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Notes -
Happy tariffs eve, to those who celebrate.
With by all accounts the tariffs against Mexico and Canada going into action tomorrow, actually for real maybe probably this time, let's have a slice of cake and blow some party horns. This is quite a significant change of political fortunes - symbolically at least, and one would presume economically too, depending on how quickly the reshufflings happen or if this actually goes through at all. Since the 1880s, and more definitely since the 1980s, the world and its various regional economic blocs have moved towards the free trade of goods and services between nations. It has not been uniform or without reverses, but the trend has been unmistakable.
Often I like to wonder how a given event might be thought of 100 or 1000 years from now - will some future textbook see this as the high water mark of globalism, some point in the line of history that is forever after viewed with special significance? As much as people have claimed Donald Trump has been hindered by the Deep State, they seem to be slow to react to him ripping up one of the signature features of American hegemony (something he himself has contributed to, given that it's his free trade deal that is essentially being dissolved).
At the very least this is all going to be fascinating - one of the ironclad, universally agreed-upon tenets of a social science being put to the test. Markets have not reacted well so far, but that's as much a feature of groupthink as it is reflective of material reality. It's a good time to be a prospective PhD in Economics. You're about to have more than you could have ever hoped to work with.
So, have a Happy New Era. If this is actually happening, which I'm sure a lot of people are still unsure about (certainly I am). See you on the other side.
Do they have any reason to? Honest question.
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This is like firing up the Large Hadron Collider for the first time for macro-economists right?
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Speaking as a Canadian, we are so, so boned. Things were already looking bad for us economically, with poor productivity, insane housing bubble, and crumbling infrastructure while debt keeps piling up. I keep hearing from my fellow citizens that we are going to need to diversify our trading partners and I really can’t believe they can be so insane. Like, you thinks it’s gonna be easy to freight our goods across the second largest country in the world, to get it across an ocean? And the buyer won’t even have dollars to trade us for it?
So boned
Canada is so easily fixable.
Step 1) Elect non-retarded government
Step 2) Immigration moratorium. Evict the temporary residents who gamed the student visa system.
Step 3) Deregulate economy
Step 4) Let capitalism do the rest.
Canada's advantages are numerous. High IQ population. Low population density. Immense natural resources. All Canadians have to do is get out of their own way, and the future is going to be great.
Unironically, the biggest threat to Canada is Trump. Not because of anything he will do. But because of the allergic reaction he provokes that causes Canadians to self-own and double down on socialism and open borders. Sadly, this is the final boss that most Canadians can never defeat.
As a Canadian, the first step is impossible. We're under the permanent rule of theater-kid occupied government: all optics, no substance.
Damn. I just checked the polls and Trump is killing Poilievre's chances. I'm sorry for the collateral damage.
Any chance to move to the US? It's nice here.
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On the plus side container export to China is incredibly cheap. Shanghai to LA is like $4000, the reverse is $700. If you guys have the port capacity, there's a huge market out west in the far east.
Not sure about bulk rates tbh, and a lot of Canadian exports are bulk iirc.
It's cheap because there's no market there.
There is for raw materials, which is what Canada exports.
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If we can manage to elect somebody who's not a total moron (so yeah, probably boned) I think it can be OK -- the current sabre rattling (pocket-knife rattling?) is exclusively to play to domestic morons for a sugar rush in the polls. The political is very very personal for Trump, and since he & Trudeau already hate each other deeply there was never going to be any rapprochement until he's gone -- the upside is that there is an opportunity there for the new guy to, um, build back better?
I do hope that during the campaign somebody will be able to convincingly point out that adding to the burden of American tariffs on our producers' exports with an additional domestic tariff burden on a big chunk of their input costs is the most retarded idea I've ever heard -- are we really that dumb?
Canada has no culture...except when Americans say it. Nationalism is finally a thing again and it must get its due.
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You already know the answer to that question.
You also already know the election's going to come down to being a referendum on who wants to prosecute the war; that is, in part, why the Reform party (in blue) doesn't have much room to campaign while the Conservative party (in red) is going full bore on the war- the Red party will attempt to get voted in before their idiotic policies really start taking their toll, because by then it'll be too late to do anything.
The tariffs are a liability for the Red party (no matter what they do, they lose), but abandoning the last 6 months of agitating for non-confidence votes only to suddenly slam on the brakes for political expedience is a huge liability for the Blue party. All that remains to be seen is if the Red party calls an election immediately, or tries to force the Blue party to vote for a non-confidence vote (and the pattern of constantly doing that only to not do that now is itself a liability).
They've got their sugar rush, I think they will go for it -- I do think there's some Kamala effect going on here at the moment and they will still lose, but I guess wrecking the country to avert a landslide is what these fuckers would consider a win.
