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Tariffs Work Better if You Have Leverage
If Trump had leverage, it’d be all over the news.
For a while now, I can’t remember when exactly it started, President Trump has been on a tear with tariffs. I think I suffer from trauma caused by Trump’s tariffs. He’s got this idea in his head that America has leverage over China and that tariffs will bring China to heel. Trump must think he’s competing with peasants.
America has had tariffs in place for as long as I can remember. I remember the 70s and the first wave of Japanese cars. Then the tariffs came. Oh, how the American carmakers enjoyed the tariffs. They raised prices and the CEOs sat on their asses. This didn’t work for very long and eventually, millions of Americans bought Honda, Datsun (Nissan), and Mazda cars.
The executives were fine. The rest of us suffered. In Trump’s crisis, the executives will be fine, the rest of us will suffer. Pictures of empty store shelves have appeared already in social media and we’re just getting started. The real impact of the Trump Tariffs haven’t actually hit us yet, and when they do, we’ll see it in our local shopping venues.
The stock market has been busy pricing the tariffs into their business models, but Trump keeps moving things around. He’s not thinking long term, and he seems very focused on getting China to come…
