just increased significantly due to tariffs.
We now have to raise our prices, but our Made in China competitors have to increase theirs even more. That isn't a net benefit for us, given the product is "nice to have" and does not have an inelastic price.
If my sales drop by 50% and the Chinese competitors drop by 75%, is that winning ? I am still in shock and denial by all this. After 11 years in business, this manufactured/avoidable crisis can't be what ends us.
And it gets worse for you. That's primarily considering the US market. Your Chinese competitors aren't simultaneously being shut out of non-US markets (since this is a unilateral trade war, not the US + allies).
Your US sales may drop 50% due to the change in price, and your Chinese competitor's US sales may drop by 75%, but their sales in other countries may not change at all. Meanwhile, your sales outside the US are going to drop because not only are your component costs going up driving your price up, you now face tariffs when selling in every other country in the world (if they choose to respond to the tariffs the US is levying on their goods).
Because of how China desperately needs exports, they'll almost certainly end up being tariffed by the EU, so just because this started in the US doesn't mean it's gonna stay there.
it probably won't end you but maybe try to make sure your neighbors don't vote Right and support ultra-nationalist racists in Eastern European countries.
An old lady in the fashion industry once said "Everything is connected" and if Europe hadn't been mislead for fuck knows how long by dimwitted conservatives and their formidably educated voters, they would have been a proper economic competition with their own social medias instead of a tool to dump and pump stock prices ... which is how you can absorb your losses ... by focusing less on your productivity and more on that of le Wall Street's drivers and handlers of crisis
Any additional cost on top of the 'natural' costs involved with producing a result raises prices.
Additional costs that direct resources to a government are a form of a tax, this includes direct taxes at the point of sale, and it should also include taxes incurred for traversing an arbitrary interface (tariff or toll).
Any form of tax on goods / services proportionately effects those who spend more of their income on those goods / services more. Tariffs on not-luxury goods are regressive taxes on the poor and middle class.
This is too simple. Prices float somewhere between cost to produce and value to consumers.
You can’t raise prices beyond value or no one will buy it.
You can’t lower prices below costs (for too long) or you go out of business.
Competition pushes prices down towards costs.
Therefore businesses are always looking for markets with barriers so they can rise prices to value.
Tariffs typically raise costs for all producers, but this only inevitably leads to price increases when competition has driven prices down to near costs.
Unfortunately many staple grocery products fall into this category.
The supply and demand curves are not straight lines. There is not one unit price that consumers value a good at, that's why the marginal price that a consumer will pay depends on the quantity produced. The first most eager buyers would pay a higher price than the rest of the buyers you can find at higher quantities produced (but a lower price).
Tariffs eat into consumer surplus and producer surplus not just by raising prices, but also thereby reducing quantity. I think the only times you'd see no effect on consumer surplus via a tax are when the consumers are always going to pay a fixed amount regardless of quantity they can get (perhaps in some budget-constrained scenario), or if the amount of the thing that can be produced is fixed regardless of price; neither of these scenarios describes consumer goods.
Your argument assumes there is meaningful competition to begin with.
In the case of groceries, a few big companies ultimately control nearly all of it. They know you “need” groceries, so they will happily pass along the increased cost. What are you going to do, stop buying food?
And folks who argue the situation harms the billionaires typically are thinking about it in dollar valuations as opposed to percentage of all wealth owned. If their portfolios shrink on paper to be only worth a tenth as much tomorrow (but everything dropped that same paper value amount) but their purchasing power goes up and are able to buy a larger percentage of all wealth, they are coming out ahead. As #47 said, only the weak (poor) will fail...
You left out exchange rates and therefore purchasing power.
Historically, tariffs have led to a widening of currency spread between the tariffed (weakens) and tariffing (strengthens) nation.
Which generally acts in opposition to inflation, ceteris paribus.
E.g. importers pay more in dollars to import goods from a tariffed country, but if the imposition of tariffs causes the dollar to strengthen and the foreign currency to weaken, some competitive exporter will say "You know, I can sell those to you for less, in dollar terms, because my costs are in my (devalued) currency."
First, prices per se are irrelevant. The ratio of labor price to goods&services price is relevant.
Second, the labor / goods&services price ratio itself is irrelevant, as measured in the short term. What is relevant is the long term outlook of this ratio. See eg the Dutch Disease.
