Critics of Trump’s hefty tariffs on China frequently treat them as radical measures far outside the norms of global trade. However, Trump is not the only one slapping anti-dumping tariffs on China. The EU has also imposed heavy duties on some types of Chinese exports.
The European Commission said on Monday it had imposed duties of up to 66.7 percent on imports of Chinese machines that lift construction workers after concluding that the producers were benefiting from unfair subsidies and selling at artificially low prices.
These include boom lifts (AKA cherry pickers) and scissor lifts.
The extra duties on Chinese mobile access equipment (MAE) will range from 20.6 percent to 66.7 percent, the Commission said, as it sought to protect domestic producers in the EU market worth more than 1 billion euros [per] year.
The tariffs are the latest in a series of EU anti-dumping and anti-subsidy duties focused on Chinese imports, including a high-profile investigation into Chinese-built electric vehicles, which culminated last October.
The EU executive, which conducted the investigation, said Chinese MAE producers had benefited from preferential financing, grants, state provision of inputs at below-market rates.
The Commission said Chinese producers had gained a 41 percent market share in the year from October 2022, from 29 percent in 2020, and sold at prices some 20 percent below EU competitors.
The tariffs will apply to Chinese companies such as Hunan Sinoboom Intelligent Equipment, Zoomlion Intelligent Access Machinery and Zhejiang Dingli Machinery. EU MAE producers include French companies Haulotte and Manitou.
The European Union now has in place anti-dumping or anti-subsidy duties on almost 80 Chinese products from truck tyres to ironing boards.
Trump’s shock and awe approach has already drawn numerous nations to the negotiating table to lower or eliminate tariffs. There’s no guarantee that Trump’s tariffs will necessarily bring China to negotiate, though Trump is in a much stronger position than Xi Jingping, and there are already signs that China might cave. But clearly Trump isn’t the only one calling China on their unfair trade practices, and there seems to be fairly broad consensus in the west that the time of allowing China to unfairly dump products without consequences is at an end.
China’s foreign trade hit a record high in total value in 2024 as the world’s second-largest economy further consolidated its top position globally in goods trade.
The nation’s total goods imports and exports in yuan reached 43.85 trillion yuan (about 6.1 trillion U.S. dollars) last year, up 5 percent year on year, according to data released Monday by the General Administration of Customs (GAC).
Exports grew 7.1 percent year on year to 25.45 trillion yuan last year, while imports expanded 2.3 percent from one year earlier to 18.39 trillion yuan, the data showed.
I have my doubts.
We looked at the situation just under a year ago, and there hasn’t been any shortage of “China is doomed” videos (many from China Observer) depicting the effects of of deep recessions in many of China’s export sectors since then. Video after video shows closed factories, shuttered storefronts, and people complaining about a lack of jobs.
This one, from a year ago, talks about a drastic decline in Chinese exports:
Here’s a video on how Microsoft is just the latest western company to pull out of China entirely:
Or this video from early December, showing how supply chain companies in Guangzhou are failing from lack of business and vast rows of shops are now closed:
Nor have things improved this year. This video, from two months ago, of a businessman complaining that no one is buying industrial machinery because exports are way down:
Or this video of Shanghai from five days ago, talking about a 90% decline in foreign investment in China and how lots of shops in Shanghai are closing down.
Or another video from five days ago, of Yiwu International Trade City already reeling from Trump’s sanctions:
Somebody, somewhere is lying about the strength of China’s economy and the health of their export sector. Remember, there were already plenty signs of a slowing economy in China before Trump took office. Is China Observer overselling economic difficulties in China? Probably some. Gloom and doom is their stock in trade. You never get any “Everything in China is honky dory!” videos from them (with good reason). But I don’t think they’re making things up from whole cloth.
Everyone know China’s communist rulers manipulate economic figures to their advantage. There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence that they’re falsifying their export statistics to make things look better than they are. I rather strongly suspect that their hand in the trade war poker game they’re having with Trump is much weaker than they let on.
On Monday, Nvidia announced that it has started producing its Blackwell AI GPUs at TSMC’s plant in Phoenix, Arizona, while companies within the state package and test them.
TSMC, or Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., is the world’s biggest chipmaker and announced a $100 billion investment in US chipmaking last month. It began producing chips using the 4nm process at its Arizona factory in January and has plans to make chips with the more efficient 2nm technology by the end of the decade.
Nvidia doesn’t say which Blackwell chips it has started producing at TSMC’s plant and whether it includes the latest Blackwell Ultra GB300 chip it revealed earlier this year. Blackwell chips use TSMC’s custom 4NP process, according to Nvidia’s website.
The world’s leading manufacturer of graphics processing units (GPU) and advanced chips has announced it will build new plants in Texas, amid global economic shake-ups.
Note: Plants, not fabs.
NVIDIA has announced partnerships with Foxconn and Wistron to build “supercomputer manufacturing plants” in both Dallas and Houston. These global companies are “expanding their global footprint” and their international presence for the purposes of “hardening supply chain resilience” in their partnership with NVIDIA.
“Manufacturing NVIDIA AI chips and supercomputers for American AI factories is expected to create hundreds of thousands of jobs and drive trillions of dollars in economic security over the coming decades,” the announcement states.
