Summary
Global leaders criticized Trump’s new tariffs, which range from 10% to 49%, warning of trade wars and economic fallout.
The UK and Italy urged negotiation, while Brazil passed a reciprocity bill. China and South Korea vowed countermeasures.
Australia and New Zealand rejected Trump’s logic, citing existing trade deals and low tariffs. Norfolk Island was baffled by a 29% duty despite having no exports.
Financial markets dropped, oil and bitcoin sank, and leaders warned of inflation. Analysts say Trump risks fracturing global trade with little to gain economically.
I hope the EU reacts with something non-tariffy. Like forbidding US online platforms to serve ads and collect personal data, with severe punishments if they still do.
Advertising should just be illegal.
It gives an unfair advantage to those who already have an unfair advantage.
I recommend installing an addon called AdNauseam to block ads in addition to sending data that you’ve clicked them.
Please everyone. Try to understand that being a useful idiot is the norm these days. It’s what’s cool.
Nice mention of AdNauseam, here is a link:
It’s based on uBlock Origin, so still state of the art in ad-blocking.
Someone needs to create plugins not to block data being sent, but to send inordinate amounts of trash data.
Make the whole system pointless.
I recently read an article that suggested the best retaliation would be to stop enforcing US intellectual property in the EU. One of the biggest exports they have is media, if we would stop enforcing their copyright it would cost them a lot of money.
You don’t even have to go that far. Just adopt sane copyright laws, like copyright only lasting the life of the artist.
Thats still too long imo. Patents are 20 years, so should every IP protection.
If it’s good enough for inventors, it’s good enough for musicians, writters and software developers.
Exactly. Especially when you figure in the longer scale up time with an invention. You can’t just flip a switch and start making money.
Yeah, but think about the grandchildren of the CEO who bought that IP from the artist‽
Do you want them to
starvehave to work for a living?Copyright and patent laws should just go away entirely.
The amount of resources we spend enforcing them, just so we can spend more resources on the products themselves, could all be spent improving the lives of people who need it.
Most great art doesn’t make much money anyways, barely more than a service job if you’re lucky. It’s the trashy-shit for low-standards morons that makes an egregious amount of money, like the marvel crap we keep seeing every year.
I’d be fine with less marvel-crap in the world. It’ll make what we do get more impactful, and we can dedicate more resources to fewer, higher-quality products.
That’s a great plan for letting those mega corps steal from the little guy EVEN more than they already do
Not really.
Corporations aren’t going to be making billions of dollars off of, say Photoshop, if copyright and patents laws didn’t exist.
Same goes for hollywood movies.
You’re peddling rhetoric that was put here by your oppressors so you will work against your own interests. Congratulations.
The entities with the established distribution networks will make the money, not the little guy who makes their own little story.
If I write a little seld published novel, under your system, Hollywood can just take that story and make a movie of it without my permission. How is that better? You think more people pirating will take down these mega corps? Your system is chaos that’s even worse than the current model.
They can do so currently by making a couple of minor changes and settling for a pittance because your lawsuit would bankrupt you.
“Chaos” is a better system than one benefitting corporations only.
Your dilemma essentially translates to “wahh, he stole my idea!”
You’re also missing the forest for the trees, again. How is hollywood going to make an egregious amount of money off of ‘your’ idea without copyright and patent laws? Without them, piracy isn’t piracy. It’s just a normal and legal way of sharing media.
Sad watching how hard you people go to bat for your oppressors, but it really puts into perspective why things are the way they are.
The average person just can’t see past their conditioning or how hard they’ve been indoctrinated to support a system that works against them. In the words of Mark Twain, “it’s easier to fool a man than to convince him he’d been fooled.”
Your mistake is thinking that Marvel is art.
Everything done with skill is art. From Citizen Kane to the design of a candy wrapper.
Sure, but that wording becomes detrimental when you only expect high-quality things because that’s what you associate with art, forgetting that there is also entertainment that doesn’t need to be high quality necessarily.
MY wording?
You were the one claiming marvel movies weren’t.
Would also save the EU an enormous amount in monitoring and enforcement
Official EU website hosting American-made media for a nominal fee. Can’t tariff data!
I think a lot of that kind of stuff is going to happen. I don’t think other countries are insulted, as much as they find it ridiculous, and to be ridiculed, I think they’re going to do some inventive chaos. I think we need to be building some world bingo cards, and I’ll bet we won’t guess all the (hopefully hilarious) petty revenges about to snowball.
Of that I am not convinced. This will work with a lot of smaller countries that don’t have much of a copyright portfolio, but not with Europe.
Yes that would be amazing and a great stimulant for EU companies to start developing a competing platform of it’s own (we have BeReal, Dailymotion, Medal and Dumpert, but they aren’t very big AFAIK)
Having Non-US platforms would be nice, yes, But leaving the US-based ones without ad revenue and a shit-ton of users would be nice, too.
Why not both?
or something ultra specific that is super easy to source from any other country, to exclusively hurt the american businesses
or something ultra specific that is super easy to source from any other country, to exclusively hurt the american businesses
That was part of what went into how Canada chose the targets of our first rounds of counter-tariffs.
