Steel and aluminum tariffs...

[boutons_deux]

We estimate China only makes $8.46 from an iPhone – and that’s why Trump’s trade war is futile


China's biggest exports to the U.S.

China's top exports to the U.S., like cell phones and computers, haven't yet been hit by Trump's tariffs.

But given their size, they're bound to be targeted if the trade war escalates.

The top 10 product categories made up almost three-quarters of China's $505 billion in exports to the U.S. in 2017.

Cell phones and other household goods$70.36 bln

Computers
$45.52

Telecommunications equipment
$33.49 bln

Computer accessories

Toys, games, and sporting goods
$26.75 bln

Apparel, textiles, nonwool or cotton
$24.14 bln

Furniture, household goods, etc.
$20.67 bln

Other parts and accessories of vehicles
1 bln

Household appliances

Electric apparatus

https://theconversation.com/we-estimate-china-only-makes-8-46-from-an-iphone-and-thats-why-trumps-trade-war-is-futile-99258

[boutons_deux]

Trump’s delusions are about to blow up in his own voters’ faces

the issue that taps most directly into the most visceral strains of Trumpism is his escalating trade war with China.

Given how often he preens about his “toughness” toward China before roaring, worshipful rally crowds,

it’s hard to see how he’ll back down, no matter what the consequences.

Numbers provided to me by the Brookings Ins ution suggest that those

consequences will most directly impact the counties that voted for Trump.

Indeed, the numbers show that

China has taken aggressive steps to sharpen its targeting of Trump counties

in the latest round of retaliatory tariffs it just announced.

Politico notes that

Trump has “no clear exit strategy and no explicit plans to negotiate new rules of the road with China,

leaving the global trade community and financial markets wracked with uncertainty.”

But Trump loyalists say

he’s playing a long game and won’t buckle.

As Stephen K. Bannon puts it, Trump “has preached a confrontation with China for 30 years,” making this a “huge moment” that

pits “Trump against all of Wall Street.” Bannon!

Despite this phony populist posturing about Trump targeting “Wall Street,”

Trump counties are the ones most likely to take a hit.

The Brookings Ins ution, which keeps

detailed county-by-county data on employment by industry, looked at all the counties that have jobs in industries that China is targeting,

and broke them out by counties that voted for Trump and Hillary Clinton. Brookings provided me with this table showing the results:


https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...nl_most&wpmm=1

[boutons_deux]

BMW just retaliated against Trump with a devastating move

"Bavarian Motor Works, more famously known as BMW, has just announced that they will be moving a large portion of their SUV production to China,

where Brilliance Automotive Group Holdings will be building nearly half a million vehicles every year for the company by next year.

The move was provoked by the recent 40% tariff that China slapped on the vehicles, which in turn was in response to Donald Trump’s imposition of $34 billion in tariffs on Chinese goods,

provoking the “largest trade war in history.”

The BMW move is likely to hit Trump voters the hardest,

as their plant in Spartanburg County, South Carolina, employs over 10,000 people.

BMW was once the largest auto exporter in the United States – but no more.
https://washingtonpress.com/2018/07/...astating-move/

[boutons_deux]

Trump Falsely Claims It’s ‘Impossible’ for American Farmers to Do Business in Europe

The United States exported $11.5 billion in agricultural products to the European Union last year.

In fact, the 28 countries of the European Union are the United States’ fifth-largest export market for agricultural goods,

like tree nuts and soybeans, totaling $11.5 billion in 2017,

according to the Department of Agriculture.

But the United States did import about $10 billion more in agricultural products,

like wine, beer and chocolate, from the European Union than it exported there.

(Overall, the United States has had an agricultural trade surplus with the rest of the world since 1960.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/10/u...er=rss&emc=rss

So US exports low/no added value ag products, and imports high-value ag products, with EU.

Goddamn, you Trash supporters are ing stupid.

[boutons_deux]

Six lies on trade

from Dean Baker

After 500 days of Donald Trump’s presidency, it is clear that

any relationship between his statements and the truth are purely coincidental.

He even boasts about his lack of interest in the truth,

touting the fact that he had no idea what our trade deficit was with Canada when he confronted Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau over our “$100 billion trade deficit.”

(The actual figure is around $20 billion.)

But Donald Trump’s contempt for the truth should not cause the rest of us to become liars also. In fact, it is more important than ever that progressives ground arguments in reality.

This is especially the case with trade, where lying was standard fare long before Donald Trump entered politics. Here are six common lies which deserve major pushback any time they appear.

