Tag: economics

104 and Counting

Tariffs on Chinese goods are going to 104 percent.

China now faces another 50% in tariffs after Beijing missed a noon deadline to withdraw the retaliatory import taxes it imposed on the United States.

The new tariffs will go into effect at 12:01 am, the White House said. That brings the total tariffs on all goods from China coming into the United States to 104%.

Trump placed a 34% increase on China when he announced his tariff plan on Liberation Day. That was on top of 20% import taxes rolled out earlier this year on Beijing.

The president, on Monday, pledged another 50% tariffs after Beijing responded to his tariff threat with a 34% increase on U.S. goods coming into China.

Well, the Chinese can’t say they weren’t warned. I warned them, on their state TV, nearly nine years ago, that President Trump would wage, and would win, a trade war against them. None of the Chinese or Hong Kong economists agreed, of course, but what was obvious then is even more obvious now.

When you’re running a trade surplus, you can’t win a tariff battle. Reciprocal tariffs are not a viable weapon for the country doing most of the exporting, because the importing country benefits from protecting its manufacturers.

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The Ultra-Rich Condemn Robin Hood

A host of American financiers and billionaire investors have criticized President Donald Trump over the sweeping tariffs he announced last week, calling the measures “poorly advised” and warning of serious consequences for the US economy.

In other news, the American Society for Surprise Sex condemned the President’s new executive action establishing stronger penalties for rapists, with automatic life-in-prison for anyone convicted of sexual assault on a minor. ASSS spokesman George “Rape Rape” Martin decried the measure, calling it: “poorly conceived” and warning that it would have a depressive effect on novelists who are struggling to complete their books.

This meme fairly well characterizes the state of popular and media discourse about the tariffs.

Free trade is an absolute evil and an obvious lie. Both Ian Fletcher and I have conclusively, and separately, proven that it cannot deliver the promised benefits while the costs will eventually be unsupportable for any nation. If, for some reason, you are still a believer in the concept of free trade, I suggest reading my three-part critique of Henry Hazlitt’s orthodox case for free trade, in which I point out the multiple errors in the argument that was presented as the best possible case for free trade.

If you want more detailed demolitions of the concept, read WHY FREE TRADE DOESN’T WORK by Ian Fletcher and ON THE QUESTION OF FREE TRADE by me and Dr. James D. Miller, PhD.

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Disinformation on US Tariffs

The mainstream media likes to talk about “disinformation” on the Internet. But that’s only because it wants to preserve its monopoly. Consider the following description of literal Never-Trumper Ben Shapiro:

Ben Shapiro, a long-time supporter of the president, also smashed the illusion that tariffs are a good business deal for Americans to smithereens, with a startling insight on Monday: ‘Musk is right. Musk happens to be 100 percent right about this.’

Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, similarly used his shareholder letter to warn that Trump’s levies would result in ‘inflationary outcome’ both on imports and prices in the United States.

‘The recent tariffs will likely increase inflation and are causing many to consider a greater probability of a recession,’ he told shareholders, according to the Washington Post.

Some Republican senators have also voiced their support for a measure that would require the president to inform Congress of upcoming tariffs within 48 hours of them being implemented.

It would also mandate that the tariffs need approval from Congress within 60 days of them being imposed and that Congress could end any tariff at any time.

Meanwhile, a libertarian group funded by Leonardo Leo and Charles Koch has launched a legal challenge against Trump’s tariffs, The Guardian reports.

The New Civil Liberties alliance filed the suit to prevent Trump from imposing tariffs on imports from China, arguing that doing so under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act is unlawful.

If you want to better understand the retardery of Clown World and its manufacture of its pet opinion leaders, just look at how it is casting Ben Shapiro as both a) “a long-time supporter” of President Trump and b) an expert on economics.

Now, as it happens, I am both. The Littlest Chickenhawk is neither. I was also much more widely read than Shapiro when we were competing on a level playing field, his readership at WND was always between one-quarter and one-third of mine. But the media needs its puppet mouthpieces, so they elevate these nonentities and then continuously push them in front of the public in order to prop up their Narrative.