The mass production of chips at these plants is expected to begin in the next 12 to 15 months. The $500 billion investment in AI infrastructure within the U.S. does not make mention of direct government subsidies or public financial incentives related to NVIDIA’s recent announcement.
I’m quoting that summary because it demonstrates that it’s easy to misunderstand things about the industry if you aren’t familiar with it. The way it’s worded make you think the “plants” are the Texas facilities they’re going to be building in 12-15 months, but the actual Nvidia press release makes clear than TSMC is doing the fabbing:
NVIDIA is working with its manufacturing partners to design and build factories that, for the first time, will produce NVIDIA AI supercomputers entirely in the U.S.
Together with leading manufacturing partners, the company has commissioned more than a million square feet of manufacturing space to build and test NVIDIA Blackwell chips in Arizona and AI supercomputers in Texas.
Note the more precise wording.
NVIDIA Blackwell chips have started production at TSMC’s chip plants in Phoenix, Arizona. NVIDIA is building supercomputer manufacturing plants in Texas, with Foxconn in Houston and with Wistron in Dallas. Mass production at both plants is expected to ramp up in the next 12-15 months.
The AI chip and supercomputer supply chain is complex and demands the most advanced manufacturing, packaging, assembly and test technologies. NVIDIA is partnering with Amkor and SPIL for packaging and testing operations in Arizona.
Within the next four years, NVIDIA plans to produce up to half a trillion dollars of AI infrastructure in the United States through partnerships with TSMC, Foxconn, Wistron, Amkor and SPIL. These world-leading companies are deepening their partnership with NVIDIA, growing their businesses while expanding their global footprint and hardening supply chain resilience.
Now, if that half trillion does get spent (no guarantee, since press releases aren’t legally binding; try to contain your shock), that would certainly buy a lot of cutting edge fabs. Nvidia is one of the few companies that has the financial resources to build their own cutting edge fabs (Apple is another), but I get the impression that they’re going to partner with TSMC. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they follow the Apple model, where they tell a company “Here’s X amount of money, go build a fab. You’ll give us the first 24 months of production at x-cost per chip, and after that the fab is yours free and clear.” This is one of the tools Apple used to become the dominate tech buyer, and what some call a monopsony.
As far as building their own supercomputers, that’s great for Texas and not so great for Hewett Packard Enterprise, which finished their acquisition of Cray in 2021.
The Trump administration has effectively barred Nvidia (NVDA) from selling its custom artificial intelligence processors to customers in China. The move will force the AI chip leader to write off up to $5.5 billion in inventory and purchase commitments in its fiscal first quarter. Nvidia stock fell Wednesday.
Late Tuesday, Nvidia disclosed in a regulatory filing that the U.S. government is now requiring it to get an export license to sell its H20 processor in China and other restricted countries. Nvidia said it was informed of the move on April 9, the same day NPR erroneously reported that the White House would not seek further restrictions on the chips Nvidia can sell in China.
Your tax dollars at work.
Nvidia said the U.S. government told it on Monday that the license requirement will be in effect for the indefinite future.
Wall Street analysts say Nvidia’s write-off indicates that the company believes it won’t be granted licenses to sell H20 processors in China.
The H20 was designed for the Chinese market to comply with Biden-era restrictions on selling advanced processors there. The H20 is less capable than the Blackwell series chips Nvidia sells in the U.S. and other markets.
“With Nvidia writing off associated H20 inventory, it appears the company is taking the position that it will not be granted licenses to ship product to Chinese customers (with no other geography likely to take the governed silicon given the availability of more powerful standard Hopper or Blackwell SKUs),” Wedbush analyst Matt Bryson said in a client note Wednesday. SKU stands for “stock keeping unit,” a unique identifier for products used in inventory management.
China represents a little over 10% of Nvidia’s revenue.
The Trump Administrations believes (probably correctly) that AI is a key strategic industry and that we don’t need to give China any help there.
A half trillion dollars is a lot of cheddar, even for the (as of today) company with the third largest market cap in the world…
The Trump administration released new guidance late Friday night on its tariff on China, exempting electronic devices such as smartphones and laptops.
The guidance, posted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which oversees collecting taxes on imports, could relieve some anxiety among consumers and tech giants like Apple and Microsoft, which manufacture many of their products in China, The Wall Street Journal reported. Around 20 electronic products — which also include memory cards and machines used to make flatscreens and tablets — will now be exempted from Trump’s massive “reciprocal” tariff on China. The exemption comes after the president increased the tariff on China in recent days in response to China’s retaliatory tariff on U.S. goods.
Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy and Homeland Security adviser, wrote on X, “These products are subject to the tariff under the original IEEPA [International Emergency Economic Powers Act] on China of 20 percent.” The IEEPA tariff was the first one Trump imposed on China after taking office in January. The tariff was levied on China, along with Canada and Mexico, in an attempt to “hold” the countries “to their promises of halting illegal immigration and stopping poisonous fentanyl and other drugs from flowing into our country.”
The Trump administration has suggested that the tariff on China will encourage companies, including Big Tech companies, to manufacture their products on U.S. soil, arguing that the move would be better for the economy and national security.
“President Trump has made it clear America cannot rely on China to manufacture critical technologies such as semiconductors, chips, smartphones, and laptops,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Saturday, according to the Wall Street Journal. She added, “Companies are hustling to onshore their manufacturing in the United States as soon as possible.”
