Trump's 'Liberation Day': US govt imposes tariffs to 'reset' global trade, 'MAGA', 'defeat' China - Will it work?

[Windmill knight]

This article fully grasps the crux of the issue. It is clearly written by somebody with a brain. At the end of the day, trade is why you can buy a sandwich for a few dollars, and don't have to grow and mill the ingredients yourself. To be anti-trade is to be anti-growth, economically and maybe spiritually.

Now compare and contrast with Steve Miran's recent rambling, published on no less than the Whitehouse website. It sums up perfectly the deranged, psychopathic, exceptionalist mindset, with almost every word being an exact inversion of the truth.

Basically the US carries out "public goods", preserving liberty and peace for all. Providing the world reserve currency is such a burden for poor USA. It is because of these other evil countries that the US population is taxed into oblivion and struggles to make a living. It's everyone else's fault that we have huge trade and fiscal deficits. China caused the 2008 housing crisis. All in all, the USA is but the well-meaning victim of all these other freeloading countries. But we can stop all this if all you share that burden with us and give us tribute.

Well said Carl. Indeed, everyone should read both articles to get a grasp of what's going on and what's not.

Miran's position is not just crazy and entitled, it's also wishful thinking in that it wants to have everything both ways. The idea is to fix the US trade imbalance, because it consumes much more than it sells. Partly, that's because the US dollar as the global reserve currency is strong, and a strong currency makes it harder to export (if your currency is cheap, you produce cheap at home and can sell at more competitive prices abroad). But Miran wants the US dollar to continue as the global currency - therefore strong - while simultaneously producing and exporting more.

Somehow all other countries that sell stuff to the US are to blame. As Jeffrey Sachs put it, that's like going on a shopping spree with your credit card and then blaming the shop owners for selling you all that stuff. Also, there's no mention of the massive advantage of the US dollar as reserve currency. Basically you can print as many dollars as you want and pay for stuff anywhere, safe in the knowledge that your money will be accepted and it won't devalue. And that's a burden?

More wishful thinking: If we just impose tariffs, the industries will run back to the US and we'll be producers again. Well, the thing with the economy is that it's complicated. If you push something on one side, it will have consequences on the other side, which may be quite the opposite to what you expected. In the case of the tariffs, Trump is playing an aggressive ('negotiating' perhaps) strategy. As someone else mentioned on this thread, if you are a company owner, will you take the time, money and effort to move your manufacturing plants from other countries into the US when you are not sure what Trump is going to do from one day to the next? Investors like certainty.

Sachs mentions that the industries being abroad means that the US workforce moved internally into service industries rather than manufacturing. In a sense, it 'outsourced' the jobs that were not so well paid. So do you really want to bring those back and have American workers being paid for manufacturing rather than better paid service jobs?

Other possible effects of increasing tariffs: Foreign products will be more expensive in the US. Local producers will therefore increase their products too, creating inflation. If less foreign products come in, then local producers sell more locally, therefore there will be less stuff to export, therefore the US trade imbalance will not be fixed.

And so on. I don't claim to understand the whole banana, but it's clear to me that the global economy is a complex system where one move can have many side effects. Therefore, a deep understanding of the situation and paying attention to details and nuances is important. At the moment, Trump and his advisers seem to be playing a sort of hard and fast 'cowboy poker', which can easily result in the global jenga collapsing.

Now you could argue that Trump was simply doing the 'art of the deal' to force the entire globe into a negotiation stance favorable to the US. Perhaps in part, but I also believe that Trump does think that tariffs can more or less magically bring jobs back home (apparently he's been saying that for decades). I also think that he back-tracked with the 90 days pause for all countries (except China) because he realized it was resulting in too much pressure on many fronts. Investors close to him told him so, he saw US and global markets collapse, so he declared he was pausing because "people were getting nervous". It's funny, Trump is complaining to investors and markets that they chickened out and didn't want to go all cowboy like him. In any case, I don't think he planned to do that from the start, because otherwise he would have lifted tariffs according to each negotiating case, not all at once.