The fact is that the tarrif rates announced are a) far too high and b) calculated via an absurd method, and c) irrelevant. The rates are just the God-Emperor 2.0’s usual way of getting his negotiating partner’s to accept his frame by metaphorically slapping him in the face. It’s the start of negotiations, nothing more. And the smarter countries understand this; they are either caving very publicly or refraining from retaliating, because they know US tariffs are a) necessary, b) justified, and c) long overdue.

Not that the media will tell you that, since they have their Narrative to prop up.

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China Hits Back

Even though the trade war is not the war that China can win right now.

China will soon impose an additional 34 per cent tariffs on all American imports in retaliation for Donald Trump’s 34 per cent levy. Beijing announced the measure today, the most serious escalation in a trade war with Trump that has fed fears of a recession and triggered a global stock market rout.

The new tariff, which comes into effect on April 10, matches the rate of the ‘reciprocal’ tariff imposed by Trump this week. The levies are in addition to the existing tariffs already imposed on US goods.

US exports to China totalled $143.5 billion last year, according to Office of the US Trade Representative data. Oilseeds and grains, including soybeans, machinery and aerospace products were America’s top exports to the country. The US imported $438.9 billion worth of goods from China last year, with top imports including electrical and electronic equipment, machinery, toys, and plastics.

I don’t know why China is doing this, since the balance of trade surplus means that the more US-China trade declines, the more it will hurt China rather than the USA. All I can think is that China isn’t actually concerned about the inevitable trade war, but is more interested in gradually turning up the heat in a conflict that it knows to be unavoidable.

Time would appear to be on China’s side in this regard. It has been 25 years since Bill Clinton announced the United States-China Relation Act of 2000 that opened the floodgates of US-China trade.

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It’s Just the Opening Bid

The “tariff rates” to which the God-Emperor 2.0 utilized to generate his newly-announced tariffs aren’t actually anything of the sort.

Flexport’s team was able to reverse engineer the formula the Administration used to generate the “reciprocal tariffs.” It’s quite simple, they took the trade deficit the US has with each country and divided it by our imports from that country.

This makes a lot more sense, because Switzerland doesn’t have a 61 percent tariff on anything. Which means that we’re in the realm of rhetoric here, not dialectic, and I suspect what the God-Emperor intends is for everyone to simply accept a 10-12 percent tariff rate without any reciprocating tariffs on their own imports.

I’ll admit, I’ve seldom been more wrong than seeing the initial tariffs being graduated UK-EU-CH instead of the other way around, as I was expecting. But Trump’s usual tactic is to slap his interlocutor into accepting his framework, then offering a much more palatable deal that would have looked unattainable before the metaphorical slap in the face.

Regardless, he’s doing the right thing if he wants to rebuild America’s industrial capabilities again.

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EU Hit From Both Sides

The EU’s reaction to getting a taste of its own medicine is downright humorous:

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyden has three big concerns with the new trade/tariff reset. I strongly suggest everyone to read the EU concerns slowly to fully absorb decades of hypocrisy now surfacing:

  • The EU will not be able to compete for U.S. market share with 20% general tariffs and 25% auto tariffs.
  • The EU must deploy countermeasures against the risk of losing industrial capacity and manufacturing to the United States.
  • The EU must defend itself against China dumping cheap products into the EU now rejected by the USA.

Von der Leyen is concerned mostly about the extremely valuable U.S. consumer being leveraged by President Trump, essentially blocking exploitation from EU and Asia. The EU will not tolerate losing access to the most valuable customers in the world, Americans.

So, just to be clear, the EU is now going to a) fight a shooting war with Russia, b) fight an economic war with the USA, and c) fight an economic war with China.

I strongly recommend exiting the so-called Union at the earliest opportunity to every leader of an EU member state. The EU is the last surviving vestige of the neo-liberal world order and it’s going to collapse soon.

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The Trump Tariffs

They’re hitting Switzerland harder than we expected, and the UK considerably less than we expected, but this will not interrupt our plans nor is it likely to change our book prices. If we have to, we can obviously increase our manufacturing in the USA, but some of the improvements in the coming payment systems should cover most of the increased costs for us. And, as with all things Trump, wait two weeks before attempting to analyze anything.