Next came word that the pause in semiconductor tariffs will only be a month or two.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Sunday that the administration’s decision Friday night to exempt a range of electronic devices from tariffs implemented earlier this month was only a temporary reprieve, with the secretary announcing that those items would be subject to “semiconductor tariffs” that will likely come in “a month or two.”
“All those products are going to come under semiconductors, and they’re going to have a special focus type of tariff to make sure that those products get reshored. We need to have semiconductors, we need to have chips, and we need to have flat panels* — we need to have these things made in America. We can’t be reliant on Southeast Asia for all of the things that operate for us,” Lutnick told “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl.
He continued, “So what [President Donald Trump’s] doing is he’s saying they’re exempt from the reciprocal tariffs, but they’re included in the semiconductor tariffs, which are coming in probably a month or two. So these are coming soon.”
With all respect to President Trump and Secretary Lutnick, you can’t set up a new fab to manufacture semiconductors in America in two months. In fact, you’d be really hard-pressed to do it in two years. It usually takes a fab about three years to get up and running. Bosch took three years to get their 65nm fab in Dresden up and running, and Samsung broke ground on their Taylor fab in 2022 and it hasn’t entered production yet.
Setting up a semiconductor fabrication plant is much more difficult and time-consuming than setting up just about any other factory.
As I’ve mentioned before, you can’t just take an existing building and turn it into a fab, it has to be specially built from the ground up with exacting standards for cleanroom air filtering, concrete slab level uniformity, etc. You need extremely exacting air purity handling equipment, as well as a system for running de-ionized water throughout the plant. Then you need to purchase, install, bring up and qualify all the hundreds of pieces of semiconductor equipment necessary to run a modern fab. And 2-3 years is probably the lead time to get an ASML EUV stepper, if you’re going to be building a cutting edge fab. (If the goal is to reshore the semiconductor industry, then you probably need to build a lot of less-demanding fabs as well.)
I’m in favor of the Trump Administration using tariffs to bring other countries to the negotiating table to eliminate their tariffs on American goods, and for kicking China out of the global free trade order for repeatedly breaking the rules and just being general asshats. But a two-month difference in tariff implementation dates isn’t going to change the timeline for opening new semiconductor fabrication plants in America.
*Flat panel display manufacturing uses some of the same semiconductor processes to make displays. The technology is less demanding overall, but the substrate sizes are considerably larger. Because the feature size is less demanding, I imagine bring-up and qualification is somewhat quicker, but I’ve never worked on a flat panel display machine, so I have no idea how the lead time varies to obtain and install that equipment.
As mentioned in yesterday’s LinkSwarm, Trump has offered temporary tariff relief for everyone…except China. China got hit with even higher tariffs. Evidently the only “trade war” that is happening right now is with China…and China is losing.
Behind the global economic chaos provoked by president Trump’s tariff tsunami, there are growing indications of a strategic purpose. It is now conceivable that plunging into, and then retreating from, a generalised trade war was actually a deliberate means to a truly geostrategic end: to thwart China’s ambition to replace the US as the dominant world superpower.
While Trump’s public statements still chiefly concern the need to impose economic measures to correct decades of unfair foreign trade, senior US officials, including Pete Hegseth, defence secretary, and Scott Bessent, treasury secretary, are increasingly taking a more strategic geopolitical line.
In late January, Hegseth told the US armed forces that America would “work with allies and partners to deter aggression in the Indo-Pacific by communist China”. In Panama, he said that Beijing was investing in the region for military and economic advantages. “War with China is certainly not inevitable … But together we must [deter] China’s threats in this hemisphere.”
Bessent has linked recent US tariff tactics with a shared geostrategic pushback against China, stating that “we can probably reach a deal with our allies, and then we can approach China as a group”.
In this light, the suspension of tariff combat for 90 days with most countries, while doubling down on the levies imposed on China, leaves Beijing isolated and in the firing line.
So far, after reciprocal gestures and vowing to “fight to the end”, Beijing has focused mainly on rallying anti-US sentiment across the globe. But India and Australia declined to join forces with China. ASEAN remains caught between opposing powers. The EU, in a quandary over Russia and Ukraine, likewise continues to hedge.
China has long sought to frame the West as a feeble, fragmented anachronism. Is it conceivable that, by unleashing economic fire and fury on friends and then provisionally reining it in, Trump might succeed, where Western multilateral diplomacy failed, in forcibly forging a credible consensus of opposition to the threat of global Chinese hegemony?
One assumes that Washington understands that it cannot prevail over China alone and a substantive US pivot to the Asia Pacific to press home a contest with China is starting to emerge. Trump has already reached out to Japan and South Korea, and US officials have tackled Vietnam. The Philippines, in striking distance of any hostilities over Taiwan, support the US and talk about preparing for war.
Taiwan, South Korea, India, Japan, Vietnam, Philippines: It’s like a greatest hits of nations that have bad blood with China. It’s no wonder they’ve chosen to trade with the world’s biggest economy rather than a historical enemy with designs of territorial expansion.
The developing world now faces a binary choice, and ruthlessly exploited debt and resource dependencies are not a firm basis for loyalty. This remains the case despite decades of nugatory US investment and engagement.
