The company that moves (or starts) manufacturing here today might get run out of business when/if tariffs are repealed and their competitor already has production lines in other countries ready to go. Heck, the factory might not even open before the winds shift.
No one can accurately plan with the uncertainty.
All the big names like Apple are just paying lip service to this. They are throwing, quite literally, pocket change or funds from the government (like CHIPS, which was less ham-fisted than the tariffs IMHO but still not something that's going to change the landscape overnight) at these endeavours to appease the current admin in favor of reduced/removed tariffs on _their_ products and good PR.
If congress wanted to actually do their jobs instead of both them and the judiciary abdicating their responsibility to the executive branch then _maybe_ we'd have a chance in hell. Until then you can look forward to more flip-flopping as the government changes and the smaller companies continuing to be ground under the heel of large corporations who can weather (or bribe) their way out of the tariffs.
If not caused by politics, then by demographic crash.
Can't really be shocked when nation states enact laws to protect industries + workers.
To compare, 2024 (UN) fertility rates (highest-lowest):[1]
US: 1.62
Japan: 1.23
China: 1.02
ROC: 0.86
ROK: 0.75 (where an increase to 0.8 in 2025 was cause for celebration, as is a predicted increase to 0.85 by mid 2026)[2]
US: +10%
Japan: -16%
China: -8%
ROC: -6%
ROK: -12%
[2] https://www.chosun.com/english/national-en/2026/01/24/IVHGRT...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_past_and_...
China's one big advantage over other work forces is massive amounts of labor that can be directed by central planning. As their labor costs have gone up, labor intensive manufacturing has already started shifting away. When population declines cause labor costs to go even higher, they lose their advantage.
China threatened to pull rare earths from the menu which is how they beat Trump in the trade war, among other things which were not going to be sustainable aka farm stuff.
They want to take Taiwan eventually and that will cause potential confrontation.
So the key to China is that it just can't be a lynchpin for anything.
Major trading partner - yes.
Key partner for anything - no.
The US is already a material player in Chips, outside of Trump's 'knee jerk' and reactionary instinct based on 1980's geopolitics and stupid understanding of trade (aka 'importing = getting ripped off', or 'other people doing similar things = stealing from us') ... it does make sense to have material domestic capabilities.
The only place that can be more or less trusted to not play hard shenanigans is Europe. They will do their own regulatory things, and play rough with exports, but they would not threaten something hard.
Europe has underplayed the value of ASML etc..
China has also flipped from 'Quiet and Bide Time' to the opposite, and are not a nice geoplitical actor in their direct environs like S. China sea, although are relatively 'neutral' on most other things.
Best thing is to a) have 'reliable domestic capability' b) learn to build stuff, if not labour intensive ways c) don't depend on sketchy places for key things d) moslty carrots, have a big stick when needed.
China will never 'play fair' in terms of what we would consider 'fair' - they have their own views of everything - that's fine - but it just means has to be manaaged.
Also China should not have any access to data or popular social media / entertainment etc. TikTok must be locally managed, and strong data sovereignty rules also apply.
More of a 'good fences make good neighbours' think with them.
See former Aussie PM Rudd on 'Strategic Guardrails' - he has a good understanding.
This changed under Xi Jinping and no one knows what the effects will be.
> inevitable decline or elimination of China as a production and/or trading partner
I don't think this will happen anytime soon, that companies will need short-term planning.
Granted, I don't think continuing to shift to places with slave wages is a good thing overall, but we need complete factory automation to solve that problem (the problem of wanting cheap goods AND ethical labor). But the major players have seen the writing on the wall ever since covid lockdowns and have been slowly moving out of China since.
https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/2024/chinas-popula...
Massive immigration (on a scale never seen in human history) would be required. I don't see that happening with one of the most xenophobic cultures on Earth.
This isn't a problem confined to China, they just have the worst numbers. The entire "first world" is facing declines of varying degrees.
This coupled with climate change is why immigration policy is probably the single most important thing for most countries right now.
It's a reason they began to be called nation-states - states without a nation backing it tended to flop, and nation's without a state tended to slowly (or quickly) be absorbed into the dominant culture.
There are roughly five working-age adults to support every retiree today. This is going to crater. United Nations projections show that by 2050, that ratio will more than double, climbing past 50%. At that point, China will have fewer than two working-age adults for every retiree. The west grew rich before growing old. China, Vietnam, Brazil are aging as middle income countries.
