We just received an email this afternoon for the additional tariff on our auto parts, potentially 79% total by May. The existing 25%, the March addition of 20%, and the possible 34% in May.
Trump Tariffs started today, Some Countries Caved in early morning.
by liam 95 Replies latest social current
-
-
DisgruntledFool
Dagney...without giving myself away, I have been in the auto parts business for 47 years. These tariffs are creating the worst price hikes I have seen in my lifetime. So far, the company I am affiliated with is only raising prices in the teens percentage wise to start but even then they will be devastating to the end user who can ill afford to pay for repairs on their automobiles in the current economic environment.
-
Balaamsass2
4/3 5:39 et wsj opinion.
- Review & OutlookFollow
Trump and His ‘Little Disturbance’ From Tariffs
The effective U.S. tariff rate is now higher than after Smoot-Hawley. "President Trump said there would be “a little disturbance” from his tariffs, but how does he define little? The stock market Thursday suffered its worst day since the government shut down the economy in March 2020. Not to worry, the White House says tariffs will eventually be worth the pain. Feeling better?"
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/donald-trump-tariffs-disturbance-markets-trade-243b36ef?st=qYgLW7&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
-
slimboyfat
Trump imposed a 10% tariff on the Heard and McDonald Islands inhabited only by penguins. 🐧 🐧 🐧 😮 😆
America you are being governed by a clown and all y’all pretending this insanity makes any sense are showing yourselves up big time. Power is slipping away in real time as countries round the world make other arrangements that don’t rely on the whims of a madman and his enablers.
-
hoser
Anna Nana
I was thinking the same thing about the stock markets when the current president went back and forth on tariffs the last few months.
He would put them on then the next day day them off
Anyone with prior Knowledge to the announcement could pocket millions from the stock market if they were positioned correctly.
-
no-zombie
I know that Slimbyfat beat me too it but ...
So the smartest businessman in America (who has already been bankrupt 4 times) is now tariffing penguins. Putin must be laughing his ass off, at you guys.
-
Dagney
I am looking at broker invoices just received from our NJ office. Containers that typically land at $3K-4K are now landing at $14K per container.
Trade agreements should be reviewed and renegotiated regularly, of course. The people feeling the hurt from all this chaos are the businesses scrambling and the consumers. I have a feeling the chaos will settle somewhere in between. But the method is so difficult for the average to small business. But who cares about them right!
I will be out of here very soon. I also have been in auto parts for decades...and it's been a good industry to be part of, very recession proof. We had Brazilian suppliers in last week that will pick up some of the manufacturing, less tariff and landing costs. So it goes.
-
Balaamsass2
Friday afternoon. What does the World think? Wallstreet Journal:
"2,200-Point Drop in Dow Ends Brutal Week for Stocks
Blue chips enter correction as Nasdaq, S&P plunge nearly 6%; more than $6 trillion erased from market in two days"
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-tariffs-trade-war-04-04-2025
"What Happened in Markets Today
Markets are in free fall. China retaliated against U.S. tariffs, escalating the biggest trade war in a century and sending global stocks to a second washout day in a row. The Nasdaq entered a bear market while sliding 5.8% at the close. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell about 2200 points, or 5.5%. The carnage was widespread, with fewer than two dozen S&P 500 stocks rising for the day. The marketwide toll from the two-day tariff rout surged past a record $6 trillion.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell warned of economic harm. He said the U.S. economy was likely to face a period of higher prices and weaker growth than seemed possible a few weeks ago because of larger-than-anticipated tariff hikes. His remarks carried an undercurrent of caution about how the Fed would be able to address any fallout because the central bank will want to ensure one-time price increases don’t lead to persistently higher inflation.
The economy is still strong. Investors drew little solace from an unexpectedly strong jobs report that showed the economy added 228,000 jobs last month, well above the 140,000 economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had expected.
Uncertainty is the only certainty for investors right now. Even as Trump left the door open to making deals, he vowed new tariffs on drugs and microchips. JPMorgan analysts on Thursday boosted their odds on a global recession to 60%. Trump remained unbowed, saying now is a "great time to get rich" and that "China played it wrong, they panicked."
Investors rushed into Treasurys. That pushed 10-year yields below 4%. Bonds in other big economies, like Japan, Germany and the U.K., also rallied. Bond yields fall as prices rise. The dollar, which fell sharply Thursday, rebounded somewhat but remains near its weakest levels of the year.
