Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Economics Page 1 of 90

Yes, If You’re American There Will Be Serious Shortages Starting In About A Month

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On May 6, 2025

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Effective tariffs are over 100% on most goods coming in from China. Everything from medicine to toys to machine and electrical parts will start running out soon. If your air conditioner or fridge breaks, the parts necessary to it may not be available. America doesn’t make these parts, and it’s endless. For example, magnets used in appliances.

So, yes, if stock up if you can.

No way of knowing how long this will go on for, and it’s worth noting that some factories in China have just shut down, period. You’d think they’d move production to other countries and some are trying, but since Trump has declared his retard trade war with entire world, and since he’s completely fickle (he just put a 100% tariff on films, claiming national security, which isn’t even allowed for films, but who knows) decision makers are reluctant to re-shore to other countries. Trump might have another one of his distempered starts and tariff them.

Anyway, even after the trade war ends, which I suspect it will, prices will be higher and supply for some products will be thin, but unless you’re an insider in a particular industry it’s hard to say which ones. Setting up production in the US takes time, sometimes years, and, again, because Trump is so fickle, hardly anyone is willing to invest. Ironically if Trump believably said “it’s going to be 100% on everyone forever”, that would in some ways be better than the current situation, since at least people could make decisions and invest.

Note also that even if the trade war ended tomorrow, the pipeline has been disrupted and there’s at least a two month gap to overcome.

So, rocky road ahead if you’re American. Stock up, strap in, and pray.

This blog has always been free to read, but it isn’t free to produce. If you’d like to support my writing, I’d appreciate it. You can donate or subscribe by clicking on this link.

How Soon Empty Shelves

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On May 6, 2025

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I just listened to Chuck Todd say the following three things regarding economics, “eveything is unstable; everything is uncertain and we’re probably about a month a way from empty shelves.”

Ian and others far brighter than me, what say you?

I’m speechless.

Canada’s Future & The New Carney Government

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On April 29, 2025

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Mark Carney

Carney has won a minority government. He will have to govern with the support of the NDP. The NDP was slaughtered in this election, and there were a few ridings where people strategically voting for the Liberals actually led to the Conservatives winning. Iit’s worth pointing out that the Conservatives increased their seat count, which is why Poilievre is sticking around as leader, despite losing the election and his own seat. (A loyal MP will stand down and let him run in a by-election in a safe riding.)

The NDP lost their official party status in this election and their vote percentage was cut in about half by strategic voting. They need to bargain hard with Carney in exchange for support and be willing to walk away. The most important thing, for them and Canada, is to change the voting system. Proportional would be ideal, but it’s unlikely the Liberals would go for it. They would probably go for ranked ballots, assuming, probably correctly, that they’ll be the most common second choice.

But it would also benefit the NDP and make it less likely for radical conservatives of the current variety to get into power.

If I were the NDP, I’d go to the wall for this. There’s likely to be more polarized elections in the future, because the Conservatives remain a Trumpist style party and a lot of natural NDP voters will keep going Liberal to try and block them. If they want to get back up to near 20% of the vote, this is necessary.

Now as to Canada’s future: it’s going to depend on whether Carney can actually deliver. If he can make Canadians better off and win another election, Poilievre is toast and Trump style conservatism will be discredited in Canada. If he doesn’t deliver: if effective wages don’t rise and if rent and housing prices don’t go down, then Poilievre or his successor’s Conservative party WILL win the next election, just based on disgruntled voters.

Carney’s talked a fair bit of sense: doubling building housing, pivoting to new trade partners and creating vertically integrated industries within Canada. If he can pull it off, he’ll go down as one of Canada’s greatest Prime Ministers. But, at the end of the day, Carney is a neoliberal, and his impulse to always cut taxes on the rich and so on is going to hold him back.

He also needs a full term to pull it off. A lot of pain is coming down the pike and the next couple years will be ugly.

