Comment by cjrp
10 days ago
> This is Russia's and China's liberation day
With the tariffs in Asia (Vietnam: 46%, Thailand: 36%, Cambodia: 49%) it feels like a good opportunity for China to increase their trade/influence in the region as well.
10 days ago
> This is Russia's and China's liberation day
With the tariffs in Asia (Vietnam: 46%, Thailand: 36%, Cambodia: 49%) it feels like a good opportunity for China to increase their trade/influence in the region as well.
Sri Lankan here. They just slapped 44% on us (higher than on China). The country is just trying to recover from the economic crisis and the sovereign debt default of 2022, so we have very high import duties on certain items (e.g. vehicles) to discourage dollar outflow. Looks like the US just saw that as hostile and decided to strike back.
The numbers appear to be based on the trade deficit alone, not on any differences in import duties etc.
That is correct. It was empircally proven here: https://www.ft.com/content/c4f9c7f6-0753-4458-840e-bcde1b74a...
To quote Alex Scaggs of FT:
All countries tested against this theory are correct within 1-2 percent.
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You're right I think it's MAX(10%,(imports-exports)/imports) as a general tariff plus targeted reciprocal (in some cases, not all)
It does nothing with "hostile". For China, yes, but for most other countries tariff is simply ($USA-import - $USA-export)/$USA-import. That simply, numbers are check for many many countries. I'm sure, USA imports a lot of tea from Sri Lanka and some fruits and wood/furniture.
(Freshly made Sri Lankian tea is the best, IMHO! I mean, proper tea, not all these grasses, berries and synthetic aromas which are named "tea" in modern western world).
I would have assumed it was Sri Lankan textiles that were a major cause of the tariffs.
Any recommendations for tea brands/products?
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> They just slapped 44% on us (higher than on China).
Not true, China's is on top of its existing tariffs.
So 53% on China in total, because the previous rate was 20%
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(waves from across Lake Beira)
It's mind-boggling because the US has been trying very very hard to pull Sri Lanka away from China for a decade now
I would be surprised if the current US administration even knows where Sri Lanka is, let alone our pre-Trump foreign policy with them.
> it feels like a good opportunity for China to increase their trade/influence in the region as well
influence for sure. But trade? Vietnam/Thailand/Cambodia already have ~40% of their imports from China and 5% or so from the US, I don't think this tariff can realistically increase trade between China and SEA countries much.
What about the inverse though; Vietnam/Thailand/Cambodia increasing their exports to China?
China has been trying to build up domestic markets for the past several years. With the US imposing high tariffs on Chinese goods it stands to reason that they’re not in a position to import from Vietnam, etc. because there will be domestic overproduction.
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Could be, but China's imports from the US where not much (6% of their total) and cannot be easily substituted from SEA countries, as they were mostly importing a ton of agricultural stuff (soybeans, corn) plus fossils.
I understand 6% of china may be a much higher percentage of, say, Vietnam's export, but I just don't think Vietnam can produce that much more of that, quickly.
https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/explore/treemap?exporter=count...
Would it reduce the share of exports that US sells? If they decide to buy directly from China over the US given the higher price of everything in the US (keep in mind the raw components dont all appear out of nowhere).
I checked these numbers for Thailand: China: 24%, US: 6.73%
For Vietnam: China: 32.79%, US: 4.04%
I did too, from the Atlas of Economic Complexity (2023 data).
Cambodia's top 3 is China 42%, Thailand 20%, Vietnam 12%
Thailand's is China 28.7%, Japan 10.2%, US 6.3%
Vietnam's is China 40.8%, South Korea 15.9%, Japan 5%
https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/116/export-basket
https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/764/export-basket
https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/704/export-basket
Non-monetary tariffs: - Regulatory hurdles that prevent import (eg. CE requirements) - Currency manipulation (eg. RMB) - Domestic industrial subsidies (eg. export tax credits). ... you have a lot to learn about international trade.
The Chinese don't want to buy anything, except raw materials. Their idea of trade is to sell products to you, not buy anything from you.
The CCP maybe, but the Chinese people for sure want to buy products from other countries.
No, they used to, but less and less now, bc Chinese goods are getting better, plus economic is tighter in recent years.
For most things, they already produce better and cheaper products. And they can buy from obter countries, It is just in US that Trump tarifs are applied.
What about fashionable Brand stuff?
That will continue to exist but less popular than they use to, as local fashion brand is catching up fast.
And what’s wrong with that?
Did not turn out too well the last time they sold tea, silk and porcelain and accumulated the vast majority of the world silver reserves.
You don't want to buy anything? You don't need anything? The British had one thing the Chinese "needed".
Eventually, you are no longer producing goods domestically and they can raise prices or deny your ability to purchase.
Not to mention 29% tariffs on Norfolk Island. Who hasn’t exported anything to the U.S. in years.
And a 10% tariff on the Macdonald Islands, which has a population of zero (not including the penguins).
Perhaps Trump thought he was taxing a fast food competitor?
