That was the entire point of hiking interest rates, to slow down the economy and stop inflation. Tariffs are universally acknowledged to cause inflation, and we would be in a recovery path if it weren't for the delays that tariffs are causing right now.

It is rather interesting to see the difference in standards of accountability for different presidents. Some are responsible for the economy even if its behavior is not sure to their actions. Others are not responsible for poor economic performance even when taking actions universally agreed to harm the economy.

Nearly 10% of the s&p 500 value is one company- nvidia. The mag 7 make up a significant portion. Prosperity isn’t distributed, it’s concentrated and the stock market is not even close to the only measure of the health of the American economy.

There are other options, it’s not that simple. They may foresee an economic slowdown (they certainly say they do at every opportunity), they feel they are currently overstaffed, the ETF and hedge fund managers who own most of their stock are pressuring them to save money because they don’t like what they’re reading in the tea leaves, etc.

S&P 500 or S&P 10, tho?

Market bubbles combined with parallel political bubbles are probably the real black swan event coming down the pike

> The hiring slowdown predates tariffs.

That's true, but it didn't predate the election of a man who has made his understanding of tariffs and economics crystal clear in the months and years leading up to January 2025.

I would say more about general uncertainty than volatility but similar thought. Disagree on the reason though, tariffs like we are experiencing have not been in our existence for a couple generations. And especially not in the modern connected global market.

I don’t believe most if not all of us have experienced such an immature and erratic administration. We are taxing trade partners, flip flopping on rules and nobody knows what to make of it.

You can't write a business plans/proposals and get loans/management approval on these kinds of tariffs.

Imagine trying to get a loan from a bank to make a USA manufacturing plant, pointing to the 150% Chinese tariff. A week later the tariff is 25%. Does your math still work? Probably not. Will that bank continue the loan? Nope. Will the bank even entertain a similar proposal from someone else right now? Nope.

If you want to grow USA manufacturing you need to subsidize it, or give private industry confidence it's not going to lose them money. If you can't do that, your relying on charity / non-profit / philanthropy... And I don't see many of those in manufacturing.

They didn't change monthly.

This is different -- the tariffs are being applied and changed chaotically, with no direction on actually serving the point of protecting native industry. The goal of the tariffs is to replace income tax, everything else is a smokescreen.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/22/trump-tariffs-replace-income...

I question the president’s cognitive state if he openly stated there would be some “pain” and then when the statistics show he was correct, he attacks the BLA director and claims the economy is booming.

The president and his defenders are playing us when they appear to want a growing economy. They don’t.

She had been doing crap job going back to Biden. I don't think she was fired for optics.

As claimed, light reading confirms this observation to be data not anecdata.

"NY's COVID unemployment fraud topped $11B, partly due to system failures..."

https://www.yahoo.com/news/nys-covid-unemployment-fraud-topp...

Should fraud rates in public taxpayer-funded systems stay constant or go down over time, assuming no new fraud type is invented?

Immigrants are more likely to be xenophobic as they move to a less xenophobic place.

There are and have been pockets in immigrant communities where e.g. older members would live their entire lives in US and never speak a word of English. But conversely, no one expected the rest of us to know Chinese, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Russian, ..., etc. But somehow now we are supposed to accept a sizeable subset of our nation to only speak Spanish.

> Assuming someone speaking another language is both a “recent arrival” and working illegally is… something. Apparently it’s not xenophobic, but it’s not a good look.

I do not care if it is not a "good look" by some standard. What I care about is cultural and value system continuity and national cohesion.

That seems to have changed in March 2025 via executive order, with English now being the official language of the US

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_Stat...

https://www.usa.gov/official-language-of-us

There are communities of non-English speaking people here in Montana. They speak a form of German. Hutterites (kind of like Amish).

If there’s demand for 5 million units and supply of 6 million prices will go down as 1 million units will be empty

If there’s demand for 5 million units and supply of 4 million, prices will go up and 1 million will move out of the city

I'm not ignoring it, but I’m not falling into a post hoc fallacy, either.

I'll put it this way: if I were ignoring it, I'd be ignoring one more data point than you are in cherry-picking a single example.

