Does Trump need the adrenaline boost of getting in a new fight to make his day complete, as well as keep his name in the headlines? We’ll recap some of the latest developments in his tariff war.
Bye bye foreign films? First, to Trump’s latest attention-grabbing row of putting 100% tariffs on foreign movies. His Truth Social rant:
Of course, Trump and his ilk would never consider what neoliberalism has done to fiction publishing and the theater in the US, and that the endless milking of action franchises has turned off a lot of once-loyal movie viewers.1 No, it’s those conniving furrniers! From BBC:
US President Donald Trump says he will hit movies made in foreign countries with 100% tariffs, as he ramps up trade disputes with nations around the world.
Trump said he was authorising the US Department of Commerce and Trade Representative to start the process to impose the levy because America’s movie industry was dying “a very fast death”.
He blamed a “concerted effort” by other countries that offer incentives to attract filmmakers and studios, which he described as a “National Security threat.
Foreign movies as a national emergency? Seriously? But does anyone have the staying power to sue?
More from the BBC:
But the details of the move are unclear. Trump’s statement did not say whether the tariff would apply to American production companies producing films abroad.
Several recent major movies produced by US studios were shot outside America, including Deadpool & Wolverine, Wicked and Gladiator II.
It was also unclear if the tariffs would apply to films on streaming services, like Netflix, as well as those shown at cinemas, or how they would be calculated.
The governments of Australia and New Zealand have spoken out in support of their countries’ film industries.
Reuters gives more detail on foreign production:
In January, Trump appointed Hollywood veterans Jon Voight, Sylvester Stallone and Mel Gibson to bring Hollywood back “bigger, better and stronger than ever before.”
Movie and TV production has been exiting Hollywood for years, heading to locations with tax incentives that make filming cheaper.
Governments around the world have increased credits and cash rebates to attract productions and capture a greater share of the $248 billion that Ampere Analysis predicts will be spent globally in 2025 to produce content.
So how does one count the origin of a movie with AI actors? Will the ability to classify a considerably AI movies as American if American-managed/funded accelerate this trend? And as for Netflix, I’ve never been a fan of streaming and hope my DVD collection proves to be adequate.
De minimus exemption ends….whacking lower income consumers as well as Meta and Facebook. NBER confirmed that the end of this exemption on shipments will hit lower income buyers hard.
A U.S. consumer can import $800 worth of goods per day free of tariffs and administrative fees. Fueled by rising direct-to-consumer trade, these “de minimis” shipments have exploded in recent years, yet are not recorded in Census trade data. Who benefits from this type of trade, and what are the policy implications? We analyze international shipment data, including de minimis shipments, from three global carriers and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Lower-income zip codes are more likely to import de minimis shipments, particularly from China, which suggests that the tariff and administrative fee incidence in direct-to-consumer trade disproportionately benefits the poor. Theoretically, imposing tariffs above a threshold leads to terms-of-trade gains through bunching, even in a setting with complete pass-through of linear tariffs. Empirically, bunching pins down the demand elasticity for direct shipments. Eliminating §321 would reduce aggregate welfare by $10.9- $13.0 billion and disproportionately hurt lower-income and minority consumers.2
Trump and his fellow travelers really do hate the poors.
CNN was more dramatic. From A massive tariff on millions of Americans’ purchases just went into effect — cue the chaos:
CBP [Customs and Border Patrol] told CNN it currently processes “nearly 4 million duty-free de minimis shipments a day.” Research indicates that a majority of those shipments come from China and Hong Kong. In total, over the last fiscal year, CBP said 1.36 billion packages came to the US under the de minimis exemption…
Regular Temu and Shein shoppers told CNN this week they’ve increasingly turned to the site as they feel made-in-the-USA products have gotten out of reach.
“I can’t afford to buy from Temu now, and I already couldn’t afford to buy in this country,” Rena Scott, a 64-year-old retired nurse from Virginia, previously said to CNN Business.
Lower-income households will suffer the most from the end of cheap Chinese e-commerce sites. About 48% of de minimis packages shipped to the poorest zip codes in the United States, while 22% were delivered to the richest ones, according to February research from UCLA and Yale economists.
But it’s not as if some US big fish will escape collateral damage. From the New York Times:
Sky Canaves, a principal analyst for retail and e-commerce at the research firm eMarketer, said ads from Temu and Shein were once “inescapable” on search, social media and applications. But that is changing…
Over a two-week period starting March 31, Temu spent 31% less on US daily advertising on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snap, X (formerly Twitter) and YouTube compared with its average daily spending on those platforms in the previous 30 days, according to estimates from the market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. Shein’s daily advertising outlays on its social networks in the United States were down 19% over the same two weeks.
