Post tariff world

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MikeG said:
When I started working full time at age 17 it was in a factory that made water fountains. Shit wages and poor working conditions. What i did get out of it was a sense of redponsibility, knowing that I had to get up every morning and go to work so I could actually pay for that shiney black Honda CB160. stayed long enough to know I could do better and set about doing it. Until and unless a person learns that, about the only path to success is blind luck, crime, or election to public office. Or just be a drug addict.
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You've omitted a CRITICAL comma after the word "that", where I've highlighted it in green!!!!
 
I once bought a Chinese made vise grip. I applied it to a sticky (not frozen) nut. The vise grip broke and a piece of metal missed my face by less than a foot. Since then I have always looked for US or German made tools - used. Estate sales are an excellent source of well made inexpensive tools.
 
@Madnorton & @ZFD
Thanks for chiming in with your clarification. Sounds like a real headache, and what a drop in worldwide worker productivity over the last week. I know I spent the last three days making no money, trying to figure out just how to export high dollar goods to China to customers that have already paid me months ago, rather than making said high dollar goods. If it was instead to a country that suddenly is back to zero tariffs, oh man, I'd be righteously pissed off.

Honestly, the part of the newsletter that piqued the most interest for me was your new Domiracer. Please keep us in the loop on that!

Whew... Talk about can openers...
 
t ingermanson said:
@Madnorton & @ZFD
Thanks for chiming in with your clarification. Sounds like a real headache, and what a drop in worldwide worker productivity over the last week. I know I spent the last three days making no money, trying to figure out just how to export high dollar goods to China to customers that have already paid me months ago, rather than making said high dollar goods. If it was instead to a country that suddenly is back to zero tariffs, oh man, I'd be righteously pissed off.

Honestly, the part of the newsletter that piqued the most interest for me was your new Domiracer. Please keep us in the loop on that!

Whew... Talk about can openers...
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World class troll post.
 
After a business federation zoom call yesterday with many others including a member from the UK government trade department, it still stands like this, 10% on all items crossing from the UK into the USA unless exempt. Uncertainty around whether items will stay at 10% or go to 25% we should know more shortly.
 
Seems to me that whether one thinks he’s ‘caved’ or ‘won’ depends on your news media of choice…

Caved / reversed / climbed down due to the mounting pressure ?

Or

Got exactly what he wanted: world leaders desperate to negotiate on FAR more favourable terms than they otherwise would have ?

Looks like many (or most) world leaders have been forced to look in the mirror and realise how toothless they really are. Especially our pathetic specimen! Can’t help but think that was at least part of Trumps intent.

Either way, hopefully further escalation has been averted (apart from China… that one’s gonna be interesting)…
 
There was a big selloff in the US bond market, that's why Bessent and Lutnick went to Mar a laga to ask/tell Trump to do the U turn.
The bond sell off continued thru the day, so bonds didn't recover like stocks did.
This may be Chinese retaliation as they own about 800 billion of US treasuries. No one seems to know at this point.
The USD has been dropping a lot along with the bond selloff ( DXY)
According to the billionaire investor and Trump backer, Bill Ackman, Lutnicks company was heavily invested in bonds before all of the Tariff announcements started. Ackman was angry about this and called it a conflict of interest. One of his comments was " The more they collapse the economy the more money they are making!"
The bonds should have been a good place to be with the Tariff announcements and the following stock market crash. It was very good for them, for awhile.
A weird thing happened about three days ago. That was when both the bonds and stocks started falling together.
Hoisted by their own petard.
That's what caused the panic that Trump described as " people getting yippy"
 
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concours said:
World class troll post.
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You're welcome, but I'm not sure what you mean. It's real experience, not imagined. Not told to me by expert economists. It's a very large order out of my very small shop, half down the tubes, cut very short by the customer's unwillingness to pay retaliatory tariffs.

This isn't ideological political bullshit and if real, unideological experiences are ruffling your feathers, it might be time to give the partisan propaganda machine a rest, as hard as it might be to find something outside the echo chambers.

edit: Your implication that my sharing the relevant experience and concerns (that started this whole thread) is a troll is a bit unsettling to me. You and I have way more in common than we don't, and when you can't tell your friends from your enemies that's a sad reflection. The culture war that's turned us against each other is only as effective and pathetic as we let it be.
 
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t ingermanson said:
You're welcome, but I'm not sure what you mean. It's real experience, not imagined. Not told to me by expert economists. It's a very large order out of my very small shop, half down the tubes, cut very short by the customer's unwillingness to pay retaliatory tariffs.

This isn't ideological political bullshit and if real, unideological experiences are ruffling your feathers, it might be time to give the partisan propaganda machine a rest, as hard as it might be to find something outside the echo chambers.

edit: Your implication that my sharing the relevant experience and concerns (that started this whole thread) is a troll is a bit unsettling to me. You and I have way more in common than we don't, and when you can't tell your friends from your enemies that's a sad reflection. The culture war that's turned us against each other is only as effective and pathetic as we let it be.
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So you are now faced with the 85% retaliatory tariff, is that correct?
I can't imagine that anything works at 85%. Between the 145% US tariff on China and the 85% retaliatory Tariff, that trading will pretty much shut down.

Glen
 
worntorn said:
So you are now faced with the 85% retaliatory tariff, is that correct?
I can't imagine that anything works at 85%. Between the 145% US tariff on China and the 85% retaliatory Tariff, that trading will pretty much shut down.

