Posted on 08/19/2019 6:55:54 AM PDT by Thalean
CNN reports that President Trump’s aides persuaded him to delay the imposition of the latest round of protective tariffs, previously scheduled for September, until December 15, 2019. How? They claimed new tariffs would “ruin Christmas.”
Peter Navarro, Trump’s director of trade and manufacturing policy, defended the move saying that this was Trump’s, “Christmas present to the nation.”
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Not only would tariffs not perceptibly increase the price of toys, this schizophrenic shift in policy empowers the president’s political adversaries and enriches greedy multinational corporations and China.
It is fairly obvious to anyone who has worked in retail—or who shops at big box stores—that Christmas inventory arrives months before Christmas, and thus ships from China even earlier. CFC, a China-based shipping agent, notes that China’s peak export season is from July to September. Naturally, that’s when products typically ship to America for Christmas.
us open around the sun chadha usually mrs yes the thing is it the moon's orbit 00:00 As such, President Trump’s September tariffs would have had little to no impact on shoppers this Christmas—assuming that greedy toymakers didn’t jack up the price of toys and use tariffs as an excuse!
(Excerpt) Read more at amgreatness.com ...
Christmas merchandise is and has been delivered usually by July....................
I get the feeling that CNN is trying to make two points:
1) Trump is a bad man for imposing Tariffs.
2) Even worse, Trump is not imposing them fast enough
I think there is some cognitive dissonance there.
If nothing else, President Trump is a master negotiator. And this is an arm twisting exercise.
I will trust his judgement.
The Trump administration will begin withdrawing from a United Nations treaty that offered low rates for foreign postal deliveries of small packages in the US – the latest move to challenge practices it sees as unfairly advantageous to China.
White House officials said on Wednesday the US would start the process of leaving the Universal Postal Union (UPU), a Switzerland-based organisation that connects postal services worldwide.
The White House said the UPU enabled foreign postal services to take advantage of cheap shipments to the US, creating an unfair cost advantage over US companies that shipped goods, and hurting the US Postal Service.
One senior White House said the treaty’s “subsidy” had facilitated the transfer of a high level of counterfeit goods and the narcotic and fentanyl trade.
Another official said the system allowed for a 40% to 70% discount on small packages arriving in the United States from China compared with what it would cost to send them domestically, costing $300m. The official described it as an economic distortion that the administration wanted to correct.
Order signed on 10/17/18...takes a year to withdraw from the Postal Union
10/17/19...JUST IN TIME FOR CHRISTMAS.....Happy Christmass CHICOMS.
But according to the letter by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to the UPU leadership, the U.S. government “denounces” the organization's Constitution, and the American withdrawal will become effective one year from the date of the letter.
Like hell most product is here by July. Most contacts are signed by July. To mitigate currency risk those contracts are signed as Dollar contracts and hedged out in currency futures markets. Are contracts FOB(Origin) or CIF(Delivered to US)? CIF because again less risk. When do you pay? When it lands. Trump is merely not adding the tariff to stuff already contracted for, letters of credit issued and the intermediaries hedging out all the currency/contract performance risks. (Currency futures contracts, certified load inspections, insurance, etc.) He just is allowing contracts to execute and no one to take it in the proverbial shorts. Export/Import companies would have been destroyed by this.
I know of what I speak. I traded goods internationally in a previous life. I was the Importer/Exporter. Margins are razor thin but the $ total of trades can be immense and so the profits can be big. 1.5% on a $100M contract is nothing to sneeze at.
Yup. Then again, most people are clueless about business, economics, accounting, supply chain, common sense...
Trump knows what he is doing.
He is fine tuning the tariffs for negotiation purposes and to make sure he doesn’t damage our economy.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.