We may not see increase in prices. We may see decreases.
Trump’s plan has always been to just get everyone to drop their tariffs against us, to get to a true free trade situation with no subsidy of others by America.
Vietnam, India, Israel have all dropped their tariffs against us and possible Canada. More will do that once actual tariffs go into effect but not before, which is why we must actually implement them for real (not just the threat of).
Things are working out just as Trump planned, while the media around the world tries to scare everyone.
The words that aren't being said:
The United States needs a drastic revitalization of manufacturing talent and knowledge. Unfortunately, in order to get these jobs stateside, we need to rip off a few band-aids. Some of that are these reciprocal tariffs. While this may produce a bit of pain, the improvement of manufacturing knowledge for millenials and zoomers is necessary to keep the US relevant, especially as technology like Tesla's Optimus becomes ubiquitous throughout the world. It will be rather trivial in 10 years to produce a humanoid robot, while right now it is seen as nigh impossible (but there are many companies working on this, and making great headway). So, with the cheapest available labor, manufacturing should become hyperlocal, thus if we don't know how to do certain things here in the US, it will have drastic consequences as the robots (non-US made) will fill in and supplement existing manufacturing facilities abroad. Tesla will be making millions upon millions of humanoid robots before 2030. This is a certainty, not a possibility. This is a good thing for the US, so the next time some retard tells you Tesla is bad, do yourself a favor and find out which company makes the cars with the most US-sourced parts. The same will be true for their Optimus robots. They will be a HUGE competitive advantage for the United States.
Regarding price decreases:
If energy prices fall dramatically, which they likely will, that will bring down prices in a big way. The cost to transport something is large portion of the bottomline cost.
Also, I think we're about to see the USD rally extremely hard versus other local currencies, and the death of most fiat currencies. The US is a gigantic consumer economy, and producer countries often employ a strategy of weakening their own currency to ensure their producers stay competitive vs other producer countries in the market of selling products to our consumer economy. That's obviously a complicated thing to explain, but this tariff action starts to make all of them much less competitive than they have been, and incentivizes US-based production. If a country starts to export substantially less than they were previously...
Overall, this needed to be done. Yes, there will be consequences, but we will find out a way to navigate things, just like we did during COVID when paper mills started converting to board manufacturing.