Under Trump’s tariffs, it is too soon to know how far China will be able to maintain the global supply lines on which its aspirations to become the world leader of innovative consumer production depend. Nor will it be easy to develop export markets big enough to compensate for declining sales to the West and its allies. Beijing’s military influence has begun to expand, but remains localised.
Most importantly, the question of Taiwan is now implicit in US language about deterring Chinese aggression. How does Trump’s assault on China’s geostrategic ambitions affect the threat of an imminent blockade, or even a full-scale invasion? The widespread view that an invasion isn’t inevitable now gives little real assurance.
Indeed, with the US taking an active stance, the status quo based on “ambiguity” is gone. Preparations to besiege Taiwan, let alone to invade, would be spotted in time for pre-emptive action.
104% tariffs on China are not enough, I’m advocating 400%. I do business in China, they don’t play by the rules. They’ve been in the WTO for decades. They have never abided by any of the rules they agreed to when they came in for decades. They cheat, they steal, they steal IP, I can’t litigate in their courts. They take product, technology, they steal it, they manufacture it and sell it back here …
I want Xi on an airplane to Washington to level the playing field. This is not about tariffs anymore. Nobody has taken on China yet … As someone who actually does business there, I’ve had enough. I speak for millions of Americans who have IP that have been stolen by the Chinese … the government cheats and steals and FINALLY an administration … that puts up and says “enough!” …
Xi can only stay the supreme leader if people are employed … It’s time to squeeze Chinese heads into the wall NOW!
Or check out this video from Chris Chappell of China Uncensored.
“The CCP wants to defend global trade. But they’re the ones who destroyed it in the first place.”
“The Chinese Communist Party is freaking out about US tariffs. They’ve launched a full-on propaganda blitz, calling the tariffs abuse. And blackmail. And if anyone is an expert on abuse and blackmail, it’s the CCP. The CCP is also claiming to be the defender of global trade. Yes, China is going to safeguard multilateralism and the multilateral trading system. And they totally are! I’m not being sarcastic here. They really are.”
“The CCP is going to fight for the current global trading system. It’s not because they love international cooperation, which is just propaganda BS. It’s because the CCP has spent decades manipulating global trade to their advantage. So there’s no way they’re going to let all that lying and cheating go to waste. Plus, global trade is basically the only thing keeping China’s economy afloat.”
“China is an export economy. That means their economy relies on manufacturing stuff for the rest of the world to buy. Chinese manufacturing exploded after China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. Because China was able to make stuff more cheaply than other countries, consumers around the world benefited from lower prices on Chinese imports. But countries also lost tons of manufacturing jobs to China. The US alone lost more than two million jobs between 1999 and 2011 as a result of Chinese imports.”
“Besides manufacturing, the other big driver of China’s recent economic growth was real estate investment. Which became a problem after China’s real estate market started to collapse in 2020. So, the CCP decided to double down on manufacturing. They pumped billions of dollars into building more factories and exporting more goods to keep China’s economy from crashing. Which did work, but now China is making way more stuff than the rest of the world can buy. That’s called overcapacity.”
“China is making way more batteries, solar panels, and electric vehicles than the rest of the world wants. And because China has so much overcapacity, it also doesn’t import much from other countries. Which means China now has a trade surplus of almost a trillion dollars. That’s more than any country’s trade surplus in the past century, even adjusted for inflation. And China doesn’t show signs of stopping. Its export volume is growing three times as fast as global trade. That’s insane.”
“So what happens when China exports more and more stuff? They have to cut prices to be able to sell it all. Which means other countries lose even more jobs to China. Entire industries shut down. There are now certain products you can only buy from China. And when those are critical things like medical supplies, that gives China massive political and economic leverage on other countries. Remember when China stopped exporting medical goods during the early days of Covid? Yeah, that, but on an even bigger scale.”
“So that’s why the Chinese Communist Party is fighting to maintain the global trading system. They dominate it. And without it, China’s economy would fail. And their political control would crumble.”
“But how did China get here? It’s not just about cheap labor. The CCP has built an entire economic system to dominate global trade. Back when China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, they promised to follow rules to ensure fair trade practices. To be fair to the CCP, something I never thought I’d say, they did make a bunch of economic reforms in order to get into the WTO. But after they joined, they violated the WTO rules repeatedly. They’ve been cheating the system for decades. And largely getting away with it. You see, the WTO rules are set up to prevent government intervention that would artificially distort global trade. But in a communist system, it’s government intervention all the way down.”
He brings up the example of honey producers getting subsidies at every step of production.
“This industrial policy is incredibly effective for the CCP. It’s how the CCP jump-started its entire electric vehicle industry. And they’re now flooding the rest of the world with cheap EVs.”
“Yes, these are all things that other countries do, too. But no one does them on the same scale as the CCP. In 2019, the CCP spent almost $250 billion dollars on its industrial policy. That’s massive.”
“But it’s not just industrial policy. There are also ways China’s entire financial system distorts global trade. Like everything in China, the financial system is political. All banks in China are either state-owned or state-linked, so the CCP controls how they give out loans. Which means state-owned banks give lots of loans to state-owned enterprises, and to other companies the CCP wants to support. And if those companies can’t pay them back? The banks just keep extending the loans. Because it’s better to take the financial risk than to risk getting on the CCP’s bad side.”