And that means he needs to keep the NDP happy. If they stop supporting him before he turns things around (assuming he can) he’s toast, and the Conservatives are in. So the NDP may as well force him to do some other things: pharmacare and universal dental, probably.

It’s going to be an interesting few years for everyone. Carney was right when he said:

America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country. But these are not idle threats. President Trump is trying to break us so that America can own us. That will never, that will never ever happen...

…

Our old relationship with the United States, a relationship based on steadily increasing integration, is over. The system of open global trade anchored by the United States, a system that Canada has relied on since the Second World War, a system that well not perfect has helped deliver prosperity for a country for decades, is over. 

But it’s also our new reality.

We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons. We have to look out for ourselves and above all we have to take care of each other.

The old system is over. Carney’s problem is that he doesn’t see that for a ton of Canadians the old system hasn’t been delivering for a long time.

Every country in the world will have to adapt to the new economic landscape. Some will succeed, others like Britain, will fail. It remains to be seen if Canada is one which adapts well. What is certain is that if Poilievre gets in, he will usher in a new era even worse than the old neoliberal one. He will be prostrate before the US, will slash the civil service, healthcare and so on and will turbocharge the oligarchy.

So Carney’s it. He wouldn’t have been my first choice, but if he doesn’t pull it off, no one will.

This blog has always been free to read, but it isn’t free to produce. If you’d like to support my writing, I’d appreciate it. You can donate or subscribe by clicking on this link.

How Biz Profs Destroyed Free Markets

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On April 28, 2025

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Economics is largely a worthless discipline. Its axioms, like humans being rational utility maximizers, are simply wrong and everything built on top of them is thus flawed. It reminds me of pre-Copernican astronomy, which was based on the idea that the sun and planets revolved around the Earth. The difference is that pre-Copernican astronomy more or less worked and economics mostly doesn’t.

But there are insights in economics, and there’s a cluster around free, or rather, competitive markets. In order for competitive markets to work:

  1. There must be lots of buyers and sellers, so no one has pricing or buying power.
  2. There must be no significant barriers to entry. If you can’t start a new business doing whatever it is, market incumbents can jack up prices. Barriers to entry are both legal and technical: if there’s no availability of whatever is needed to make the product, that’s a barrier to entry.
  3. Products must be roughly the same. If one producer is able to produce much better products, then people will buy that. This means, in effect, that intellectual property laws must be open, or people won’t be able to produce roughly equal goods.
  4. Collusion in setting prices cannot be allowed, nor can special deals like larger buyers getting better prices. (A large supermarket which pays lower prices will drive smaller ones out of business till there are only a few major supermarket firms left.)

Now the problem with competitive markets, from the point of view of capitalists, is that they keep profits low. If you start jacking up your prices, your competitors will get the business, since the products are about the same and since other firms can easily enter the business.

Competitive markets lead to fast innovation and low prices, with any high profit periods due to innovation lasting only as long as it takes for others to reproduce the new product. If you want high profits over a long time period you have to keep innovating, you can’t make essentially the same product forever and expect to make more than average (low) profits.

But business hate competitive markets, exactly because they do make it almost impossible to make high profits over the long term.

So business profs and consultants read the economic literature and said “if we want to make high profits we have to find or create businesses which are not competitive.

Reverse engineering, high profits come to companies which are oligopolies or monopolies so they have pricing power; to companies in industries where there are significant barriers to entry, whether thru intellectual property laws or vertical integration; to companies that have a better product because no one else is allowed to make that product (pharma is great at this); and to businesses which collude on prices. Right now, for example, a lot of landlords subscribe to a software service which sets prices and even keeps rental properties off the market in order to keep rents high.

There are other tricks, of course. Health providers, in general, have an advantage. When someone’s seriously sick they can’t really comparison shop and they’re desperate, they’ll pay whatever they have to save their life or get well.

Another one is network externalities. If everyone’s on one site or a few, then other sites have a hard time competing. Think of Facebook’s suite of sites, or think of Google’s monopoly on search.