This analysis comes from the Journal's Heard on the Street team. Subscribe to their free daily afternoon newsletter here."
My 2 cents. You can't plan factory moves, expansions, or even create accurate spread-sheets with daily changes from a "leader" tweeting new policies every day.
-
Balaamsass2
:) Some background on the "carefully crafted" tariffs on remote islands;
"A Tariff Whodunit: How a Tiny French Archipelago Became Trump’s Top Target
Locals in some of the most remote parts of the globe are sifting through records to figure out how they landed on the list"
Out on the tiny islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, locals spent the past few days trying to get to the bottom of a perplexing mystery: Who sold so much stuff to a buyer or buyers in the U.S. that it got hit with a tariff of 50%, the most punitive of all of President Trump’s levies this week?
“We were stunned,” said Thierry Hamel, who works in the mayor’s office on one of the islands, which are French overseas territory perched a few miles off the coast of Canada.
The question of what triggered a trade war between this barren archipelago and the world’s biggest economy is consuming officials here. “We are 6,000 people and export nearly nothing to the U.S., except maybe some tuna,” Hamel said earlier this week, his shrug almost audible down the phone line.
U.S. trade data show the islands sold virtually nothing to the U.S. for the past 10 years, except in July 2024 when $3.4 million in goods was sent to America. In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s announcement Hamel was scratching his head over who had done this sudden chunk of business with America. “Someone sold an aircraft a few years back,” mused Hamel as he racked his brain, adding he thought it was sold to Colombia.
Before that the last time the island did serious business with the U.S., he said, was during prohibition in the 1920s when it became a waypoint for Canadian whisky being smuggled stateside.
The fact that the territory produces very little is a running joke in France. The day before the tariff announcement, French state TV ran an April Fools’ segment joking that the French were planning to source new heavy artillery weapons from the archipelago.
Some of the most remote parts of the world were swept up in Trump’s tariffs this week, sparking questions about how his administration concluded it was being cheated by places few even knew existed.
Those in the administration’s crosshairs include Nauru, one of the world’s smallest countries with a population of around 11,000. The tariffs also hit some places that aren’t technically countries, including the frozen Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard and La Reunion, a piece of France located in the Indian Ocean. Some targets are only inhabited by animals. Heard Island and McDonald Islands, a territory of Australia, are home to penguins and not much else.
Tariffs hit some places that aren’t technically countries, including the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. Photo: Angela Owens/WSJ“Poor old penguins,” Don Farrell, Australia’s trade minister, said in a television interview Friday. “Don’t know what they did to Mr. Trump.”
Economists have been trying to work it out, too.
It turns out the White House calculated the tariffs on some 200 countries in two main ways. For most, it set out a flat tariff of 10%.
For the others, it took the amount of a country’s trade imbalance with America, then divided it by the value of the goods the U.S. imports from that nation. It said that figure represented the tariff applied to American goods.
From there, the Trump administration roughly halved that figure to come up with a new levy of its own.
Heard Island is home to penguins and not much else. Photo: Inger Vandyke/Universal Images Group/Getty ImagesThe results have raised a few eyebrows. The Falkland Islands, a British overseas territory off the coast of Argentina, is petitioning the U.K. government to help it understand how it got hit with a 41% tariff. Teslyn Barkman, who looks after trade matters in the Falklands’ legislative assembly, said it couldn’t figure out the Trump administration’s math and said 90% of the country’s fish exports went to Europe, providing a large quantity of calamari eaten in Spain.
“We have one flight arriving here a week,” she said, adding she wasn’t sure what was sent stateside but assumed it wasn’t very much.
Local officials in Norfolk Island, a tiny external territory of Australia in the Pacific largely dependent on tourism, were similarly caught off guard. Initial information from the Trump administration suggested Norfolk Island would be hit by a 29% reciprocal tariff, higher than the 10% levied on the rest of Australia.
“We were astonished,” said George Plant, the island’s administrator, who didn’t think Norfolk Island would appear on a government list in faraway Washington.
The only island export he could recall was seeds for Kentia palms, a popular indoor plant, which he said had gone to Europe. He couldn’t think of anything the island sends to the U.S., nor figure out why people in the Trump administration thought Norfolk Island imposed such hefty trade barriers to justify a high reciprocal tariff.
“We don’t have tariffs, and we don’t have any non-tariff barriers that would affect any exports from the United States,” he said. “The only export we have is happy people.”