“The CCP’s industrial policy and financial system is destroying the global trading system. More countries have stopped relying on the World Trade Organization to stop the CCP’s unfair trade practices. Instead, they’re putting their own tariffs on Chinese goods. Like Europe’s tariffs on China’s EVs. Or President Trump’s tariffs on China’s…everything.”
Then there’s China’s use of transshipping to other countries to get around tariffs and sanctions. “The US has had anti-dumping tariffs on Chinese honey since 2001. So Chinese exporters have tried to get around it with what’s called ‘honey laundering.'”
“So that’s how the CCP’s industrial policy, their financial system, and their export system are all designed to manipulate global trade. They’ve kept China’s economy going, while hurting other countries. Both advanced economies and developing economies are dealing with the fallout. But it’s gotten so bad, that the rest of the world has no choice but to fight back. Not just the US, but also Europe. And as a result, we may be watching the collapse of global free trade. And it’s the CCP’s fault.”
Also, Trump has the upper hand in the fight because China’s factories had already been closing left and right before he took office, due to rising labor costs and dwindling foreign customers. Here’s a China Observer video from 11 months ago speculating that 90% of Chinese factories might have to close.
And that was before Trump’s tariffs.
Trump is going to win his trade showdown with Xi because American has a much stronger economy than China, one that supports vastly higher domestic consumption, and because he holds all the cards.
Are Trump’s tariffs working? Falling stock prices and gloom and doom MSM posts may suggest otherwise, but there’s a growing body of anecdotal evidence that suggests the tariff announcement already has a host of foreign nations eager to make a deal to eliminate tariffs.
So right now, let’s say: Maybe
First up, a whole lot of countries seem eager to strike trade deals with the Trump Administration. “More than 50 countries have reached out to the White House to negotiate on tariffs, Kevin Hassett, the White House’s national economic council director, said on Fox News on Monday.”
The European Union has offered the United States an agreement on the reciprocal lifting of all tariffs on industrial goods, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced on Monday, days before 20% tariffs on EU exports enter into force.
“Europe is always ready for a good deal, so we keep it on the table,” von der Leyen told reporters in Brussels.
The EU remains ready to negotiate a solution despite US President Donald Trump’s tariff decisions, she said, after an exchange with representatives from the steel and metals industries.
The US imposed tariffs of up to 25% on imports of steel, aluminium and related derivative products from the EU and other trading partners in March.
Note that agricultural products weren’t mentioned. I’m guessing that will be a sticking point for the Trump Administration.
Then there’s Vietnam, which says it’s ready to eliminate all tariffs.
Confirming that Trump’s “dealmaking” was about to shine, on Friday Trump posted on his Truth Social account, announced that he had a “very productive” call with the head of the Vietnamese communist party, adding that if Vietnam wants to cut their tariffs to “ZERO”, all they have to do is “make an agreement with the U.S.”…
Fast forward just one day, and we have an example of the first official capitulation by a trading counterparty as Bloomberg reports that Vietnam has offered to remove all tariffs on US imports after Donald Trump announced a 46% levy on the Southeast Asian nation, according to an April 5 letter from Vietnam’s communist party.
The offer was made by party chief To Lam to the US president in a letter that was seen by Bloomberg. In the letter, Lam requested that the US not apply any additional tariffs or fees on Vietnamese goods and asked to postpone the implementation of the tariff announced by Trump last week by at least 45 days after April 9.
The letter confirms comments made by Trump on Friday on his Truth Social network, following a call between the two leaders. Vietnam, which has increasingly become a key manufacturing and export alternative to China, was slapped with one of the highest tariff rates worldwide last Wednesday.
Expect all the companies profiled as the biggest casualties from the Vietnam tariffs to soar, as the market realizes that for all the posturing, Trump’s tariffs were just that: a negotiating chip to minimize trade barriers against the US, which as Vietnam so aptly demonstrated, are now well on their way out.
Also coming to the table: Taiwan.
In addition to the news about Vietnam bending the knee, The Epoch Times’ Jacob Burg reports that Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te on April 6 said his nation would offer zero tariffs and no retaliation as the start of negotiations with the United States while vowing to remove trade barriers.
Lai said Taiwanese companies will also increase their investments in the United States. The comments were made in response to sweeping import tariffs announced by President Donald Trump on April 2. Taiwan has a trade surplus with America and will see a 32 percent tariff on its imports into the United States.
The new tariffs do not, however, affect semiconductors, one of Taiwan’s largest exports.
It’s less than a week since Trump’s announcement, and a whole lot of countries seem extremely eager to make a deal and remove tariffs on American goods. Trump has long been hailed as a master negotiator, and one of his main tactics to to directly threaten one of the most precious things the other side has in order to bring them to the table to make a deal.
As far as retaliatory tariffs from other countries, there’s a lot of muttering, but evidently only China has threatened an immediate 34% tariff, and Trump is threatening another 50% tariff on China on top of the previous ones as a retaliation to the retaliation. Honestly, I don’t think Trump much cares whether China signs up to eliminate tariffs. China was already cheating so many ways on trade, and is obviously America’s greatest strategic rival, that Trump probably wouldn’t mind completely decoupling red China from the American trade system.
A feature, not a bug.
There are enough facets to that last point that it may be worth a separate post…
President Trump announced his tariffs on countries, especially those that tariff goods from the United States.