Third, even the long term labor / goods&services price ratio is irrelevant. Not everything in this world is, or should be, reducible to simplistic financial value.
One way to approach the underlying intuition is in terms of homeostasis, at nation state level.
I'm confused, are you asking we close our eyes and only operate on internal bias? Where does the world matter if no single metric is relevant? Regardless of number metrics, what do you think matters? I think a family that can no longer afford a laptop for their child's education matters. I think 10,000 or 100,000 such families matter a lot. How do we tell that story? What options have we but the numbers?
Tariffs only make sense to protect a fledgling domestic industry which is already receiving investment. Even then, does anyone think that for instance US car makers will suddenly be competitive globally?
Tariffs make sense to protect industry critical to the independence of a country. Imagine how different the Ukraine war would look if the EU wasn’t dependent on Russian (or US) energy.
Yes, profits and growth may not be optimal. But it’s like complaining your 401k isn’t doing as well as it could since you’re paying for healthy food and a gym membership.
That being said the manner trump is implementing these tariffs is ridiculous. They should be slow, meticulous, and announced far ahead of time. These seem optimized for chaos and are likely aimed at political goals (see TikTok and China already) or simply crashing the market (wouldn’t be the first time Bessent has profited off a financial crash).
> They should be slow, meticulous, and announced far ahead of time.
The main lesson they learned from Trump's first term was that they were better off making big changes and fixing what they broke later. Moving slowly seemed to make it too easy for "the machine" to stop them as it were.
I don't say this as the right lesson to have learned or a good approach, just an observation.
Europeans don't tend to buy American cars because they're too big for smaller older roads and are inefficient (Europe has no domestic petroleum source, so fuel prices are much higher and volatile).
We don't live every family in a house miles away from work, schools and friends. Many of us live in cities, within flats, with lines of metro or bus close by. Our children go walking to schools. Roads are fine and maintained so regular vehicles can be used instead of 4x4, bikes are respected. Roads have sidewalks to walk.
I think US and other non-european companies can and do make cars targeted to EU market that complies with local laws and customer preference. They can make the cars smaller to fit road/lanes/parking spaces, just like they put the steering wheel on the right for UK.
Infact Tesla is (or was) best selling car in Norway and UK too.
Ironically, the one American car company that was interesting to Europeans was Tesla.
European governments may be reluctant to put a tariff on Tesla because of Elon Musk's political association with the Trump government. This is literally how fascism works, and appeasing the bully is distasteful, but that's realpolitik. It will be up to European consumers to reject Tesla because the brand is now toxic.
Trunk whines that American cars aren’t bought in. Europe. Americans cars are “big as bars”, a “compact” is larger than my “big car”, let alone the small one. Their trucks literally won’t fit down the road.
I'm not in EVs, but I'm already seeing a "don't import anything to the US if you can avoid it" message at work.
Datacenter space in Canada is now suddenly very appealing, you can put machines there directly from Asia without paying tarrifs, but still get good network latency into the US
I'm not going to quibble with you on this, because I think you're right, but I can think of a secondary use. A country with weak governance could use tariffs to raise money because it's easy to manage at the point of entry, rather than requiring more sophisticated systems such as income or property value reporting.
This could explain why, for instance, poor countries use tariffs on goods that have no chance of building a local industry.
This is also why some economists like them, they're hard to cheat on. Know what's even harder to cheat on and has much less long term impact on the economy? Sales tax. A federal sales tax would have been preferable to the import tax. But there are probably other political concerns at stake here.
Tariffs will make them less competitive, mainly because the inputs are also being tariffed whereas international competitors can buy tariff-free inputs. These blanket tariffs will destroy any potential for internationally competitive manufacturing.
Is anyone expecting tariffs to improve global competitive advantage?
Tariffs may work towards an isolationist goal of producing and consuming our own goods. Tariffs are an attempt to unwind globalization though and disconnect our markets from the rest of the world.
Whether it makes us more competitive globally is really a non-goal. It could happen if our resources, labor, and manufacturing costs are lower than other countries but that's extremely complex to predict even if you wanted to try.
Free trade has its own set of negative consequences. Namely that it’s good for owners of the means of production but not for the workers.
What’s interesting to me is that tech is effectively the last “American made manufacturing”, and the relative lack of outsourcing (compared to other forms of manufacturing) has kept tech workers powerful.