When Private Equity and investors who provide seed capital roll up firms or invest in new firms, they’re either looking to liquidate those they buy (PE likes this) or they’re trying to destroy a competitive market so they can charge much more than a competitive market would normally allow.

One of the things which has made China so dynamic is that it has much more competitive markets than America or Europe. There are dozens of EV firms, for example. Tons of drone makers. Multiple space companies. Absolutely massive supply networks where you can buy anything you need to make whatever it is, or get them to make anything new you’ve thought up. IP laws are weaker, and often not enforced, and so on. Where there is market power, the government often steps in either to regulate what firms can charge (in natural monopolies like power distribution, for example) or to prevent the use of that market power to freeze out competitors.

As the US and the West have financialized, they’ve destroyed most of the laws which were in place to keep markets competitive. Eggs, for example, are not high priced primarily because of Avian bird flu, but because there are only a few oligopoly suppliers in the market, and they’re making more money with shortages than they would by providing as many eggs as people really want to buy at lower prices. Those prices would still be profitable, but they would be obscenely high.

Almost all Western industries are now entrenched behind various barriers designed to give them pricing power: to allow them to charge more than they could in a competitive market.

So China, with competitive markets, produces EVs which cost under 20K in many cases. Everything they produce is cheaper than in the West. This isn’t all about barriers and non-competitive markets, but a lot of it is and most of what seems to not be about competitive markets, like needing to pay American workers more, really is. American workers need more money because of high rent, high health care costs, high tuition, high real estate prices and just, in general, high prices. When Chinese show Americans their grocery bills, Americans are startled and some even cry, they are so much cheaper.

So driving up prices deliberately makes US goods in particular, and Western goods in general non-competitive because it jacks up the cost structure.

Matt Stoller, of course, is the premier thinker and activist around this and his BIG column is worth reading regularly.

But the simple takeaway is that your life sucks and the West can’t compete because of non-competitive markets and the regulations which are bad are those which make it non-competitive: horrific IP laws, non enforcement of anti-trust, allowing huge mergers and so on.

If America and the West are ever to be competitive again, we must make markets competitive and where they can’t be, in natural monopolies like energy and water and so on, we must have regulations that directly control prices, as we did in the 50s and 60s, where utilities were basically guaranteed a 5% profit, and forced to reinvest in infrastructure (no California fires because PG&E would rather pay dividends then replace century old power lines and poles).

This isn’t really a hard problem, conceptually. We know how to create competitive markets, and regulate non-competitive markets. We’ve done it before. It is entirely a political issue, because incumbents with tons of money also have tons of political power.

But don’t let anyone spew nonsense like “it’s complicated” or suggest it’s an unsolvable problem, it isn’t.

 

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The Proximate Cause Of Revolutions Is Inability To Tax & The US Is Well Down The Road

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On April 21, 2025

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Top Tax Rates

—And thus, inability to run the state.

In the modern world this causes a great deal of confusion. I guarantee some MMT follower is gleefully planning a comment saying “a state’s ability to spend is not based on taxation.”

Technically true, practically false. A state which uses its own currency can always, in theory, print money.

But taxation is best understood more primaly than “the people send us money, we spend it.” Rather it is the amount of the economy which the government can control.

Every country has an economy. The economy is what the people of the nation actually do. Dig stuff up, refine stuff, grow stuff, manufacture, stuff, take money from idiots as consultants, waste everyone’s time with advertisements, destroy the digital commons, and so on.

Near adjacent to the economy is what it could do if we wanted it to, because we know how to do whatever it is and we can easily get the resources: so we could easily build more homes, for example, or train more doctors or nurses, or hire more Professors or build out more solar power and so on.