Regardless, we’re on top of it, we’re prepared for it, and we’ll deal with it in whatever way least disrupts our subscribers.

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Europe Gambled and Lost

It turns out that betting on satanic globalism that seeks to eradicate your own nations is not the smart way to bet:

The Ukraine war is going to be concluded soon. Attempts to prevent the outbreak of peace are being bypassed by direct negotiations between the US and Russia.

Aside from the obvious desire to stop the killing, arguments about cost are being made. The broader strategy of the Trump administration is to present its foreign and domestic policy as an efficiency drive to cut waste. There is no difference between foreign and domestic policy of course. This means regime change abroad means regime change at home.

Under the former grand strategy of liberal globalism, it made “sense” to sponsor social revolution, coups and military regime change abroad. If your strategy changes, as it has, then all this becomes “waste” overnight. It also quickly becomes “corruption”.

The main reason for all this is that the United States was going to go bankrupt if it did not abandon the global empire model of the liberal consensus.

Globalised economics, social policies and grand strategy have produced a record debt and have met with hard limits in a changed world. This model is no longer practical, realistic or affordable and so it has been replaced.

Governments such as in Britain and France and Germany were formerly partners in this consensus. Their political and financial fortunes were invested in a project to overextend and destabilise Russia. This has failed.

The reward would have been immense. A Balkanised Russia would have been absorbed into the liberal-global system, giving the backers of the war which broke it immense strategic and political power in the resulting geopolitical arrangement.

In short, Western Europe gambled everything on the collapse and domination of Russia and lost.

Now all of the European regimes are going to fail. What the EU calls “democracy”, which of course is closer to anti-democratic rule by a corrupt retarderati that has sold their souls and sold out their nations, is going to come to an end within the next ten years and probably sooner.

Once Germany goes bankrupt, the other European Clown World states will rapidly follow suit. And all the post-WWII Enlightenment appeals to fake virtues that are only honored in their absence will lose the final remnants of their rhetorical power.

The nations will rise again and Clown World, or as Susan Cooper called it, The Dark, will once more be driven back into the shadows on the periphery. Because one can only war successfully against Nature and Nature’s God for so long before reality exerts itself on one’s delusions.

And in a reflection of the global return to Great Power Balance, the EU finds itself the enemy of both Russia and the USA due to Denmark’s claim to Greenland. Which is going to be claimed by the USA, especially in light of Zelensky announcing that he’s going to default on Ukraine’s war debt by redefining US loans as grants. Which is an object lesson in why one should never loan money to anyone known to be prone to redefining words.

Like in the 1860s, when Russia wanted the United States to take control of Alaska to curb the power of the British Empire, and the Americans also used it to smash the Japanese Empire during World War II, both of whom were major threats to Russia, the United States takeover of Greenland would eliminate the socialist European powers military threat to Russia in the Arctic, while also curbing socialist European Union economic threats to America—and in viewing the current dynamic, it caused world-renowned Norwegian international relations expert Florian Vidol to most factually observe: “In the power game that is developing over Greenland, there is one big potential loser, and it’s the European Union…It needs the resourse for its energy transition…It’s heavily reliant on Greenland…And it faces the potential danger of being squeezed out”.

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Protecting the Automotive Industry

The God-Emperor 2.0 is slapping 25 percent tariffs on all foreign cars. It’s about two decades too late for this, as GM already went bankrupt back in 2009, but it might start turning things around for the USA’s beleaguered industrial capabilities. Regardless, it’s time to buy domestic if you need a car; hopefully they’ll start making real cars that run on gas and don’t have all that worse-than-useless computer gadgetry in them.

Donald Trump has warned the European Union and Canada they can expect to contend with ‘large scale tariffs’ if they seek to do ‘economic harm to the USA’ in an unsettling post early this morning. The US President plans to impose a 25% tariff on imported cars and light trucks starting on April 3, and earlier this month rolled out an increase in tariffs on all steel and aluminium imports from the European bloc.

This prompted the EU to retaliate with a series of duties on US industrial and agricultural products from April 1, setting the foundation of what could prove to be a damaging trade war.