So now he changed strategies. At least from a strictly strategic point of view, it makes more sense to tackle one 'enemy' at a time (i.e. China) rather than the whole globe. And I'm not saying that's a good idea.

 

[BHelmet]

Truth

I support what Trump wants to do, but I can't support misguided policies that move America further from his goal. Those who also support the president, but who refuse to criticize him when he's wrong, or make excuses for his mistakes, are doing Trump and the nation a disservice.

— Peter Schiff (@PeterSchiff) April 10, 2025

Translation: I can’t support policies that cause my stock portfolio to get crushed.

 

[Puma]

Translation: I can’t support policies that cause my stock portfolio to get crushed.

In my case, a mere mortal without a penny in the stock market: "I cannot support policies that crush my job and the present and future well-being of my family."

 

[BHelmet]

Business as usual: the markets started to rebound before the pause announcement. IOW, the news was leaked and key players liquidated their shorts and/or bought massive longs. It was both a rescue operation and It was an insider rally…no integrity…there will be no SEC investigation…no diff than Pelosi’s trading. Todays reversal is more evidence of that: no follow through on the bounce up.

 

[SummerLite]

Sachs has always been on the liberal side on things, so you do have to take some of what he says knowing that. So his use of the standard Democratic rhetoric on class warfare is not surprising. But he is right about the tariffs, just as he is right about the U.S.'s mistakes regarding Russia and the Ukraine.

Since this interview with the judge was posted things have changed with the tariffs and they will continue to change. I don't buy the notion that Trump is stupid about tariffs far from it. I'm suspicious of the US "institutions of higher learning" partly due to the well known interview with Yuri Bezmenov. He saw how the Marxist doctrine took hold in US universities. Is Sachs to wise to be part of such indoctrination, maybe, I don't know. I do know this program to turn students against their country is real having been in that system myself. I have nothing against a common sense liberalism, I fall on that side of the character spectrum myself. Sachs says a lot of insightful things then throws some zingers in the mix. There is an intense information war going on right now,. Much seems to be based on what a persons core beliefs about a subject are and so easily fall into black and white thinking which allows for easier manipulation it seems to me. The black and white checkerboard comes to mind.

It’s a great brainwashing process which goes very slow and is divided into four basic stages, the first one being demoralization. It takes from 15 to 20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years which is required to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy exposed to the ideology of your enemy. In other words, Marxism / Leninism ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least 3 generations of American students without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism, American patriotism.

“[The leftists] serve purpose only at the stage of destabilisation of a Nation. For example, your leftists in the United States – all these professors and all these beautiful civil rights defenders – they are instrumental in the process of the subversion only to destabilise the nation. When their job is completed, they are not needed anymore. They know too much … They think that they will come to power. That will never happen, of course.”

Yuri Bezmenov: The four stages of Marxist ideological subversion - The Expose

In an interview with G. Edward Griffin in 1984, former KGB informant and Soviet journalist Yuri Bezmenov discussed the four stages of “ideological subversion” created by radical Marxists to indoctrinate and weaken nations from within. Although he uses his personal experiences to describe...

expose-news.com

 

[John G]

Paul Craig Roberts says the U.S. has a house of cards economy propped up by having the global currency and debt. He thinks Trump should be pressuring U.S. companies into bringing back manufacturing. He likes tariffs instead of income tax but thinks that would be tough to get to. I think he has long thought that U.S. companies in China should be selling to Chinese and ideally Chinese would have plants in the U.S. selling to the U.S. A lot of engineering/programming jobs leave with the plants.

I was a manufacturing engineer and never worked again after age 40 after getting laid off due to circuit board manufacturing moving to China. Roberts has mentioned these associated jobs too. Rust belt incomes and population have gone way down since imports got big. We had a sarcastic saying where I worked of make charts not parts. You probably need to be more self sufficient manufacturing-wise than the U.S. is just for disaster recovery reasons even if services could keep incomes good and dollars from stockpiling overseas (the house of cards).