The final part of the economy is what you can get from other nations. Call this the external economy. Does someone else make it, will they sell it to you, can  you afford it? Most of the time countries won’t sell other countries nukes, for example, and for much of history countries tried not to sell other countries the knowledge required to make advanced techs. When they didn’t prevent this, they paid big time: Britain was de-facto subjugated by America and America is now losing its Empire.

This is why being the richest King in Africa in 1850, even if you had been richer than England, would have done you very little good. You could not buy what you needed: industry, and even if you could buy a few weapons and machines you couldn’t maintain and repair them.

Taxation is the ability to command the resources of other people. That is all it is.

Now, in the US and the West generally, since some point in the sixties, the state has been increasingly losing the ability to tax the rich. The rich insist on controlling more of the nation’s wealth and economic activity and every decade they have increased that control. Every time something is privatized, that’s the state losing power to tax—to control a piece of the economy. Every tax decrease on the rich is, obviously, a reduction in ability to tax the rich.

The amount of control the State has has been reduced, and amount of control the rich have has been increased. This is an effective loss of the ability to tax.

What is happening right now is that the US is losing the ability to tax the rest of the world. Dollar privilege was “we’ll take American money and make what Americans want for them.” It was the ability of America to direct other people’s economies to do what America wanted. The vast power this implies is mind-boggling.

It is that ability to control other nations’ economies which made the US an Empire, even if it directly militarily occupied few countries. It didn’t need to. It could still tell them what to do.

Since the US didn’t need to make and dig everything, it didn’t: it just made everyone else do that. This was, in many ways a bad idea, but it did mean that the US got the benefits of industry without a lot of the downsides.

So, since JFK and especially since Carter/Reagan, the US has been losing its ability to tax the rich. It has increasingly chosen to tax the rest of the world, moving industry, in particular, to other countries. Those countries made what the US needed, and sold it to them in US dollars, of which they were willing to accept nearly infinite amounts even though, in most cases, they didn’t need nearly as much from the US as the US did from them. (What they did need, in the early and middle years, was capital goods and knowledge, almost infinitely precious, though. Now with China leading in 80% of fields, well, not so much.)

Right now a huge tax cut for the rich is being paid for by cutting 800 billion from Medicaid, even as DOGE savagely cuts a federal civil service which has not grown in nominal numbers in sixty years, and thus has really already been contracting. State capacity is being savaged and services and jobs are being removed from the lower and middle classes.

Now let’s bring this back to the original topic: revolutions happen when states can’t command enough of the internal or external economy. It does not matter how much you can print or tax in nominal terms. In the Weimar Republic people would take a wheelbarrow full of cash to the store: all that matters is what you can actually command/buy with the money. For a long time the US dollar could buy pretty much anything.

But what happens when it doesn’t? What happens when you give it to cops and bureaucrats and soldiers and brown shirts like ICE and it doesn’t buy what they need, or even what they want?

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America Is Trying To Form An Anti-China Trade Bloc

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On April 10, 2025

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Trump backed off on most of his tariffs after Japan sold a ton of bonds and he panicked. He replaced most of the tariffs with a blanket 10%, and kept tariffs on China and Canada (because those countries had counter-tariffed the US, supposedly.) Now the report is that what US negotiators are demanding is that in exchange for avoiding US tariffs, other countries tariff China.

It should be noted, first, that China will not back down. The way Trump is framing this is “China will come to us” and sub-voce “beg” and that’s not happening, it would be a massive loss of face for Xi and for China and China is a “face” society. So massive tariffs on both sides will continue unless the US makes the first overtures and in a face saving way. The US rates on China are 125% and the Chinese rates on America are 85%.

These are nuclear levels and are going to bring trade damn-near to a halt. China has also put export bans on a number of companies for “dual use” techs: in practice, they’ve hit Lockheed and Boeing (big military aviation companies) so hard that I’m not sure those companies will be able to build planes, the supply chain is that China-centric and there are no alternatives.