Temu and Shein, which had flooded Google in the United States with ads for the goods they sell, started to disappear from the platform in April. On April 5, Temu accounted for 19% of all US ads displayed on Google Shopping, but that figure dropped to zero a week later, according to research by the marketing firm Tinuiti. Shein went from about 20% in early April to zero by April 16.
And of course, the closing of this loophole will harm some small businesses. Resilc confirms: “I have several maker3 friends who get their parts this way. No mo.”
Trump rejects breaks for small businesses. This critically important tidbit is buried in an Axois story we’ll return to later in this post. The reason this matters is that the Chamber of Commerce sent want amounted to a Defcon 1 level alert, describing the need to give many waivers to small businesses. As we and many others have pointed out, they are vulnerable by generally having less in the way of funding reserves and borrowing capacity. And they are important to the health of the country, both by regularly being the driver of jobs growth, as well as often the makers of intermediate goods that are important to supply chains. From Axois:
The intrigue: Trump said that there would be no tariff exemptions for small businesses.
- “They’re not going to need it,” he said, despite a letter from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that warned of catastrophic consequences for small businesses from the tariffs.
- The massive lobbying group >asked the administration to create a tariff exclusion process that could help some of the businesses.
- A separate group that lobbies on behalf of footwear companies also asked for industry relief earlier this week.
Financial Times talks up Chinese tariff evasion via Southeast Asia. Given that tariffs on goods from Southeast Asian countries are set to range from 10% for Singapore to 49% for Cambodia,4 trans-shipments, even if they could be executed without causing a world of hurt for buyers, would only provide some relief. And the pink paper does not suggest that low-tariff Singapore could be a smuggling route.
Note that there were some dismissive remarks in the Financial Times comments section. First (as you will see) the story relies entirely on the existence of tariff-evading schemes promoted in Chinese social media. These readers contend these ads are long standing and if anything have been running less frequently of late. Second, some in the international shipping industry say no reputable ship operator or buyer would take this sort of liability, which suggests this sort of tariff-busting (beyond the games played already) is not likely to become a large-scale activity.5 Nevertheless, from the lead story in the Financial Times, Chinese exporters ‘wash’ products in third countries to avoid Trump tariffs:
Chinese exporters are stepping up efforts to avoid tariffs imposed by US President Donald Trump by shipping their goods via third countries to conceal their true origin.
Chinese social media platforms are awash with adverts offering “place-of-origin washing”, while an inflow of goods from China has raised alarm in neighbouring countries wary of becoming staging posts for trade actually destined for the US.
The article mentioned Malaysia and quoted a source that depicted its customs as being lax. But other countries were tightening up. Again from the Financial Times:
Vietnam’s industry and trade ministry last month called on local trade associations, exporters and manufacturers to strengthen checks on origins of raw materials and input goods and to prevent the issuing of counterfeit certificates.
Thailand’s foreign trade department also last month unveiled measures to tighten origin checks on products bound for the US in order to prevent tariff evasion.
Trump continues “deal just around the corner” patter while signaling tariffs set to remain. Given how well that posturing worked out with the (immediately broken) Israel ceasefire, the Ukraine war negotiations, and now the Iran nuclear enrichment talks, one has to severely discount Trump “deal almost here” messaging. But Wall Street seems to be a true believer. Any excuse to buy a dip, one assumes.
If you read some of the stories with care, you can see not much has changed.
We had assumed Trump would keep tariffs on permanently, say at his present 10% default (unless he was able to wrest a very big economic and/or military concession from a particular country) and 25% tariffs against China even in the event of a major economic implosion. He has too much ego invested in his tariff scheme ever to retreat fully.
Axois confirmed our belief. From Trump says tariffs could be permanent, but strikes softer note on China:
President Trump said Sunday he would need to keep at least some tariffs on foreign goods in place to convince businesses to move production to the U.S.
Why it matters: It suggests that the historic levies on nearly all goods coming into America would remain in some form — even as the White House says it intends to strike trade deals with a slew of nations, including China.
- Such a development would be a huge blow for the economy. It can take years for companies to re-shore manufacturing — and doing so would likely result in higher costs for businesses and consumers.