President Donald Trump on Wednesday imposed sweeping new tariffs on all imported goods and unveiled a detailed list of reciprocal duties targeting more than 60 countries, asserting that the move is necessary to combat trade imbalances and restore U.S. manufacturing.
“This is Liberation Day,” Trump said during a Rose Garden ceremony, holding up a printed chart of countries and their new tariff rates. “For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike.”
The tariffs, which he described as “reciprocal,” fulfill a key campaign pledge and are aimed at pressuring trade partners to lower their own barriers. The administration expects the new rates to remain in place until the U.S. narrows a $1.2 trillion trade imbalance recorded last year.
But the extensive list of tariffs also threatens to upend the U.S. economy, as many — but not all — economists say they amount to taxes on American companies that will be passed down to consumers.
Trump held up a chart while speaking at the White House, showing the United States would charge a 34 percent tax on imports from China, a 20 percent tax on imports from the European Union, 25 percent on South Korea, 24 percent on Japan and 32 percent on Taiwan.
The centerpiece of the announcement is a 10 percent universal baseline tariff on all imports, effective immediately. For instance, Chinese imports are now subject to cascading tariffs of 10, 20 and 34 percent, for a total of 54 percent.
In addition, Trump’s administration imposed country-specific reciprocal tariffs on nations it accuses of unfair trade practices — including India, Vietnam, and the European Union, in adding to China. The rates are calibrated at approximately half the rate those countries impose on U.S. goods.
For example, China, which Trump said charges 67 percent in tariffs on U.S. goods when factoring in non-tariff barriers, will now face a 34 percent reciprocal tariff under the new system, in addition to the 10 percent baseline tariff and the 20 percent tariffs already in effect. Vietnam, assessed at 90 percent, will face a 46 percent tariff; India at 52 percent will now see 26 percent duties; and the EU, which imposes 39 percent, will be met with a 20 percent response, according to the White House chart.
This is a “devil in the details” issue that has a lot of ramifications depending on how the directives are written. But several of those countries are big players in semiconductors, so here’s a quick and dirty look at winners and losers if those tariffs stay in place a significant amount of time.
The main countries here, along with the reciprocal tariffs being applied to them:
Taiwan (32%)
South Korea (25%)
China (34%)
European Union (not a country, but they play one on TV) (20%)
Japan (24%)
Singapore (10%)
Israel (17%)
Save a few smaller, older fabs here and there, that’s pretty much 99% of semiconductor manufacturing, though Vietnam (46%) and the Philippines (17%) do a lot of semiconductor package assembly work, and the tariffs may apply to them, depending on wording.
So let’s look at the business Losers and Winners in the space. (Note: You might find this post useful, as it defines some of the semiconductor industry terms used here.)
Losers
TSMC: As the world’s biggest and most important chip foundry, the Taiwanese tariffs will hit TSMC hard. Their U.S. fab in Arizona isn’t ready for production yet, so all their chips will (theoretically) get hit with tariffs, assuming Trump doesn’t grant them a waiver because they’re already constructing a plant. But if they do go into effect, possibly even more heavily impacted will be:
TSMC customers, including Apple, Nvidia and AMD. All three get their very highest-end, cutting edge, sub-10nm chips fabbed there. For Apple, the M-series and A-series chips made there form the heart of all their Macs and iPhones. Likewise, Nvidia gets its highest end GPU/AI/etc. chips fabbed by TSMC. AMD’s most powerful CPU’s are also fabbed by TSMC, though some lower end chips are made elsewhere (like GlobalFoundries).
Tokyo Electron: Japan’s biggest semiconductor equipment manufacturer assembles pretty much all their equipment in their home country. 24% tariffs may make their equipment uneconomical compared to rivals Applied Materials and LAM Research.
South Korean DRAM manufacturers Samsung and SK Hynix: 25% tariffs will definitely impact sales in a market segment whose overall margins (robust in booms, and barely breaking even during busts) are thinner than others.
Every American electronics company that uses DRAM. Which is pretty much every American electronics company.
Every American AI boom company. Their data center costs are going up, while those of their foreign competitors are not.
Korean flat panel display manufacturers Samsung and LG Semicon, who between them control over 50% of the market.
Every American TV and monitor manufacturer, the vast majority of which have their devices manufactured overseas.
UMC: They’d fallen woefully behind TSMC for foundry work, and they won’t be winning much additional American business now.
Every company trying to build a sub-10nm fab in the U.S., as steppers from Netherlands-based ASML just got more expensive and the competition to obtain them might have increased.
Pretty much every fab in China just got more screwed…but they were pretty screwed (and trailing badly) before.
American fabless chip startups: Their costs for getting chips to market probably increased.
Winners
Applied Materials, LAM Research and KLA Tencor. Buying competing Tokyo Electron equipment just got more expensive, and a bunch of companies now have incentives to build fabs in America.
Intel: Assuming they’ve finally got their process technology sorted out (a big if), they’re well-positioned to take CPU market share from AMD and to grow their under-performing foundry business.
Micron (sort of): As the only American DRAM manufacturer, they can probably earn more per each chip produced domestically. But Micron has a lot of overseas fabs these days, and building new domestic DRAM fabs will take years.
GlobalFoundries: The costs of their global competitors just increased, so they can probably win more business for their domestic foundries…if they have the available wafer starts. But they have a lot of foreign fabs as well.