1. Everyone gains from trade.

This is not even the textbook story. The textbook tells us there are winners and losers. In the standard story, the winners gain more than the losers lose. This means that the winners could compensate the losers so that everyone is better off. In the real world, this compensation never takes place, so the losers just lose.

If this is hard to understand, suppose we arranged for 300,000 highly qualified doctors from other countries to start practicing in the United States. This influx would probably lower our doctors’ pay by around $100,000 a year each to roughly European levels.

This would save us close to $100 billion annually ($700 per family) on health care costs. That’s a big gain to the rest of us, but a big loss to US doctors. That’s basically the story of trade, but the compe ion has been for manufacturing workers.

2. The loss of manufacturing jobs was due to productivity growth, not trade.

This is a classic economist’s sleight of hand. Manufacturing productivity typically increases at the rate of 2-3 percent annually. (It has been much slower in the last dozen years.) This is also roughly the rate of growth of demand, which means that increased demand for goods typically offset the jobs lost to productivity growth.

The data are clear. In the three decades from December 1970 to December 2000, manufacturing employment only fell by 100,000, less than 1 percent.

By contrast, we lost more than 3.4 million manufacturing jobs from 2000 to 2007 (before the crash), which was more than 20 percent of total employment.

This was due to the explosion of the trade deficit in these years, which peaked at almost 6 percent of GDP in 2005 and 2006. That would be equal to $1.2 trillion annually in today’s economy.

There were benefits from getting cheap imports, but it is incredibly dishonest not to acknowledge the enormous job loss associated with the expansion of the trade deficit in those years.

And of course, over the last 50 years, many more manufacturing jobs were lost to productivity than trade. This is true, but completely irrelevant.

3. It is inevitable that less-educated workers lose jobs to the developing world.

This is a great example where the classism of our elites obstructs clear thinking. It is absolutely true that there are hundreds of millions of people in the developing world who are willing to work in factories at a fraction of the wages that US manufacturing workers receive. This means that opening to trade puts downward pressure on the wages of US manufacturing workers, and less-educated workers more generally, as they either accept large pay cuts or lose their jobs.

The complication is that there are also tens of millions of very smart hard-working people in the developing world who would be happy to work in the United States as doctors, dentists, lawyers or as other highly paid professionals at a fraction of the pay of our professionals. They could train to our standards and learn English where necessary. This would drive down the salary in highly paid professions, and thereby lead to savings to consumers, but we don’t allow it.

Trade deals have been about lowering the pay of less-educated workers, while highly paid professionals continue to enjoy protection from international compe ion.

4. Trade deficits don’t cost jobs.

It is very popular among pundits to claim that trade deficits don’t cost jobs by pointing to our current 3.8 percent unemployment rate, even as the deficit is on a course to exceed $600 billion (3 percent of GDP) this year.

While it is true that a trade deficit does not necessarily cost jobs, in a period where we are below full employment, a $100 billion increase in the trade deficit reduces demand and employment in the same way that a $100 billion reduction in investment would reduce demand and employment.

The large trade deficit in the last decade was certainly a big factor in the weak labor market recovery from the 2001 recession. We eventually filled the demand gap from the trade deficit with the demand generated by the housing bubble. This is hardly a good model for the future.

5. It is important that other countries respect “our” intellectual property.

This is a line that has come up repeatedly in Trump’s trade war with China. We have been told that we have an interest in making China pay for the intellectual property of US corporations that it allegedly steals.

Okay, it is clear that Pfizer has an interest in having its drug patents respected by China, as does Microsoft with its software copyrights and patents. But what about the vast majority of us who don’t own lots of stock in these or other companies that have intellectual property claims at risk?

The standard trade theory tells us that if China and other countries have to pay less money to Pfizer and Microsoft due to patent and copyright monopolies, they have more money to spend on other items we produce. In other words, the money they pay to these companies increases the trade deficit in other areas.

We do have to support innovation, but that is a separate issue. There are far more efficientmechanisms than patent and copyright monopolies for financing innovation in the 21st century.

6. The developing world needed to kill US manufacturing to allow people to escape poverty.

Hundreds of millions of people in the developing world have seen huge improvements in living standards over the last three decades, especially in China. These people went from living near or below poverty levels to enjoying middle-class living standards.

This is indeed a great story, but it is not true that this rise in living standards had to come at the expense of manufacturing workers in the United States and other wealthy countries.

In the 1990s, the countries of East Asia (the big success stories) had even more rapid growth than they did in the last decade. This was a period in which they were running large trade deficits, with the important exception of China, which had nearly balanced trade.

