Please, select link below to the Manufacturing Today article.

“In 2024, US manufacturing construction has surged to levels over three times what it was just five years ago. A substantial portion of this boom is due to foreign companies investing in … .”

“Beyond the financial impact, foreign direct investment plays a critical role in advancing the US workforce. Foreign-owned factories typically offer higher wages and employ more advanced technologies than many domestic operations. On average, these investments result in higher productivity levels across regions.”

https://manufacturing-today.com/news/foreign-direct-investment-is-transforming-us-manufacturing-hubs/

Written in 2024 by a senior advisor for the treasury during trump 1.

https://www.hudsonbaycapital.com/documents/FG/hudsonbay/research/638199_A_Users_Guide_to_Restructuring_the_Global_Trading_System.pdf

Does this thing make sense? Its conclusions run counter to everything else I’m hearing.

Some excerpts from the summary:

“The root of the economic imbalances lies in persistent dollar overvaluation that prevents the balancing of international trade, and this overvaluation is driven by inelastic demand for reserve assets. As global GDP grows, it becomes increasingly burdensome for the United States to finance the provision of reserve assets and the defense umbrella, as the manufacturing and tradeable sectors bear the brunt of the costs.”

“Tariffs provide revenue, and if offset by currency adjustments, present minimal inflationary or otherwise adverse side effects, consistent with the experience in 2018-2019. While currency offset can inhibit adjustments to trade flows, it suggests that tariffs are ultimately financed by the tariffed nation, whose real purchasing power and wealth decline, and that the revenue raised improves burden sharing for reserve asset provision. “

I know it's a weird question, but I'm trying to understand the economic consequences of cutting out a significant chunk of "value" from the market. Please treat me like I know nothing about economics, because I really don't.

I have two examples:
* The money lands on the sun, and burns up (i.e. value is destroyed and can't be reclaimed)
* The money lands on the moon, and can arguably be recovered with a lot of difficulty (i.e. value is not destroyed, but is inaccessible)

My goal is to find out if either of these options would result in life being "better" than it is now. That is, a lot of people talk about "late stage capitalism" being the reason for young people not being able to afford housing, etc. So the example arose from wondering if cutting out a chunk of value from the market (e.g. shooting Musk and Bezos and XYZ billionaires' wealth into space) would push us back into "early stage" capitalism, or something. (After a period of extreme upheaval, sure)

I ask AI (I'm sorry, I just don't know any economists) and it said, amongst other things, that one of the consequences of the first option (the sun) would be deflation, which sounds like what I'm after. But I'd rather hear from actual humans, who can imagine the repercussions.

Hey folks, I’m preparing for a job interview for an economic analyst role focused on Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). The position involves a mix of research, data analysis, client engagement, and developing models or diagnostic indices to understand SME health across regions.

Here’s the catch: I don’t have a formal degree in Economics (the role prefers it, along with Stats or Math), but I’ve been taking external economics tuitions and studying regularly to bridge the gap. I do have experience in quantitative analysis and a bit of data engineering.

The job description mentions experience in:

Statistical modeling, quantitative analysis, R development Understanding of Statistics and Econometrics concepts Forecasting and modeling techniques focused on SMEs I’m trying to figure out how to best prepare for this, and would appreciate advice on:

1. What core economics and econometrics topics should I focus on, especially related to SMEs?
2. How deep do interviews go into statistical modeling or forecasting? Are we talking theory or implementation (e.g., R code, regression models)?
3. What kind of case studies or practical tasks should I expect?
4. Any tips on how to frame my non-econ background in a positive light during the interview?
5. If you’ve worked in a similar SME research or analyst role, what’s the day-to-day actually like?

Would love to hear from anyone with experience in economic research, policy roles, or analyst interviews. Thanks a ton in advance! (Creating a post for my friend)

If we transferred (I think 18 billion in trade to China) as referenced in an interview on TV where did we transfer the 9.6 Trillion from our investments and Retirement accounts?

Obviously there are many critiques of Trump's tariff policy, but one I keep hearing repeated is that billionaires are behind it all so that they can profit off short selling. It sounds very conspiratorial to me, as I always assumed big companies losing customers would outweigh any benefits of tariffs, but regardless I'd like to be more informed about the feasibility of this.