The same logic of h1b workers weakening the American citizen tech worker, applies to free trade.
They can also make sense where you largely have primary industry (that is, extractive; mining and forestry and so on). There’s a reason that pretty much all high-tariff countries are low-income developing countries; it _does_ make more sense there.
In addition it’s precisely because of tariffs (of which there have been many on cars and SUVs long before all this) that we have tons and tons of foreign brands actually building cars in the US.
I unfollowed Marginal Revolution when Tyler joined The Free Press this week. I’d already been pretty skeptical about the content on MR because there was very little rigor in the discourse and there are, apparently, no limits or constraints to what economists think they’re qualified to comment on, particularly when economics isn’t even invoked in the discussion.
I don’t go to my doctor for a discussion on urban planning. And if I do.. not at their medical office.
It’s a blog. Not a practice of economics, this one article notwithstanding.
And it isn’t even by Cowen.
EDIT: The comment section on MR is pretty awful too.
Economics is a great way of looking at the world as long as you acknowledge its limitations. I think you're conflating an economist with economics. Economists are human with all that entails.
Alex is a better straight up libertarian-ish guy. Tyler has been on this "but ... what if this CONTRARIAN thing....?" for a long time and I am done with it. I may not agree with Alex on this that or the other thing, but it doesn't feel like he's trying to show off how clever he is all the time.
Sure, but that wasn't the essence of my take. Everyone can have opinions on things, but if the doctor said, "As a doctor..." and then just talked about urban planning, I'd be suspect. "As a human..." would be different.
> particularly when economics isn’t even invoked in the discussion…
I think the Professor Cowen fancies himself in the way of the “public intellectual,” so that he takes the liberty to write on a range of topics outside the domain of his academic focus. He does seem extraordinarily well-read; and in many topics he writes about, I have no way of judging his contribution to those fields. While I occasionally read MR, it strikes me as quite technocratic in the way that most libertarian writing is; and this sort of socioeconomic analysis detached from human values of empathy and concern for the wellbeing of the collective isn’t appealing to me personally. But I’m sure it fills an important niche.
Their money is probably a large reason his content gets well promoted.
The Kochs got into politics in the 1980s because of a series of fights with the EPA whom they thought were getting in the way of their chemical company's right to pollute. If you've ever heard a morality play written about hairdresser licensing and why it means Regulation is Bad - that was them, and it leaks on to hacker news sometimes. E.g.
So many screws that we should have human American workers installing screws in iPhones? And this is how we make American workers wealthier?
They think we're stupid or they want us to be stupid. This isn't an economic policy. It's a way to reward fealty and punish disloyalty, to a specific person.
I’m not gonna tell you Lutnick is smart, but did you watch the clip or just read Rupar’s quote? He’s clearly saying that electronics manufacturers are leaning on low-wage foreign labor as a crutch to avoid the cost of investing in more innovative automated assembly strategies.
That's it. That's all you need to do to explain this to people. It's amazing to me how many have fallen for this ridiculous lie that the other country somehow pays the tariff AND there will be no increase in cost to the consumer.
I used to think these lies were cynical, like how Mexico was going to pay for the border wall. But I'm not convinced now. I think there's a not-insgificant chance the president doesn't know this is how tariffs work. And that's terrifying. I would respect a cycnical lie way more.
You buy $1000 in t-shirts from China. The government places a 30% import duty on them. The importer pays $300 to the government. Those t-shirts now cost you $1300. Whoever sells them retail will be charging up to 30% extra to recoup that. It blows my mind that this even requires explanation.
It's never purely on the buyer or the seller. The price goes up 30%; fewer customers buy them and the ones that do pay more. The business makes less money; they cut some prices to recoup some sales.... maybe to $900. The lot of shirts now sell for $1200.
Basically, market distortions like that are never paid exclusively by one party or the other; instead, it moves the equilibrium point. Both the buyer and the seller are worse off.
The best explanation I’ve seen is that tariffs are a stick that can be used to enforce compliance with other policies, and selectively lifted when companies bend the knee.
That isn’t really how they’re supposed to work, and in a normally functioning country the state could expect to be sued by the injured parties (that is, the competitors of the specially favoured companies) if they tried it. Of course, in 2025 the US is hardly a normally functioning country, but it’s also not clear that its court system is _totally_ compromised, and any company who went along with this would certainly be taking a risk.