Product categories that we also make here, or can easily get elsewhere or can comfortably do without for an extended period of time.
That combined with a consumer led boycott of anything "made in the USA " and even staunch Republicans like Mitch McConnell are starting to push back against Trump.
We can only hope.
ok, then…
i have a huge trade deficit with walmart.
i buy way more from them than they do from me ($1200-1500 a year vs $0); just like the u.s. buys more from many countries than those countries buy from the u.s.
like the leaky diaper’s new
tariffsimport tax, i should charge myself a ridiculously high extra tax on purchases from walmart until they buy $1200-1500 a year of some mythical product from me to even out the ‘unfair’ imbalance?yea. that’ll work.
I think Trump doesn’t want to trade at all. He wants us to produce everything we need.
Just like Mussolini.
and see how well that turned out?
I am really afraid that this is what America is coming to. The problem is that we have a third of the country that supports the Mango Mussolini.
We’ll have to see if that holds true after people watch their retirements get obliterated by a drastic drop in stock values across the board. Biden didn’t do enough to show the people that the economy was doing well, and recovering better than other countries around the world, under his watch. Trump won’t be able to pin this downward economic trend on Biden cause it happened too fast and multiple sources have cited the import tax, or fear of them, at the reason for the stock market tanking.
If owning the libs is so important that tRump voters will still vote for the ones actively hurting them, then those people are truly beyond help.
One can only dream. Joking there is no Resistenza in the USA.
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Well, artificially increasing the price of all the raw naturals we use to make those things will certainly help with that goal…
I’m actually pretty down with that that. We should be able and ready to produce whatever we need in case another country does what trump is doing or something happens that would prevent trade. If China attacks Taiwan, we should be able to produce our own chips. We should be able to function with as little dependence on other countries as possible.
In no way do tariffs fix that. You invest in yourself, slapping your friends because they’re better than you at something is really fucking stupid.
Meh, I think it’s fine and good for countries to specialize and be dependent on each other. Keeps the peace through mutually assured economic destruction. Global upticks in isolationism preceded the World Wars. Also, it just makes sense, because different countries have different resources, and their populations are differently skilled.
He’s hoping the foreign companies are going to open up shop in USA to avoid the tariffs.
Which they’re not going to do as that takes time and meanwhile he keeps moving the goalposts.
And they’ll just fill in the gaps with China, or other non USA alternatives.
Which they’re not going to do as that takes time and meanwhile he keeps moving the goalposts.
Sounds like you had better open a diaper factory in your house. Then you wouldn’t have to pay the tariff that you are charging yourself.
That’s actually a pretty good and understandable explanation of what’s going on.
the “logic” is pretty much as you described it. Only, after charging yourself with the extra tax on Walmart purchases, you obviously can’t afford Walmart any longer, so you learn to make your own soap with ash and the fats of animals that you have started breeding in your own flat.
Or your neighbour does all the work instead of you, so you decide to buy soap from them. They’re next door, while Walmart is across the county line, so you decide you won’t charge yourself the extra self-tax with your neighbour.
Walmart"s soap, which used to be $2, is now $3, while your neighbour’s soap is $2.50.
A week later your neighbour sees that demand for their soap is huge because everyone is self-taxing. So they raise their price to $2.95 to make extra profit.
In case you think this is just a contrived fiction, this is exactly what happened to many goods, like solar panels, with Trump’s first-term tarrifs. Americans paid over double the average world price for solar panels.
Worse still, Trump knows this happened, yet somehow this time will be completely different. <sigh>
So sad and so true. You made me giggle and frown at the same time. Have some 🥇.
Thank you! Neither the BBC nor the Flemish public tv seem to say this yet (they just repeat the statement Trump gave)
This is the only person I have seen say this so I can only guess no one is repeating it but it appears to be correct when I checked a few countries.
Its fucking insane to think Cambodia has a 97% tariff, and he thinks they are getting rich off of it.
Just unfathomably stupid.
Nope, not for every country. Russia is missing from the tariffs
Overview In January 2025, United States exported $34.9M and imported $196M from Russia, resulting in a negative trade balance of $161M.
and the price of bitcoin dropped 4.4%.
I cannot express how much I hate that this appears in a serious economic article.
You don’t like hearing about made up currency with no backing that’s primarily used for pump and dump schemes and money laundering?
Bitcoin is primarily used for pump and dump schemes? You mean like the middle step trade between scam crypto and real money?
But arent all fiat currencies made up since there’s no gold standard backing them.
No, they are backed by the economies of the issuing countries.
Gold standard is not viable in a modern economy.
If I can’t pay my taxes with it, it isn’t a real currency.
I pay my taxes with Euros so I guess Mericuhn Dollers are not a real currency
Depends. Do Mericuhns pay their taxes in Dollers?
By that logic you don’t think foreign currencies are real?
Sure they are, as long as foreign nationals pay their own taxes with them.