Glen
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I honestly don't exactly know. The customer freaked out at the potential tripling of his already high bill, wanting to cancel completely. I convinced him to take what was already completed, and I'd send what I could via a couple large boxes USPS (the post), rather than the usual pallet, risking damage to the goods, in favor of making the grace period (reportedly today) before the new taxes kicked in. I had very little time to figure it all out, as I was sorting everything and driving an hour each way for the boxes that would just come in under the max dimension. Three separate trips to the post office later (everyone is clueless to the new reg's, and no private shipping company could act quickly enough), the boxes are (hopefully) on their way. What the actual payment was became less important than immediate action when faced with the possible consequences. I lost over half the value of that sale (9 months of work to date), and will try to re-coop by selling a very high dollar custom fabricated item to anyone who will purchase it.

It's early yet, but so far, I'm not a big fan of this policy. My Japanese customer (another $36k sale, 2/5ths complete) is starting to make noise. No ideology, real shit.

My intention in starting this thread was not bomb throwing, but to get some clarity, not just for what Andover is doing, but what I'm supposed to do. I'm a dummy metal fab guy trying to make sense of international trade policy to pay some bills.
 
worntorn said:
That is awful, no way to sugarcoat it.

Glen
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Honestly, it could be worse. It's a beautiful day. First day of shorts in the shop (while I work on my drawings, of course), starting a couple new projects for really nice people, the orchard is full of flowering trees, and the smell of orange blossoms and jasmine overwhelm the smell of coolant on the lathe. If only that insecure tom turkey would just shut up.

I'll survive. I have a phobia of debt and too much growth that sticks my neck out further than I can smell the orange blossoms.
 
nortonmargie said:
I once bought a Chinese made vise grip. I applied it to a sticky (not frozen) nut. The vise grip broke and a piece of metal missed my face by less than a foot. Since then I have always looked for US or German made tools - used. Estate sales are an excellent source of well made inexpensive tools.
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My neighbor cruised the estate sales at Leisure World (AKA 'Seziure World') senior community, and as a token of neighborly good will due to the ensuing traffic on Sat AM, gave me first dibs on Friday PM. Anything I picked he said "take it." I have tons of CraftsMAN stuff haha.

On tariffs, I remember watching the McLaughlin Group in the 80s/90s. To me, Pat Buchanan was the template for Trump. I can't think of an issue they differed on: trade, protectionism, or immigration. Pat had a sense of humor and made many good points.

Targeted tariffs were a tool of many fledgling manufacturing economies. Local rules were designed to keep the factories humming. In LA it's always been super cheap to grab a low-mile Japanese engine at San Pedro/Long Beach. Japan requires ever more intensive inspections on the cars ....umm, for safety, sure. After 5 years it's becomes financially abusive and they scrap the vehicles. At least that's how it used to be. I had a side business when I was a poor working stiff, putting myself through college doing engine swaps. I could get an immaculate Civic 1.5L long blocks, for example, for under $400. I remember taking the valve covers off, and they were like new.

I don't know how this will translate to American manufacturing. I heard an analyst saying that Apple has a thousand factories in China (?). The supply chain is 43 countries, per Wikipedia, anyway. As a hypothetical, pulling all that back to the USA would be an immense task, the iPhone will cost $4K (per the analyst) in today's money. It just seems impossible.
 
Fast Eddie said:
Seems to me that whether one thinks he’s ‘caved’ or ‘won’ depends on your news media of choice…

Caved / reversed / climbed down due to the mounting pressure ?

Or

Got exactly what he wanted: world leaders desperate to negotiate on FAR more favourable terms than they otherwise would have ?

Looks like many (or most) world leaders have been forced to look in the mirror and realise how toothless they really are. Especially our pathetic specimen! Can’t help but think that was at least part of Trumps intent.

Either way, hopefully further escalation has been averted (apart from China… that one’s gonna be interesting)…
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If this was planned then he is a bigger idiot then I thought (which is actually quite difficult)).. It’s a bloody expensive way of getting nations to negotiate- he could have simply given 90 days notice and achieved the same result. As it is, with his talk of all the world coming to kiss his arse and beg for a lower rate, he has really queered his pitch. China is not going to be in a hurry to meet him.
 
In a previous existence I worked with a US supplier in the mid west, which had originally started as a family engineering business and subsequently became the major employer in the area, and a leading global supplier in my industry.
After years of steady growth it got swallowed up by one of the big conglomerates with an east coast head office.
They then proceeded to outsource the machining, assembly and testing overseas, whilst replacing spec parts with cheaper non-conforming items.
The engineers at this organisation ( the ones who had escaped the resulting lay-offs) spent most of their time flying around the world fixing the resulting quality, manufacturing and testing issues.
There was no business case for reducing the cost of the product to the customer - it certainly didn't get any cheaper, so the motivation had to be pure greed at the expense of the US workforce.
A corporation run by those who know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

I can understand the motivation behind bringing the jobs back within the US, but based on what I'm reading it doesn't seem that it's achievable.
I note that most new Triumphs are made in Thailand...
 
BSAs made in India, a lot of Land Rovers are made in Eastern Europe (Slovakia or Slovenia?), small BMWs and KTMs in China.... Where desirable higher order / complex and high value products are made in the West, they incorporate lots of imported components. 'Western' labour is too expensive. If the jobs are brought back, labour will get even more expensive, as workers demand oustrips supply. Very inflationary, unless demand drops significantly (recession). And then, even if production were to be brought 'home', how do you stop the slide back to offshoring? Permanent tariffs?
 
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