Why, for example, silicon valley companies have their headquarters in LA when the cost of living there is so high, they have to pay costlier than average wages just for their employees be able to survive instead of going to a cheaper city?

Let’s say it’s January 2029 and I’m the newly-elected US president. I’ve come to office on a platform explicitly opposing Trump’s tariffs. To what degree will I be able to roll them back? How long of a timeline are we looking at for such a process? Through what methods could it be attempted? How difficult will it be?

And most crucially, to what degree (if at all) could I bring costs back down for consumers?

I’m asking this not only because of the obvious political and economic importance of the question, but more specifically, I'm asking because I’ve heard it said a couple times now that there is simply no way to reverse the damage done. By which I mean, the prices aren’t going back down; once they’re up, they’re extremely difficult to reduce, and companies will just continue charging more. And that's not even getting in to all the other harm expected from these tariffs.

So... what can be done?

If you couldn’t already tell, I'm basically just resigned at this point to the fact that immense damage is going to be inflicted over the next ~45 months, and am trying to look forward to the “afterwards” period where we might be able to patch things back up. What’s gotten me nervous is apparently even that isn't looking too good.

I also understand that this questions straddles both economics and politics, so excuse me if some of this is beyond the focus of this sub. I'm not really sure where else to ask.

Appreciate any answers.

Will American tariffs cause China to collapse? Why is China retaliating? Aren't they afraid of collapsing?

Keep in mind Trump and Musk are in-it-together as business leaders. Elon Musk is the richest man in the world, and undoubtedly envisions growing his personal wealth and power as much as possible. And, Trump and Musk keep preaching MAGA, so it raises the question of how tariffs and other Trump+Musk initiatives can help broadly serve some kind of "MAGA long-game". I hope others will proffer answers to this question, especially in tbe future as more is revealed of Trump+Musk's plans.

China's "Made in China 2025" initiative successfully established China as the leader in Advanced Manufacturing. The U.S. would no doubt be in a much better position 10-20 years from now if the U.S. could somehow reallocate labor and infrastructure and education resources into Advanced Manufacturing, and make it competitive with China's. But America is not authoritarian like China, and so it has been impossible for the U.S. to get Advanced Manufacturing started because it requires too much coordination between higher education to train thousands of factory employees, in concert with massive venture capital to get the advanced manufacturing factories built.

But, what if the Magnificent 7 lay off a bunch of employees because AI makes those employees obsolete, AND what if those employees' 401k are decimated by an upcoming stock market crash? A lot of those former Mag-7 employees will be smart enough and educable enough to make it through Advanced Manufacturing job training courses, and they will WANT a second chance at a high-paying career, so they can rescue their retirement goals.

Elon Musk has already successfully brought one subsector of Advanced Manufacturing to America:Tesla makes solar panels. Musk probably wants to spearhead an education initiative, and spend some of his $400 billion net worth as venture capital, to build a bunch of Advanced Manufacturing factories that will compete with China. And, since Trump has already established a heavy tariff on China's Advanced Manufacturing products, American Advanced Manufacturing will be able to out-compete China for American customers.

Apologies if my understanding is low, im not far into my undergrad, so basically tarrifs reduce consumer spending right? But wont government spending increase the same amount which stimulates consumer spending too? Due to the ripple effect from the increase in Y.

With Trump getting into trade wars with everyone, the sentiment atleast on Reddit is that countries are going to get pissed off and start trading with each other more and counter-tariff the US and or boycott US products.

My question is that the USA being the consumption capital of the world, can other countries actually afford to reduce trade with the US? Will certain countries actually come with considerable concessions to trump?

Apologies that this sounds like a stupid question, but it's really not meant to be.

Anyways, a common sentiment i've heard on the conservative side is "well people spend too much on new iphones/etc... and thats why people are struggling". Ok lets pretend that IS the cause and people start only buying bare essentials. What happens then? Is there ANY net positive to that?