The agricultural section indicators are that there's about to be a big, expensive bailout for ag:

> “Right now, we have zero bushels of soybeans on the books with China for this fall harvest that has begun in the Deep South,” Ragland said. “Normally by this time, close to 40% of our sales for the marketing year are on the books. And with zero on the books right now, it is alarming for American soybean farmers.”

https://www.farmprogress.com/soybean/us-soybean-exports-to-c...

The first time that Trump screwed over with tariffs, they got tons of bailout money that we all paid for.

Not all sectors of the economy are so lucky. The big man at the top must be paid with either bribes or allegiance or both.

ICE raids are freeing up a lot of spots in the agri sector.

And again, even if you assume that all of that is true, you're still making a leap of logic that these changes are because of the tariffs.

No but it could shift consumer demand a bit to favor apples, for example, which largely come from domestic sources.

Not arguing one way or another, but your reduction isn’t quite accurate with the affects tariffs can have

Hawaii produces 6.3 million lbs per year of bananas which is a tiny fraction of the 8 million metric tons per year Ecuador produces. Labor and land cost is the primary reason Hawaii can't compete with Latin America, but long-standing tariffs could change that.

Isolationists would say we should be eating corn instead

China has been making soft power gains for a decade. They are everywhere in Africa. When I went to Macedonia five years ago, there was a giant screen in the main square explaining how their medical cooperation with China was such a boon for the country. China already is a diplomatic giant.

I think American are partially blinded by the crazy negative propaganda against China you see all the time in the US. They significantly underestimate where China stands and overestimate the impact American tariffs can have.

> I could easily see them filling the voids that US policy chaos is currently creating.

More than that, I think China would be mad not to step into the vacuum the US is creating with it's isolationist policies. For years US aid has been extremely influential around the world, doing a huge amount of good (e.g. USAID) and buying relatively cheap influence in many countries. Countries that were reliant on that aid are going to be understandably jaded by their experience with the US and looking for more reliable allies.

> The rhetoric around them is changing too, I think they are making significant soft power gains. I could easily see them filling the voids that US policy chaos is currently creating.

As long as they are cooperating with Russia at least European countries will have a hard time to accept China's advances.

China has a demographic time-bomb about to go off in the next decade or two. We'll see if they can survive it.

They were making soft-power gains before that maniac we elected showed up. Now our now former allies are leaning on their shoulder.

I'll add that the team leader doesn't expect to live long enough to see his team lose, and that's all that really matters to him.

When people see everything as an ego-based competition, they lose track entirely of the fact that trade is not zero-sum: both parties (or nations) benefit from increased trade.

It’s the zero-sum mindset of leadership that only ever learned to excel by cheating and stealing, not cooperating, building, or synergizing.

It might be an authoritarian one party state but China isn't a dictatorship right?

I never thought America was this fragile, or should i say the governmental mindset was, to just change things are essentially the backbone of what made America "America" in the first place. Changing policies that otherwise should not be changed is dangerous. When in doubt and there needs to be change then make the changes around the preexisting guidelines/settings, not change those first. Whether we like it or not enemies and competitive economies are reliant on our policies and , therefor vice versa. Changing big things first will make you the outcast, especially to our rich economy--relatively moderate population. Vs other economies of much larger population. There is fragile silver lining there to pay attention too IMO.

Reindustrializing America requires people that are actually willing to work in a factory.

i don't see any indication that either republicans or democrats intend to reindustrialize america

Tariffs are protectionist, does not boost competitiveness. Tends to be the wrong tool, there are better.

Tax breaks, grants, physical infrastructure, creation of entire markets - those are better tools.

The issue with tariffs is non-competetive companies aren't required to become more competitive.

I mean consider it, a tariff is a tax on those buying a specific competitors goods. Even if tariffs were done surgically, still it seams like a tax benefit is a better tool

China is the most capitalist country in the world.

We're on the same side of the argument here? Obviously that 3% is not going to go down to 0%, which means that the US has even less leverage against the Chinese than it looks.

Besides, I don't see how a $20 shirt becoming a $30 shirt is going to make a difference for American manufacturing. It's simply a sales tax (maybe even the greatest in the world). And on top of that you have all inputs for American manufactures getting more expensive.