Samsung‘s US foundry business. Presumably the wafer starts for their Austin and Taylor fabs will see increased demand.
Maybe Texas Instruments, but I’m not sure how much mixed-signal and analog competition they have, and that’s their bread and butter.
Neutral
ASML: Being in the Netherlands and having TSMC as their biggest customer, you figure they’d be hurt, but no. You can’t get EUV steppers from anyone else, and I get the impression they’re building EUV steppers as fast as they possibly can already. Anyone building a cutting-edge fab will just have to pay more to get them.
Tower Semiconductor: Half their foundries are in Israel and half in the U.S., so I figure it’s a wash.
That’s my quick and dirty analysis. Of course, Trump is using tariffs like a battering ram to smash foreign tariffs, and if he’s immediately successful, there probably will only be minor hiccups in the global supply chain. But if not, a whole lot of disruption might lie ahead, and it usually takes a minimum of 3-5 years to bring a new fab online.
This may count as an “old man yells at cloud” moment, but before the Flu Manchu lockdowns and the resultant supply chain breakage, HEB’s house brand of Diet Root Beer went for $2.25 a 12-pack. Now, here in early 2025, it’s going for $5.20. I calculate that as a 131% inflation rate over five years, considerably above the official 21.9% phony baloney “let’s lie for Biden” rate. So what gives?
My first thought was “Well, aluminum prices must have gone through the roof again.” Nope.
Aluminum shot way up in 2022, and then came right back down, and has been essentially flat for two years.
As one of the biggest costs in soft drinks 12-packs, you’d think prices might be stable for that, but no. The prices for name brand soft drinks have gone up as well.
Even if we can all agree that the real inflation rate is much higher than admitted, why are soft drinks up so much more than even the unofficial rate?
If you have any idea, please feel free to share in the comments below.
Happy New Year! The Biden Administration is made of lies (which you already knew), a few links about guns, mysterious deaths in Tarrant County jails, Russian finds new, embarrassing ways to lose equipment, Hasbro destroys D&D’s legacy, and a look at biblical werewolves. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
One of Biden’s main legacies: Corrupting official government economic statistics:
Another 653,000 fake jobs revised away by govt statisticians. They were faking the data during 2023 and 2024 to try to boost Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
In the revisions, they have also admitted to 818,000 fake jobs being removed from the 2023 data.
A brand new investigation from the Wall Street Journal has revealed that scientists knew early on that the COVID-19 virus was an engineered virus that escaped a lab, but the information was suppressed by intelligence agencies and removed from all presidential briefings on the matter.
Three scientists from the National Center for Medical Intelligence, John Hardham, Robert Cutlip and Jean-Paul Chretien, had reported their findings that the virus was manipulated in a lab. They shared their findings with the FBI, but were soon told to stop.
In August of 2021, Biden was briefed on the origins of COVID-19 after a 90-day investigation from intelligence agencies. National Intelligence Director Avril Haines briefed the President and left out all research pointing to a lab leak from her briefing.
Sarah Hoyt has a pretty good plan moving forward: We win, they lose.
It’s going to take a long time for us to stop flinching and deciding we’re going to be betrayed. 2020 left scars in the collective psyche, and scars take a long time to fade if they ever do.
The last four years we were hunching our shoulders and just enduring the blows, and that will take a long long time to fade.
And sure, there are things that won’t go our way. But you shouldn’t worry too much about that.
Look, the edifice that supports the boot on our necks is not only rickety. It always was rickety.
Keeping the big lie of the all powerful centralized government in place was a full scale production, and it required a fully coordinated media, fully coordinated panels of “experts”, and a trusting public that believed all of it. Or at least a majority of the public that believed all of it.
It has been eroding for a while, since social media and blogs got really big in the wake of 9/11. Despite their best efforts at censorship, a massed multitude of — what did they call us? — hobbits is harder to control than a few journalists who want to be invited to the right parties.
Trump’s election in 2016 was the first time the media lost to the hobbits. Really lost, publicly. They didn’t like it. The hell the establishment has put us through since is their payback.
It came with unexpected consequences though. The main ones being: their masks were yanked off; and we don’t believe them anymore.
This is the sort of thing that not all the king’s horses and not all the king’s men can put together ever again.
Sure, we’ll “lose” some. Sure, they’re making cunning plans to thwart the will of the people.
But be not afraid. If we win even a few places, it’s enough for the whole edifice of oppression and lies to come tumbling down.
It has been tumbling down, already, even while they were nominally in power, which is why we won 2024.
Be not afraid. This is very important. The rest will fall into place, provided you keep your heads and remember you’re Americans.
Until a few years ago I was working as a mid-career research scientist, no I won’t tell you what field. Within my collaboration I was known for being extremely productive. I’ve seen jaws drop when I show colleagues my publication list.
Then it came time to start applying for junior professor positions.
Got a few interviews, but doors kept getting slammed in my face. It’s a very opaque process ofc, they never tell you why. In one case however I had the dean – a portly Hispanic woman – tell me two minutes into the interview that “women in STEM are very important to me”, and ultimately heard informally from one of the profs at that dept that I hadn’t been hired because of interference from the dean, despite all of the profs on the committee wanting me, and that instead they’d hired … no one.
One of the many controversial chunks of the short-term spending bill that sparked debate recently included funding for the State Department’s Global Engagement Center.