(Aside: the criminally minded will be scrambling to smuggle into the US, and fortunes will be made, as they were during Prohibition. Those who wish to reduce criminal risks can just import Chinese goods to Canada and Mexico and sell them to whomever. “I don’t know officer, I don’t ask them why they want all those machine parts. Not my business.”)

It’s hard to say how this will play out, because:

  • Lots of western countries have a hate-on for China. European and Canadian politicians, early on in Trump’s regime, had suggested “why tariff us, let’s go after China together!”
  • But… that was then, and this is now. A lot has changed in three months. No one trusts Trump to keep deals any more and China is looking mighty stable. Even if you’d really rather do business with the US, like Europe, can you expect any deal to be kept?

I’m genuinely unsure how this will play out. My personal preference would be to tell the US and Trump to pound sand: they don’t keep their deals, so you just can’t do business with them no matter what the theoretical case is. (That case is mostly that it’s hard to compete with China, their goods are so cheap, whereas the US is sclerotic so you can sell them stuff, especially if they’re in a trade war with China and can’t buy cheap: charge them 2x as much and still come in under!)

If Trump had gone for this as the start, he would have gotten it. Canada and Europe would have fallen over themselves to join in. Now? Not so sure.

There’s a lot of “Trump is a genius and there is a PLAN” going around in MAGA circles. Bullshit. If this was Trump’s actual goal, what he did made it harder to achieve rather than easier. What actually happened is that Japan jerked the bond market’s chain and Trump backed down and is trying to pivot.

It’s not a completely stupid pivot, the West isn’t competitive against Chinese manufacturing, and one way to deal with that (a bad way, but still a way) is to just cut China out of Western markets and sell over-priced goods to each other.

Years ago I said that the way geopolitics were playing out was leading to a “New Cold War” — there’s an entire category on this blog, just on that.

Crunch time has come and we’ll see if it happens, and who’s on each side. Trump’s made America’s chances of putting together a strong coalition far weaker than they should have been, but anti-China fear and a refusal to end rentierism in the West mean that we can’t, actually, compete against China, so there’s still a strong temptation to form that anti-China bloc.

If so, we’ll be the weaker side, as the USSR/Warsaw Pact was last time and we will lose the new Cold war, falling further and further behind technologically and watching as the Chinese enjoy goods we can barely even dream of, just as was true of the late Soviet Union.

Everything, and I mean everything, will be sacrificed to keep the oligarchs in power, keep making them richer and keep the flow of unearned cash pouring into every rich person’s orifices.

Update: Seems that the EU and China are in talks to end EU tariffs on electric vehicles. That sound you hear is Elon Musk puckering up to kiss his ass goodbye.

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China Cuts The Legs Out Underneath The US LNG Industry

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On April 9, 2025

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I didn’t see this coming:

In a move that stunned traders, analysts and policymakers alike, China has just announced a complete halt on all liquefied natural gas imports from the United States. A decision made abruptly with no prior indication, no phased reduction and no explanation beyond a terse statement from Beijing…

…China was one of the fastest growing markets for American LNG, importing more than four million tons annually. Cutting that overnight is more than symbolic, it’s surgical.

Early reactions have been nothing short of panic. Energy markets were jolted, LNG prices in Europe and Asia swung wildly and US energy firms reported immediate financial hits…

…Overnight, the US was eliminated from one of the world’s most lucrative gas markets worth more than US$2.4 billion a year. Let that number sink in. More than 4.4 million tons of American LNG every single year now suddenly has nowhere to go.

Ports along the Gulf Coast are already feeling the shock. Massive LNG tankers are sitting idle with nowhere to dock, no buyers to receive them. Terminal operators are scrambling to reroute shipments, but the damage is done. Revenue streams are drying up. American energy firms are haemorrhaging cash: millions of dollars in losses each day…

…

China has begun rerouting LNG cargoes originally meant for East Asia straight into Europe’s energy-hungry markets. The message is clear: If the US wants to weaponise trade, China will weaponise its energy strategy.