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I've been reading Richard Gwyn's two-part biography of Sir John A recently and it's interesting to see how many direct parallels there are. Confederation was essentially premised on economic rationales in order for the British North American colonies to be able to compete against American tariffs, and much of the post-Confederation work of Macdonald was to try and cobble together a semblance of national identity and acquire the rest of British North America as a way to forestall American annexation. We've been in tough times before. The problem is I don't know if there's any politician of that caliber around today. The people who would be that kind of leader generally aren't in politics to begin with.
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Looks like trade with the US is ~20% of Canadas GDP. Imports are also sizeable. This will not end well for Canada - my sincere apologies from the US. I honestly wonder what Trump is after.
It's all so petty. Trump wants Trudeau to bend the knee. Trudeau sees #resist as a strategy to improve his own popularity, and if average Canadians get fucked all the better. That's been his MO from day one.
In the end, we have two vain leaders peacocking for their respective audiences.
Trudeau already negotiated a deal with Trump last time around.
And then Trump shows back up treating Trudeau as a domestic partisan enemy because ??
Like, I don't think this is a "both sides" thing: Trudeau/the Liberals would probably love to head this off again but nobody is sure what's going on with Trump (who chose to be obnoxious even by Trump standards) which cause a backlash within the population any leader would have to be wary about meeting head on.
Like, the perception of hesitation alone has caused the only blip in what should otherwise have been a cakewalk for the CPC into power.
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Increasingly, personal vanity seems to be the explanation that makes the most sense for most of what Trump is doing. After decades of the left talking about the "American Empire," Trump is embracing that view and demanding fealty from his vassals.
Fealty would make more sense. It seems that a lot of this is driven by basically projecting domestic cultural battles and petty resentments out into international politics.
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Obligatory "anschluss", but Southern Ontario is still more industrialized than the US North East is with a government more sympathetic to natural resource development than the Blue states that it supplies with energy.
And it'll effectively be a 50% tariff if the Canadian government decides to "retaliate" (less cutting off its nose to spite the face, and more cutting off its head to spite the rest of its body): 25% on the way down for the raw resources, and 25% on finished goods on the way back.
The Federal government has already abdicated. This country is post-national- the Provinces are conducting the foreign policy now.
Why stop at two tariff payments on the same materials? Raw aluminum goes to the States ( about $15B), then aluminum products come back to Canada ($4B), I'm sure some of that gets put into manufactured goods for the States, and...
I heard that it's much worse for the automobile industry, with semi-finished parts hopping back and forth several times.
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What odds do you place on this causing local depressions or a global recession?
I’d go for at least single digit.
The fed's already changed US Q1 growth forecasts from 2% to -3%: https://www.atlantafed.org/cqer/research/gdpnow
No. They did not update their forecasts by 5% because of today's news, and this is not an official forecast.
It isn't a forecast at all - it is a nowcast. It is the Fed's best estimate of what is happening right now, but won't be officially reported until Q1 GDP comes out at the end of April (provisionally) and late June (as a final official number). The numbers are annualised quarterly numbers, so a 5 percentage point shift in growth means that (if the nowcast is correct) the economy is, right now, 1 1/4% smaller than predicted.
DOGE has fired about 35,000 people so far who won't have new jobs yet. In addition, about 75,000 workers are on the payroll but not working because they took the 8-month buyout, and 10,000 are locked out at USAID. That means 120,000 former government employees are no longer contributing to GDP. There are 133 million full-time workers in the US, so ~0.1 percentage points of the 1.2 point drop is due to government cuts.
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Trump's core appeal was an improved economy, particularly comparisons between the 2016-2020 economy and the 2021-2024 economy. Not that he has to run for re-election, but if he tanks the economy chasing tariffs, he might end up disgraced even among those who voted for him.
Negative partisans will still hate him less than Democrats, and his core will still love him, but he has a chance at destroying the future of his movement. It was already looking shaky whether MAGA could outlive Trump.
The US could easily crush Canada or Mexico in a trade war. It would do fine against the EU or China. It’s suicide to attempt all at once! The bargaining position of the US isn’t going to be better after a year of tariffs with neighbors that hate us and -10% gdp growth.
Fucking up the economy has got to be the one way to get congress to step up.
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For the life of me I don't understand why the Fed started cutting way before it was clear they got the job done.
The worse sin was the Fed not raising in 2021. But, sadly, I think the Fed is in the bag for one party.
I don't think it's so much that (The Fed did keep rates low in Trump's first term, after all.) as a bias toward "low rates good", belief that inflation was "transitory" and would correct itself more quickly than it did (Strictly speaking, it was, in the sense that inflation in the late 40s was also transitory.), and fear that raising rates would slow down the economy more than it did (Volker's rate hikes made for a nasty recession in the early 80s.). There's also the inconvenient problem that high rates are bad for the government's balance sheet.
Trump actually bullied Powell into that, IIRC.
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