In principle, there is no reason these countries could not have continued on a path where domestic demand fueled growth and was funded by foreign investment flows.

However, the East Asian financial crisis hit in 1997. The United States led the bailout organized by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and essentially required that these countries run large trade surpluses as a condition of getting aid.

The shift from running trade deficits to running trade surpluses was a requirement of the IMF, not a law of economic development. If these countries were allowed to continue to be importers of foreign investment (the standard textbook model), and sustained the 1990s growth path, they would be far richer today.

In fact, countries like South Korea and Malaysia would now be richer than the United States on a per person basis.

In short, it is simply not true that the pain to factory workers, who lost their jobs in the United States, was somehow a necessary condition for hundreds of millions of people in the developing world to escape poverty.

Other paths would have allowed for even more rapid growth in these countries.


Getting to a Reality-Based Trade Policy

Trump’s trade war will go down in flames when Trump eventually loses interest and goes back to the hunt for President Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate.

His reckless actions deserve all the ridicule and contempt they have received.

However, we should not go back to a trade policy that was based on lies.

We need a trade policy that is about raising the living standards of working people in the United States and the developing world, not just giving all the money to the rich.

https://rwer.wordpress.com/2018/07/1...lies-on-trade/

[boutons_deux]

‘Wherever you look, you see damage’: CNN analyst shows how Trump’s tariffs are killing the stock market

Breaking down the impact of the new tariffs, CNN financial analyst Richard Quest said that

there are potentially few winners and a whole lot of losers in the latest round of the president’s trade war.

Pointing to the losses in Wednesday’s stock market, Quest said we can expect more days like this if tensions keep escalating.

“Is this what a trade war looks like? Yes,” he said. “And at this stage, we’re only in the skirmish section.”

Host Kate Bolduan then asked him what comes next — and he pointed to a chart showing nothing but red numbers, indicating a dramatic decline in share values.

“This is what the next stage looks like!” he said excitedly, before pointing to dropping share prices of key American companies such as Caterpillar and United Airlines.

“Wherever you look, you are seeing the damage that is being done!

And remember the important thing about a trade war:

The gains are very limited.

They are those industries that benefit.

The losses are widespread and diversified throughout the economy.”

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/07/wherever-look-see-damage-cnn-analyst-shows-trumps-tariffs-killing-stock-market/

And the Repugs do nothing, in an election year, as Trash/Mnuchin/Ross kill Ms of US jobs and share prices.

[dabom]

That sick piece of orange .

[Chucho]

That sick piece of orange .

[boutons_deux]

How Rare Earths (What?) Could Be Crucial in a U.S.-China Trade War

Those minerals almost certainly came from China. Ms. Lacaze’s job is to give the world an alternative source, in case a global trade war spirals out of control and China cuts off supply.

But it has other ways to retaliate beyond tariffs. It could refuse to buy American products, like planes from Boeing. It could intensify regulation of American companies doing business on the mainland. It could threaten to offload a piece of its huge portfolio of Treasuries, which could rattle the bond market.

And in one of its more strategic weapons, Beijing could use its dominance to cut off key parts of the global supply chain.

China is the major supplier of a number of mundane but crucial materials and components needed to keep the world’s factories humming. They include obscure materials like arsenic metals, used to make semiconductors; cadmium, found in rechargeable batteries; and tungsten, found in light bulbs and heating elements.

They also include rare earths. A trade war risks putting those minerals in the middle of the conflict, potentially giving China a way to get back at the United States by cutting off supplies to American companies.

Already rare earths have become embroiled in the conflict — they were among the long list released on Tuesday of Chinese-made goods that the Trump administration wants to tax.

China has used its control of rare earths to try to get its way before. In 2010, it stopped exports to Japan for two months over a territorial dispute.

Speculators hoarded rare earth minerals, sending prices soaring.

“There is a hole in the western supply chain,” said Ryan Castilloux, the founder of Adamas Intelligence, a research firm.

It is hard to go a day without using rare earths. They are found in personal electronics like smartphones, televisions and hair dryers, and electric and hybrid cars.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/business/china-trade-war-rare-earths-lynas.html

Trash certainly foresaw this lethal weapon in China's trade war artillery.

[boutons_deux]

Hyundai Motor union warns auto tariffs could hurt US jobs

Hyundai Motor Co.’s labour union said Thursday that steep auto tariffs the U.S. is considering could cost tens of thousands of American jobs, echoing concerns of the global auto industry as spiraling trade conflicts between the U.S. and other major economies heat up.