Posting on his Truth Social platform this morning, Trump declared: ‘If the European Union works with Canada in order to do economic harm to the USA, large scale Tariffs, far larger than currently planned, will be placed on them both in order to protect the best friend that each of those two countries has ever had!’

The EU retarderati clearly has absolutely no understanding of its lack of power and influence. The EU can no more win a trade war with the USA than it can win a shooting war with Russia, and here its leadership is blithely proceeding to enter into both. This is, of course, because the EU “leadership” is nothing more than Clown World puppets who know nothing about either military history or economics and will simply repeat whatever rhetoric they are instructed to repeat, as many times as they are told to repeat it, no matter how obviously nonsensical it is.

Kaja Kallas, the Vice-President of the European Commission, is exemplary of the absolute ineptitude of the current EU puppet-leaders. She combines ignorance with vacuity, a complete lack of experience with accountability, and a pretty woman’s unfamiliarity with being told no. She’s the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, which is supposed to be the highest diplomatic position, but she’s been acting as if she’s the prime minister of a belligerent party, which isn’t at all the same thing.

At this point, I won’t even be surprised if both the USA and Russia break ties with Europe in the coming years, just to give the poor European nations a chance to break free of their satanic would-be masters and their fake, unelected “democracy” and their self-destructive economic and immigration policies.

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Fake Prizes for Propaganda

In case you weren’t convinced that Nobel Prizes are just another fake Clown World propaganda prize, consider who was awarded the most recent not-Nobel for Economics:

Why Nations Fail was shortlisted for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs business book of the year award 2012.

I read the book shortly after the publication since the authors spent quite some time analyzing China and contrasting with the US. I found they had very little original insights and merely recycled western stereotype caricature of China while their praise for the US somewhat unwarranted. I soon forgot the book.

If this is just another book that doesn’t age well, no one would have noticed, and I won’t be writing about it. After all, it’s par for the course for “social science” books to echo the ethos of the time when they were published. They are often dead wrong and people move on to the next shiny object.

However, 12 years after the publication of the book, the esteemed Nobel economics committee decided to award the authors the Nobel prize for this work.

So I re-read the book and did some research on what others thought about it when it first came out. I found my original impression of the book was validated and there were serious critiques, most presciently from Ron Unz of Unz Review. Let me dwell into this.

Robinson and Acemoglu analyzed the economic institutions and performance of numerous countries in the book. As the major economies of the world, China and the US were given special attention.

The authors used China and the US as the examples of what they characterized as “extractive” vs. “inclusive” systems.

They argued that China was destined to fail as it had an extractive economic system run by a venal, self serving elite. On the other hand, the US would win with its inclusive, democratic system run by rule of law, democratic check and balances, and broad citizen participation in decision making.

The Chinese system was described as closed from competition, incapable of innovation, and run by corrupt authoritarian leaders. Robinson and Acemoglu contended China’s economic performance to date (at the 2012 publication date), while impressive, was unsustainable and would falter.

They stated the US economic system thrived on creative destruction as the inclusive institutions encourage competition, reward innovation, and provide opportunities for new entrants into the market. The authors argued that the U.S.’s success was not due to geography, culture, or natural resources, but rather its inclusive institutions and an elite that work to advance the interests of the population.

13 years after the publication of the book, you have to wonder what planet Robinson and Acemoglu lived on when they wrote the book and what kind of ideological blindness has led the Nobel economics committee to award the prestigious prize to them.

Ironically, the only reason nations fail that is actually related to economics is if they are dumb enough to buy into free trade, and worse, open immigration. Women’s right and educating women are much more serious problems, as the collapsing birth rates everywhere from Japan and South Korea to Germany and Italy suffice to demonstrate.

But the thesis presented by Messrs. Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson, and Simon Johnson is so obviously irrelevant, especially in light of the fact that they couldn’t even correctly identify which nations are presently crippled by an “extractive system, run by a self-serving ruling elite”.

Then again, the fact that Paul Krugman, of all people, was awarded one of these prizes is sufficient to prove its worthlessness. That’s just embarrassing. If these awards were legitimate, Ian Fletcher, Steve Keen, and your favorite dark lord would have all won at least one.

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