What they’re saying: Trump told NBC’s “Meet the Press with Kristen Welker” that he would not rule out the possibility that the tariffs announced in recent weeks might stick.
- “No, I wouldn’t do that because if somebody thought they were going to come off the table, why would they build in the United States?,” Trump said in an interview that aired on Sunday.
- Trump said auto companies — including Toyota and Ford — have announced plans for additional U.S. plants in the wake of tariff policy.
Axois described Trump continuing his attack on toy-makers and parents:
Trump doubled down on those views on Sunday: “We don’t have to waste money on a trade deficit with China for things we don’t need, for junk that we don’t need.”
The Axois headline depicted Trump as taking a “softer” line on China. I have difficulty with this positioning. This is the same nonsense that Trump tried with Russia: depicting Putin as in desperate need of a deal because Russia was taking large battlefield losses and its economy was suffering. But Russia before and China now, and not Trump, are the judges of how eager they are to make concessions to the US. This is yet more patter for a US business audience, to try to signal that relief is not that far away when the Chinese have not indicated any change in stance, which is that the US has to drop tariffs (one assumes they don’t mean all but quite a lot) before China will talk. Again from Axois:
Yes, but: He conceded it was impractical to keep the tariffs on China at their current rates.
- “At some point, I’m going to lower them because otherwise, you could never do business with them. And they want to do business very much. Look, their economy is really doing badly. Their economy is collapsing.”
….
What to watch: Trump in recent days has tempered his tone on China, signaling willingness to strike a trade deal.
- “They want to make a deal. They want to make a deal very badly. We’ll see how that all turns out, but it’s got to be a fair deal,” Trump said.
Bloomberg showcases more Trump palaver in Trump Suggests Some Trade Deals May Come as Early as This Week:
President Donald Trump suggested that his administration could strike trade deals with some countries as soon as this week, offering the prospect of relief for trading partners seeking to avoid higher US import duties.
“It could very well be,” Trump told reporters on Sunday when asked whether any trade agreements were coming this week. He didn’t specify any countries.
“We’re negotiating with many countries, but at the end of this, I’ll set my own deals — because I set the deal, they don’t set the deal,” Trump said aboard Air Force One. “You keep asking the same question: ‘When will you agree?’ It’s up to me, it’s not up to them.”
There’s no evidence that The Don as Dealmaker King is working all that well.6 There were rumors that “a deal” was on the verge of being announced last week, with the supposed holdup the need for approval in the counterpart country. One would think that means legislative approval. Yours truly is not omniscient but I have yet to see any press accounts along those lines. Some wags though the country that was set to go first was India due to having very high duties on US car imports.
Consider a few examples:
This Japanese MP (whose name is Shinji Oguma) absolutely nails it, and reflects what pretty all countries in Asia are thinking: pic.twitter.com/U1jZahc5Sh
"When Japan negotiates with what [Trump] is saying it's akin to being extorted by a delinquent.
If Japan gives in, thinking…
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) April 18, 2025
Japan, the most likely country to bend the knee is not backing down when faced with extortion from the US.
Japan trade representative states that eliminating all new tariffs are non-negotiable. pic.twitter.com/v8qbW2j1GM
— Zhao DaShuai 东北进修🇨🇳 (@zhao_dashuai) April 20, 2025
Countries in Southeast Asia have no doubt taken note of the US’ very rough handling of top ally Japan. They also know that Vietnam went to the US quickly, with the offer of dropping all tariffs on US goods and was rebuffed. Although this may not have been the reason, Thailand cancelled a trip to the US for negotiations on April 237.
I wrote to a well-connected economist colleague, sputtering over a lead story in the Wall Street Journal story over the weekend, that depicted the US economy as “powering” through the Trump tariffs. Note that he’s been much more sanguine about where things might go, believing that there are good odds that Trump will pull out of his controlled flight into terrain. My e-mail, subject line “This is the last thing the US needs”:
See below as a lead story in the WSJ plus the market bounce will encourage Trump to stick with his tariffs even as the damage becomes irreversible (business closures, which are already starting).
You may have seen the Chamber of Commerce sounding a DefCon1 alert and pleading for (many many) specific waivers
This is an effect of the stockpiling, both the pulling demand forward at the consumer and business level, and the stockpiling postponing the onset of shortages.
You see at the FT that Buffett is still selling stocks.