The labour union at South Korea’s largest auto company said in a statement that if President Donald Trump goes ahead with imposing 25 per cent auto tariffs, it will hurt Hyundai’s U.S. sales and jeopardize some 20,000 jobs at a Hyundai factory in Alabama.

The labour union, which has 51,000 members in South Korea, said

its contracts with Hyundai Motor mandate Hyundai

to shut down overseas factories first

before closing its plants in South Korea

in the event that restructuring becomes inevitable.

https://business.financialpost.com/p...d-hurt-us-jobs

That's how union power protects domestic jobs, unlike USA where BigCorp kills US jobs in preference for foreign jobs.

[boutons_deux]

China’s soybean imports forecast to fall as tariffs hit and buyers switch to other animal feed

Prices of oilseed from US to rise, prompting buyers to seek out alternatives, Chinese agriculture ministry report says

mports of soybeans in the crop year that starts on October 1 would be 93.85 million tonnes, down 1.8 million tonnes, or 2 per cent, from last month’s estimate, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs said in its monthly crop report.

That compares with its estimate of 95.97 million for the 2017/18 crop year and would be the lowest import level since the 2016/17 year, according to US government records.

The ministry’s Chinese Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (CASDE) report said new 25 per cent tariffs on US shipments introduced last week would inflate prices of the oilseed.

Meanwhile, crushers that make meal and oil from the beans will process fewer beans in favour of other protein subs utes.

Meal made from rapeseed, peanuts and sunflower seeds are expected to be popular alternatives.

The government also cut its soybean consumption forecast by 2 per cent from the previous month’s outlook to 109.23 million tonnes.

That would still be 1 per cent higher than consumption in the 2017/18 crop year.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/dipl...ariffs-hit-and

[boutons_deux]

Here's retail price with the "tariff fee" listed separately

http://www.grizzly.com/products/7-X-...op-Lathe/G0765

[KenMcCoy]

Here's retail price with the "tariff fee" listed separately

http://www.grizzly.com/products/7-X-...op-Lathe/G0765

That's fantastic. If Grizzly doesn't figure it out soon, I'm sure some savvy US entrepreneur will figure out how to make the same products in the US for about $100 cheaper than the tariff price.

[boutons_deux]

That's fantastic. If Grizzly doesn't figure it out soon, I'm sure some savvy US entrepreneur will figure out how to make the same products in the US for about $100 cheaper than the tariff price.

The trade war future is unforeseeable, so nobody's going to spend $10Ms on a machinery factory for the low-end / hobby market

[boutons_deux]

IMF warns Trump trade war could cost global economy $430bn

US could find itself ‘focus of global retaliation’ in tariff dispute, says WEO report

Rising trade tensions between the United States and the rest of the world could cost the global economy $430bn (£324bn), with America “especially vulnerable” to an escalating tariff war, the International Monetary Fund has warned.

Delivering a sharp rebuke for Donald Trump, the Washington-based organisation said the current threats made by the US and its trading partners risked lowering global growth by as much as 0.5% by 2020, or about $430bn in lost GDP worldwide.

Although all economies would suffer from further escalation,

the US would find itself “as the focus of global retaliation” with a relatively higher share of its exports taxed in global markets.

“It is therefore especially vulnerable,” the fund said.

https://www.theguardian.com/business...-us-tariff-weo

Trash ing up the American economy? Pootin LOVES it.

[sickdsm]

Saw a chart that showed since the beginning of the year the Dow was up 1%. Shanghai composite was down 16.8%. Lots of different opinions but I thought that was very interesting

[boutons_deux]

Saw a chart that showed since the beginning of the year the Dow was up 1%. Shanghai composite was down 16.8%. Lots of different opinions but I thought that was very interesting

incompetent asshole Greenspan's "irrational exuberance".

I've seen economists, market gurus saying US stockmarket is even more insanely overvalued (ready for a crash) than it was before the Banksters Great Depression, or the late 90s Internet boom.

[boutons_deux]

Saw a chart that showed since the beginning of the year the Dow was up 1%. Shanghai composite was down 16.8%. Lots of different opinions but I thought that was very interesting

incompetent asshole Greenspan's "irrational exuberance".

I've seen economists, market gurus saying US stockmarket is even more insanely overvalued (ready for a crash) than it was before the Banksters Great Depression, or the late 90s Internet boom.

[Winehole23]

US files WTO complaint:

The Trump administration is hitting back at a number of countries for what it considers unjustified retaliatory tariffs that were imposed as a response to the steel and aluminum duties the U.S. applied on its closest allies in the name of national security.

