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  • damn the higher the China one goes, the more fucked apple stock is, right?

    among others to be sure, but my understanding is apple is the big boy at the table, losing the most by percentage and total volume.

    I want to see a $10,000 iPhone and the person who buys one.

    • with some shenanigans of india manufacturing shipped to usa, while the rest of the world gets chinese, they could deal with it (even if we take working assumption that iphone cost 300 bucks, mix of 300 and 600 bucks (non-tariffed and tariffed respectively) iphones, apple can absorb or dump the difference on consumers with 10% price increase and keep margins)

  • r/wallstreetbets guys caught holding the bag yet again because they were all going in on puts/shorting the S&P and mistimed JDPON Don's latest flipflop

    bass boosted windows xp shutdown noise plays eternally

    • i know a lot of people have said it, but it's still so funny that the last vestiges of american capitalist hegemony are so absorbed by the mythos that the only thing left to do is perform pump & dumps on themselves

  • He didn't "blink". He did a Dump & Pump scam. He and his wealthy buddies shorted a bunch of stock, then he announced tariffs and crashed the market. Anyone with short positions in advance of the crash made serious bank. Then he and his friends bought a bunch of stock at reduced price right before Trump announced a 90 day pause which pushed the market back up. Insider trading.

  • It wasn't paused on China. This is just phase 2. Nothing has gone substantially wrong for the US plan.

    I plead with you stop buying the circus in front of your eyes and look at the bigger, deeper picture.

    IF Trump was rattled by China's retaliation he would include them in the pause and pretend it had nothing to do with them, he'd attempt to play it off as a global thing so as to not given undue impression of power on China's part. That he hasn't tells you he doesn't care.

    The point of this was never hurting say India. It was always about China, other nations were included to disguise this fact and to shake them down because why not. Also to pressure them to bring them into the fold for the next phase.

    But the fact that China's tariffs were increased, not removed tells you all you need to know. Namely they are absolutely dead serious about decoupling from China. I cannot crow about this enough given how many people in left online spaces have for years dismissed as impossible, absurd, ridiculous the idea of decoupling from China. I'm not happy about it but the US certainly seems to be pushing for a bifurcated world, one camp under their control, another camp for China.

    India is not going to help China, they're a reactionary/fascist nation actively trying to stab China in the back weaken China and take their industry and courting the US for a trade deal which the US will give them in exchange for helping move important (iphone, etc) manufacturing from China to India for the US. China is courting them anyways in public but it won't work. The only real allies China has in this are likely to be Vietnam (maybe, US is trying to peel them from China and stoke division and these moves were going to badly hurt Vietnam but were pulled back), DPRK, Russia. The US likes those odds. The US feels it can deal with an isolated bloc of those countries and Trump feels he can maybe peel Russia away with time.

    China made a call and Trump seized on them trying to stand fast and rally the world to them to fight the US by giving everyone else a reprieve and thus no reason to stand with China while he leaves them isolated and alone. They can't back down now so in a way I think Trump has them where he wants them. Namely standing alone, with the rest of the world negotiating with the US on terms which will doubtless include measures to pull them into the US orbit and away from China's orbit in exchange for tariff relief.

    I don't disagree with China's call but they may have walked right into a trap of certain intent and design by the US. To be fair they didn't have any great choices. If they just bowed their heads and pleaded on their knees things would also be bad for them. I've heard that Trump admin has been refusing meetings with envoys and so Trump and co are lying about China not trying to negotiate, it's just a lie they're pushing while they refuse to listen or treat with China so they can justify all of this and cast China as the belligerent aggressor who doesn't want to be fair.

    It's about isolating China. It's about creating economic interests and incentives that isolate China and I think its working at least at this stage. The pause will cause most countries to come and negotiate and most will be given relief for token concessions which Trump will trumpet as big deals and big wins. The US may indeed be intent on devaluing their currency to make exports competitive but as part of this they have to isolate China, they have to smash Chinese industry and competitiveness and look what we have? China standing alone against the US, calling out to other nations who even now slink away from it leaving it alone because no one else wants this fight, they all want to take the out because the US is still too strong.

    China needs to use what strength it has to really hit the US.

    Though I worry it doesn't matter. I worry they've built into their plans a hope that tariffs can continue to spiral out of control, that Chinese goods become unaffordable, that the economy crashes, that supply chains are forcibly rerouted and there are years of shortages but that they achieve a quick, fast, if painful decoupling from China leaving them free to isolate, sanction, blockade, and attempt to destroy China using their navy, their control of global finances to sanction and make trade with China for third party nations impossibly expensive or painful, and so on and use this to crush Chinese industry and economy, to break up the belt and road, to re-enslave the global south that China was trying to free with better loan and development terms. If that's the case and capital doesn't revolt and I think there's a very good chance it doesn't as at least tech capital seems to be standing with Trump and can always be bought off with specific exemptions for say Apple to import x amount per year not subject to tariffs then China has a hell of a fight ahead of them.

    • India is not going to help China, they're a reactionary/fascist nation actively trying to stab China in the back and take their industry and courting the US for a trade deal which the US will give them in exchange for helping move important (iphone, etc) manufacturing from China to India for the US.

      The great India understanders on this site have logged on.