And Trump is nowhere on negotiating. The Bangkok Post the US hsn’lt even set a time to deal with Thailand. From 3 days ago. The PM dropped some other initiatives as soon as the tariffs were announced and said the negotiations were her top priority.
https://www.bangkokpost.com/business/general/3014792/bank-of-thailand-cuts-rate-as-tariff-storm-darkens-outlook.
Nikkei reports SE Asian states have little to give the US save more LNG buys.
His reaction: “Yup.” He does tend to the laconic.
_____
1 Book publishers once had a healthy “mid list” business, of books on which they paid reasonable but not hefty advances for works they expected to sell 5,000 to 25,000 copies. That would in aggregate be enough for them to pay for themselves, plus a few could be expected to break out and become bestsellers.
For reasons I do not fathom (and it does not seem entirely due to e-publishing, since the original sharp falloff in printed books has substantially reversed itself), the mid-list business has collapsed.
Similarly, my impression is that off Broadway, which is also a source of movie scripts, has been suffering. I know personally a writer (and a good one) who had to quit producing plays (the writer would often have to help raise the funds) because it was too tenuous an existence (their transition to Los Angeles TV writing was initially successful even though it felt like a big step down, but that line of work has also become imperiled). If nothing else, ever levitating real estate rental costs would raise the cost of mounting a show.
2 More detail from the NBER paper:
In recent years, de minimis imports have exploded, fueled by streamlined customs processing, high tariffs, and an emergent type of international trade that ships directly to consumers purchasing through online retail platforms. For such transactions, online orders bypass domestic warehousing and are shipped directly to consumers (often referred to as “direct-to-consumer” or “drop ship” shipments).
To get a sense of de minimis’ rising importance, in 2023, these imports totaled $54.5 billion over 1 billion shipments, up from just $0.05 billion over 110 million shipments in 2012. When compared against relevant benchmarks, in 2023 de minimis imports were 7.3% of U.S. imports of consumer goods and 4.9% of E-commerce sales, a substantial increase from just 0.7% and 1.0%, respectively, from before the trade war.
De minimis is an integral logistics strategy of some of the world’s largest and fastest-growing retailers, such as Shein and Temu, that ship directly to consumers. Five legislative proposals to pare back §321 were recently introduced in Congress, and in September 2024 an Executive Order was issued to rescind the de minimis exemption on shipments containing products subject to 2018-19 tariffs.
The growth of low-value shipments and related policy concerns are a global phenomenon….
Who benefits from direct-to-consumer and de minimis trade? What are the aggregate and
distributional welfare consequences of potential changes to §321 trade policy?.. We rely on a novel
dataset encompassing the universe of shipments into the U.S. handled by three global carriers.
The maker culture is a contemporary subculture representing a technology-based extension of DIY culture[1] that intersects with hardware-oriented parts of hacker culture and revels in the creation of new devices as well as tinkering with existing ones. The maker culture in general supports open-source hardware. Typical interests enjoyed by the maker culture include engineering-oriented pursuits such as electronics, robotics, 3-D printing, and the use of computer numeric control tools, as well as more traditional activities such as metalworking, woodworking, and, mainly, its predecessor, traditional arts and crafts.
The subculture stresses a cut-and-paste approach to standardized hobbyist technologies, and encourages cookbook re-use of designs published on websites and maker-oriented publications.[2][3] There is a strong focus on using and learning practical skills and applying them to reference designs.[4] There is also growing work on equity and the maker culture.
I assume there is a profit, if modest, or at least cost recovery objective since Wikipedia reports on “maker faires” and participants can sell or license their works for payment.
4 Specifically: Cambodia 49%, Laos,48, %Vietnam 46%, Myanmar 44%, Thailand 36%, Indonesia 32%, Brunei and Malaysia 24%, the Philippines 17% and Singapore 10%
5 For instance:
Bounded Rationality
This is where the reputation of arbitrariness turns into a positive. Any nation suspected of wash knows fully well that they will also be targeted likewise. Individuals will always have an incentive to engage in such obfuscation, but the nations know that US administration will be looking at ∂import. Besides, the Chinese margins are thin.Washing the origin (just like money laundering) has significant costs. Money laundering works because the gain to the malefactor are immense (zero ability to spend to a 75-80% ability). Here, gains is minimal and the risk to the colluding nation is large. I cannot see this working.