The smaller the polity, the less practical it is to produce everything. Most towns aren't going to be growing wine grapes or olives at all, so tariffs would just raise local prices and lower imports rather than shifting local production. But they could also induce people to drive to the next town over for shopping.
Ah yes, Paul "Inflation has slowed down (but not reversed) if you ignore all the things people actually need to live" Krugman. That man is a dishonest, partisan hack and if he said the sky was blue I'd go outside to make sure:
If anything, economies of scale are a powerful argument for free trade.
Say, we can have a single company in Taiwan running insanely capital intensive chip factories making chips for the entire world.
One downside of this being resiliency; what happens to the global electronics supply chain if China one day decides to invade Taiwan? Something not taken into account in typical economic models.
For similar reasons developed countries still try to have things like domestic agriculture, despite that being a low value add industry where poorer countries might have a large comparative advantage in a hypothetical free trade scenario.
I believe they are referring to marginal costs. Yes, with economies of scale can become cheaper to produce, but they still require capital to reach that scale.
And the exchange rate is mentioned precisely zero times in that article, as is the current unused and underused labour in the economy. Instead it drops straight onto land which we can’t make any more of.
Do it again with a factory that puts on a double shift with the unemployed and see what happens.
Do it again with the Chinese sovereign wealth funds, the likely source of mercantile intervention, offering 14 CNY per USD rather than the current 7.
It’s unlikely that any production will move. What’s more likely to change is the quantity and location of financial savings. The distributional impact of that change is probably unknown.
>...the current unused and underused labour in the economy.
Chamber of commerce says:
>Understanding America’s Labor Shortage
>We hear every day from our member companies—of every size and industry, across nearly every state—that they’re facing unprecedented challenges trying to find enough workers to fill open jobs. Right now, the latest data shows that we have 8 million job openings in the U.S. but only 6.8 million unemployed workers. https://www.uschamber.com/workforce/understanding-americas-l...
Nations that sell products in the US have often sought to made their currency worth less vs the dollar, so their products are cheaper here. They might well do it again.
> Beijing has previously said it won't go down the FX depreciation road, preferring to keep the yuan relatively "stable". But that was before Trump's self-styled "Liberation Day". Beijing's first response might be to try and negotiate with Washington to get the tariffs lowered. But if that fails, FX devaluation becomes a real option to offset the shock.
They didn't take the negotiation route. We'll see what's next.
Readit News
We now have to raise our prices, but our Made in China competitors have to increase theirs even more. That isn't a net benefit for us, given the product is "nice to have" and does not have an inelastic price.
If my sales drop by 50% and the Chinese competitors drop by 75%, is that winning ? I am still in shock and denial by all this. After 11 years in business, this manufactured/avoidable crisis can't be what ends us.
Your US sales may drop 50% due to the change in price, and your Chinese competitor's US sales may drop by 75%, but their sales in other countries may not change at all. Meanwhile, your sales outside the US are going to drop because not only are your component costs going up driving your price up, you now face tariffs when selling in every other country in the world (if they choose to respond to the tariffs the US is levying on their goods).
An old lady in the fashion industry once said "Everything is connected" and if Europe hadn't been mislead for fuck knows how long by dimwitted conservatives and their formidably educated voters, they would have been a proper economic competition with their own social medias instead of a tool to dump and pump stock prices ... which is how you can absorb your losses ... by focusing less on your productivity and more on that of le Wall Street's drivers and handlers of crisis
Dead Comment
Additional costs that direct resources to a government are a form of a tax, this includes direct taxes at the point of sale, and it should also include taxes incurred for traversing an arbitrary interface (tariff or toll).
Any form of tax on goods / services proportionately effects those who spend more of their income on those goods / services more. Tariffs on not-luxury goods are regressive taxes on the poor and middle class.
You can’t raise prices beyond value or no one will buy it.
You can’t lower prices below costs (for too long) or you go out of business.
Competition pushes prices down towards costs.
Therefore businesses are always looking for markets with barriers so they can rise prices to value.
Tariffs typically raise costs for all producers, but this only inevitably leads to price increases when competition has driven prices down to near costs.
Unfortunately many staple grocery products fall into this category.