But what’s the problem? After all, who doesn’t like “Global Engagement”?!
Well, this agency — formed by Barack Obama — has been moonlighting as a censorship czar, handing out taxpayer dollars like candy to groups that spend their time suppressing conservative voices online.
(In other words, your average Obama administration government office.)
But after widespread backlash, the new version has no room for the Global Engagement Center.
Snip.
Reports from the Washington Examiner indicated that the GEC bankrolled groups like the Global Disinformation Index and NewsGuard, organizations that basically police speech with the finesse of a drunk mall cop. The Federalist and the Daily Wire even sued the GEC over its role in suppressing right-leaning voices.
Thanks to the new continuing resolution, the GEC finally met its own doom, with yet another scrap of Barack Obama’s legacy shuffling off into the sunset like Joe Biden’s last remaining marble.
Sounds like some companies are asking for a lawsuit:
Just got a dm from someone who works in recruiting at one of big tech companies. He said it's internal policy within the team he works for to reserve roles for what they call “outside talent”.
They are not allowed to recruit Americans for these roles but must go through the…
Suspicious. “North Texas Activist Is Latest to Die in Tarrant County Jail. Mason Yancy was the ninth person to die in Tarrant County Jail custody this year….Yancy was well known to grassroots activists in North Texas and across the state as an advocate for limited government and First and Second Amendment rights. He co-founded Open Carry Texas with activist-turned-attorney CJ Grisham.”
Anti-Chinese riots in Africa, following a disputed election in which Daniel Chapo of the ruling FRELIMO (socialist, formerly communist) party was declared the winner. Seems like the citizens of Mozambique aren’t big fans of Belt and Road…
Waterloo records in Austin is relocating under new ownership. “Caren Kelleher, founder and president of Gold Rush Vinyl, confirmed Thursday she and business partner Trey Watson (CEO of Armadillo Records) will be taking over Waterloo Records. The vinyl shop has operated in Austin for more than 40 years, including 35 years at its current location along West Sixth Street and North Lamar Boulevard.” I used to spend a fair amount of time searching their used CD bins, but I all but stopped going downtown during the “homeless camping” fiasco. (Hat tip: .)
We’ve previously covered that China’s demographics are in severe decline and that China’s GDP may be overstated by 60%. Now a researcher says that China’s population could be overstated by 37-50%.
(Before we dig in, two caveats: First, the channel is Lei’s Real Talk, from someone who came over from communist China and was a student in the U.S. during the Tiananmen Square crackdown, but she doesn’t use her full name, which she says is to protect her family back in China. Second, she’s using AI to answer some of her questions. Still, the math-based questions don’t seem conducive to the “AI hallucinations” we see elsewhere, but some caveat lictor seems in order.)
“We know China is facing a series of economic challenges. Weak consumer, confidence falling real estate prices, high debt, industrial overcapacity, sluggish exports, and so on and so forth. But the underlying issue of the faltering economy, in my opinion, is a severe population crisis.”
“China’s actual population is far below than the official figure of 1.4 billion.”
“I want to compare China and India’s population between the 30-year period from 1990 to 2020. Let’s also compare their average fertility rate between the two countries and their medium age.” If you run those very basic numbers, things don’t add up.
“In 1990, China’s population is over India is by about 270 million [1.14 billion vs. 870 million], and 30 years later China’s population is still over India by 30 million [1.41 billion vs. 1.38 billion].”
“However, if you look at the fertility rate, India’s average fertility rate [2.97%] during the 30 years years is so much higher than China’s [1.70].” All these are the official published rates.
“With that kind of fertility rate in India consistently over 30 years, India’s population should be larger than China’s. Mathematically it’s impossible that China’s population is still greater than India’s.”
I’m skipping over a detailed breakdown of the two country’s respective fertility rates by decades.
“I asked GPT to apply the fertility rates for each country and give me the total population in 2020 for India and China respectively, and this is the results it generate. In 2020 population, India’s population was 1.38 billion, China’s was only 890 million.” India’s number is off the official figure by 4%. China’s number is off by 37%, or 520 million people. And this is at a time when life expectancy for China has been increasing.
Analysis of various other population factor considerations snipped.
“I asked AI to recalculate everything by replacing the official fertility of 1.7 and 1.5 from the year to 2000 to 2010 replaced them with Dr. Yi Fuxian [University of Wisconsin Madison demographic researcher whose work we previously mentioned here] fertility assessment of 1.1. It came up with a shocking total population of 695 million, and that’s less than half of the announced population of 1.4 billion.”
We didn’t see a huge drop in economic output because China’s economy is investment driven.
“Population loss took place over 30 years, and particularly started since 2000, and this reduction in population didn’t show up as reduction in consumer spending until this generation reached the age of 18, or even older, when they started to spend money. So now we start to see the impact on consumer spending because there’s a time lag.”
Plus Flu Manchu deaths.
“China suddenly saw a wave of kindergarten closures, so in some cases private kindergartens have been shrunk by 20% in some regions.”
“So for all these factors combined, I think China’s real population may be between 600 million and to 800 million.”
Given the GDP overstatement estimates, this enormous overstatement of China’s population seems plausible. It also makes all those wild claims of “China will soon overtake the US economically” look even more ridiculous.
China’s “one child per couple” policy will be seen by future generations as one of the greatest self-inflicted catastrophes in history.
