Uhm, yes? You just said the same thing I just did, in more words.
The only way this works is if the profit is a stupidly high percentage of the original sale price, pre-tariff.
In your example, if Labor and Materials only cost $10, so the profit was $90, I could, in theory, drop my profit to $40, making the pre-tariff sale price $50. Adding 125% tariff adds $62.50 to the final cost, making it $112.50 to the end consumer. So both sides still lose out, but the buyer just not by as much.
But any realistic profit margin would be wiped out by this. There just isn’t enough wiggle room to both stay solvent, and keep the price anywhere close to the original, pre-tariff price.
I don’t think they’ve even said what’s happening with Canada and Mexico… You were left out of liberation day, so who knows if you’re in the 10% gang.
God what a shitshow.
So great leader has had his temper tantrum and showed the world what kind of a shit show he could do if he felt like it. Now he is showing who his real target is, China.
This shit isn’t over yet. It’s just the opening round of the next four years.
The whole situation is now so utterly confused and unstable that both White House officials and Trump himself issued contradictory statements today on the impact on Canada and Mexico. Tomorrow it will probably all be different again. The Orange Buffoon literally has no idea what he’s doing from one moment to the next.
Unless you’re Canada. In which case there is no 10%, but there is a 25% tariff on cars, or maybe there isn’t. And a tariff on the steel and aluminum the USA cannot do without.
At this point it is near certain that even US CBP personnel cannot be expected to flawlessly figure out what tariffs are being charged, and who can blame them?
So that was market manipulation and insider trading. Someone specifically posted MTG’s trade logs on reddit and she made an unusual investment in SPY right before the tariffs were announced that instantly gained massively and no doubt plenty of others in Trump’s inner circles did the same. This is the most brazen, open instance of insider trading the US market has ever seen - he threatened the economic world order as a pump and dump (or, I guess, a dump and pump). The world is not going to invest in US markets with blatant corruption like this, and without that foreign investment the US financial system is massively weakened.
News is now reporting Trump will consider exempting some US companies from the Tariffs. We are bearing witness to a speed run where the US becomes the most corruptible banana republic on the planet.
When asked how he would determine which companies might receive such an exemption, Trump responded, “Instinctively.”
“You almost can’t take a pencil to paper. It’s really more of an instinct than anything else,” Trump added. “Some companies, through no fault of their own, they happen to be in an industry that is more affected by these things than others. You have to be able to show a little flexibility, and I’m able to do that.”
Nonsense. He’ll have his minions, headed by Navarro, do all that scutwork. He’ll just slash his big manly signature on the deal paperwork when it’s finished.
From my read through the news of the day, it looked like with the way that bonds were headed, it looked likely that there’d be a sufficiently large recession that tax revenues would drop and - given all other craziness from the White House - the US government wouldn’t be viewed as solvent in the near future.
As such, it seems likely that Congress was - behind the scenes - starting the process towards cancelling the Presidential tariff power.
Been those two things, I think that Trump decided that he needed to back down.
I do think something like that was likely because Trump truly believes in his stupid ass tariffs ideas and has for decades. That’s why I bet he wasn’t going to give them up so easily. But I’m sure once he decided to turn everything around, he did tell all his cronies to buy 5 minutes before he made the announcement, which has to be the biggest case of market manipulation/insider trading in history.