The price of speculative speculation dropped
I saw someone say it seems that the tariffs were calculated by dividing our trade deficit by their exports to us and cutting that number in half. Another person analyzed his charts and concluded they look a lot like they were generated by AI.
So, there is, literally no basis in logic. Either one of Trump’s minions calculated what it would take to recoup the difference in the trade deficit and just wrote it down and he announced that as the new basis for international trade, which has never, ever been done, for the reason that it is fucking idiotic, or he asked Gemini how to execute his already objectively stupid policy and wrote an Executive Order making it the law.
And the fact that we are forced to accept people on the Internet’s guesses about how he calculated these numbers may actually be worse than the fact that just about every product on the market more complex than a stapler just jumped about 30% in price.
AI would make a lot of sense, considering that there are uninhabited islands on the list.
They published their “methodology” today, and it’s as dumb as you’d imagine: https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations
I’m dumb but that just means that every product will be 30% more expensive for Americans, right? And the 30% is just… Going to the state or something? So it’s just taxing your ppl?
Companies will raise prices to account for what they’re losing on the tariffs.
Effectively, yes. Tariffs are basically just a sales tax. It’s a little more complicated than that but the end result for consumers isn’t really any different.
So, the tariffs make things more expensive for US citizens?
Yes. Its like sales taxes are going up. Unless something is assembled in the US from parts produced in the US there is now a big increase in taxes that must be paid. Most things people buy in the US will now be taxed significantly and thus cost significantly more.
Heather Cox Richardson, historian of the republican (Lincoln) party said that in her daily newsletter. She cites all her sources.
So, now $1 per banana is now real, wow. A complete bunch on my country costs that… We are banana exporters we are the banana republic…
It’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost? $10?
“No basis in logic”
No shit, this whole administration has no basis in logic. Just look at Project 2025 and the progress they’ve made on it in a little over 2 months.
Woah, and biden waited until the very end of his term to do something as benign as removing Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Man, whoever is voting for establishment democrats in primaries is really just helping Republicans at this point.
Art of the deal, folks
This is unironically a great deal for him and his cronies and an awful deal for the working class.
I swear, it’s just distraction after distraction, obstacle after obstacle that keeps us from toppling the ruling class. Anytime we get anywhere close to doing something significant, it’s like the useful idiots come out in droves to make sure “NOPE NOPE NOPE, gotta keep history repeating itself!”
I wish I took my teachers and intelligent peers more seriously as a kid. I didn’t realize how lucky I was to be surrounded by such great, smart people. I took them for granted, and now that I’m out in the real world I see exactly how stupid the average idiot is.
It’s scary. Terrifying, even. There’s so many of them and they all use that as justification for why they’re right.
None of Trump’s policies have any basis in reality
I’ve been saying this for years - why does anyone listen to him? He has no credibility - his whole life bio shows this clear as day.
Americans are trained from birth to value ignorance as the greatest virtue. Donald Trump represents everything that American culture venerates.
Failing upward. Trump Steaks, Trump University, hell, he couldn’t make money running a CASINO: Trump Castle Hotel and Casino, bankrupt. Trump Plaza Casino, bankrupt. Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts, and Trump Entertainment Resorts… all bankrupt.
Now he can add the US economy to his trophy case of participation ribbons.
You know what’s fun? Cancelling stuff and citing the reason as ‘tariff-related inflation’. It’s too new and there is no response script yet, so customer service doesn’t really argue.
Norfolk Island was baffled by a 29% duty despite having no exports.
Ahahaha. For a day, I want to be inside his head and see the world through his eyes. It would be the most valuable insight for humanity… If only to learn exactly what not to do.
No thoughts. Only anger at being confused.
More then racism, Trump’s appeal is being a simple answer to a complex question. Which happens to mean racism when applied to race relations, but also harebrained economic policies or injecting bleach into yourself. This is the same man who used a sharpy to change the path of a hurricane on a map rather then admit he misspoke.
It would be like that scene in Braveheart, where the Prince is having servants walk in front of him holding a full length mirror, so he can constantly admire himself.
The point is to make China the new boot on the throat of the human race instead of the US
no. the US is still the boot
That’s why they installed a Russian asset as president and why he has been destroying the US’s global influence and economy for the last 3 months.
I hate the fact that you are correct.
Dead horse economics:
Wake up you lazy horse!
I don’t buy that Trump has anything to do with the logic behind this world-destabalizing shock and awe spectacle.
The conversation would be different if people stopped attributing authorship to him and acknowledged the massive decades-old machine using him as a mouthpiece.
But it sure makes people feel smart though. Gives them something to meme about while the people who planned this get the real dirt done. Maybe he’ll misspell a country name next… Do another ad for Leon’s dinkeys, Israeli beans or something. Stoopid Donald got poopy pance. lol.
The conversation would be different if people stopped attributing authorship to him
Is there a lemmy channel for those conversations?
So 100% on brand for Trump and America in general
Oh, do you guys think he might be a stupid maniac gosh
shocked_pika thanks for the honest lol