As an example, I'm pretty sure I just took up some of the slack here in NZ. I've been looking at installing solar for a while, and a particularly good quote for a Chinese system (Sigen) recently made me go ahead. I strongly suspect the unusually good price and fast delivery were due to cancelled US demand.

OT: Solar is awesome! 18 panels are generating 2/3 of our load, despite it being late winter. And a 16kWh battery means the grid power we import is all off-peak. In summer we're going to be exporting enough that we may even cover our winter grid import. Plus it gives us the best UPS system we've ever had, including zero-second cut-over (c.f. Tesla's half-second glitch).

When demand is reduced, you lower prices. Rest of the world suddenly are buyers. Governments can throw subsidies at impacted sectors too to cover the price difference while supply chains adjust. With growing trade relations, economies of scale and transition costs become factors. The cost of trade with the new trade relationships become cheaper and so does the reluctance to change (for example with a 3 year production pipeline baked, you don't walk away easily).

It seems plausible to me that growing markets like India could fill that hole over time, yeah.

If the US buys less, there will be unsold inventory and a temporary glut in supply, which will lead to the Chinese dropping prices and exporting elsewhere. This is already happening in SE Asia:

https://www.chiangraitimes.com/china/china-export-dumping/

Obviously the profit margin will be less than selling to the US, but it does mean that the 3% of GDP mentioned above is not going away entirely, just shrinking to (say) 2 or 2.5%.

The article also mentions transshipment, where Chinese goods get routed to the US via a third country. Although Trump's strategy of "tariff everybody for all the things" is putting a damper on this too.

China exported something like 525 billion worth of goods last year to the US. Not all good can be replaced but let’s say something like 350 billion worth of goods are unmarketable because of the tariffs. Do you really think the whole world can’t swallow 350 billion of imports?

American real GDP per capita grew at 1.7% a year from 2015 to 2025 [2]

From 2004 to 2024, Chinese PPP GDP/c grew 7.4% a year [4].

What an incredibly dishonest comparison!

I'm from China. I know what real numbers and news come out of China.

Japan? South Korea? Taiwan? Singapore? Saudi and the Gulf States?

I have family from the Chinese countryside. It’s nowhere near as bad as it was even just a decade ago, but there’s still no comparison.

By making the imports needed for domestic production and infrastructure development more expensive through tariffs, before there are domestic alternatives available, and expelling large swathes of the labour force necessary for such construction, no he really isn’t.

It would be possible to develop domestic supply capacity, starting with the inputs necessary to feed that development, and then nurture and encourage the process with a targeted ramp up of tariffs. That’s not happening though, instead domestic investment is collapsing.

Because companies make more profits when the prices are higher.

Under normal conditions, if one company increases their price then buyers will find an alternative.

When all the companies increase the price at the same time then there are no alternatives. Customers become acclimated to the new price.

Doesn't insurance normally work by protecting rare instances whose cost is amortized over the base?

This would be a claim by a large amount of insurance clients at once

>but do you think you'll be able to ship to the US without restriction?

Whenever I import goods the HS codes are provided for each item, so it shouldn't be hard to collect the correct amount of money for tariffs.

To put it in perspective, China installed 277 GW of new solar capacity in 2024.

For coal, the "started construction" number there isn't the same metric as began operation. You want to look for "commissioned" and you get 30 GW. From https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/when-coal-wont-ste...

> Note: In 2024, 66.7 GW of new coal power capacity was permitted, a decline from previous years but still above the subdued pace seen earlier in the year. New and revived coal power proposals totaled 68.9 GW, down from 117 GW in 2023 and 146 GW in 2022, indicating a potential slowdown in project initiation. Meanwhile, construction started on 94.5 GW of new coal capacity — the highest since 2015 — suggesting continued momentum in project development. However, the pace of new coal plants entering operation has been more moderate, with 30.5 GW commissioned so far in 2024, down from 49.8 GW last year but in line with 2021 and 2022 levels.

China is well positioned to do solar + storage, but a lot of that coal is probably (a) for base load, (b) for steel production and (c) to keep the coal miners in business. From the same write up:

> In 2024, more than 75% of newly approved coal power capacity was backed by coal mining companies or energy groups with coal mining operations, artificially driving up coal demand even when market fundamentals do not justify it.

