Savvy countries will discover there’s a way to mitigate the harm incurred by Trump’s tariffs—and it’ll boost their own economies while making goods cheaper too.
There might be a valid argument somewhere in there that constantly changing the trade policy is worse than keeping a bad one in place? Not sure the trade-off there though. If you know you have a certain tariff in place long term, you can work around that and the tariff can actually do the things it is intended to do. If the tariff changes on a whim, you can’t and the country just becomes a more risky proposition to do business with.
Adopting and expanding terrible policy long term signals future intent.
Anecdote, one of the biggest doorlock companies (i don’t recall the name) started migrating inputs and trying to expand sales towards europe, and set up a factory to assemble doorlocks in Vietnam during the 2nd half of Biden’s presidency. The CEO saw Biden maintain the tariffs and correctly understood Trump’s trade policy was not an aberration, but a bipartisan consensus. Unstable signals might delay expansion as businesses wait to see, bipartisan hostile signals tell businesses their long term plans do not include the US.
There might be a valid argument somewhere in there that constantly changing the trade policy is worse than keeping a bad one in place? Not sure the trade-off there though. If you know you have a certain tariff in place long term, you can work around that and the tariff can actually do the things it is intended to do. If the tariff changes on a whim, you can’t and the country just becomes a more risky proposition to do business with.
Adopting and expanding terrible policy long term signals future intent.
Anecdote, one of the biggest doorlock companies (i don’t recall the name) started migrating inputs and trying to expand sales towards europe, and set up a factory to assemble doorlocks in Vietnam during the 2nd half of Biden’s presidency. The CEO saw Biden maintain the tariffs and correctly understood Trump’s trade policy was not an aberration, but a bipartisan consensus. Unstable signals might delay expansion as businesses wait to see, bipartisan hostile signals tell businesses their long term plans do not include the US.