 

[WhiteMountain]

Since this interview with the judge was posted things have changed with the tariffs and they will continue to change. I don't buy the notion that Trump is stupid about tariffs far from it. I'm suspicious of the US "institutions of higher learning" partly due to the well known interview with Yuri Bezmenov. He saw how the Marxist doctrine took hold in US universities. Is Sachs to wise to be part of such indoctrination, maybe, I don't know. I do know this program to turn students against their country is real having been in that system myself. I have nothing against a common sense liberalism, I fall on that side of the character spectrum myself. Sachs says a lot of insightful things then throws some zingers in the mix. There is an intense information war going on right now,. Much seems to be based on what a persons core beliefs about a subject are and so easily fall into black and white thinking which allows for easier manipulation it seems to me. The black and white checkerboard comes to mind.

Yuri Bezmenov: The four stages of Marxist ideological subversion - The Expose

In an interview with G. Edward Griffin in 1984, former KGB informant and Soviet journalist Yuri Bezmenov discussed the four stages of “ideological subversion” created by radical Marxists to indoctrinate and weaken nations from within. Although he uses his personal experiences to describe...

expose-news.com

Labels are not so useful to me. Everyone is wrong on many things. People should be judged mostly based on what they are saying and the underlying logic, not their ideological camp. Sachs happens to be right with regard to the U.S.'s position towards Russia despite his leftist economic views. HE also happens to be right when he talks about how the tariffs were done recklessly and that Trump basically is lying his ass off when he said they were "reciprocal tariffs" as his own administration officials admitted it, and they had to as the facts did not support Trump's statements. If he goes on about his love of socialism, then i have issues with that.

Tariffs are not the problem so much as the manner in which he implemented them. I am for tarrifs when done in ways that make economic sense with these least disruptions for the people of the nation you are supposed to represent. This round of tariffs were all about Trump's ego and "tough man" persona, and I think most sane economists that lean left or right will agree with that statement.

 

[WhiteMountain]

Paul Craig Roberts says the U.S. has a house of cards economy propped up by having the global currency and debt. He thinks Trump should be pressuring U.S. companies into bringing back manufacturing. He likes tariffs instead of income tax but thinks that would be tough to get to. I think he has long thought that U.S. companies in China should be selling to Chinese and ideally Chinese would have plants in the U.S. selling to the U.S. A lot of engineering/programming jobs leave with the plants.

I was a manufacturing engineer and never worked again after age 40 after getting laid off due to circuit board manufacturing moving to China. Roberts has mentioned these associated jobs too. Rust belt incomes and population have gone way down since imports got big. We had a sarcastic saying where I worked of make charts not parts. You probably need to be more self sufficient manufacturing-wise than the U.S. is just for disaster recovery reasons even if services could keep incomes good and dollars from stockpiling overseas (the house of cards).

Just to put the notion of we can get rid of the income tax through tariffs to bed (as my mom keeps telling me), let me quote some math. Total income and payroll taxes in fiscal 2024 for the US were $4.065 trillion. Total US imports last year were 845 billion. So in order to directly offset the income tax the tariffs on EVERY DOLLAR OR FOREIGN TRADE would have to be 481%!!!! And obviously there would be a LOT LESS trade to tax if tariffs were that high. You CANNOT fund the US budget with tariffs while eliminating income taxes which represent 80% of total US tax revenue. And we are running almost a $3 trillion deficit on top of that according to those same reports.

So the whole narrative that they are putting out that tariffs will allow us to get rid of the income tax is just irresponsible by all the social media influencers who assume Trump is playing 4D chess all the time. The 7.8 trillion in total government spending needs to be completely slashed to get back to where we were before the curse of the income tax and money printing allowed government coffers to grow beyond their means.

 

[Serendipity]

---- Sorry this should have been posted in the thread "The stock markets are already crashing"

"Show me the charts and I'll tell you the news"

"All economic movements, by their very nature, are motivated by crowd psychology."

- Bernard Baruch

Guys it's not the news that is causing the markets movements, it's the charts (which are led by crowd psychology, by the emotions of the investors).
News are only triggers (at most), and likely not even that, but simply a timed narrative purposely placed to explain the movement of the charts (that was already about to happen/'scheduled' to happen, due to crowd psychology/the state of the charts themselves).