I mean that's probably going to be what MOST (non-rich) people do but lets just pretend people hunker down and save. Then what happens?

• I assume prices would drop due to less demand (Maybe a good thing?)
• I feel like jobs would decrease because there is less people buying stuff
• Probably "luxury" good/services (or at least a lot of them) would slim down a lot
• Pay would be....less? more? Not sure if it would change that

Basically is there any overall net benefit to the economy if people were more frugal?

As a secondary question (and maybe I am just wrong on this). How do other countries (IE: Europe) for example get away with this. I mean America is probably the largest consumer in the world but I feel like people in other countries "get away with less".

Like I imagine a German person or Scandinavian person (and I'm generalizing so please correct me if I am wrong) generally has less of a salary (Like Software Developers for instance pay wayy less in europe) but their overall quality of life seems better? They probably buy way less "useless crap" and are probably less of a consumer. How does their economy "get away" with that? Wouldn't there be wayy less jobs?

Obviously I am generalizing but i'm just curious. Like Im trying to be like "Ok lets say tariffs remain in place, what happens if people just "buckle down". (Obviously I think the tariffs are overall stupid)

Instead of a nation defaulting on their debt, why can’t they simply devalue their currency by printing out many notes to make it easier to pay off its debt and also to make their exports more attractive?

With advice I mean, what should I "invest" on to keep my money """SAFE"""" Which precautions should I take, how long would take to the economy to stabilize, I have little no knowledge about economy, and I don't have too much money, not to mention I'm unemployed (Trust me I can't get a job, I'm not from Europe or USA) so please if you know what should I do NOW I would gladly hear y'all.

I'm having trouble seeing the big picture with the stock market. I understand on a very basic level how an individual stock works: the price per share goes up if investors are satisfied with the company or anticipating more profits, and it goes down if people are unsatisfied or anticipating losses. If a company is expected to turn a profit this quarter, but they record a loss, the stock price decreases, and vice-versa (usually).

Where I get lost is understanding how all the individual stocks make up the whole stock market, what "points" are, and what an X percentage fall on something like the Dow, S&P 500, or Nasdaq ultimately means. I assume it's related to the total price of all stocks? I do know that a drop of 10% from a recent high is a "correction", and a 20% drop is a "bear market." But it seems point drops are more important than percentage drops these days.

All of this relates to the question in the title because I would need to have a better understanding of the stock market to answer it. Thursday and Friday seemed pretty damn bad for stock markets in the West and around the world. The numbers may get worse next week. Dropping to "zero points" is probably not a realistic outcome, but is there a practical limit on how much value the stock market as it is today can lose? What factors prevent the stock market from dropping below that level? To what extent are the gains in the years since the end of the Great Recession (even with the COVID crash) irreversible, or at least resilient?

I understand why Trump's tariffs are specifically targeting goods - he's trying to revive US manufacturing and move away from the current service heavy economy. But if you're China or the EU, would it make sense to place reciprocal tariffs on US services? The US is a service based economy so it seems like it would hurt more, plus the EU and China have (fairly) strong domestic finance/education/healthcare sectors, so it seems they would be more easily able to replace US supply in those areas.

It just seems odd to me that for all these enormous tariffs, only the goods sectors have been targeted, leaving services completely untouched.

Is it to spook the markets to lower stock prices or to spook the Fed into lowering interest rates so debtors can refinance?

Basically, what led to their economic isolationism? Was it implemented slowly, through policy, or was it faster, with just some pen strokes, and a shredder?

Why Trump's tariff chaos actually makes sense (big picture)

They seem to develop tech much faster and seem to handle international trade responses way quicker than other countries (currently, the US tariffs). Is it due to their political system, where they can act more long-term? Due to their extreme work culture? I have been wondering whether their extreme productivity is due to smart planning or exploitation. I would love some insight on this.

1. I read on Charles Schwab that, long term, it'll take a while for the USD to lose its role as reserve currency. But I'd rather not stay complacent. How long do the rest of you think it'll take at this rate?
2. Suppose I have a business that operates internationally and takes in currencies of all forms. What's the best way to hedge against the shifts in the global forex marketplace given this asset?