The World In Which We Live: Ongoing Trade War Edition

It wasn't supposed to last this long. Or so it was thought.

"Trade wars are good and easy to win!" the tweet read. I'm not seeing much good and no one appears to be having fun.

I suppose a trade war is good when you have no skin in the game, ie your living expenses are covered by taxpayer dollars and you know how to write down losses, but for those of us on the ground in this trade war, real pain is being inflicted. Ask the farmer who is losing money (although in a bit of welfare, there are subsidies being discussed). Ask the customer paying more and more for the same items. Ask the business owner paying more for said items and passing that cost on to the customer you just spoke to.

The current trade war is the economic equivalent of the second Iraq War: a war of choice, led by amateurs. Sure, US-based intellectual property is being stolen, but the companies whose IP is being stolen are multinational corporations who operate in China willingly. I'm yet to meet an independent software developer whose IP is being stolen, and if I did, I"m certain there wouldn't be a trade war to protect it and pursue damages.

"Trump is repricing access to the American consumer," some say. That's a fair assessment, but at what cost? Will there be an easing of price once the dispute is settled and the tariffs lifted, or will prices remain the same because this went on so long that no one remembers a time when costs were 25% lower?

This is the world in which we live. Hedge accordingly.

Comments

Regarding Keeslyn

In January 2020, a young lady named Keeslyn Roberts disappeared from a fuel station near my home. The case remains unsolved. This post will examine the actions, and lack thereof, of those in authority, and how this contributes to the case remaining unsolved. But first, a little backstory. As a teen, I lived in the same neighborhood as the Roberts family. Keeslyn's father, Eric, is older than I, and I don't recall the two of us having much interaction. His sister, on the other hand, is the same age and we've been friends for over 40 years. It was she who told me about Keeslyn's disappearance and the family's frustrations with the lack of police action. To learn more of the specifics of the case, numerous podcasts and news stories are available online. To my understanding, the police reaction to the disappearance has thus far been little to no reaction. After no word from his daughter for several days, Eric went to the fuel station where her car was parked. He th...

Dark Planes Over The Cumberland

Part 1: Treetop Flyer In the immediate pre-Covid era, when my son was 4 and 5 years old, he played soccer (at 4) and T-ball (at 5) in our small rural town in Georgia. Both years, two prop-driven airplanes flew over the fields the team was practicing or playing on. The plain, painted dark and with no clear tail markings, didn’t appear to be commercial aircraft, nor did they fly at high altitude; at times they seemed to be just above the tree tops. Needless to say, all action on the field stopped as the children and parents stopped in wonder to watch them fly by. Around this same time, a controlled substance arrest took place in an equally rural county across the state line in Alabama. Among the usual contraband of substances and paraphernalia was found a small amount of heroin. That last detail caught my eye as the area in which the arrests took place is even more rural than my own. When I lived in Sydney, heroin was a fact of life in the port city and was said to be quite easy to...

How To Beat A Billionaire - Updated

If you've spent any time at all on this site, you will have noticed I have an interest in investing. I had no interest in finance until my mid-40s, when I took a job at a printing company in which one of the partners is a CPA. I learned personal finance the hard way, struggling with credit card debt in my early 20s (it was the 90s; I blame the guitar and camera stores). After digging myself out of the hole I was in by age 27, I was cautious to avoid debt anytime I could. Investing, aside from employer retirement plans, was not on my radar. Fatherhood really spurred me into action when it came to investing. There's simply no way a savings account can outpace inflation; if you want to thrive financially, investing is the best way to get ahead. So, with encouragement from my boss, I began to study and learn. Investopedia and The Balance proved to be immensely helpful. In time, I opened an account and started buying exchange traded funds (ETFs) and was on my way. I read a few...

www.markholder.org

Search This Blog