I give two figs about it, the guy should be arrested

No one cares about "fascism" or "communism"; these labels distract from the root of the problem: authoritarianism. Mind you, without excessive power and authority, neither hardcore fascists nor hardcore communists can do that much.

So NK workers own or control the means of production?

Makes it hard to believe the administration's claims of hundreds of billions in revenue

this isn't true, tariffs are assessed within the US by the receiving firm, not on the sender's side. We run a business with a foreign supply chain and our suppliers have changed nothing, we just get an extra bill to pay to the government when our inventory arrives.

Look on the bright side, it would have been much more harsh, had they worked in binary.

Could be worse, you could be stabbed.

I wouldn’t say archaic or historical definitions are improper, but you’re right - the primary meaning of decimate in English changed and now means to destroy the majority of. Maybe this is because decimate was always very damaging; threat of death is very serious, regardless of the numbers.

That said, I had sweet breads recently. And a cat being a deer sounds strange in English now, but deer is still the word for animal in other Germanic languages today, even if it faded in English, so it doesn’t sound completely archaic.

I split the hair where chickens were men

South America doesn't produce enough soy beans for them to replace America even if China bought every single ounce of soy.

When it comes to soy, America has enormous leverage and China already accepted they're negotiating from a position of weakness.

Seasonally adjusted and annualised.

Popular vote does not matter to americans, otherwise they would have changed the voting system.

36% of voters said: I support every outcome of the election, no matter what.

And we are now about half a year into his term and I see some complaining, but not one single person seriously opposing him and his politics. If the things he does were really that unpopular, he would not be able to do them. To me it seems like he has the full support of the american public.

I was gonna say something gross but decided against it.

I keep a list of every time I change one of my work passwords with the date it would have expired, and it seems to fluctuate between 2.5 and 3.5 months with little consistency. Some of us used to have it locked so we didn't need to keep changing it, but they reenabled it some time ago and we got confirmation it was for some sort of external security requirements.

PasswordAugust2025!

That was best practice until maybe 10 years ago. Point the people in charge of that to the NIST standards.

Ah thanks for that. I've been meaning to change my password for a while, looks like this is a strong choice then.

I think you're correct. They probably use it as the password "format" and haven't updated the post-it in order to trick anyone trying to steal the password! What could go wrong?

Everybody logs-in with the same username into the only app. It's a kiosk computer without a surviving vendor to support it.

Fair enough!

They are so ludicrously wealthy that even a very small increase in percentage points of tax ends up being a very large number, and no one likes to see a very large number of their “hard-earned” dollars get “taken away”. The marginal value of each dollar to them I don’t think is a calculation that is very accessible to our emotional human minds.

I do see your point, but it's highly unlikely that they are putting their wealth into a HISA for 30 years. There is likely 0 people who got to UHNW through saving money.

This is assuming they have to work for the $1M income. The point of having $30M is to make $1M income without doing anything.

Totally. I'm someone who could choose to enter the capital class via purchasing rental properties or investing heavily in stocks, but I deliberately do not.

Capital class wildly different than wealthier working class. But in all honesty, bring the taxes all the way down to me at least. Anyone making a million a year could be taxed a lot more and still live comfortably. The capital class above me could afford a LOT more taxation and still live lives of unbridled luxury.

> In the middle of the 1900s, the tax rate on the wealthiest Americans was 91%

You forgot to mention that only half of capital gains were subject to tax. So the highest marginal rate was 45.5%.

This statement is also supported by the fact that despite the relatively high taxes in NYC billionaires will jump through all loops necessary to effectively still live there just not on paper

It is, probably because it has a 39% tax rate on income over $180k, and no capital gains (stock sales are considered income and taxed at income tax rates).

It's pretty observable and part of the reason many microstates are extremely wealthy.

Also keep in mind the US is a winner here. The UK loses the most millionaires and it's had an observable impact on their economy.

You are thinking of “social mobility”, which is a term of art that doesn’t mean what people assume it means. It is essentially a zero-sum rank of your income compare to your neighbor. You can become poorer and still be “socially mobile” or much richer and not be “socially mobile”.

