Port of Los Angeles says shipping volume will plummet 35% next week

Some of the tariff increases are so high that they effectively spoil the cargo; there's no point in bringing it through customs at those prices, and it typically won't make sense to ship it back, and it may not be possible to ship it elsewhere from the port either, so it is most likely to be destroyed at the port. Delaying to see if tariffs go down may be worthwhile for enough of the cargo that it makes sense to slow the whole boat.

Additionally, if demand for shipping is up, going faster allows for more supply, and if demand has slowed, going slower reduces supply.

Something that has become apparent to me is that in our years of somewhat peaceful economic growth, we seem to have forgotten that there are haves and have-nots and that the economic system that was created to hopefully replace war with peaceful competition only works so much as the large powers decide that it works well enough. Those who are have-nots tend to not have the proportional military leverage to do something about their position.

Our rejection of colonialism, mercantilism, and imperialism in favor of a "rules based international order" has blinded us a bit through abstraction and legalese to the reality of how the world works and the limits of resource availability given the size of the planet and the population numbers.

> As such it should be the priority of all democracies to extinguish authoritarians whenever possible.

I used to think this as well, but I recently re-read George Washington's 1796 Farewell Address [1] and it aided me in coming to the conclusion that such a moral crusade is neither wise, nor moral, and least of all practical.

There will always be some nations that have governments, authoritarian in our eyes or otherwise, that we disagree with from a political perspective. But we simply do not have the time, resources, or motivation to do something about all of them, and even as we try to do something about one or more of them we wind up with others popping up. Instead we should seek to treat fairly where possible, and treat not at all where necessary due to immoral behavior and stop trying to control the entire world. That doesn't mean we should never intervene or do anything, as in the case of Nazi Germany or perhaps other atrocities, but a national policy of extinguishing authoritarians seems to me to be one that isn't in our best interest.

[1] https://www.georgewashington.org/farewell-address.jsp

However, the parent poster paints a different picture. If people in Moscow were economically threatened by reduced trade caused by an invasion, the elite appetite for such a move would be reduced.

One of the lessons from the prelude to WWII is to be careful about trade imbalances, as they can breed instability and radicalism. During the 1920s the US enjoyed huge trade surpluses with Europe, which caused all manner of monetary and labor dislocation in Europe. Worse, the US wasn't content with this surplus, so similar to modern China they erected additional barriers to imports to try to have their cake and eat it, too. These effects were amplified by the gold standard, which accelerated deflation and unemployment in Europe, and accelerated (stock market) inflation in the US. And of course all these ill effects were amplified again for Germany.

Toward the end of the 1920s and during the 1930s, the whole system was disassembled as every country, understandably, retreated to lick its wounds. Economic interdependence is critical to maintaining global security, but that interdependence itself isn't self-sustaining. It can fall apart if dislocations aren't managed well across the system. For example, the lessons from the 1990s and early 2000s is, "just go back to college or trade school" is an absolutely horrible approach to dealing with labor dislocation. Significant changes in labor structure need to happen inter-generationally, not intra-generationally.

There’s a whole generation of neoliberals learning Littlefinger’s lesson these days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifaRhL95HUM - it’s a shame the rest of us are stuck on this ride with them.

This is what I mean when I say the oligarchs have the tiger by the tail - from the time of the Moral Majority through the evangelicals of Bush's era through the Tea Party through MAGA, the business wing of the republican party has been cultivating the populist wing as an electoral strategy. They've managed to muddy the water with enough "government bad, immigrant criminals, trans athletes" rhetoric that what you've got now is a party and a movement that can _feel_ that there's something wrong - stagnant wages, inaccessible health care, deaths of despair, and Jeff Bezos - but the right wing message machine still has enough of a hand on the wheel that they can't actually get their way to things like labor rights and social security and all the other stuff we came up with last time this kind of thing happened.

Then you get Donald Trump, who well and truly does not give a shit about anything at all, and so he's absolutely fine to grab the wheel here and yank it hard into populism land, and now the oligarchs have a problem, because they've got a mafia boss at the head of an angry mob, and no part of that has any coherent ideology except Trump's crystal clear vision of people paying him a lot of money and treating him like a king, and now you've got tantrum as policy and no actual adults left in the room.

