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What will the impact of prospective -- and possibly impending -- U.S. tariffs be on audio gear?

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SIY said:
I'm amused that so many people think that the opening position in a negotiation is where the final outcome will be.

Take a chill pill.
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While I expect a train wreck of unknown scale, minor to major, you are absolutely right. We should all be taking chill pills!

In fact chill pills should be dispensed like gum balls used to be near the exits of stores. That would help us calm down after emptying our wallets.
 
BRICS are on the rise due to convergence but they are a long way from catching up, as they are missing most of the fundamentals to achieve sustained long-run growth.

I posted earlier how the US is 14th in GDP per capita and China is 97th. Well Russia is 63rd, which isn't all that bad considering it is a little more than 50% of GDP per capita in the US. Brazil is 105th and India sitting at 150th with a GDP per capita of $9,200.

Someone earlier mentioned Japan in the 1980s. During my undergraduate studies (late 1980's/early 1990's) Japan was predicted to surpass the US in 10 years. I took a special topics class on the economic competition between the US and Japan and toured US and Japanese automotive plants. 10 years later Japan was predicted to pass the US in 20 years. As of 2023 Japan is sitting at 51st ($46,300) and is predicted to fall further behind as its population ages.
 
Mr. Widget said:
...

In fact chill pills should be dispensed like gum balls used to be near the exits of stores. That would help us calm down after emptying our wallets.
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I believe chill pills have been shown by some YouTuber and podcast influencers to cause autism and several forms of cancer and will be banned by the FDA in the next year or two.
 
pablolie said:
And the TV example is perfect. It used to be TVs were things that would be kept for a long time.
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At least with TVs, I’m doing my part ;-)

I was an early adopter of flatscreen TVs, purchasing a (extremely expensive at the time) 42 inch plasma TV in 2001.

It’s still our main TV 23 years later.

(I just use that to assuage my guilt for churning through audio equipment…)
 
pablolie said:
Even if they impose 100% tariff penalties on all those DACs etc, often the price will remain very low compared to alternatives.

From a macro-economic point of view, it's simply something that *must* be done, penalizing "countries" that take utter unfair advantage of a more open global economy and basically fund economic warfare with government cash and debt. The goal is clear, and I think we have to collectively look beyond cheap audio. I have seen some great posts that look back at the history of trade deficits, past sanctions and how they sometimes backfired. But the China situation is unprecedented. When Germany cars started to grow in the USA, they were *not* undercutting US cars in price to gain increasing control of the US economy. It was not about a hostile plan. China has been doing it at an unprecedented and blatantly evident way... and it was all our own fault, because we funded their economy for many years to gain access to their consumers... our own greed funded this, and our complacency has prevented us from addressing it.

I am perfectly aware that the Zeitgeist has shifted away from any self-sacrifice to ensure the common good, but I think it's like 20 years overdue. We can't complain about jobs moving out of the USA while we buy their stuff because it's cheaper.
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I don't disagree with anything you say here - all reasonable.

I do think, however, that there's a missing piece in many of the narratives here and across the public sphere: the loss of US manufacturing jobs was mainly created by two connected factors: (1) rising competition from European and Japanese industry during the post-WWII decades as their rebuilt economies got going and US firms were unable or unwilling to make large new capital investments to modernize and increase efficiency; and (2) intentional relocation, and then outsourcing, of manufacturing by US corporations seeking cheaper labor costs.

The reference to Germany is in my view instructive here in this regard: Germany is a democratic, capitalist country just like the US, and for a long time across governments run by different political parties Germany has had an industrial strategy and policy that has stabilized and cultivated key industries to soften the blow of the globalization of labor and production. The US has not, instead letting jobs and production go wherever individual companies felt like they should go, and providing more tax incentives to smooth that movement than to shore up domestic production and employment. In my view we should not lose sight of the role of the conscious decisions in all this, even as we acknowledge the important role of large, structural changes in the global economy.
 
tmtomh said:
I don't disagree with anything you say here - all reasonable.

I do think, however, that there's a missing piece in many of the narratives here and across the public sphere: the loss of US manufacturing jobs was mainly created by two connected factors: (1) rising competition from European and Japanese industry during the post-WWII decades as their rebuilt economies got going and US firms were unable or unwilling to make large new capital investments to modernize and increase efficiency; and (2) intentional relocation, and then outsourcing, of manufacturing by US corporations seeking cheaper labor costs.
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It is simpler than this. Our economy boomed after WWII, we invested in R&D and new technologies and had a surge in higher education from the GI Bill. We have a comparative advantage and it is NOT in cheaper labor. And this is good, better to be the US than Vietnam (or China 30 years ago). Of course it is NOT good for unskilled labor and we have completely failed at providing relief for those affected in a negative manner. The gains from trade since WWII is an amazing economic success. However, the equity/fairness is a political issue and not economic, and has been a political failure. It is possible that all those disaffected people won't feel the gains, will feel very disaffected and resentful, and one day will vote in large numbers for change.