ITD
If properly enforced a certificate of origin would sink that idea immediately. Shipping goods made in country A as being form country B only by rerouting is completely illegal. Good luck to the importer in the US who is taking an enormous risk. Plus the current administration will have to charge the same high tariffs from all countries in SEA thus destroying their economy completely. Any government in SEA that closes an eye to this will be hit very hard. You cannot play this on scale, it’s impossible. We do thousands of containers a year and no way you can risk such an illegal scheme.
6 Bloomberg, later in the linked story, repeated the Trump misrepresentation “his aides are having conversations with counterparts from China.” Global Times repeated (as in validated) social media rumors that Trump officials were making entreaties to China, but pointedly did not signal any change in China’s posture.
7 The Bangkok Post reports a remarkable amount of tap-dancing by the Prime Minister, such as admitting that no date for negotiations has yet been set (!!!), trying to claim that informal talks amount to secret negotiations (contradicting the Trump claim that he will be involved at least in the final contours of an agreement and is The Decider), that the agreement will ultimately be secret: “However, any secret collaboration cannot be disclosed as other countries which are in talks with the US will know and comparisons will be made and turmoil will follow,” she said.”
It is rather hard to see how there can be any secret collaboration given that no talks are actually taking place, just feelers. And Nikkei in a May 2 article argued that Southeast Asian countries don’t have much they can offer the US aside from LNG buys:
Asian economies are set to use imports of U.S. energy resources as leverage in negotiations with U.S. President Donald Trump to back down from his hefty “reciprocal” tariffs, but concessions in other areas like automobiles and agriculture could prove harder, observers say.
“Asian trading partners have been the most forthcoming in terms of doing the deals,” Scott Bessent, the U.S. Treasury Secretary and Trump’s chief tariff negotiator, said on Tuesday, singling out India, South Korea and Japan.
The U.S. announced in April that it would pause threatened tariffs for 90 days. With the exception of China, which has imposed retaliatory tariffs against the U.S. already, more than 100 countries and regions are rushing to negotiate in order to mitigate the possible fallout.
Negotiations have already begun with Vietnam, Japan, Indonesia, South Korea and India, and are set to increase in the coming weeks well ahead of the July 9 deadline.
Having said that, the PM is confident that the US and Thailand will reach an agreement before the 90 day pause on the 36% tariffs has been reached.
In reading this post, I was reminded of an article headline I saw the other day which gave me pause. It indicated that Trump’s tariffs are in a way America’s Brexit. Consider. Brexit and Trump’s tariffs are causing massive self-damage, both are being done with little or no pre-thought, both had no consideration to the direct and secondary effects on the economy, both had little preparations made to deal with the consequences as the deadline approached, etc. The UK was cutting itself off from the EU and Trump’s tariffs are having the effect of cutting off America from the rest of the world. I could go on but you get the idea. I do wonder if there are people in the Trump regime that saw Brexit being carried out years ago and thought to themselves that maybe that is what America needed – a sort of “Amexit” where America could stand aloof and all the other countries come begging to make their offerings for sanctions relief. I’m sure that there were a few in the British establishment that thought the same when Brexit was done.
In passing, listening to that Japanese leader’s speech it seems that there is a Japanese word for “Danegeld”.
This might be a very good analogy. I would only add that from the cheap seats observation post you are missing one really really big factor in this – Delusion or utter disassociation from the reality of life outside their own bubble. The people who floated Brexit honestly believed that more people loved being part of the EU than thought it was damaging their lives. They knew it was never going to pass, it was going to go away after the election. Clearly they were wrong.
It will become clearer as more time passes, but delusion seems to be fueling the tariffs and the lack of clear opposition to them here. As we know the Democrats honestly have no connection or understanding of more than half the citizens of the US and how angry they are over the trajectory of the country for the last probably fifty years. There are a whole lot of similar totally unconnected to reality delusions among the wealthy and powerful. It wasn’t just Trump that thought there would be a lot more bowing and scraping when these tariffs were raised. Many probably still think that the failure to do so is all for show. While some of it was the need to reassert dominance, they didn’t get that US policy and actions of those same last fifty years have been all to the benefit of a small group of people and left the country weak in multiple areas – including in ones they thought we were dominant in. And that other countries had been chafing under our stupid, arrogant and outright destructive big footing for long enough to really grow alternatives to dealing with us. But it is the weakness that they wrought in this country that will be the biggest shock to them. They honestly do not have a clue how much of the function of this country has been ‘outsourced’ for the benefit of a few.
Apparently Carville said the Dems should just sit tight and let Trump destroy himself–which he is so obviously doing–and they will win politically. That’s all they really care about.