Tariffs eat into consumer surplus and producer surplus not just by raising prices, but also thereby reducing quantity. I think the only times you'd see no effect on consumer surplus via a tax are when the consumers are always going to pay a fixed amount regardless of quantity they can get (perhaps in some budget-constrained scenario), or if the amount of the thing that can be produced is fixed regardless of price; neither of these scenarios describes consumer goods.
In the case of groceries, a few big companies ultimately control nearly all of it. They know you “need” groceries, so they will happily pass along the increased cost. What are you going to do, stop buying food?
Arguably, that's precisely the aim of some of these tariffs. Price the foreign imports out of the market
Even if you have a $10m portfolio you’ll be next, once they’ve drained the $100k and $1m lot.
What does this mean, in practical examples? Just trying to understand your point.
Historically, tariffs have led to a widening of currency spread between the tariffed (weakens) and tariffing (strengthens) nation.
Which generally acts in opposition to inflation, ceteris paribus.
E.g. importers pay more in dollars to import goods from a tariffed country, but if the imposition of tariffs causes the dollar to strengthen and the foreign currency to weaken, some competitive exporter will say "You know, I can sell those to you for less, in dollar terms, because my costs are in my (devalued) currency."
Second, the labor / goods&services price ratio itself is irrelevant, as measured in the short term. What is relevant is the long term outlook of this ratio. See eg the Dutch Disease.
Third, even the long term labor / goods&services price ratio is irrelevant. Not everything in this world is, or should be, reducible to simplistic financial value.
One way to approach the underlying intuition is in terms of homeostasis, at nation state level.
Yes, profits and growth may not be optimal. But it’s like complaining your 401k isn’t doing as well as it could since you’re paying for healthy food and a gym membership.
That being said the manner trump is implementing these tariffs is ridiculous. They should be slow, meticulous, and announced far ahead of time. These seem optimized for chaos and are likely aimed at political goals (see TikTok and China already) or simply crashing the market (wouldn’t be the first time Bessent has profited off a financial crash).
The main lesson they learned from Trump's first term was that they were better off making big changes and fixing what they broke later. Moving slowly seemed to make it too easy for "the machine" to stop them as it were.
I don't say this as the right lesson to have learned or a good approach, just an observation.
Tarrifs aren't going to change that.
We don't live every family in a house miles away from work, schools and friends. Many of us live in cities, within flats, with lines of metro or bus close by. Our children go walking to schools. Roads are fine and maintained so regular vehicles can be used instead of 4x4, bikes are respected. Roads have sidewalks to walk.
Infact Tesla is (or was) best selling car in Norway and UK too.
European governments may be reluctant to put a tariff on Tesla because of Elon Musk's political association with the Trump government. This is literally how fascism works, and appeasing the bully is distasteful, but that's realpolitik. It will be up to European consumers to reject Tesla because the brand is now toxic.
Edit: relevant links
https://archive.ph/J1wSt
https://apnews.com/article/trump-tariffs-electric-vehicles-a...
Datacenter space in Canada is now suddenly very appealing, you can put machines there directly from Asia without paying tarrifs, but still get good network latency into the US
This could explain why, for instance, poor countries use tariffs on goods that have no chance of building a local industry.
Tariffs may work towards an isolationist goal of producing and consuming our own goods. Tariffs are an attempt to unwind globalization though and disconnect our markets from the rest of the world.
Whether it makes us more competitive globally is really a non-goal. It could happen if our resources, labor, and manufacturing costs are lower than other countries but that's extremely complex to predict even if you wanted to try.
Free trade has its own set of negative consequences. Namely that it’s good for owners of the means of production but not for the workers.
What’s interesting to me is that tech is effectively the last “American made manufacturing”, and the relative lack of outsourcing (compared to other forms of manufacturing) has kept tech workers powerful.
The same logic of h1b workers weakening the American citizen tech worker, applies to free trade.
At this point I'm not even sure that is true. I think instead we'll just see the "cost of doing business" passed along to us consumers.
Deleted Comment
In addition it’s precisely because of tariffs (of which there have been many on cars and SUVs long before all this) that we have tons and tons of foreign brands actually building cars in the US.
Do European car makers build in the US? Yes. Is that going to change? I don't think so.
Do US cars sell good in Europe? No. Is that going to change? I don't think so too.
I don’t go to my doctor for a discussion on urban planning. And if I do.. not at their medical office.
It’s a blog. Not a practice of economics, this one article notwithstanding.
