Subject: Re: Brace for Impact...
We're about to witness a forcible decoupling from China as a manufacturing source...will get interesting.

Well, for the U.S. at least.

As we've discussed, the tariffs are structured in a way to significantly reduce the overall impact to China's manufacturing sector from the tariffs we've imposed. We've imposed very high tariffs on China, which will damage their exports to the U.S. But we've also imposed very high tariffs on many (most?) of the low wage countries that were their biggest rivals for manufacturing. So while the tariffs on China damage them by denying them a market for their exports, the tariffs on places like Vietnam end up damaging those countries' manufacturing sectors - reducing their competitiveness. And since we're pulling our exports out of the Chinese economy, that creates a massive business opportunity for other Western nations to increase their bilateral trade with China - which similarly creates an opportunity for China to bargain for better access to those other nations' markets in exchange for taking over our spot in the Chinese market.

The practical upshot of our tariff plan is that we're not isolating China from the rest of the world; we're isolating ourselves from the rest of the world, including China. As the ROW adjusts, we can expect them to try to reach an equilibrium where international trade flows are strengthened between everyone except the U.S.