      Amazing how the political knowledge about the world’s most populous nation always just boils down to some racist drivel about the place you can find on x

      But I agree with the rest of your post

      • Can you provide a correction here? Cuz I'll freely admit I don't know shit

      • I can honestly say I wasn't trying to read anything special into the stabbing thing other than both are BRICS, non-white, and should if everyone is thinking right be allies against the US but are not. So I apologize if that was read to be some sort of trope, I promise It was not my intention (unfamiliar with any kind of history where India has been anything but a victim of say your standard white colonial backstabbing). I've used similar language describing hypothetical scenarios with Russia.

        Let me correct a bit they're a nation thoroughly in the grips of a reactionary religious-political movement that has control of the government and seems to me unlikely to be dislodged through elections by any group with a more meaningfully left program and certainly not by one more anti-west and pro-cooperation with China. Fair enough?

        Modi and his ruling party are Hindu nationalists (supremacists), reactionary, and all around not great people for China or for Indians for that matter. Fair enough?

        I understand there are Marxist movements in India. I understand there are many good comrades there. But as the state of India is concerned (and when talking geopolitics its states we concern ourselves with and their present and near future nature) and as it functions it has been and remains an accomplice of the west regardless of intentions in that regard. The kind of third way independent nations stuff they clutched to in the cold war of sitting on the sidelines rather than aligning with the USSR or China for that matter is something I've seen criticized pretty harshly by some Indian leftists and the policy they pursue now also not good and I think at odds with world-wide liberation from the primary contradiction of the US/NATO.

        However, BJP leadership at some level I think look on at China with negative emotions. Because both countries were former victims of colonialism, both in similar positions in 1960 and yet in dramatically different positions now. The Indian leadership being reactionaries like all reactionaries cannot accept something like "Marxism works, it worked to the salvation of the Chinese people and it could work for our people", but must instead resort to other thinking, to petty jealousies and racial hatreds and conspiracies which they stir up in their party controlled media. They like all capitalists and especially religious/ethno-nationalist supremacists suffer from zero sum thinking, for them to win China must lose, for India to be powerful China must be weakened. This is obvious from the reactionary Indian media anyone can peruse.

        I would love to see a revolution in India but on the basis of the history of the past 50 years I cannot count on it coming to pass soon enough to matter for the calculations and plans I'm talking about.

    • It was always about China, other nations were included to disguise this fact

      This doesn't really make any sense.

      He doesn't need to disguise anything. He could have just targeted China from the beginning, there wasn't a point in trying to "disguise" it.

      He's definitely targeting China, no question about it, but I think this was an insider trading scam. Trump and an inner circle make trades before he announces the tariffs and then make more trades before he cancels it.

      If anything, he's using China as a smokescreen to cover up the insider trades.

    • No doubt. Bringing back industries to USA like he keeps saying is veeery unlikely in the near future. Something you hear on the vine smaller firms in some countries with some small adjustment to WTO folding on some deal with Chinese product. Cheaper to offload. How far the US can get with this idk. How far they can decouple from China? I really dunno

    • Fully agree. Seems like maybe preparing the ground for a hot war too with the way they are maneuvering regarding the military, although maybe they just want to do economic/political war with China and keep armed conflict for the middle east.

      • He's shifting troops out of Europe, forcing Europe to take responsibility for their own defense, openly talking about the need for this and it builds on Biden's push to re-arm Europe with Ukraine. Those troops can only be moved to Asia.*

        So I agree some sort of military use is likely. Will it be a war or just piracy and using those troops as part of an island chain blockade of Chinese goods? Maybe they plan to fight them over Taiwan, to attempt to bleed China and give rationale for why the "liberal garden" of Europe should cut trade with China just when they're still weakly entertaining trying to use China to balance US influence in order to uphold their "liberal values" they cherish more than life itself. They have Taiwan declare independence and China has to act, it's as simple as that.

        Certainly the US needs the middle east occupied and destabilized save for their puppet kingdoms to create an impassible zone for the belt and road that prevents China using overland routes for trade with Europe/Africa/etc. Their zionist puppet has had sadly great success lately, they've won the war whether we like it or not. Syria has fallen into the hands of extremist puppets, Hezbollah is biding their time (for what who knows) after losing their leadership and facing the risk of the nation's army being turned on them, Hamas has not won and Bibi is so corrupt he cannot let the war end so his only solution is continued genocide to prevent the courts at home getting him, figuring once he delivers greater 'israel' and defeats all their enemies he'll be such a hero that they won't be able to send him to prison. Iran is weaker than ever as a result of these developments, loss of its proxies and supply lines to them (Syria was a vital link to supply Hezbollah).

        *That's another possibility. Rather than attacking China they could use their troops to attack and destroy Iran to completely cement control of that key region, removing it as both trade routes, trade partners, and access to any oil from the region leaving China wholly dependent on Russian gas and oil which Russia then has an incentive to charge China higher prices for the moment that their own access to world markets to sell their petro-products is unblocked which makes China less competitive.

    • Well, the "other countries" now see US as unreliable trade partner and change their trade accordingly.

    • Why would any of those countries dump China, their larger trading partner who can actually deliver material goods, for an openly erratic and irrational US that's a declining trade partner and just slapped them with 10% tariffs? This has obviously done much more to isolate the US than China.

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