According to one famous political leader, "tariff" is the most beautiful word in a dictionary. In this light, some historical parallels are worth remembering.
The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act was passed by Congress in June 1930 and signed into law by President Herbert Hoover on June 17, 1930. On September 18, 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria and a bloody war followed. This was a direct consequence of said legislation, albeit an unintended one. Reciprocal tariffs from the rest of the world hit US exporters really hard too. Because the U.S. was a large net exporter it only worsened the already deteriorating economic situation. Back then the driving force behind tariffs were farmers, who had an overly naïve understanding of the economy, yet were extremely vocal constituents. It was MAGA before the term's existence.
To be fair, tariffs are a useful tool to hedge from beggar thy neighbor industrial, and by extension trade policies, of other countries. Just don't pretend they'll be cost-free.
According to one famous political leader, "tariff" is the most beautiful word in a dictionary. In this light, some historical parallels are worth remembering.
The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act was passed by Congress in June 1930 and signed into law by President Herbert Hoover on June 17, 1930. On September 18, 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria and a bloody war followed. This was a direct consequence of said legislation, albeit an unintended one. Reciprocal tariffs from the rest of the world hit US exporters really hard too. Because the U.S. was a large net exporter it only worsened the already deteriorating economic situation. Back then the driving force behind tariffs were farmers, who had an overly naïve understanding of the economy, yet were extremely vocal constituents. It was MAGA before the term's existence.
To be fair, tariffs are a useful tool to hedge from beggar thy neighbor industrial, and by extension trade policies, of other countries. Just don't pretend they'll be cost-free.
U - Unintended consequences.
#economics February 2025
BY Random Thoughts
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Ukrainian forces successfully attacked Russian vehicles in the capital city of Kyiv thanks to a public tip made through the encrypted messaging app Telegram, Ukraine's top law-enforcement agency said on Tuesday. The company maintains that it cannot act against individual or group chats, which are “private amongst their participants,” but it will respond to requests in relation to sticker sets, channels and bots which are publicly available. During the invasion of Ukraine, Pavel Durov has wrestled with this issue a lot more prominently than he has before. Channels like Donbass Insider and Bellum Acta, as reported by Foreign Policy, started pumping out pro-Russian propaganda as the invasion began. So much so that the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council issued a statement labeling which accounts are Russian-backed. Ukrainian officials, in potential violation of the Geneva Convention, have shared imagery of dead and captured Russian soldiers on the platform. Following this, Sebi, in an order passed in January 2022, established that the administrators of a Telegram channel having a large subscriber base enticed the subscribers to act upon recommendations that were circulated by those administrators on the channel, leading to significant price and volume impact in various scrips. But the Ukraine Crisis Media Center's Tsekhanovska points out that communications are often down in zones most affected by the war, making this sort of cross-referencing a luxury many cannot afford. Some privacy experts say Telegram is not secure enough
from tw