So it will have to be other Republicans who stop this runaway train and it sounds like some are publicly starting to object and perhaps far more privately. This article talks about how the supply shock will hit home midsummer because it will take that long for the warehouses to empty.
https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-04-30-waiting-for-the-supply-shock/
As for Trump, how long before he starts calling an upset working class “deplorables”? Animal Farm was really Orwell’s best book.
TYPO “powering” thought
Fixing, thanks.
same PM mentioned US Treasuries of over $1Trillion dollars held by Japan. worth noting.
Yes but the wee problem is that selling them would drive the yen higher when Japanese officials already regard the yen as too high.
They don’t have to convert the proceeds to Yen, they could buy gold, etc. Also the Yen is overly weak, food inflation is more than 7% year over year (Japan imports 60% of its food supply) with fresh food prices having risen more than 70% since 2010. On top of that, Japanese people can’t even afford to travel domestically. I live in Osaka and right now it’s Golden Week i.e. peak travel time for Japanese people other than the Obon festival, but seems to me it’s basically foreigners doing all the fun things, with citizens delegated to playing second fiddle.
IMHO, selling 1 trillion dollars in Treasuries amounts to an empty threat, because the Fed would step up to the plate and absorb the whole thing as part of QE Infinity.
*Sign*
If they sell Treasuries, they are selling dollars. That makes the yen higher relative to dollars. There is no way around that.
Putting aside the very dubious legality of his tariffs, and my real question is other than the self-serving nonsense that comes out of his mouth which doesn’t comport with reality, if trade deals were in the offing we would know. There are so many reporters covering this the odds of keeping negotiations quiet is functionally zero. Also, given his extreme need for adulation, they would be publishing pictures of people at negotiating tables bending the knee to him.
There is no plan! As Yves blogged, the complacency is overwhelming. If/when we start to have real problems one has to hope they can stop the tailspin when it starts. If will be swift and painful.
My BFF moved to Japan 30 years ago and is so Nipponised that he’s very senior at Tokyo uni and in an area of expertise that encompasses international relations. That Japanese reaction was akin to a Pearl Harbour mk 2. Everyone was astonished.
BTW Japan is not posturing. Plus they even have a Chinese-Japanese electric vehicle hitting markets any day which is a major step forward beyond existing ones. US tariffs don’t scare them at all regarding this car. They’re using special Toyota war chest to loss-lead on it.
I don’t doubt it (re not posturing). I should have added that this degree of blunt disapproval is way way way outside the normal Japanese communications register, as in they must be off the charts outraged.
Thanks. I wonder if whatever faction(s) of the LDP are helping Toyota keep its stash away from prying eyes has factored in broader effects on the Yen. I’ve tried to do some homework on this Sino-Nippon tie up; even if it’s Japanese car know-how but Sino production at high scale, coupled with third party trade I can’t see how it ultimately counters your point that Japan gets pieces of paper that if sold will push up the Yen against some of its major trading partners.
Though my friend said there’s a real sense of fatality in Japan these days anyway. We’ve all read about the young men who’ve given up. The LDP is doing nothing notable to address their population crisis; at least during the first two lost decades they tried actively to do *something*. Now they give off vibes along the lines of “we’ll go out largely quietly but with an example of what made us great”.
Most of their (being re-activated) nuclear power plants and (perhaps more worryingly spent fuel reserves) were all placed near sea-level (useful for the water needed) in prefectures that (inevitably) were LDP held BUT were held by weaker LDP factions who didn’t have enough NIMBY power. What are the Japanese doing to move these plants upriver to avoid further Fukushimas? Precisely nothing. They are just pretending nothing is wrong since they’re paralysed with fear.
My friend’s son is billingual (Japanese mother) and I wonder if my BFF wants him to move to somewhere in the west that is not currently destroying itself in near future. Good luck on that score! Maybe he should have learnt Mandarin not English…..
Trump wakes up everyday thinking that he is playing no limit poker with house money. He is basically going “all in” all the time with the American people because he knows muppets have no cards to play. Say what you want, at least Trump is never boring. Either way, there will some changes coming out of this. Now I am thinking AOC should step up to the plate and start wearing a white gown with the words “Impeach Orange Julius!!” every day, but no, tariffs or no tariffs we don’t even get that show. How disappointing.