The one child policy was like doing speed, it temporarily freed up massive amounts of capital and labor. But China's work force peaked over a decade ago. The bill is now due, and all the those "single children" know that they are expected to support 2 parents and 4 grandparents.
Aside from the dubious wisdom of similar interventions, cruelly forcing abortions was a lot easier policy to enforce then it would be to try to shove pro-natalist policies on people increasingly overburdened with caregiving for elders because of earlier interventions.
I don't think they're foolish enough to invite the entire third world into the country to bolster low birth rates like the west does. So that leaves doing it the old fashioned way, which is a slow ship to turn around.
Outlawing or taxing imports (=tarriffs) of course helps with this.
However, if you look at economic history this always slowly lead to problems that only got resolved by fresh loans (that's what the move to dollar effectively did), hyperinflation or wars.
Wiki says: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_in_China
> In the book, McGee says that, under the leadership of Tim Cook, Apple invested $275 billion in China between 2016 and 2021, to manufacture its products in the country (including building factories and supply chains in China, as well as training Chinese workers). McGee compares this to the Marshall Plan, as this is in excess of other corporate spending and, in real terms, was about twice the monetary value of the Marshall Plan.
People in favour of tariffs make it seem like the best and wealthiest economy in the world is in a bad shape, and it is completely opposite, while failing to address the inequality issue with the wealth distribution.
It also increases the immiseration of those in the areas replaced[3], which is likely a contributor to rising populism and political instability. Most of this malaise is just hidden in places like the Rust Belt.
[1]https://www.csis.org/analysis/rare-earth-export-restrictions...
If the type of prosperity you want to point to is "stock market go up," we need to talk about who owns the stocks and who doesn't.
We used to actually have starving people in this country, now we talk about "food insecurity".
Would you prefer to go back to a time were people were literally starving?
Because that's the difference between China and the US. It's not that the US does nothing, just that China does way more. Some companies are apparently paying negative tax (meaning every products sold the state adds 15% to the price, such deals apparently exist)
But, yeah, less tax means less everything for everyone. Especially less social support and less healthcare. But I guess this is what some of the more constructive people mean when they say taxes are too high. As well as what socialists meant 30 years ago when they said that very high import tariffs are a necessity. They compensate for these huge differences. But at the cost of making any foreign product (ie. "your iPhone") a lot more expensive than it already is.
Apple invested 3x that because they got 30x in return from the savings versus US manufacturing.
>Imagine if they'd spent that on the US instead.
Then iPhones would either have to be 10x more exsolve to keep the same profit margins or Apple would be broke trying to compete with Chinese made goods using US manufacturing.
However, it seems that Americans are so tired of growing prices that they are getting used to paying them. Just yesterday there was an article that summarized oil price drop 40% from when the war cooled down, but prize at the pump went down only 12%. The big oil explains this that people will buy gas anyways, so why lowering the price? I think we will see the same happening with electronics - Apple breaking news on $500B factory spending in USA is mostly because they believe Apple owners will keep buying Apple regardless of the price. They may be right... will see.
> I still get iPhone and Lenovo laptops 40% cheaper than family members living in Europe.
Because the gas station across the street will sell it for less. Because a different refinery will sell it to the gas station for less. Gas prices are the pump and oil prices in the commodities market don’t move in perfect unison. But they do move eventually.
Wild how some ragebait “article” can erase people’s memory of gas prices going down. Not to mention that gas at the pump has taxes/labor applied to it that can also change.
https://www.macrotrends.net/2501/crude-oil-vs-gasoline-price...
Indeed, but the role of a government is to steer/push private initiative in a certain direction.
Tariffs and stuff are steering private companies towards building stuff in-house (as in: "in the us").
Future initiative inconsistent with this directions will essentially be a sabotage of the US economy.
The fact that a president can create them out of thin air means they can be removed just as easily. I'm not anti-tariff or anti-re-homing-production (where it makes sense) but the _way_ it was done is my problem. Additionally there was no ramp, it was 0->100 immediately. A bill passed by congress to slowly ratchet up tariffs or similar over a period of time would have a much larger impact IMHO. It would give companies the ability to plan instead of just react. The tariffs were enacted in a timespan that made it impossible to move production local before they went into effect. Additionally, tariffs being applied unequally is terrible, it just means whoever has the biggest bribes (solid gold plaque holders anyone?) or can pretend they are moving manufacturing back to the US gets an advantage.