Trump's tariffs announcement didn't cause the markets to drop. There is no such thing as news controlling the charts. Really there is not and it is a completely wrong concept and wrong way to look at the markets, charts and (economy) news. Like I said above, it's the other way around.

That suggests that Trump's tariffs is purposely placed narrative to explain (or maybe even trigger) the current behavior of the charts (which would have gone down regardless) of the markets. To what additional purpose or purposes I don't know for sure. One is likely to cause fear and uncertainty based capitulation of the market sentiment (which is already happening or has already happened), and the capitulation of the sentiment towards markets is what causes (or at least adds to) the reversal of the chart movement.

That's one of the indicators in the charts (where things originate from) that the market's are about to reverse and start to move up and likely even in an epic fashion (based on the extreme fear and uncertainty based capitulation, worse even than during the bottom of the covid crash). And maybe, just maybe (based on a mosaic like picture of different information bits in my mind) this is all just a preparation, a smoke and mirrors show, for a big, global economy transformative event, that is scheduled for this exact time period right now ('April drop dead date' anyone?), and may about to happen in May.

(L) Anyway. I'm tired. I'm ready to be done. No more questions. Is there any message or any question we should have asked that we didn't ask to, which we could get an answer here at the end?

A: Yes, things may get dire as summer approaches. Just sit tight and hang on! Goodbye.

Has something big been planned for this May? Is a summer that's approaching a metaphorical one (including a summer of the markets)?

This is one of the good/informed chart analysts/traders on youtube (who understand how markets really work).

 

[axj]

Total income and payroll taxes in fiscal 2024 for the US were $4.065 trillion. Total US imports last year were 845 billion.

Total imports in 2024 were much higher, about $4 trillion. $800 billion is just the import of services.

Also, reducing the income tax (without even abolishing it) would go a long way to offset the increased costs for people in the US. Tariffs increase the domestic prices for many things in the short term.

 

[Breton]

...
Now compare and contrast with Steve Miran's recent rambling, published on no less than the Whitehouse website. It sums up perfectly the deranged, psychopathic, exceptionalist mindset, with almost every word being an exact inversion of the truth.
...
I haven't seen this article discussed in many places, but it is absolutely psychotic and definitely worth a read.

I agree.
It kind of blew Alexander Mercouris' mind too:

Alexander Mercouris: now I say all of this there's been an astonishing comment by a US official Mr Miran who has been talking about the kind of things that countries need to do in order to get themselves back in favor with the United States and you know this applies presumably to all of these Asian countries as well and it's all set out there on the White House website
...
so as I said confronted with this kind of rhetoric is it realistic to think that countries like India Vietnam Indonesia Malaysia other countries in East Asia are ultimately going to say to themselves well we should accept this. we should write checks to the Treasury we should tax our people and dismantle our manufacturing so that these the Americans can continue to rule over us in the way that they seem to feel that they're entitled to do.

I have to say that the crudity of this particular statement on the White House website is incredible and I think it was a serious error of whoever it was who authorized its publication on the White House website to do so.

It seems so provocative that it is almost bound to provoke a reaction. Now I said that the Mr Miran people who write - the people behind this statement on the White House website - basically that they're demanding the preservation of US hegemony and that they seem to imply that the reserve currency status of the dollar has not been a privilege but a burden and they seem to think that it's the job of other countries to lift that burden off America's shoulders...

From: "China Hits Back, Trump Wants Deal, Tariffs Explode; Russian Offensive Gains Speed, AfD Overtakes CDU"

 

[Serendipity]

A: Yes, things may get dire as summer approaches. Just sit tight and hang on! Goodbye.

Has something big been planned for this May? Is a summer that's approaching a metaphorical one (including a summer of the markets)?

And if summer approaches, it means we are in spring.
Spring or the coil is what market chart does while preparing to bounce/reverse by releasing the 'potential energy' (in this example fear and uncertainty) into 'kinetic energy' (price moving to the opposite direction.. which then causes the opposite emotions to fear and uncertainty, a.k.a. the positive emotions and is then also explained by a narrative/news events). And that can be considered as summer.

And what comes after summer?