#TrumpChangeYouCanBelieveIn
LOL. At first glance I saw #ChumpChangeYouCanBelieveIn
there will be damage done to trade relations with the Japanese and other Pacific rim countries. Where will blowbacks, retaliation happen. the PNW grows and exports 80% of the class of wheat known as soft white used for noodles mostly and confections, non-rising baked goods. the Japanese buy or tender on a weekly basis as do other importers. this is food mind you, not dolls or screens and there are alternatives to buying from the US, but these markets have taken all of post WW2 to develop. Wheat is already cheap, will buyers discount for imposed tariffs, yes. Will gov’t buying agencies shop somewhere else (read Australia), yes. the states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho will suffer greatly from the stupidity of all this as will their farmers. Republican pols are mostly silent, democrats feeble. Commodity commissions are taking a FAFO attitude when they need to be screaming at the top of their lungs! Potatoes, Apples, Hops, Cherries, Beef, Wheat…are all at risk, thousands of jobs, farms, and businesses. Dumb and dumber!
I wonder if there is an idea in the Trump regime to get farmers to forgo the whole idea of export crops and concentrate on crops consumed at home. They would see this as a way of lowering food prices at home and make themselves popular. But for farmers it must be hell trying to plan just what to plant in the coming seasons.
“an idea in the Trump regime” – Rev, you can’t be serious. There’s only one idea, keep rolling out the nonsense plans to remake late 19th century America. I would seriously not be surprised to see an executive order abolishing the Federal Reserve. Checks and balances seem dead, so why not?
Abolish the Federal Reserve? Would that be such a bad idea? The fact that it was created on 23rd December by Woodrow Wilson should say something. Cut the banks out entirely and have only the Federal government have these responsibilities. After all, ‘the Federal Reserve Banks are set up like private corporations. Member banks hold stock in the Federal Reserve Banks and earn dividends’ Only trouble is that any new actual Federal Reserve would be treated by both the Dems and Repubs as their new play toy.
I should note too that the Federal Reserve was created ‘after a series of financial panics led to the desire for central control of the monetary system in order to alleviate financial crises.’ But only 13 years after their creation you had the Great Depression so maybe they weren’t really good at their jobs. :)
Too many rich guys work there to be seen as illegitimate. It’s a playground to gain a fancy title much like coursus honorum.
The issues on the domestic side is largely about what they view as legitimate. Except for the “independence,” the Federal Reserve is safe.
I am becoming more and more convinced that Trump doesn’t even know what tariffs are. It seems like he believes a tariff is a magic spell that forces foreign countries to give your country money.
There are some remarkable details in this post. Thanks.
First, “Of course, Trump and his ilk would never consider what neoliberalism has done to fiction publishing and the theater in the US, and that the endless milking of action franchises has turned off a lot of once-loyal movie viewers.”
One reason publishing has trouble with midlist and older books was that publishers lost a case on valuation of inventory. I cannot (using DuckDuckGo) find the name of the case. The result is that publishers just don’t keep books around as much as they used to. The second problem is the blockbuster mentality, which goes back to the 1990s. This mentality affects books and films.
From a longer article that I researched: “It used to be that the first book earned a modest advance, then you would build an audience over time and break even on the third or fourth book,” Morgan Entrekin, the publisher of Grove/Atlantic, told The New York Times. “Now the first book is expected to land a huge advance and huge sales…. Now we see a novelist selling 9,000 hardcovers and 15,000 paperbacks, and they see themselves as a failure (Bureau of Labor Statistics).”
That idea of nurturing careers is over. Obviously, it had drawbacks, when publishers took time to develop the careers of snoozy types like John Updike. Now, though, plenty of people think that they are busting into publishing and tearing down the patriarchy — but it turns out that there is no there there.
The result is that many writers simply no longer have a career in books or theater. We won’t even mention musicians! There are lots of instant successes from the latest (uniform) products of MFA programs. Then those writers / playwrights / filmmakers go on to teach in the world-renowed MFA program at Northern South Dakota University, Blueberry Muffin Campus. So there is endless churning.
The long-needed and well-deserved strikes by the Writers Guild and Sag-Aftra against the Hollywood establishment and its skeezy practices have had downstream effects: Stagnation. Don’t call your agent. Or: Do call your agent to find out if he has been laid off.
Second, for those of you who enjoy a good footnote, and who doesn’t have a footnote fetish?, endnote 1 gives more details worth considering about books, film, and theater — in short, the current disaster that passes for U.S. culture. And I won’t mention woke pretentiousness as a factor. Or self-censorship. Or being a painter — and having to deal with the general mess that is the world of art galleries.
