chat

China makes stuff, the US does not make stuff. It seems pretty obvious who'll be hurt more by this tariff shit.

They should make us cede some important port cities by unequal treaty. Take LA and make it good instead of bad.

Lemme get my armchair. I think Trump's number one mistake was fucking with China. America can bully weaker nations like Canada or Greenland no problem. And if they want to do that, there's little the rest of the world is going to do about it, for various reasons. But China?

One has to assume there are people in positions of power who truly buy into the propaganda of American exceptionalism or, more likely, they´re either true believers or so closely tied to Trump that they can be nothing more than yes-men.

Either way. If China wanted to, they could fuck up America's shit hard. They could make 2008 look like a happy memory.

Now you're gonna say, "But China would suffer too." True but the U.S. is already a deeply divided nation. If Trump fucks with the money, even his supposed "allies" on the right will start putting a target on his back. Simply put, China can point to the U.S. as the enemy and use that to further unite its population. Meanwhile, outside of MAGA circles, no one's going to buy into the narrative in America that this is Chinas fault. And even among right-wingers, the smarter ones will see that Trump is fucking things up for everyone.

It’s almost funny Trump probably could annex Greenland without much trouble. But fucking with China? You don’t fuck with the money, Donnie.

If I’m baselessly speculating, I’d guess we’ll see some threats of that “90 day pause” being unpaused unless countries agree to cut off or limit trade with China.

I see the only way for Drumpf is a hot war. Make Taiwan a new Ukraine.

Wouldn't China just trade more with the rest of the world instead? Maybe they can gain more customers from those who have abandoned American products due to the tariff excitement.

I don't really know what's going on either. I'm pretty sure that the actions of the US are being driven by individual motivations (ego, for-profit domestic market manipulations, racism) rather than the cold-blooded rationality of international relations ghouls. I'm pretty sure the people setting policy in China know what they're doing. So I think the best way to understand the situation is to figure out what the Chinese government is thinking. They bothered to do a reciprocal tariff, why?

I think China is going to pull and Iran and just say screw trying to make a deal. They have a whole world to trade with and the Americans have no spending power, and their dollar will be more and more worth less.

The Democrats are fully on board the Red Scare train they've been doing it against Russia for a decade now. Jumping on the anti China bandwagon is easy for them. So I can see if China sees that even if they wait Cheeto out, the replacements are more than happy to continue the Red Scare treatment.

What will bring things back? American jealousy. China will be far ahead in energy efficiency and purchasing treat power per capita while America goes full "you'll own nothing as a service." Which itself will collapse because of rapid enshittification.

The rest of the world will trade with China and BRICS. America will fade as THE country to look up to.

I sure wish I was financially literate enough to understand how to protect myself from the accelerating collapse. I've squirreled away every dollar from my receptionist gig I could to try and buy a house of my own one day. It's still in cash because stocks always intimidated me. I have no idea if investing in SHCOMP would protect me since it's still traded in dollars. I'm also afraid it's going to end up with a unilateral decision by the federal government that US citizens aren't allowed to own Chinese shit and I'd end up losing everything. I'm halfway to just buying a bunch of fucking gold, and I always thought gold people were morons.

None of that matters. He’s speedrunning to multipolarity because in the case of a peaceful (relatively) unipolar world, a country in a better position to dominate global trade becomes the new pole rather than having everything break down.

Doing tariffs on everyone then only on China but to the max forces everyone else to pick sides which creates a multipolar world. If he didn’t do tariffs there would just be a shift to China as the pole slow enough that every player including the us would realign themselves to keep trade going.

It’s not good, but it’s whats happening.

The US will always have a trade deficit because the people there consume so much stuff.