The amount of power held in the executive branch is unacceptable. Just look at how they raided/repurposed the CHIPS act money to force Intel (which I have no real love for) to sell a stake to the government.
Authoritarian governments are bad for business.
Some of them were removed. And then put back. Then increased, then decreased, or otherwise changed depending on what Trump was thinking at 3am while making social media posts
If tariffs were planned, steady increase on a long term we might see a good effect. Like tariffs were used before this trump admin.
More to the point, the notion that dollars leaving the country is a real problem is really a kind of primitive understanding of money. Dollars are something we control. If dollars leave the country, that means there is demand for dollars. We control the supply of dollars. We literally can’t lose, so long as people are still using the USD, which they’re less inclined to when we’re tariffing their exports.
It's important to remember that money is not value. It's a score that's meant to represent value, but the value itself is entirely distinct.
It's true that people work hard for that representation, because we've built systems where the link between the representation and the underlying value is quite strong, but it is still just a number at the end of the day.
I think you should equally be confused about abstractions such as university credentials, or citizenship.
And yes, those others are great examples of this principle. The diploma is just a piece of paper and an entry in the university's records. Set it on fire and I still have all the skills and knowledge. Give me a good solid blow to the head which breaks the skills and knowledge, and you've destroyed what's actually useful and interesting, even though the diploma is completely intact. Likewise, citizenship is only relevant because it convinces other people to let me do things like work, cross borders, and vote (which is a whole other number-that-does-stuff-because-people-happen-to-agree-on-it system).
I'm not confused and I don't think money isn't real. I just understand what it actually is, versus what people agree to do with it. It's a typical example of the map not being the territory. Money exists, but it is not wealth or value. Money in an account is a number. Money as a system is a collective arrangement where money can be exchanged for goods and services, usually.
It did make it easy to raise capital, though, which is nice.
> Plenty of countries have spent billions on new construction in the US and gotten smoked.
Yes, it's owned by foreigners and sends cash overseas but all of the economic activity is here and if push came to shove.. they're not exporting the building.
It's not all gravy, there are issues with having global capital so deeply involved in the country, but it's better than the alternative, there's a reason Americans live so well and its not because they're all smarter or harder working.
As I understand, those investment waves were mostly buying existing assets, not building new ones. From your examples, do you have examples of significant new construction? I do not.
When I think of foreign investment to build things in the US, I mostly think about German/Korean/Japanese auto manufs and Korean/Taiwanese semiconductor manufs. Most people don't understand the massive investment that German/Korean/Japanese auto manufs have made into the US to build and operate plants in the last 30+ years. (This also includes local R&D centers.) It is huge, maybe more that the domestic manufs in aggregate. The same can be said for Korean/Taiwanese semiconductor manufs in the 2020s: The numbers are simply staggering and far exceed domestic producers.
Predominantly US financial assets, like Treasuries and company equity.
Who is "we"? Trade deficit dollars are recycled into assets, which compete with exports in the balance of payments. If you have a big house and fat brokerage account, you win big. If you have a job building shit, you lose big. If you have a job building tradeable shit and a low net worth, may god have mercy on your soul.
If you want the full economist version, "Trade Wars are Class Wars" by Klein and Pettis
No, the alternative is Alexander Hamilton protectionism, which built the country into an industrial superpower that eclipsed the very shadow it was put in place to escape.
What's done is done, though. We successfully sold the industrial base of the USA to the Communist Party of China in order to pump our brokerage accounts. Winning?
Dollars can only be created in the US by the Federal Reserve or US banks. Since the USD is the currency in which most global trade is conducted, the US MUST provide USD liquidity to the rest of the world that they can exchange between one another and the US (cf. Triffin Dilemma). If the rest of the world has no dollars, e.g. an Indonesian company cannot sell goods to an Ecuadorian company settled in USD.
The benefits of this system to the US are enormous (cf. Exorbitant Privilege) since US can print dollars out of thin air and 'give away' these bytes in a database and receive real goods in exchange. Real goods that people spent energy and expended labor for, in exchange for bytes in a DB.
