Subject: Re: I must need to drink more Kool-aid
So what will unicorns poop?

Ice cream:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Joking aside, what I outlined above is (as far as I can tell) what the Administration genuinely believes will happen. They think other countries need the U.S. so much more than we need them, so not only will they perpetually pay a 10-20% entry fee just to get to our markets, but they'll also give us virtually any change in their trade policy (or even their non-trade policy, like VAT) that we want them to.

But then, if that's wrong we'll have a major problem with the "reciprocal" tariffs. Because then we're just isolating ourselves from the entire global economy - we end up cutting ourselves off from most international trade, and the rest of the world just carries on trading amongst themselves mostly without us.

We're a few weeks away (at most) from getting a real good idea of how that's going to shake out. Our five major trading partners that account for about 2/3 of our imports (EU, China, Canada, Mexico, Japan) seem relatively content to let this sit for a while, and see what happens when American consumers start encountering bare shelves in the early days of summer and all the trade-related supply problems start hitting the rest of the economy.