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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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If 50% tariffs have been painless

Most global trade is via ocean freight, which is fairly slow. Domestic supply chains and inventory turnaround time delay the impact further. I would consider most data on final prices to very much still be pre-tariff, especially since headline series like the CPI/PCE are still only through May. The big data tests for the tariffs implemented in April will probably be for June and July data over the coming weeks, but even then the metals tariff increases to 50% didn't take effect until June.

I think it really depends on how much pain it is to stockpile the goods in question.

For example, assume that when Trump announced his tariffs, market observers agreed that the price of Tamagotchis in the US would increase by 100%. Obviously, this would lead to people starting to hoard Tamagotchis, which in turn would cause the stores to increase the prices on their existing stockpiles, on which they had not paid any tariffs. When a few months later, the next container ship arrives, the prices will stay high even though supply might be far higher than demand, as the owners are just sitting on their supply and waiting for demand to materialize, knowing that more shipments of the goods will not be coming soon.

Now imagine the same situation for bananas. Even anticipating a price hike, customers will not buy their four-year supply of bananas while they are still affordable. While the banana-delivering ships which set sail in the pre-tariff era are still on the ocean, the supermarket price of bananas should mostly stay stable -- some importer is making a loss on them, but still not as much of a loss as if they left them to rot.

Of course, the banana importers will anticipate higher prices and thus lower demands and therefore order a lot less bananas. Unless they are mistaken about the shape of the demand curve, this will lead to a price hike roughly when the ships with the smaller orders come into port.

My estimate is that different factors affect how well you can stockpile a certain trade good. Food will rot. Any resource needs to be stored, many of them in a dry place. Fossil fuels have to be protected from going up in flames or escaping into the atmosphere or the ground, sometimes. Electronics become obsolete, eventually. Consumer taste and fashion changes, who knows if in two years anyone will still be interested in cheap Chinese "Alligator Alcatraz" merchandise.

I wonder how much of US prices' resiliency to the tariffs is caused by long-term contracts that were signed before Trump started to levy tariffs and are still in effect. I have no idea, I know very little about how international trade works.

I do not know much about international trading contracts either, but I assume that most Chinese companies would not guarantee delivery to your porch at a fixed price. I would guess that in most cases, it is the importer who will have to cough up the unexpected tariffs.