If the US stopped supplying dollars to the rest of the world, it'd first spark a massive financial crisis as companies that owe USD to one another default in a chain reaction. Afterwards, an alternate to the USD would emerge as 'hard money that everyone accepts'. Candidates for this currently are limited in the space of fiat, Europe and China are net exporters so they cannot supply EUR/CNY to the rest of the world in net just like a US with trade surpluses cannot. Possibly there could be a return to precious metal backed currencies. But in any case, in such an environment, US could no longer receive goods 'for free' in exchange for bytes in a database and its life standards would greatly suffer.
https://www.bea.gov/news/2026/us-international-trade-goods-a...
The next Congress and the next president have a job to do there.
This is somewhat justifiable with vital sectors like agriculture, but if you do this in an arbitrary way just for the sake of it you just make stuff more expensive and your workforce less productive for no gain.
Those dollars are not just vanishing abroad, you are getting actual stuff for them, and your citizens then don't have to spend their own time building it and can do something more productive instead.
Have you accounted for the dollars that are no longer re-entering the country due to boycotts or retaliatory trade policies?
Steel tariffs are calculated to cost ~$900k per job saved. It also makes all other industries in the US that use steel less competitive in the global market.
> It doesn't mean tariffs are the most effective way to meet that goal.
Might cause fewer dollars to enter the country too. Closed doors block both directions. Other countries are watching and responding in kind. Maybe not that much at first out of fear of retaliation but builds up momentum.
So this is just a tax on imports for mostly the middle class.
Furthermore, this is the results of the CHIPS Act, which gave incentives for TSMC to build the Arizona fabs.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/balance-of-trade
None of his promises ever come to fruition. Stop hoping.
Theater to keep Mad King Trump off their back.
For some more detailed data (hard to find it publicly available), also see the OECD report at [2], particularly pages 18 and 20 (as numbered). This report provides a breakdown of ~2024-2025 per-country/per-region capacity by chip type (power, analog, speciality memory, commodity memory, advanced logic, mature logic) and a prediction for pre-country/per-region upcoming capacity increases by chip type.
There are markets within markets of course. China dominates in power electronics which makes senses when you consider even just their domestic demand for electric vehicles and renewable generators. Taiwan dominates in advanced logic and exports pretty much all of it. ROK dominates in commodity memory and also exports pretty much all of it. When you compare populations of China vs. USA, the USA are/will be punching above their weight for analog and advanced logic chips, which is also where the focus of their investment is.
In categories such as power electronics and mature logic which China dominates, labour cost is much more important than categories such as advanced logic where equipment is the overwhelming cost. For this reason you'll find China (and maybe even India if they bother to get into the market) dominate these categories due to lower costs of labour. Traditional competitors in these categories such as Onsemi and STMicroelectronics have been hurting.[3]
It's hard to predict which announced/planned investments will go ahead and be impactful, for various reasons such as utilisation rates of fabs once built. But it'll be particularly and increasingly difficult to predict the future of semiconductor fabrication due to what is happening in China. China has expanded their domestic chip making equipment industry enough to mandate Chinese fabs use at least 50% Chinese equipment.[4] Over 2024 and 2025 the investment from China into chip making equipment was estimated to be 37-42% of global spend, so we're talking about 20% (or maybe higher up to 40%) of global chip making equipment spending not being readily observable.[5]
[1] https://www.yolegroup.com/product/report/status-of-the-semic...
[2] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...
[3] https://www.trendforce.com/news/2025/02/26/news-power-chipma...
[4] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-mandates-50-domest...
[5] https://www.semi.org/en/SEMI-Reports-Global-Semiconductor-Eq...
Much has simply been replaced by nothing at all, i.e. businesses shutter rather than deal with the mess, or ride out until the midterms to see if sanity and rule of law returns at least in Congress. The only ones who actually make an effort are the big companies like Apple that for one need to stay in Trump's good graces lest he slaps them with foreign-asset crap like he did with Anthropic and OpenAI, but also need to divest from China and Taiwan for geopolitical reasons.
Analysis of previous tariffs have found they cost a ton, drive prices up, and increase corporate profits.
The 2018 Trump washing machine tariff raised prices not just for washers but also dryers (12%), and cost $820,000 per job onshored.
A 2012 chinese tire tariff cost $900,000 per job onshored.
It's terrible business.