Pelagic

Looks like Temu and Shein have already done this as well. Amazon has the analytics backend to see how displaying tariff data influences consumer habits, it will be interesting if the end result is that consumers like having this data or we'd rather just see a single price at checkout. Personally I think I'd be more likely to just not buy something if I saw I was paying $100+ in tariff fees on an order as it just feels like throwing money away.

For those of us without access to the levers of policy sometimes the best course is to just sit back and laugh at what a circus it can be sometimes. Bessent and Lutnick snuck into the Whitehouse and got Trump to send out a tweet on Truth social pausing the tariffs when they knew Navarro was down the hall in a meeting and wouldn't be able to pushback on their proposal. I guess the upside to the pause occurring this way is that it's unlikely anyone in the White House had time to load up on calls as a lot of people have speculated since the proposed pause seems to have been a surprise to all except Bessent and Lutnick. https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-tariff-pause-navarro-bessent-lutnick-b9e864fb?mod=hp_lead_pos4

It's strange Trump refused to sell Ukraine $50B worth of patriot missiles if making deals for America is his priority. His press conference made it sound like Ukraine was asking for offensive missiles, ATACMS or something similar to strike inside Russia, but then it turns out they want to buy more air defense capabilities with mostly EU funds. Hard to see the EU giving an inch on allowing Russian access to frozen funds when their plan to fund Ukraine's purchase of materiel from US stocks seems to have stalled. I think most would agree this is a fairly good plan, let the EU fund Ukraine as it can and if it doesn't have the capacity to provide weapons the US let's Ukraine purchase weapons from its stockpiles. The US gets paid back, the EU bears the brunt of the costs, and Ukraine receives the aid it needs. There's also this report by The Economist where Trump's admin apparently pressured a European ally to stop providing aid to Ukraine and they told him to pound sand. https://www.economist.com/europe/2025/04/15/trumps-ukraine-ceasefire-is-slipping-away

Ah that's just some of the videos I've seen on tiktok and twitter, who knows their veracity - it's just a viral trend that's popped up over the weekend with Chinese manufacturers talking to western audiences. One of the more popular videos, perhaps Hermes isn't in China at all and I was wrong to include them. He mentions LV, Coach, Gucci and Prada

I'd disagree, while the most recent videos by Chinese manufacturers are targeting luxury goods, it's clearly a response to higher tariffs. That luxury goods have higher margins and are more susceptible doesn't mean we won't see Chinese manufacturers keep trying the same approach (if it works) with other products as well, eroding margins of western firms across the board. Westerners buying directly isn't a new thing but tariffs have incentivized Chinese firms to try new things to stay in business and take a more proactive approach to reaching customers directly. TikTok in many ways is the perfect platform for this style of targeted advertising linking young English speaking Chinese manufacturers directly with young, and impressionable, western consumers. The latter also happen to be a subset of consumers who are less concerned with IP violations or the costs that go into developing products, they see a product they know that's identical to what's on the shelves for a fraction of the price and are given a way to buy it.

Anyone have thoughts on the all out blitz across social media that Chinese luxury goods manufacturers are on? It seems there's a potential future where Trump and Xi work things out and trade between the US and China normalizes and yet luxury brands like LVMH or Hermes suffer as customers realize they can buy the same products directly from the factory that they're made in in China for a lot less. Margins on luxury goods are juicy and thinking Chinese manufacturers that do 95% or more of the assembly of them would just roll over in a trade war seems shortsighted. They're going to fight just as hard to keep their factories running as anyone in the US is and if cutting out the western companies acting as middlemen between the factory and consumers is the way to do it, then that's the path they'll take.

As dumb as the tariffs roll out has been, there have been some fantastic memes from it. This video is one of the finest things AI has ever made.

Some excerpts in the X thread below of Gary Cohn's time at the Whitehouse during the first Trump admin. A lot of what we've seen over the last few weeks seems to be a continuation of what Trump wanted during his first term without the pushback from Cohn and others. If Cohn's account is accurate it seems unlikely we see the reversal the markets are looking for. Toned down in scope to focus solely on China - maybe.

The expression goes the other way, it's the pig that enjoys wrestling in the mud, and Trump is fully enjoying the moment - check out some of the clips of his NRCC speech last night. Agreed that 125% doesn't seem sustainable given how interwoven our economy is with theirs.

Something I still haven't come up with a good answer for, why did China hit back so quickly. Every other country was sort of content to wait and see, sure the EU and I guess Canada to an even lesser extent gave some token responses, but China came right out swinging. They had to know Trump was looking to make an example and a direct response would get an even harsher response back. They're certainly capable of crafting something like the EU did where they tariff targeted imports, so why get into the tit for tat tariff raise game they did and more importantly why get into it so quickly? They say never wrestle with a pig, but China dove right in and ended up covered in mud, while Trump seems to have thoroughly enjoyed himself over the last few days. Markets are euphoric on today's pause, rightfully so, but I think all of us would be saying wtf if liberation day's announcement was a blanket 10% rate on every country and a 125% rate on China. Better than what could have been, but today's pause only brings the average tariff rate down from 27% to 24% so not a ton of relief for domestic consumers.

And everyone was laughing at @Blake Hampton harping on Dimon's perspective when it ended up being the one thing that really mattered in affecting Trump's sentiment. Glad to see Bessent seems to have the reigns now.

Something to think about on this front. A key driver of Republican loyalty to Trump's policies has been Musk and the threat of unlimited funding to primary challengers. There's likely a lot more room to break ranks on tariffs since Musk has come out against them.