So, yes, America First and the MAGA movement are, depending on the day and time, anti-oligarch, but they're anti-oligarch like a dog is anti-car - there's not really a _plan_ there, just a lot of noise and motion and probably some teeth marks, but I don't really think it's gonna work out great for the dog either.

[0]: https://www.carscoops.com/2024/07/china-gives-its-automakers... [1]: https://www.imd.org/ibyimd/innovation/chinas-automotive-odys... [2]: https://harris-sliwoski.com/chinalawblog/china-joint-venture...

Long term, manufacturers will come back or be created to grab all those customers. But for the rest of the world, it's much harder for suppliers who lost a massive chunk of their customers to suddenly find new customers beyond what's already existing. Creating demand is notoriously harder than increasing supply. And it dosen't help that the majority of other major economies are also export-based, so unless if some are willing to run deficits (and they won't), there's literally nowhere else to go other than a global recession. Developing countries are far too poor and would essentially be turned into captive markets bereft of industrialization.

I don't agree with the implementation of Trump's policies, but this is going right back to Keynes' concerns about limitations of global trade balancing, it's a long time coming, and much of the blame does come back to the surplus economies that doubled down on manufacturing rather than transitioning to consumer based economies.

“Plenty” but still less overall than 10-20 years ago, 30, 40, 50 years ago. There’s a quite clear trend to zero here.

Because if they can't make thing you can win a war - just stop all their trade and then invade. When they are limited to stick and stone while you have guns war is easy to win.

Of course in reality the US and EU are not in danger of losing all manufacturing, and their military leaders are will aware of this and so put extra effort into keeping some important manufacturing in the country. Politicians are generally (but not always!) aware of this and try to be friends with others who can make things you don't make locally.

Relocation of mfg - years long process won't help the shelves or the prices.

Retail margin - yeah... retail will balance price hikes to avoid hitting profits with not pricing too high to further reduce demand. This is just one of the reasons prices will go up. It will reduce the demand to less efficient and profitable levels, but won't increase the supply. Shelves will be sparsely filled with more expensive items.

US based engineering and design -- analogous to mfg. Not a near term solution.

Advertising -- it doesn't matter how much you tell people to go buy shit if they don't have money and/or the prices are too high.

Why are you still apologizing for Trump's absolutely incompetent policies?

There are enough people who buy 0 of X normally, but if they think there might be stockouts, will visit every store in their area and buy 100 of X so they can scalp them and make a buck off their neighbors.

Give it a few years. They'll say he did it.

"Why do you think Barack Obama wasn't in the Oval Office on 9/11?" "That, I don't know. Would like to get to the bottom of that." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPfRGJRMbN8

Surely you don’t mean to imply the media treated Biden less favorably than Trump?

As for toys, most kids don't play with a plastic toy for more than like, 3-10 hours of its existence and then it rots on a shelf or in a drawer until is eventually ends up in a landfill. I'm not going to miss that. I'm sure that someone will point out important things that china makes dirt cheap and I'm sure they'll be right. I personally don't care if clothing options are limited or plastic toys are scarce. The US will not implode.

It really seems like china has more to lose than we do, but because they're a communist country they can just deploy troops to quell uprisings. Tiananmen Square comes to mind. So we play this game of chicken and the media screams that they sky is falling.

Of course the Walmarts and Amazons of the world care, most of what they sell is plastic shit and clothes. I have little sympathy for them.

That is just one of the many, often conflicting, goals cited by the administration, and doesn’t make sense on its face: the reason we have a trade deficit with most countries has nothing to do with them tariffing our goods or taking other protectionist measures.

If that is the goal, then it’s a terrible way of doing it. And also inflationary.

So I suspect 40% figure is how many items in a typical household are from China.

Edit: in case that's not clear, here's an example:

I have one item from the USA that costs $80. I have four items from China that cost $5 each.

My imports from China are 20% of my spending. My imports from China are 80% of my goods.

In other words, the threat model people should be worrying about isn't "bare shelves due to no goods from China to stock them" but rather "bare shelves because the entities who make the goods to stock them are missing critical components". And that's much harder for someone to predict what impact it'll have.