 

[Carl]

---- Sorry this should have been posted in the thread "The stock markets are already crashing"

"Show me the charts and I'll tell you the news"

"All economic movements, by their very nature, are motivated by crowd psychology."

- Bernard Baruch

Guys it's not the news that is causing the markets movements, it's the charts (which are led by crowd psychology, by the emotions of the investors).
News are only triggers (at most), and likely not even that, but simply a timed narrative purposely placed to explain the movement of the charts (that was already about to happen/'scheduled' to happen, due to crowd psychology/the state of the charts themselves).

Trump's tariffs announcement didn't cause the markets to drop. There is no such thing as news controlling the charts. Really there is not and it is a completely wrong concept and wrong way to look at the markets, charts and (economy) news. Like I said above, it's the other way around.

That suggests that Trump's tariffs is purposely placed narrative to explain (or maybe even trigger) the current behavior of the charts (which would have gone down regardless) of the markets. To what additional purpose or purposes I don't know for sure. One is likely to cause fear and uncertainty based capitulation of the market sentiment (which is already happening or has already happened), and the capitulation of the sentiment towards markets is what causes (or at least adds to) the reversal of the chart movement.

That's one of the indicators in the charts (where things originate from) that the market's are about to reverse and start to move up and likely even in an epic fashion (based on the extreme fear and uncertainty based capitulation, worse even than during the bottom of the covid crash). And maybe, just maybe (based on a mosaic like picture of different information bits in my mind) this is all just a preparation, a smoke and mirrors show, for a big, global economy transformative event, that is scheduled for this exact time period right now ('April drop dead date' anyone?), and may about to happen in May.


Has something big been planned for this May? Is a summer that's approaching a metaphorical one (including a summer of the markets)?

This is one of the good/informed chart analysts/traders on youtube (who understand how markets really work).

You are right that the charts can reveal the truth and cut out the noise of the headlines. But charts are not magic. They show all this, including insider activity, because they show what people are doing, and markets are made up of people.

I would caution against adopting any deeply held beliefs on how things work, especially if you're less than 10 years studying it. So many people have a view that they know it all and that the market should do this, or should do that based on the tea leaves, and they all get ruined. Many times you truly believe in something, then later you see there's a bigger picture, like russian dolls always expanding.

It really would do all people well to let go of their emotions and biases in times like these. Don't get attached to one idea. Just calm down and let the universe show you what is going to happen, and don't try to force your own view onto reality.

 

[SummerLite]

Labels are not so useful to me. Everyone is wrong on many things. People should be judged mostly based on what they are saying and the underlying logic, not their ideological camp. Sachs happens to be right with regard to the U.S.'s position towards Russia despite his leftist economic views. HE also happens to be right when he talks about how the tariffs were done recklessly and that Trump basically is lying his ass off when he said they were "reciprocal tariffs" as his own administration officials admitted it, and they had to as the facts did not support Trump's statements. If he goes on about his love of socialism, then i have issues with that.

Tariffs are not the problem so much as the manner in which he implemented them. I am for tarrifs when done in ways that make economic sense with these least disruptions for the people of the nation you are supposed to represent. This round of tariffs were all about Trump's ego and "tough man" persona, and I think most sane economists that lean left or right will agree with that statement.

Okay, fine. What was actually the more important point for me in this post was bringing attention of how the communist doctrine has been brought into the US school system to control the youth and destroy the countries sovereignty and Yuri explained that well. I'm sure many already know this here and maybe some don't but its part of the bigger picture in understanding whats happening. The infiltration of the country is happening, has happened in many ways for a long time. My position is to kick out the rot and become a good neighbor to the entire world. Its a very convoluted situation with traitors hiding in every shadow. I want to see progress out of this dark hole. I say I stand with Trump because I stand with the millions who want integrity brought to the country and freed from these criminals.

Trump, the hyped up Bull in the China Shop with such bad manners.....but in spite of that will he, can he do what he was elected to do?

 

[Navigator]

It was not China but Japan.

As Trump kept the tariffs for China, It makes sense it was someone else who dumped the bonds. Which makes me thing if this whole ordeal wasn't exclusively targeted at China.