If the us china trade war happens in earnest, it will look like a messy divorce.
I'm wondering if we'll notice a fluctuation in the price of cheap goods from china listed on amazon? If weeks or months from now I look at my amazon wishlist and there isn't a noticeable difference in prices--maybe it won't be a big deal after all?
There could be some exaggeration as to how much the cost of goods will increase. Unless a business has a monopoly or heavily centralized market with a dominant marketshare there is a limit to how much the cost of tariffs can be passed on to consumers. While there is some negative commentary in the media, it is possible tariffs will be hiked and the damage to consumers will be negligible. Chinese enterprise could be forced to eat a substantial portion of tariff hikes.
It will be interesting to see what the effects are as I remember the cost of 2 liter bottles of soda at the store roughly doubling from $1 to $2 over the past 10 or so years which would seem to indicate near to 10% price inflation per year. Will we likely price hikes anywhere near approaching that? I wonder.
I mean -- most of the goods targeted aren't those cheap Chinese goods that we buy on Amazon and eBay. So unless new tariffs are released targetting these items, you're not going to see a change at all.
China is at a huge disadvantage in this 'trade war' though, as Chinese manufacturing relies heavily on American consumers -- you can't just make 500b in consumers come out of nowhere. If the Trump administration really wants to, I think they're going to be able to force China to come to the table with real reform on free and fair trade and the protection of intellectual property. As of right now, America is getting SCREWED.
I'm happy to see this go on, China will lose at the end of this though. They just don't have the same set of defenses in place to beat us when they rely so heavily on our consumers.
