Anyone investing heavily this year??

How much money did you lose/gain this past week?


  • Total voters
    30
  • Poll closed .
PM will be very interesting.
I will be looking to see what dips to jump in on and swing..............and what options to play.
Either way, it is going to be a very bloody Monday.
NYC expect jumpers tomorrow.
 
Most of us should have followed Buffett’s advice back in late 2024 when he withdrew his capital from the market.

This is where our bands need to be invested instead of the strip club. Let our bands make those stocks dance.
Hindsight is a mothamotha. I think I'm the only poster in this thread that was pointing out Buffet’s move:.
 

The formula used by the administration to calculate tariffs made other nations’ tariffs appear four times larger than they actually are. President
@realDonaldTrump
is not an economist and therefore relies on his advisors to do these calculations so he can determine policy. The global economy is being taken down because of bad math. This short piece by
@AEI
explains it succinctly. A must read. The President’s advisors need to acknowledge their error before April 9th and make a course correction before the President makes a big mistake based on bad math.


President Trump’s Tariff Formula Makes No Economic Sense. It’s Also Based on an Error.

By Kevin Corinth | Stan Veuger
AEIdeas
April 04, 2025
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President Trump on Wednesday announced tariffs on practically every foreign country (and some non-countries), ranging from a 10 percent minimum all the way up to 50 percent. The economic fallout has been dramatic, with the stock market losing nine percent of its value (based on the S&P 500 index at the time of writing) and forecasted probabilities of a recession rising.
President Trump described the tariffs as reciprocal, equal to half of the rate of tariffs and non-tariff trade barriers imposed by other countries. However, they are nothing of the sort. The tariff the United States is placing on other countries is equal to the US trade deficit divided by US imports from a given country, divided by two, or 10 percent, whichever rate is higher. So even if the United States has no trade deficit (or a trade surplus) with a country, they still receive a minimum tariff of 10 percent.
As an example, if the US imports $100 million worth of goods and services while exporting $50 million to a country, then the Trump Administration alleges that country levies a 50 percent tariff on the United States (the difference between $100 million and $50 million, divided by $100 million). The “reciprocal” tariff put into effect by President Trump on Wednesday would be half of that, 25 percent.
The formula for the tariffs, originally credited to the Council of Economic Advisers and published by the Office of the United States Trade Representative, does not make economic sense. The trade deficit with a given country is not determined only by tariffs and non-tariff trade barriers, but also by international capital flows, supply chains, comparative advantage, geography, etc.
But even if one were to take the Trump Administration’s tariff formula seriously, it makes an error that inflates the tariffs assumed to be levied by foreign countries four-fold. As a result, the “reciprocal” tariffs imposed by President Trump are highly inflated as well.
Though in effect the formula for the tariff placed on the United States by another country is equal to the trade deficit divided by imports, the formula published by the Office of the US Trade Representative has two additional terms in the denominator that just so happen to cancel out: (1) the elasticity of import demand with respect to import prices, ε, and (2) the elasticity of import prices with respect to tariffs, φ.
corinthveugerequation040425.png

The idea is that as tariffs rise, the change in the trade deficit will depend on the responsiveness of import demand to tariffs, which depends on how import demand responds to import prices and how import prices respond to tariffs. The Trump Administration assumes an elasticity of import demand with respect to import prices of four, and an elasticity of import prices with respect to tariffs of 0.25, the product of which is one and is the reason they cancel out in the Administration’s formula.
However, the elasticity of import prices with respect to tariffs should be about one (actually 0.945), not 0.25 as the Trump Administration states. Their mistake is that they base the elasticity on the response of retail prices to tariffs, as opposed to import prices as they should have done. The article they cite by Alberto Cavallo and his coauthors makes this distinction clear. The authors state that “tariffs [are] passed through almost fully to US import prices,” while finding “more mixed evidence regarding retail price increases.” It is inconsistent to multiply the elasticity of import demand with respect to import prices by the elasticity of retail prices with respect to tariffs.
Correcting the Trump Administration’s error would reduce the tariffs assumed to be applied by each country to the United States to about a fourth of their stated level, and as a result, cut the tariffs announced by President Trump on Wednesday by the same fraction, subject to the 10 percent tariff floor. As shown in Table 1, the tariff rate would not exceed 14 percent for any country. For all but a few countries, the tariff would be exactly 10 percent, the floor imposed by the Trump Administration.
Now, our view is that the formula the administration relied on has no foundation in either economic theory or trade law. But if we are going to pretend that it is a sound basis for US trade policy, we should at least be allowed to expect that the relevant White House officials do their calculations carefully. Hopefully they will correct their mistake soon: the resulting trade liberalization would provide a much-needed boost to the economy and may yet help us stave off a recession.
Table 1. President Trump’s Tariffs Announced April 2, 2025, actual and with corrected formula

Country(Announced) Tariff(Corrected) Tariff
Lesotho50%13.2%
Cambodia49%13.0%
Laos48%12.7%
Madagascar47%12.4%
Vietnam46%12.2%
Myanmar (Burma)44%11.6%
Sri Lanka44%11.6%
Falkland Islands41%10.8%
Syria41%10.8%
Mauritius40%10.6%
Iraq39%10.3%
Guyana38%10.1%
Bangladesh37%10.0%
Botswana37%10.0%
Liechtenstein37%10.0%
Serbia37%10.0%
Thailand36%10.0%
Bosnia and Herzegovina35%10.0%
China34%10.0%
North Macedonia33%10.0%
Angola32%10.0%
Fiji32%10.0%
Indonesia32%10.0%
Taiwan32%10.0%
Libya31%10.0%
Moldova31%10.0%
Switzerland31%10.0%
Algeria30%10.0%
Nauru30%10.0%
South Africa30%10.0%
Pakistan29%10.0%
Tunisia28%10.0%
Kazakhstan27%10.0%
India26%10.0%
South Korea25%10.0%
Brunei24%10.0%
Japan24%10.0%
Malaysia24%10.0%
Vanuatu22%10.0%
Cote d’Ivoire21%10.0%
Namibia21%10.0%
European Union20%10.0%
Jordan20%10.0%
Nicaragua18%10.0%
Zimbabwe18%10.0%
Israel17%10.0%
Malawi17%10.0%
Philippines17%10.0%
Zambia17%10.0%
Mozambique16%10.0%
Norway15%10.0%
Venezuela15%10.0%
Nigeria14%10.0%
Chad13%10.0%
Equatorial Guinea13%10.0%
Cameroon11%10.0%
Democratic Republic of the Congo11%10.0%
Source: Annex I, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/regulating-imports-with-a-reciprocal-tariff-to-rectify-trade-practices-that-contribute-to-large-and-persistent-annual-united-states-goods-trade-deficits/. Note: Countries with an announced tariff of 10% are not included in the table. Their tariffs would not change.
 
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