I imagine that my daily life is very skewed away from direct impact from a Chinese embargo relative to other US citizens. And even still, I'm pretty sure it's going to be a problem.

For your specific example though, I'm not so sure. As a counterexample, I buy my eggs direct from a local farm, not in a store. Neither the ease of availability nor the price of the eggs I buy have changed one iota over the last several months. And yet I see local friends posting pictures of empty egg shelves here and there on Facebook. My takeaway has been that the average person has no idea they can buy goods outside of a grocery store.

So back to your point, I buy most of my tomatoes direct from local farmers. Unless people start buying from *them* it is fine.

HOWEVER, if those local farmers can't get parts for their farm equipment or something like that, I'm just as screwed.

The economic outlook in China isn’t great right now. The US and China are playing a game a chicken, not sure who blinks first.

But I was told the ports were empty and the shelves would be bare. That implies almost all of that 15% being shut down, doesn’t it?

> Second, the US is ~15% of China's exports and a lot of those exports will continue even with tariffs. Some by diversified supply chains (eg "laundering" Chinese made goods through Vietnam)

Sure. 15% of their economy either just disappears, gets dramatically more expensive (laundering goods cost money too) or they have to reduce the prices so they can sell their extra 15% of goods to the people that are already buying them.

Keep in mind that China is also only around 15% of US imports too so if 15% is negligible, it's negligible for the US too.

> or the Chinese goods are so low cost that the tariffs will be paid (eg a milk carton represents a small percentage of the cost of a carton of milk).

The tariffs are a percent. Just because the cost of a single item is low doesn't mean the cost of the tariffs paid by the company is going to be low. Low cost goods are profitable because they sell in bulk. It's going to hit their bottom line in the same way it hits everyone else. You've obviously not given much thought into that point.

> Third, the US will feel the inflationary effects. China will not.

China isn't immune to 15% of their economy disappearing. Selling of an extra 15% of the goods in your warehouse at discounted rates while you scale down your factory production 15% is bad.

> Fourth, if China needs to raise funds they can and will sell US treasuries, spiking yields, hitting the ability of the US to issue further debt as well as borrowing costs for homeowners and businesses.

That's a good way to permanently remove 15% of their economy.

> Lastly, the rest of the world is on China's side. This whole tariff fiasco may be the largest self-own in American history. Additionally, it's undoing generations of American soft power globally.

That's not relevant at all. What's relevant is who the American people are on the side of. I'm not saying Trump has unanimous support or anything but he doesn't care at all what Switzerland thinks of tariffs on the Chinese.

Your #4 doomsday scenario is bad for the EU given the role that the US plays in their defense and as trade partners. WTO countries will be urging both sides to come to an agreement.

That's gotta be something historians will puzzle over for the next two hundred years. It's mind blowing that we did that.

Stepping a level lower even, how, on Earth, could our system possibly have produced Harris, Vance and Trump as the options? Then you step a level lower than that, and even the challengers were like, DeSantis and Haley?

It was corruption and ineptitude the entire way down. How could that have happened?

Yes, that was the point I tried to make. The story isn't the point; the choice of language Chinese state media uses is the point.

Can you even imagine the US government, under either party, boasting about eliminating tens of thousands of US longshoremen jobs?

> Even domestic PCB manufacturers prices and lead times have shot up due to demand.

Exactly this, I bet those PCB manufacturers are quite happy. Some of their employees might get the idea of setting up a new business, too.

Sure but you were being cynical and presented port workers not having having thing to unload as a major issue to worry about. In the whole scheme it seemed like not the first problem to solve.

I love it! If that's the case, then it's easily solved, just ship empty cardboard boxes back and forth to/from Hawaii. The workers can diligently load and unload them, and then load them right back. The truck drivers can do a few loops around Los Angeles even to keep up their training.

That that kind of happened during a phase of the Soviet Union's economic development. The economic success of a branch was measured by the amount of resources consumed and the allocated work done. So they had started building large couches and started running empty trains back and forth to consume wood or fuel and add up "miles driven" to their ledger. We can do the same /s