• Akasazh@feddit.nl
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    5 hours ago

    I’m sure corporations aren’t going to use this excuse to hike the prices even more, like they did with the energy crisis …

  • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
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    17 hours ago

    The internet is about to feel a lot slower for us as more services move offshore to flee the taxes.

    • cm0002@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Not just any businesses either, he bankrupted a casino… TWICE

      It takes a special kind of stupid to bankrupt a fucking casino, twice

    • roofuskit@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      This is actually kind of funny. Because his first term is more or less considered successful in financial circles, (COVID aside). But the entire time he was fighting with aides, bureaucrats, etc… who kept either getting in his way or talking him out of his crazy or stupid ideas. Now he’s removed all the safeties and we’re getting full Trumpism with all the horrible financial decisions it brings.

      • InvertedParallax@lemm.ee
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        1 day ago

        He wasn’t successful at anything.

        He slashed the corporate income tax and due to an effective amnesty on repatriation many large MNCs brought stashed offshore cash and cut R&D to register massive earnings for his last 2 years.

        Ironically, this started to dry up right around Q1 2020… Then COVID drowned out everything.

        His response was to just pump $4T to employers with almost no documentation, thank god we didn’t see a massive wave in inflation out of that.

        • NikoWantToGoBowling@lemm.ee
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          7 hours ago

          Okay this post reeks of not understanding basic accounting. Bringing back cash doesn’t affect profits for firms. The earnings were already earned. Having money over seas and bringing it on shore does not increase your profits, it just frees it up for investment (or giving to shareholders).

          Also cutting R&D does not change profits in the short term. Any amount of R&D doesn’t change profits in the short term (either less or more). R&D is treated as an asset and depreciates over time (which does affect profits) but that’s clearly not what you’re saying here.

          The rest of your post I’m not arguing with but your understanding of accounting and how offshore money works is factually incorrect.

          • InvertedParallax@lemm.ee
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            6 hours ago

            https://www.bea.gov/news/2019/direct-investment-country-and-industry-2018

            The TCJA generally eliminated taxes on dividends, or repatriated earnings, to U.S. multinationals from their foreign affiliates. Dividends of $776.5 billion in 2018 exceeded earnings for the year, which led to negative reinvestment of earnings, decreasing the investment position for the first time since 1982. Tables 3 and 4 provide information on the country and industry breakdown of dividends.

            By country, nearly half of the dividends in 2018 were repatriated from affiliates in Bermuda ($231.0 billion) and the Netherlands ($138.8 billion). Ireland was the third largest source of dividends, but its value is suppressed due to confidentiality requirements. By industry, U.S. multinationals in chemical manufacturing ($209.1 billion) and computers and electronic products manufacturing ($195.9 billion) repatriated the most in 2018.

        • sploosh@lemmy.world
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          22 hours ago

          thank god we didn’t see a massive wave in inflation out of that.

          Where are you that hasn’t seen massive inflation since COVID?

      • Rentlar@lemmy.ca
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        1 day ago

        Markets will still consider it a win if Trump does not else good in the next 4 years except for extend the “tax cuts and jobs” billionaire and corporate handouts. He seems to be failing at that and DOGE has only made it harder in for Congress (in a budgetary sense) for them to do it.

        • Buelldozer@lemmy.today
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          21 hours ago

          Markets will still consider it a win if Trump does not else good in the next 4 years except for extend the “tax cuts and jobs” billionaire and corporate handouts.

          Of the Top 10 most profitable companies in the world 8 of them are American. Those 8 companies lost enough Market Capitalization in the last 24 hours to fund a mid-sized Country. “The Markets” are not fucking happy at all.

          • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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            11 hours ago

            Trump is making more enemies in business than the most liberal of democrat presidents could ever do. That’s impressive.

  • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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    21 hours ago

    How surprising is this really, considering we’re still paying COVID-inflated prices for most things after COVID came and went, and was gone, and is still gone, and it’s a couple years later and it’s fucking gone.

    • Buelldozer@lemmy.today
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      21 hours ago

      Inflation from the Fed helicoptering money around was probably the most predicted thing that’s happened in the last 50 years. It should have surprised literally no one.

      It’s also no surprise that it hasn’t gone away. That’s called deflation and every central banker on the planet would rather be eviscerated with a rusty spoon than allow deflation to happen.

      • Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works
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        18 hours ago

        Except that’s not what happened, companies used the slowdowns in shipping from Covid shutdowns as an excuse to raise prices, then never lowered them. This isn’t inflation, this was intentionally planned, don’t belive me? Listen to their fucking earnings calls specifically saying it out loud.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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          4 hours ago

          Look at the money supply compared to inflation. Inflation went up due to supply shocks, central banks printed money as supply shocks eased, and we’re left with stable, higher prices.

          If central banks didn’t print money during the inflationary period, we would’ve seen a period of deflation as prices returned roughly to where they were.

          Seriously, look up the numbers. Here’s UK money supply, for example.

        • CandleTiger@programming.dev
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          17 hours ago

          Companies deciding to raise prices (for any reason — justified or not) is what inflation is made of.

          Inflation just means “prices went up.”

            • CandleTiger@programming.dev
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              5 hours ago

              I’m not saying “inflation means prices go up” I’m saying “inflation means prices went up”. There can be many things that cause prices to go up, inflation is one result of any such cause and of course then causes many things itself including further inflation.

              In your scenario that’s inflation caused by price fixing. You seem to be saying these things are mutually exclusive but I don’t understand why you would say that.

              • Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works
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                5 hours ago

                I suppose my point is if we put any cause of rising prices under the “inflation” umbrella, it gives people the wrong idea as to the cause. Rather then just specifying what is causing prices to rise, people just say “it’s inflation.”

                • Tobberone@lemm.ee
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                  3 hours ago

                  Inflation is defined as the increase of prices over a set period of time. It is in itself nothing, doesn’t do anything and its singular purpose is to be able to say how much something costs today compared to yesteryear. If the price difference depends on a supply chock (something that affects the ability to produce, like a shortage), or a demand chock (suddenly everbody rejects Tesla) is all the same, it results in a price change and can therefore be compared using the measure inflation.

  • ilinamorato@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Ok. The bottom line is, either it “won’t do all that much”-- meaning it won’t affect prices, it won’t affect the economy, it’ll be basically useless–or it will be disastrously expensive for ordinary people. There is no other option. The “disastrously expensive for ordinary people” is the only thing that will cause any amount of the change Trump promises: it’s the mechanism by which the plan operates.

    There is no option where companies just eat the tariff costs, or countries pay them. Maybe a few scattered companies and countries do, but by and large, not a chance.

    Every country in the world needs all the other countries more than all of the other countries need it. There’s just no real leverage, because we’re all interconnected; you can snip one country out, and it’ll slightly hurt everyone, but it’ll wreck the country that was snipped out.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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      4 hours ago

      That’s true if all other things were equal, but they’re not. The US is the largest economy in the world, based on GDP, so it has a lot more weight to swing around than others. So theoretically, the US should have more leverage than smaller countries.

      That said, I don’t think the US has enough leverage to get away with this. Retaliatory tariffs will come and the net result is that trade in all regions will suffer. When you tax something, you get less of it…

      The US might be able to get some leverage if we had an economist in power w/ strong diplomacy skills, but we have Trump.

      • ilinamorato@lemmy.world
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        1 hour ago

        Yeah, the US has a lot of economic weight to swing around, but the world has also spend the decade (!) since Trump was first elected finding other business outlets and generally needing the US less, meaning that the relative weight of the US and the rest of the world has normalized significantly. The EU is stronger, China is stronger, Canada is stronger. The US withdrawing from the world economy would hurt everyone, but it would hurt the US a whole lot more than everyone else.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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          48 minutes ago

          Maybe, but I think you’re overselling the EU a bit. Yeah, there have been some high profile changes (in terms of stuff that makes the media), but I wonder how much that actually matters.

          The EU hasn’t really ever been a big importer of US goods anyway, at least not for decades. The biggest importers of US products are Mexico, China, and Canada. The US imports a fair amount from the EU, so if they retaliate with tariffs of their own, the US will just buy less from them, which will hurt the EU more than the US.

          The US will have a bunch of negatives in the short term too, but I guess we’ll see if those are permanent or just represent a shifting in trade partners.

      • Tobberone@lemm.ee
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        3 hours ago

        I don’t know how we define “enough” in this scenario, but as you allude to: in the end the USA is just some 400 million people buying things from overseas. Absolutely those who buy the most, and that is what drives the economy in many countries. It is what has picked up countries in SE Asia from poverty to industrialization.