Fun fact: these are all internal territories of Australia. Why they get separate tariffs is weird.
According to the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/03/donald-trump...):
> Despite this, according to export data from the World Bank, the US imported US$1.4m (A$2.23m) of products from Heard Island and McDonald Islands in 2022, nearly all of which was “machinery and electrical” imports. It was not immediately clear what those goods were.
In the five years prior, imports from Heard Island and McDonald Islands ranged from US$15,000 (A$24,000) to US$325,000 (A$518,000) per year.
Maybe someone has accidentally uncovered some kind of tax evasion scheme here?
Bizarre, tax/tariff evasion or "Mistake" does seem like the most likely explanation - yet US$1.4m is too little to bother evading tax on really. I mean that could be a refit on a boat or something -- $1.4Mn is literally nothing.
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It could be a clerical error — intending to choose Haiti or Honduras, or maybe Hong Kong, and clicking or typing HM by mistake.
Or maybe OCR is used somewhere and has made the error.
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I saw a post on X which said it was "vibe tariffing" and I think the person was speculating that the tariffs were probably generated using an LLM and saying "make me a tariff chart with ALL the countries and each one about 25% but randomize them."
That's the only plausible explanation I can see. A human with any brains wouldn't put tariffs on islands only populated by penguins.
Doge should look into this inefficiency.
I think it's basically reciprocal adjusted for trade deficit, with a floor of 10%.
So obviously you'll end up with 10% on all sorts of places where you actually have a trade surplus and no tarrifs on your goods, or, yes, islands inhabited only by penguins.
But some of those places aren’t even countries. As already stated - weird.
It’s almost like it wasn’t well thought out.
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I'm not saying they make sense but according to the US Trade Representative this is the equation used to calculate the tariffs:
https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations
For many countries patter look like ($USA-import - $USA-export)/$USA-import.
> these are all internal territories of Australia. Why they get separate tariffs is weird.
Probably because they had separate entries in a "list of countries" which they picked as a base for their list? I don't really think there was more thought put into that, especially not for the countries who "only" got the "baseline" tariff of 10%. Interestingly though, Russia seems to have been completely left out, while Ukraine gets 10%.
, while Ukraine gets 10%.
The Orange Emperor has a huge hard on to make Ukraine suffer ever since it led to his first impeachment. Zelenski didn't kiss the ring so down they go.
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Then that list is wildly inaccurate. Norfolk Island hasn’t been an external territory of Australia for some time (about a decade) - it is literally part of the Australian Capital Territory and they vote in the electorate of Bean.
The Trump admin couldn’t arrange a pissup in a brewery.
I've seen a suggestion that they're using ccTLDs.
Which might explain why the British Indian Ocean Territory - population, one US military base - has such a high tariff. The BIOT, aka Diego Garcia, has the ccTLD .io.
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10% on British Indian Ocean Territories, whose sole inhabitants are US soldiers at the Diego Garcia base.
It's what you get if you let people which don't know what they are doing make decision about things they don't really understand without being open for consulting because they know better using only oversimplified statistics which often don't tell even half the story.
Or at lest it looks a lot like this, honestly from its patterns it looks a lot like the decision making done at a previous employee where someone who was expert in one field got a lot of decision power and decided they now know better in every field and dear anyone says otherwise.
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It's like they pulled a list "All Countries the US Trades With" off wikipedia and used that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa...
Same clowns who made blanket cuts to every Federal dept and then had to walk a bunch of them back. There's no nuance or forethought, or realization of the long term damage they're doing.
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Strictly speaking it also includes some British military and contract staff from other countries (cleaning, landscaping etc, whatever they need).
Where is this list posted by the US Government? These countries aren't in Annex I of the Executive Order.
It has British in the name of course. Gotta tariff those leeches. /s
Probably because the tariff table was put together by an ignorant acolyte. They are not serious people.
> Not to mention 29% tariffs on Norfolk Island. Who hasn’t exported anything to the U.S. in years.
Should have set that to 99% then eh?
Tax the 99% seems pretty accurate.
It's a tariff, it could be infinity percent
Well, you know, you can go even higher, you don't have to stop at 100% :) Infinity is the limit here ;D
Seems like a business opportunity to set up an import company on the Macdonald Islands and sell the goods to the poor folks in Norfolk Island.
If this made any sense to begin with, then not excluding any region at all would make sense. Why leave some area which would become a theoretical middleman in trade just for purpose of tariff evasion? At least they'd be covered from the simple workarounds.
They knew what they were doing. They created a meme, a dead cat.
Then you waste time discussing the unimportant, "funny" topic, while the big picture is ignored.
This is to stop the practice of shipping things to a place, making a small change, then re-exporting from there to avoid tariffs.
Is that commonly done on uninhabited islands? Wouldn’t the shipping cost offset any gains? Where do you even make these small changes if there’s nobody there? And what does the export paperwork look like?
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That doesn’t hold water if you’re talking about uninhabited Antarctica territories.