Social mobility has very little to do with increasing your economic welfare in any absolute sense. It strongly favors countries with highly compressed wages and doesn’t imply much about ease of increasing income since it is only weakly correlated with that.

Beware of rankings that rate perception.

Also most easily available statistics are from 2020. The US economy has been a massive winner post-Covid and has diverged a lot from some countries.

This website should be a good example. The typical Sr Software dev in the US would be in the top 1% to 0.1% of earners in European countries and Canada. The US has more millionaires than many entire European countries have citizens.

A top 10% earner in the US would be in the top 1% in Canada. An AVERAGE earner in the US is about top 10-15% in Canada.

Class mobility (or social mobility) indicates ability to go from lower to middle class, working class to generational wealth, etc... All income statistics show the US as having a particularly large amount of high income earners, self made millionaires (and billionaires), etc...

The average European is poorer than the average person from Mississippi, the US’ poorest state. It isn’t even comparable

> The globe can collaborate to make sure capital has nowhere to fly to

<meme>hahahaha no</meme>

There are countless places that are more than happy to accept capital with few questions asked. Including, funnily enough, the US itself.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/america-becomin...

> but still better than any of the alternatives.

Is it though?

For many of our current societies I would say that we have failed to distribute the available resources. And even more so if we look at how we have failed distributing resources between societies and countries.

> Capitalism is a morally reprehensible way to distribute resources

Agreed!

> Is there any documented case of a rich-popular municipality increasing taxes on the ultra wealthy and seeing the tax levy go down?

Sort of but AFAIK nothing similar to this. There is some evidence of this occurring in Europe, notably France, but it was structural pretty different. Connecticut, NY, and Jersey often trade a small amount of residents depending on taxes year to year, but none of those individuals are really leaving the NYC economy.

NYC is also pretty unique in the availability of certain high-income jobs and amenities catering to the ultra wealthy. Like high-tax California (and America generally), the extra income and benefits from living there outweigh the costs for many. Massachusetts implemented a millionaire tax and saw a net increase in ultra wealthy individuals.

NYC is already one of the most expensive places in the country. People either live there because it’s worth the cost, or it’s the best place for them to make more millions. There is little evidence to support a minor wealth tax would change that meaningfully.

That is one of those questions where if you're asking it, I do question how serous you are in seeking out answers. It is mathematically guaranteed that an optimal rate exists, the topic has been an ongoing research question for several centuries and it is hard to avoid if you spend time arguing economics. Wikipedia points out [0] that scholars dating back to Ibn Khaldun have been working on the topic of pinpointing an optimal tax rate for maximising income.

So while I admit to not providing you with a study in this comment [1], it is pretty obvious they have been done and I don't see what there is to challenge on the topic. Obviously there is an optimal tax rate for maximising revenue, this is an area where there has been a huge amount of research done and if a municipality pushes their rates beyond that point (which will happen with some regularity) it'll see its tax take go down. There isn't much to document, anywhere with taxing authority would be feeling out limits experimentally all the time.

> Sure some notable persons have changed their addresses, but overall, they are they hurting?

They moved states for tax reasons, so yes. Otherwise they wouldn't have moved. If notable people are starting to move then the system sounds like it is very close to the critical point.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve (not that it'd be total tax burden that needs is the limit, not just the slice imposed by one area).

[1] Wikipedia has a lot of sources though if you actually want to look it up.

"The workers only suffer if the owners deliberately act against their own interest" is "the workers will suffer" with more words tacked on the end.

I don't think the model is worthless. But there also going to be many real world scenarios where they aren't good enough.

It's like doing physics where you assume perfectly uniform spherical objects in a vacuum. It isn't worthless just because that isn't how the real world works, but depending on the circumstance it can also give you incorrect results, and sometimes even be way off.

This is satisfying similar to the ai response in Hyperion as (spoilers) the entire system collapses.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus

Its a long time known flaw in economics. Im sure there are better models but i still agree with GP, the scientific field of economics is still a joke on par with psychology.

How can they even price it if there is no model for (true instead of theoretical) risk?