        Problem is that now when everything is more expensive in the US, the same people will stop spending. They might have spent the same money on products made in America, but those are precious few and just increased in price. So in effect everyone in America can now buy less for the same money and the industry capacity to produce what’s demanded doesn’t exist in short term. And in real estate, short term is 3-10 years.

        The rest of the world? Well, most of the world just lost their biggest market. Of course, the demand that can’t be produced domestically in the US will still be seen, but at a reduced rate, which will reduce the economic development world wide, until new markers are found. China still needs to sell, but the market for the high margin stuff is reduced.

        In the end? I wouldn’t be surprised if this stunt reduces world trade to such a degree it might be viewed as a notable side effect that carbon use went down. Trump might have managed to stop overconsumption like nobody else and with it energy demand. So despite doing the oil industries bidding and go against renewables, the shipping industry stand to loose enough trade that it might affect oil use world wide.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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          3 hours ago

          I agree with most of that.

          The thing is, other countries don’t want to see a slowdown in trade, so there’s absolutely a chance that they’ll be more willing to make deals with the US in exchange for reduced tariffs. In the short term (again, like you said, could be years), there will be reduced demand, which will hurt markets, and I wouldn’t be surprised if conservatives get slammed in elections in the next 2-3 years since the pain will likely still be fresh. I don’t trust Trump to actually make those deals though, especially since so many other countries seem to hate him.

          We’ll see though. It’s going to suck if he sticks to his guns and keeps tariffs going in his apparent plan to revitalize US industrial capacity. I’m not sure why we want that, but that seems to be what he wants.

          • Tobberone@lemm.ee
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            1 hour ago

            Unfortunately i think it’s the same old extortion we’ve seen before. Trump Jr already posted “I wouldn’t want to be the last country to cut a deal”, so I guess we will see more if this. Ukraine stood up against it, I hope the rest of the world does to, but I’m afraid most wount.

            • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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              1 hour ago

              They probably won’t, but I guess we’ll see. Trump is certainly playing with fire here, and that doesn’t make me feel great as an American.

    • MegaUltraChicken@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      because we’re all interconnected; you can snip one country out, and it’ll slightly hurt everyone, but it’ll wreck the country that was snipped out

      Conservatives will NEVER understand this.

      • ilinamorato@lemmy.world
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        1 hour ago

        They will if the conservative media machine falls apart and they start actually seeing reality.

        It’s possible…someday…maybe…

      • TransplantedSconie@lemm.ee
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        1 day ago

        They may not understand it, but they’ve fucked around long enough to get to the find out part of the equation. I just wish those of us that understand this and voted against this shit wouldn’t be affected by it

    • SacralPlexus@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Every country in the world needs all the other countries more than all of the other countries need it. There’s just no real leverage, because we’re all interconnected; you can snip one country out, and it’ll slightly hurt everyone, but it’ll *wreck* the country that was snipped out.

      This is just such an absolutely perfect summary. I wish we could American politicians to speak this clearly to explain why this is such a bad idea.

      • suicidaleggroll@lemm.ee
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        1 day ago

        It wouldn’t matter. The public doesn’t listen directly to politicians, it gets filtered through the media first, and the media picks and chooses which parts they actually report. The people who would actually hear this already know. The people who would need to hear it never will because Fox won’t show it to them.

  • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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    1 day ago

    Do you think he knows that he can go entire weeks without announcing a new tariff?

  • Saff@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    Guys, as a European, does this only affects servers and hardware built in the US right? Isn’t most of it built in china and owned by US companies? So it’s literally only the US this will affect?

    • cocolowlander@feddit.nl
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      24 hours ago

      All electronics are made in Asia. So there will be no higher prices for consumers in the EU.

      US consumers will get hammered with anywhere from 25% to 55% price increase in electronics.

    • commander@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 day ago

      Pretty much. Everyone else will be able to trade with the east and southeast Asian countries business as usual. Maybe even more now that the US is making themselves less price competitive. The bad thing for the EU could be the drop in sales to the US not being replaced fast enough outside of the US leading to squeezing existing customers for more cash or possibly some businesses failing

  • otp@sh.itjust.works
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    1 day ago

    Not sure how related it is, but in Canada, I’m seeing HDD and SSD prices generally being “on sale” for the regular prices from last year (same specs and everything!)

  • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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    24 hours ago

    It’s a massive and likely short term government tax increase for all consumers is what it all is.

    Extra hundreds of billions of dollars taken from us by our corrupt government. All while I’m sure trumps inner circle bought Puts in the s&p several months ago so they can make even more boatloads of money.