Stocks plunge as investors brace for trade-war escalation after Trump said China 'broke the deal'

o force manufacturers producing in China and selling to the US which is their major market the hell out of there to other low wage nations to produce so they do not have to deal with increased production cost of incorpoarating the tariff in their product and making them less competitive.

The idea is to bring manufacturing back to the USA. Any other plan, is more traitor BS.

Good sentiment which I agree with but sorry not gonna work when widgets can be made for half the cost in Asia than the US. If you think that widgets made here can compete against the cost of others made in low wage countries, my suggestion is we invest in the US company and see how long it takes us to lose our investment when they go broke. That is the simple reality. Our immediate objective is to get tech thieving, unfair trading enemy/competitor China to implode and getting manufacturers to friendly nations that won’t steal our technology and that will allow them to sell into their markets as well as ours is the best we can do right now.

I was being conservative. Probably less than half. The average manufacturing wage in US is $15, in Mexico $1.50, in India a buck, Cambodia less than a buck, although the cost of material which are the major cost in product manufacture may not be as disparate worldwide as the labor cost We need not debate this as you seem to be pretty hot on the issue and would rather have the facts align with your opinion rather than the other way around. You may want to google it and discuss it with some other subscriber rather than get into angry opinion discussion with me which I try to avoid on this board as I am more fact oriented.

Chuckee you have to look a the PER UNIT COST not the hourly wage. For for most durable goods labor is around 10% of the retail price.

Take autos. It take around 30 man hours to make 1 car. If you double wages it does not double the price of the car. Get it?

The labor per iPhone is $16.00USD. If made in America and you paid 10x the cost of labor the labor per phone would be $160.00. So a $800.00 phone would be $960. Take away lower energy and transpiration costs higher productivity of US workers and the $160 margin is reduced drastically.

Good points. Transport costs, particularly from Asia and materials cost, ratchet up cost per unit so that there does reach a point where a tariff we may impose on a particular country like China has a tipping point level for certain products depending in the labor/materials ratio cost to manufacture that it becomes more advantageous for that manufacturer selling in the US market to make it here. And yes I was not saying all manufacturers would flee to other Asian countries.We would have a good chance of relocating back here those that are with a product that is not as labor intensive and selling almost exclusively into the US market which would be good. Others, however that have labor intensive products that sell globally as well as the US depending on the mix might find it makes better business sense to move to another Asian country to avoid the US tariff. I see iPhone has established a plant in India for their higher end products. If Trump extends the tariff to iPhones, would not be surprised if they moved iPhone manufacture to India where they would actually have a chance of capturing some of the 1.3 billion India market and no chance vs Huawei of increasing Chinese market share which is miniscule as well as perhaps opening a plant in the US to sell into our markets.That would not be perfect but better than having them made in enemy China.

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