mleku on Nostr: the current actions of trump with regard to reversing the trade deficit by ...
the current actions of trump with regard to reversing the trade deficit by counter-reciprocal tarriffs
i literally just found out i had a mere $25 item held up in customs probably over trying to make me pay a 40% tarriff for USA->EU and they expired the process and threw it away, most probably
importing goods from outside the EU, and especially from the US is a nightmare currently, and practically speaking Amazon has the monopoly on pricing it in and pre-paying the customs tax collectors
in general, these goods have already had federal and state taxes levied on all of their factors of production, as well, so the price is completely nuts, and when you don't go with their monopoly retailer, which is impossible for everyone to do, you end up having not just that 40% levy, on top of that you have to do all kinds of paperwork and my fiat mine job is worth $35/hr so uh, yeah, takes probably an hour's work to even process it so that raises the real cost for me to import a tshirt from USA to actually 80% tarriff
i have no idea if any of this is gonna really fix anything but i hope a lot of stock jockeys are falling from the sky in New York this year, because they are on the gravy train and are effectively part of the tax collection extortion racket, so they deserve it
i literally just found out i had a mere $25 item held up in customs probably over trying to make me pay a 40% tarriff for USA->EU and they expired the process and threw it away, most probably
importing goods from outside the EU, and especially from the US is a nightmare currently, and practically speaking Amazon has the monopoly on pricing it in and pre-paying the customs tax collectors
in general, these goods have already had federal and state taxes levied on all of their factors of production, as well, so the price is completely nuts, and when you don't go with their monopoly retailer, which is impossible for everyone to do, you end up having not just that 40% levy, on top of that you have to do all kinds of paperwork and my fiat mine job is worth $35/hr so uh, yeah, takes probably an hour's work to even process it so that raises the real cost for me to import a tshirt from USA to actually 80% tarriff
i have no idea if any of this is gonna really fix anything but i hope a lot of stock jockeys are falling from the sky in New York this year, because they are on the gravy train and are effectively part of the tax collection extortion racket, so they deserve it
quoting nevent1q…e0znGM.
Chapter 13 of Broken Money is called "Heavy is the Head that Wears the Crown".
It focuses on the US trade deficit and why it arises structurally. In short, since the USD is the global reserve currency (for reserve assets, international contracts, FX trading pairs, and cross-border funding), there is tremendous automatic demand for USD in the world compared to other fiat currencies.
To supply the world with that ever-growing need for USD to service all sorts of needs, the United States runs structural trade deficits with the rest of the world. That's how the USD spills out to the rest of the world for them to use. And the mechanism for that is that the overvalued USD boosts Americans' import power, reduces Americans' low-margin export competiveness, and basically forces open that trade deficit.
That trade deficit is the cost of maintaining the benefits USD system as currently structured. The fatal flaw is that those who bear the cost (e.g. industrialists in the Rust Belt) are not the same as those to gain the benefits (e.g. Wall Street and Washington DC folks). And those costs and benefits accumulate over decades, resulting in rising populism and pushback, which is now front and center.
The challenge that the administration faces is that they have identified a real problem, but are tackling the surface issues rather than the underlying structural issues.
Anyway, I uploaded that chapter 13 on my website for free reading:
https://www.lynalden.com/wp-content/uploads/broken-money-chapter-13.pdf