And it isn’t even by Cowen.
EDIT: The comment section on MR is pretty awful too.
The foundations of economics are built on school boy style maths errors.
They have famous "paradoxes" and results that are just bad maths.
It's a ridiculous joke of a research field.
(It is the intersection between domains where wisdom and innovation shine.)
Deleted Comment
I think the Professor Cowen fancies himself in the way of the “public intellectual,” so that he takes the liberty to write on a range of topics outside the domain of his academic focus. He does seem extraordinarily well-read; and in many topics he writes about, I have no way of judging his contribution to those fields. While I occasionally read MR, it strikes me as quite technocratic in the way that most libertarian writing is; and this sort of socioeconomic analysis detached from human values of empathy and concern for the wellbeing of the collective isn’t appealing to me personally. But I’m sure it fills an important niche.
Their money is probably a large reason his content gets well promoted.
The Kochs got into politics in the 1980s because of a series of fights with the EPA whom they thought were getting in the way of their chemical company's right to pollute. If you've ever heard a morality play written about hairdresser licensing and why it means Regulation is Bad - that was them, and it leaks on to hacker news sometimes. E.g.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42982578
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31765644
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31382755
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18798111
They also really like using their money to bludgeon American economics departments into teaching economics the way they "like" it: http://bridgeproject.com/research/koch-impacts-florida/koch-...
https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lm5p4tdc6a2c
So many screws that we should have human American workers installing screws in iPhones? And this is how we make American workers wealthier?
They think we're stupid or they want us to be stupid. This isn't an economic policy. It's a way to reward fealty and punish disloyalty, to a specific person.
That's it. That's all you need to do to explain this to people. It's amazing to me how many have fallen for this ridiculous lie that the other country somehow pays the tariff AND there will be no increase in cost to the consumer.
I used to think these lies were cynical, like how Mexico was going to pay for the border wall. But I'm not convinced now. I think there's a not-insgificant chance the president doesn't know this is how tariffs work. And that's terrifying. I would respect a cycnical lie way more.
You buy $1000 in t-shirts from China. The government places a 30% import duty on them. The importer pays $300 to the government. Those t-shirts now cost you $1300. Whoever sells them retail will be charging up to 30% extra to recoup that. It blows my mind that this even requires explanation.
Basically, market distortions like that are never paid exclusively by one party or the other; instead, it moves the equilibrium point. Both the buyer and the seller are worse off.
Granted, that does take some time.
Deleted Comment
Presumably the same effect applies if it were tariff between towns, then counties, then states, and finally countries.
Then what, we are missing interstellar trades to lower the prices on earth?
https://x.com/paulkrugman/status/1712494317024026761
Too bad interstellar trade will probably never be economically viable. But it would lower prices, yes.
What about economies of scale, though? If you can triple production while only doubling your cost, the unit price should drop.
Say, we can have a single company in Taiwan running insanely capital intensive chip factories making chips for the entire world.
One downside of this being resiliency; what happens to the global electronics supply chain if China one day decides to invade Taiwan? Something not taken into account in typical economic models.
For similar reasons developed countries still try to have things like domestic agriculture, despite that being a low value add industry where poorer countries might have a large comparative advantage in a hypothetical free trade scenario.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_cost
Deleted Comment
Do it again with a factory that puts on a double shift with the unemployed and see what happens.
Do it again with the Chinese sovereign wealth funds, the likely source of mercantile intervention, offering 14 CNY per USD rather than the current 7.
It’s unlikely that any production will move. What’s more likely to change is the quantity and location of financial savings. The distributional impact of that change is probably unknown.
Chamber of commerce says:
>Understanding America’s Labor Shortage
>We hear every day from our member companies—of every size and industry, across nearly every state—that they’re facing unprecedented challenges trying to find enough workers to fill open jobs. Right now, the latest data shows that we have 8 million job openings in the U.S. but only 6.8 million unemployed workers. https://www.uschamber.com/workforce/understanding-americas-l...
which doesn't look that promising.
Dead Comment
> Beijing has previously said it won't go down the FX depreciation road, preferring to keep the yuan relatively "stable". But that was before Trump's self-styled "Liberation Day". Beijing's first response might be to try and negotiate with Washington to get the tariffs lowered. But if that fails, FX devaluation becomes a real option to offset the shock.
They didn't take the negotiation route. We'll see what's next.