From what little data is available, the island has a substantial trade deficit. In 2022, it exported $1.96 million but imported $28.1 million, according to a report prepared for the local government, which cited figures from the Observatory of Economic Complexity. Exports to the U.S. were estimated at $271,000.
An official in Norfolk Island said he couldn’t think of anything it sends to the U.S. Photo: David Kirkland/Universal Images Group/Getty ImagesCraig Wilson, managing director at DeltaPearl Partners, which prepared the report, said he suspected the OEC figures are based on official U.S. data, which could be wrong. He said he doesn’t know of any actual exports from Norfolk Island to the U.S.
“If you stood at the bowls club on a Friday night and asked anyone if they knew of any exporters, they’d all say no,” Wilson said, referring to the island’s popular lawn bowling club.
Part of this conundrum can be explained by the fact that some of the goods that arrived in the U.S. appear to have been mislabeled as coming from the island, including a supply of leather for shoes.
Despite the initial shock, Emily Ryves, who makes cheese and skin care products at the Hilli Goat on Norfolk Island, said the tariffs wouldn’t impact her business because she doesn’t send products to the U.S.
“We’re just a tiny island on the other side of the world,” she said. “Nobody even really knows where we are.”
Back in St. Pierre and Miquelon, meanwhile, Hamel and the local team were beginning to get a sense of what might have happened.
Officials in St. Pierre and Miquelon parsed through the trade books to figure out what the islands sold to the U.S. Photo: Chantal Briand/AFP/Getty ImagesThough linked to France, the islands impose their own customs tariffs, including a 100% levy on American whiskey, though rarely is anything imported directly from the U.S.
After parsing through the trade books, officials thought they found the answer. Someone in 2024 had sold some $3 million of halibut and other seafood to the U.S., triggering Washington’s massive trade response.
“It was a truly exceptional sale,” said Hamel. “We rarely do business directly with America.”
As for the halibut monger, his or her identity remains a mystery."
https://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/tariffs-trump-trade-world-economy-markets-d7cf8c17?st=NjkHpK&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
-
Anony Mous
@Balaamsass before the election got underway I made a prediction here that the media would take the current (at that point) depression that the Biden gang for some reason never had labeled as a depression and blame it on Trump.
A little while ago, people were complaining (under Biden) that the P/E ratios of most stocks was incredibly high, NVIDIA at one point had a triple digits P/E ratio (meaning the stock was trading at more than twice the actual value of the company) which is an indication other options (debt, bonds, trade) was inherently untrustworthy. Biden and the Fed prevented a full correction temporarily by DURING the election (which had never been done before) lowering the rates on the Fed despite having massive inflation for months.
The market rushing to treasury is a good thing, at least for the US, it means people are buying USD investments rather than Chinese or European. The yields lower, because it is a market, demand is high, so the US doesn’t have to promise to pay back more than is being invested in the future which is good (that yield is currently mostly funded by even more debt).
As far as the tariffs themselves, there is a reason other countries have them. Whether it is protecting your own food supply or steel supply, a lot of those things are necessary in full blown war, as Ukraine and Europe recently found out. Yes, to those importing cheap supplies, they will no longer be able to undercut their competition with sub-par steel beams (https://fortune.com/asia/2025/04/02/bangkok-skyscraper-collapse-earthquake-substandard-steel/) and radioactive drywall (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_drywall) or lumber (https://nchh.org/2015/03/formaldehyde-and-wood-products/) or cars (https://youtu.be/CWwuHKrw8Cc?si=9hYtYrLX7U5zkz62) all of which many other countries, including the EU and US have historically permitted or even made exceptions for (eg. BYD in EU market are death traps that don’t have functional airbags).
As far as the “story” about the penguins - I’m sure we’re not trading with the penguins, so either this is a non-story, as we don’t trade ANYWAY with the penguins, so we’re just stunting with numbers (1M% tariffs on 0 is still 0). Or the MSM is ignoring the real problem - that penguins are trading millions of dollars annually - which would be convenient for someone to hide streams of money. So what is really going on, my bet is on the last things through the WEF and World Bank, all sorts of shenanigans have been going on that are ‘legalized’ by previous administrations. Same with the Falklands, they are supposedly trading 90% of their fish with the EU, yet millions of dollars in trade ends up being paid for by the US (and by that we mean the US taxpayer) through a mysterious fishmonger that nobody seems to know about… something ‘fishy’ is going on.