So, we had a bigger pie but did not allocate it in a fair way. So now we will shrink the pie and give more pie to those who have been harmed economically. I can't find that this is a good economic idea in any of my textbooks.
 
a4eaudio said:
... It is possible that all those disaffected people won't feel the gains, will feel very disaffected and resentful, and one day will vote in large numbers for change.

So, we had a bigger pie but did not allocate it in a fair way. So now we will shrink the pie and give more pie to those who have been harmed economically. I can't find that this is a good economic idea in any of my textbooks.
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Yes, the anger is real and powerful. Many people feel left behind, forgotten and discarded. That is what I have been saying since 2016. As you indicated, the biggest failure was not activating these people. Now they don't care if they blow up America. It hasn't worked for them for a very long time so from that perspective, why not break it?
 
jhaider said:
That’s not who new barriers to entry are designed to protect…
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Well, if you believe what has been said...the tariffs are meant to make imports from China (and overseas in general if more widely adopted) more expensive so that manufacturing jobs are on-shored to the US. An increased demand for manufacturing labor will increase the wages of such labor and give them more of the economic pie.

Of course, it might be possible that the politicians could be lying about their motivations and what they actually plan to do.
 
a4eaudio said:
Well, if you believe what has been said...the tariffs are meant to make imports from China (and overseas in general if more widely adopted) more expensive so that manufacturing jobs are on-shored to the US. An increased demand for manufacturing labor will increase the wages of such labor and give them more of the economic pie.

Of course, it might be possible that the politicians could be lying about their motivations and what they actually plan to do.
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FWIW only threat to tariff increase I've seen here in the US is China, not sure where this fear of coverage of all column 1 countries comes from. Maybe we should have kept China in column 2 years ago :)
 
The main proposal is a 10-20% tariff on all imports with a 60% tariff on China.

Oh, and 60% on Mexico and if it doesn't have the effect intended in which case it could go up to 200%. (This was mostly in rally speeches about John Deere, so who knows how serious the threat is. It was claimed, in rally speeches, that because of the threat John Deere did not move forward with a plant in Mexico. John Deere says its plans haven't changed.)
 
Mart68 said:
How is Australia? Any regrets?

I was lucky to get in on the cell phone boom in the mid 1990s. A friend I met at college was working in it and got me a job too ('It's not what you know...').

Then made some more money on the internet poker boom a few years later.

All just 'right place at right time' luck - and a lot of hard work and long hours of course.
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I was able to get a job here six months after arriving, still in the same place doing the same things, preparing for retirement and lucky to be in a position to.

I don't have enough contact with family and friends back in the UK though, and I missed my brother in law's funeral which was bad.

So a bit of a mixed bag at the end of the day.
 
JohnnyAudio said:
1. Apply tariffs to to raise prices.
2. Establish alternative trade routes in US.
3.Brokers own these alt routes and charge a bit less than tariffs.
4.Rich get richer much faster.

I didn't go to Harvard Business School for nothing.
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It's not that much of a plan really. For the highest value items, and the easiest to move, any "brokers" will be undercut by a further alternative called "smugglers" and that will not help the people who dreamt up this plan. Also, the tariffs on this scale will overwhelm any attempt to "broker" vast numbers of different products, leading to it looking just like the tariff rate on everything.

Secondly, other countries will retaliate based on the official tariff rate, not think "oh, brokers are undercutting that rate, so we don't need to hit back as hard".

Also, people wanting things will turn to other forms of criminality. Theft of items will increase markedly, and this being the US, use of guns will accompany that.

I actually think this plan you set out comes from sanctions breaking rather than tariffs, where the brokers are the only suppliers on any scale.
 
A Surfer said:
Yes, the anger is real and powerful. Many people feel left behind, forgotten and discarded. That is what I have been saying since 2016. As you indicated, the biggest failure was not activating these people. Now they don't care if they blow up America. It hasn't worked for them for a very long time so from that perspective, why not break it?
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Some of those people need to be on the receiving end of one of Dave Ramsey's rants.
 
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