Does making conflicting demands wring more concessions from an opponent? Or does the opponent just throw up its hands and walk away?
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When my wife does this I just sit down, drink a beer, and think it over. It doesn’t solve the problem but it sure helps.
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Um, is this a trick question? It seems fairly obvious that these goofballs are in disarray.
If there’s not gonna be a plan, I wish they’d make it more entertaining. I think someone should float the idea that these guys should battle it out bare-knuckle boxing style. Winner gets to set policy!
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That is the plan!
In the first term the president did things the traditional way and got sabotaged. Time to use a different approach since the traditional one didn’t work.
The Captain
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Trump is a spectacularly bad negotiator.
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Why would anyone believe Trump knows what he is doing? Just one way to fool yourself if you think he has a clue.
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How can you say that… ummm, wait:
Nobody ever suggested to sack Powell, right? At least not over the last 24 hours?
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I can only laugh at this. Did you intend it as irony? I hope so.
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Sorry to dash your hopes!
Do you recall the insanity quote by Albert Einstein? Doing the same thing and expecting different outcomes?
The Captain
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6 days ago headline wsj article linked
How Did Trump’s Team Get to a 245% Tariff Level for China? Is That New?
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That is exactly how I feel about people that put him back into office.
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Same here.
Mitch should have convicted him for trying to over throw the election.
Garland should have prosecuted him for the same.
Half the country put him back into office based on outright lies by Fox and AM talk radio.
We tried tariffs in his first term, it sparked an economic downturn, and we forgot that only because COVID followed soon after. So here we are, Tariffs Round 2.0. And surprised! The rest of the world is telling us to pound sand. And Trump is rolling it all back, with zero concessions from the rest of the world, most noticeably Canada and China.
Are we tired of winning yet?
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Exactly all this chaos and Trump blinks. The whole world backed him down and now the United States is the one who is isolated. What a weak, feckless, leader.
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It’s been 30+ days from Liberation Day. “90 deals in 90 days!”. We’ve had zero deals so far. And some people still can’t see him for the failure he is.
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Does anybody remember the concessions that Canada and Mexico gave us in exchange for lifting Trump’s 1.0 sanctions?
The answer is: Basically nothing. USMCA was basically just a scheduled update to NAFTA to make it TPP compliant, which had been in the works for years.
In exchange for lifting some tariffs, China “promised” to buy more stuff from us <wink, wink>.
So after striking out on tariffs the first time around, Trump is doing it again, only going bigger. Which brings up this quote:
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I have come to the conclusion that the US trade policy is based on what the last presidential advisor has been in to bend the president’s ear.
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Indeed. Apparently yesterday was a day when Navarro was out of the office and Bessent was there. Later in the week Bessent will have to take a meeting, and Navarro gets his turn to drive the Trade Ship…
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Except I was not thinking of tariffs. I was thinking of something more important to humans. Tariffs are just artifacts of commerce.
The Captain
USMCA increased the amount of in-zone content in cars from, iirc, 62% to 75%. There is an allocation for work to be done by labor making at least $16/hr, meaning US/Canadian: 40% on cars, 45% on trucks. There are three tiers of in-zone content requirement for different car sub-assemblies.
The TIG tariffs on Korean laundry washers motivated both LG and Samsung to each build a plant in the US.
Steve
Two sentences on how we got here.
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