The U.S. Trade Representative said it launched formal challenges against China, the European Union, Canada, Mexico and Turkey at the World Trade Organization on Monday. They come in response to retaliatory measures taken by these countries on American-made products earlier this year.

The actions taken by the President are wholly legitimate and fully justified as a matter of U.S. law and international trade rules. Instead of working with us to address a common problem, some of our trading partners have elected to respond with retaliatory tariffs designed to punish American workers, farmers and companies,”

https://business.financialpost.com/n...-wto-complaint“

[boutons_deux]

How Trump’s tariffs on Mexico are taking jobs from U.S. workers

With Mid Continent charging more for nails, orders are down 70 percent from this time a year ago despite a booming construction industry. Company officials say that without relief, the Missouri plant could be out of business by Labor Day — or that remaining production could move to Mexico or another country.

hampered a Mexican company’s multimillion-dollar effort to create jobs in the United States — an unintended consequence of Trump’s trade war that demonstrates the difficulty of attacking trading partners without hurting workers at home.

The layoffs have already begun. The company now employs fewer than 400 workers, down from about 500 before the tariffs took effect last month. Temporary contract workers have been let go. Some permanent workers have left for other jobs, in anticipation of a new wave of employment losses or the possible shuttering of the plant.

“We’re in a situation where we’re fighting against our own country,”

a battle we shouldn’t be having to fight.”

“There’s a lot of good things that he is doing.

But he’s affecting me now, and I don’t appreciate it,” Bennett, a Trump supporter, said of the president.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/busin...=.f665d65fde17

Trash's cult still supports Trash as Trash screws them while enriching the swamp and the "elites"

[KenMcCoy]

Journalism at it's finest...at least this guy attempts to tell the other side of the story:

"Not everyone is hurting from the tariffs. Magnitude 7 Metals in New Madrid County, Missouri, was able to reopen an aluminum product line and rehire 450 workers."

https://www.theblaze.com/news/2018/0...-trump-tariffs

I guess those 60 people laid off at Mid Continent can just drive the 60 miles and start working there. Or go to Illinois or Arkansas to the other US nail manufacturers who are hiring.

[Winehole23]

In such precarious times, holding American farmers hostage as a bargaining chip in a trade war, and telling them to wait for some yet-to-be-revealed plan, as Agriculture Secretary Perdue has done, is offensive and dangerous.


To add insult to injury is Perdue’s rationale behind this escalation: theft of intellectual property in the form of patented genetically engineered seed varieties. We should remember that farmers are not the ones who reap benefits from patented seed technologies. Those profits go to the patent-holding company itself, which these days is one of ever-fewer multinational seed conglomerates, while farmers watch their seed prices skyrocket.

http://thehill.com/opinion/energy-en...ps-unnecessary

[Winehole23]

If the Trump administration is truly concerned about the fate of U.S. farmers and ranchers on the global stage, there is a long list of bold steps it could take. It could push back at the World Trade Organization and fight for Country of Origin Labeling (COOL), a policy widely supported by farmers and eaters, that would increase transparency in our food system and allow consumers to choose U.S. raised meat products.

It could stop the flow of taxpayer money to new and often foreign-backed mega-farms in the poultry, hog and dairy industries — all of which are flooding the market, crashing prices and pushing out existing farmers. It could support state-level policies designed to protect U.S. farmland from purchase by foreign en ies.

This administration could also challenge Congress to pass pro-farmer policies in the 2018 farm bill that establish fair farm prices, eradicate corrupt check-off programs and close loopholes that allow the biggest farms to keep getting bigger.

It could reform trade to make it truly fair. Current trade policy is predicated on the myth that export markets will save farmers in the absence of fair pricing policy, if they just get bigger, take on more debt and produce as much as possible to “feed the world” — a narrative that has been a prevailing force driving American family farmers towards extinction.

Ibid.

[koriwhat]

Germany will bend the knee. I've been saying it.

germany altogether. let them rot into the hole islamic country they seek to be.

[boutons_deux]

Journalism at it's finest...at least this guy attempts to tell the other side of the story:

"Not everyone is hurting from the tariffs. Magnitude 7 Metals in New Madrid County, Missouri, was able to reopen an aluminum product line and rehire 450 workers."

https://www.theblaze.com/news/2018/0...-trump-tariffs

I guess those 60 people laid off at Mid Continent can just drive the 60 miles and start working there. Or go to Illinois or Arkansas to the other US nail manufacturers who are hiring.

the losers and lost $Bs will far outweigh the tiny number of winners.

Trash's simple-minded, "easy-to-win" trade war will his cult badly.