And speaking of one’s foot:
Third, footwear! Wowsers. Let’s follow footwear as a symptom. Are any shoes still made in the U S of A? When I lived in Chicago, I used to buy Redwing Boots, which aren’t cheap but are built to last and made in the US of A. That’s it, so far as I know for U.S. shoe production. I also bought other traditional men’s brands — only to find Made in China / Made in India inside.
Fourth: That video of Japanese politico Shinji Oguma is a must. The Japanese don’t only speak in haiku, eh?
I’m off to work on a libretto for an opera. (That’s how I’ll earn the euros for that snazzy villa in Tuscany-landia, ne.)
I think technology has a lot more to do with changes in the movie industry and likely true of publishing as well. Digital has broken former business models while enhancing those–i.e. Marvel movies–which are little more than technological spectacles plus banter to give the actors something to do.
The other day I checked out a coffee table book that brought back what one would once find in our now disappeared Barnes and Noble–good reproductions printed on quality coated paper. On the back it said Made in China.
I think New Balance still makes its shoes in the U.S. I have fond memories of my Redwing steel toed loggers that outlasted my body’s ability to do heavy work. I have no idea where they’re made now.
As for film entertainment, I watch very little made in America any more. Since Covid I avoid crowded indoor spaces so I stream and have a dvd collection. There are several inexpensive platforms that specialize in non-U.S. fare: MHz (primarily continental Europe), Acorn TV and BritBox (primarily from U.K. and other Anglophone countries) and a number of others. Kanopy, free to library card holders in some areas, has a great deal of content from all over the world. I don’t know if and how tariffs might be applied to foreign productions available online.
Handmade workboots:
https://whitesboots.com/
Back when I was working in the woods… high school and college… a hand made pair of White’s Smokejumper boots was the bomb. If you were on a fire crew having a pair of White’s was a big deal. I still have mine ~45 years later.
Best foot gear I have ever owned. Have had them resoled twice.
It’s definitely Hollywood that’s killing Hollywood. They’re just making a lot of bad, overpriced movies.
And Americans don’t even watch foreign films that much, I think they’re like 1% of the domestic box office.
Partly that. I said in a comment that you ignore what Trump says but what he does. In the election last year Hollywood really went after him so you would think that he would burn them to the ground. Not so. Instead he wants to make Hollywood Great Again and kill any opposition. That is a deep state policy which for many decades has sought to kill film production in other countries leaving only American ones on offer to spread their messages. Maybe the idea is to return to those glory days. But as you pointed out, modern Hollywood films – and actors – are overpriced junk but still keep on getting churned out no matter how many hundreds of billions that they might lose. I believe that most films are done overseas because of the sky high prices in Hollywood and Canada even would be out (where the Stargate TV series was filmed for example). And I don’t think that Chinese investors will be putting any more money into American films. It’s going to be a train wreck.
What Afro is saying rings true to me: very little foreign production makes it to the USA — very often, movies have to be “remade” (with North American actors and scenario revisions) to be distributed there (and this has been the case since the 1930s!)
The fact is that for several decades now cinematographies from other countries have been slowly supplanting Hollywood in the rest of the world: Bollywood superproductions, Brazilian telenovelas and their Turkish equivalents, and now Chinese movies or South Korean series. Of course, this all takes place in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and partly Europe, so it is invisible from the USA.
Not so much MAGA as NMH – Not Made Here.
Overseas and increasingly in Georgia and New Mexico. Presumably tax incentives and other bennies have a lot to do with this.
The tariffs could actually turn the industry away from the comic book remake after remake cycle. It was dependent on overseas box office.
So there will be struggles with companies used to having and covering more overhead, but I’m not going to say it won’t get interesting creatively.
“Mr. Trump”
Is it normal for Japanese MPs to refer to the US President as mister?
Hey, it’s challenging to tackle the twin budget and trade deficits while retaining the strong USD and reserve currency status without the point one per cent slowing down their wealth accumulation.
On a more serious note, at least a few republican representatives have said they will vote to remove the emergency provisions that our president exploits to usurp the tariff authority given to congress by the constitution. One can hope, that hasn’t been tariffed (yet).
Oh, the US movie industry is dying? What about trying to create something new for a change?
I’m really no expert for the movie industry, but… 86 years, 78 years, 69 years, in an industrial sector undergoing major technological changes.
Well done, Mr. Trump. A most impressive selection of talent.