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Trade War, Act 17


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Frankly these last posts were fishy to the brim.

 

Perhaps a stream of madness has hooked this thread. Such things happen once in a whale.

 

I hate to carp, but consider this-

 

Are you feeling eel?

Perhaps crabby?

Do you need kelp?

Have you haddock with your spouse?

Or are you just trying to bait me?

 

If be the latter, I will steadfishly refrain from any paronomastic response.

 

Remember, when you fish upon a star, all your breams can come true. B)

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machinehead,

 

You should've warned me to grab the excedrin and visine before reading those tariff schedules. All I can say is wow! Thanks for the link. It always helps to understand things better when you can look at the numbers and trace through their effects.

 

Regarding the US-China trade balance, the people I talked to in the garment district explicitly mentioned that China can import the fabrics without paying the tariffs which compounds the cost differences. There's an advantage to return-on-investment, and therefore capital costs. The tariffs are mostly on a weight basis, not a piece basis, so in the US you pay the tax on the left over fragments. I suspect the steel users have a comparabale cost--even if they get money for recycling the materials, it has to be lower than the cost paid for the scrap. (Although seeing these tariff schedules, it wouldn't surprise me if that weren't true, and a quota had to be put in plae to fix it.) I haven't looked at all the numbers, but they claim a lot of it depends on where the raw materials come from (England, India, New Zealand, etc.). They mentioned one other advantage which I forget. There are also differences in how the specific businesses operate in things like liquidating or marking down outdated merchandise, but those things seem too industry specific to bother with now or here.

 

One last point we discussed was that the level of technology is a big factor in that different garments require different levels of technology, not only in a competitive sense, but somewhat in an absolute sense. One of the most compilcated things to do with little technology is dress shirts, and I haven't seen many of those made in China. Still, clothes from low tech countries used to be poorly made, but the quality of clothing from China has vastly improved lately. Reminds me of cars in the 1970s.

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How ironic. I was just thinking about a couch and chair I bought from trendy place about 5 years ago. It needs to be reupholstered but the costs of materials and labour will end up costing me twice what I paid for it. It was probably made in Mexico. I figured it involved some weird tariff problem.

 

Alceringa. Funny...I'm down to rock fish and cichlids, and I'll be darned if I can do anything with that. So you win the stoolie fish pun event. You dirty rotten bass turd! :grin:

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Alceringa, Fish stories have become your sole focus, it appears. Rather than floundering about on the principals of the issue, you have provided us a story of epic scale to ponder. Thank you for the catfish story, and Cod bless.

Reading that just gave me a haddock.

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