Started a position in SOBO. Leak in the Key Stone pipeline and oil/markets turning negative seems like a decent confluence of negative news. https://apnews.com/article/keystone-oil-pipeline-north-dakota-spill-36e86142566763a5464e1dd132eede56

It's interesting that the event that seems to have launched Musk into politics was Tesla being snubbed at Biden's EV summit. An unfathomable error on their part to not invite the leading EV manufacturer in the US, likely because of Biden's union ties. Now Navarro going after Tesla has enraged Musk as well.

One twitter user put a ton of effort into this map of the Russian electric grid, a target Ukraine has largely avoided striking as a lot of it is seen as dual use civilian-military. Even if you know nothing about the Russo-Ukraine War, I think it's one of the better uses of Google My Maps I've come across. https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1ChqgfwK4x7rwMyWnHzgb6erBxfujbwM&hl=en&ll=54.52511158894112%2C35.01631581445057&z=5

Chinese Embassy posting Reagan's anti-tariff speech which has gotten a lot of play of late. Likely just a savvy PR team on their part hoping to splinter off some Republicans, but imagine if Reagan were still alive to see it.

China caving on their reciprocal tariffs, especially by tomorrow, seems unlikely. Do they get negotiated down over the next couple months, probably. But them being the first out with reciprocal tariffs while every other country was trying to figure things out was a deliberate choice on their part.

Yeah that's fair I should have found a better clip sans quote. My point in sharing it was that he views their base as high school educated labor that is underemployed currently and that is ostensibly going to find employment maintaining the automated factories. Which sure, those jobs exist and often pay fairly well, data center maintenance positions are growing rapidly for instance. But nuking America's relations with other countries and driving up costs domestically to subsidize a jobs program for your base is shortsighted. If employing that segment is the goal there's lots of ways to go about it that don't cause as much harm to the rest of the economy. FDR created the TVA for instance, hell a lot of defense spending could be seen as a pseudo jobs program for the various districts that it exists in. Other options exist to solve the problem that don't distort life for everyone else.

American labor gravitating toward its highest and best use. You get a real sense of who Lutnick sees as their base in this.

A massive gift indeed, disagree on the Taiwan invasion aspect though. The US has basically forfeited the soft-power game in SE Asia. Countries that it has spent decades creating trade relationships with in order to splinter them away from China got hit just as hard or harder than China. Sure maybe some work out a deal like Vietnam is trying to do, but they were all just shown how ephemeral their alignment with the US really is. China could announce tomorrow it's own version of the TPP and probably have quite a few takers. From China's perspective there's little sense engaging in a costly war for Taiwan where there's a chance you might lose or worse get tied up in a counterinsurgency operation for years. Instead China can take the gift they've been given when the US showed it doesn't care to make a distinction in trade between potential allies and adversaries and capitalize on it. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan is the end result of expanded American influence in the region, a last resort on their part to check that influence if you will. If that sphere suddenly collapses, from China's perspective - why bother? Sure there's still going to be nationalist voices advocating for reuniting Taiwan with China but Xi is probably smart enough to see the big picture.

This seems like a sensible approach on their part. Trump's team is goading other countries to respond like China did by increasing reciprocal tariffs. If more countries respond with targeted measures that ensnare individual American firms, the closer their executives are to Trump the better, sooner or later a mob of American CEOs are going to be a permanent fixture at Mar a Lago advocating for tariff reform. Reciprocal tariffs against the US will likely worsen the situation but targeted measures where you're incentivizing Trump's base to negotiate on your behalf might just work. The EU has the resources and familiarity with American businesses to pull something like this, other small countries who are still trying to calculate how they ended up with the rate they got are out of luck and have little leverage.

Have to appreciate how convoluted the tariffs are as they apply to France. As part of the EU reciprocal tariffs are set at 20%. French Guiana though gets 10%, but somehow Reunion Island gets hit with a 37% rate, Saint Pierre and Miquelon get 50%, Martinique and Guadeloupe - 10%. Who says having a vast overseas empire isn't useful in today's political climate? Certainly some opportunity to shuffle sales around for clever French firms if they think tariffs will persist.

Yeah secondary sanctions like are being enacted on Venezuela is the best guess. The oil will still likely make it to market, just in a circuitous way where it get's blended through ship to ship transfers and then through Malaysia, making the net proceeds to Russian exporters a lot less. The NYT piece today is fascinating. The bit about the Biden admin being furious the Ukrainians sunk the Moskva without telling them seems to have attracted most of the attention but there's a lot more to it. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/29/world/europe/us-ukraine-military-war-wiesbaden.html

The administration's chaos is a disaster for the commodity markets. "Drill, baby, drill" is nothing short of a myth and populist rallying cry. Tariff policy is impossible for us to predict and doesn't have a clear goal. We want more stability. Whoever this was wasn't holding back. Interesting that so many see $50 oil as a possibility without really a clear catalyst as to how that occurs. Both Russia and Iran are still exporting oil, I guess maybe they're thinking in terms of OPEC adding barrels back to the market or a broad economic slowdown. Also interesting how quickly they see US production falling off, 1M bbl/d within a few quarters, at $50 oil.

One takeaway from this Signal group is the US is trying to claim the wrong canal. If the US is going to engage in a maritime counter-insurgency against the Houthis to keep the Red Sea open for commercial shipping then there's a much more compelling case for an ownership stake in the Suez than there is for whatever nonsense they intend with the Panama Canal. Unfortunately I think the administration is being a bit optimistic about their ability to deter the Houthis, even if striking them is fairly popular domestically. They have a lot of low tech options at their disposal that are significantly harder for the US to deal with than the cruise and ballistic missiles Iran has provided them, and in many cases just as or more effective against shipping. There really aren't a lot of good options and bombing them only accomplishes so much. Feels a lot like Clinton's liberal use of Tomahawks during his presidency.