Why Europe? Because it’s vulnerable and China knows it. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the European Union has been scrambling to find a replacement for Russian gas. For the past two years, the US had been the emergency supplier, shipping LNG across the Atlantic to prevent blackouts and political chaos in capitals from Berlin to Warsaw. But that relationship, built out of necessity, was never guaranteed.

And China just exposed that fragility. By stepping in with competitive LG offers at lower prices, China is capitalising on a moment of weakness. European energy firms, already strained by inflation and political pressure, are welcoming any chance to secure stable and affordable supply.

One of the major stories of the Ukraine war is how the US took advantage of the pipeline sabotage and sanctions to sell Europe natural gas. Expensive natural gas. This increased the energy cost of heavy industry and led to a lot of European, especially German factories, shuttering and moving to the US.

Win/Win. For America.

China isn’t itself an LNG exporter, but it controls a lot of the market thru long term contracts. It has an excess of what it needs, and it just signed a new contract with Australia for long term supply:

In March 2025, Australia’s energy giant Woodside Energy inked a game-changing 15-year contract with China Resources Gas, one of Beijing’s top natural gas distributors.

Under the deal, Australia will begin supplying 600,000 tons of LNG per year, starting in 2027. While the volume might not seem earth-shattering on paper, the symbolism behind the agreement is monumental…

… Australian LNG is currently 20% cheaper than US shipments largely due to proximity and lower transportation costs. It takes roughly 10 fewer days for Australian cargo to reach Chinese ports, compared to those from the US.

Australia, of course, has been rather anti-China and a big US ally, BUT cold hard cash, err, trumps that.

What’s becoming clear about this trade war is that China has gamed it out. They thought ahead, having learned lessons during the first Trump administration: they were ready. They’ve massively reduced their vulnerabilities and carefully examined America’s weaknesses, and now they’re hitting them. Hard.

This realigns American allies in Europe and Australia more towards China, it hurts the US, and it highlights the benefits of doing business with China.

 

Xi Jingping

Xi, as we discussed in our last article, has been planning for this, not just since Trump, but since he took power. He’s locked and loaded and he’s firing his guns. The more Trump doubles down, the more America will be hurt, because China needs America less than America needs China. In many cases America firms have no choice but to buy from China, there is nowhere else to get what they need, while China either has alternatives or has already written off buying from the US, as is the case with chips. To China, America is a lost cause: it can’t be relied on either as a supplier or a buyer.

If America’s effectively a write-off, well, treat it like a write-off. And that’s what China is doing.

Trump and many Americans thought that China was the vulnerable one, that China was in a weaker position than them (they made the same mistake with Canada). It isn’t. Now Europe and Japan are holding weaker hands than the US in a trade war, but here’s China actually strengthening Europe.

It is to laugh. Trump’s fundamentally incompetent, a D- player and he’s going up against Xi, who’s arguably a great statesman, and so far, Xi is ripping him a new one.

This is what actual planning and actual competence looks like: see threats in the future and get ready for them. When someone declares you their enemy, as the US has repeatedly, take them seriously.

We haven’t seen that in any Western country in at least two generations.

 

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How To Do Tariffs Right (Trump The Moron Edition)

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On March 19, 2025

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One of the ways that Trump reminds me of Bush Jr. is that you never want him to do anything you agree with, because he’ll fuck it up and discredit it. Trump’s tariffs are the platonic essence of fucking up a good idea.

Let’s run thru this:

Companies and individuals need predictability. Everyone has pointed this out, but it’s still true. You can’t lay on new production if you don’t know if the tariffs are here to stay or not.

It takes time to increase production so tariffs should come in like a lamb. Personally I’d have most tariffs increase by 1% every month or two, depending on how long a specific type of production takes to increase, until it reached my target. Companies can’t just spawn in new production, this isn’t a video game.

If you can’t produce it you shouldn’t tariff it unless you have hard currency issues. Mostly self-explanatory: tariffs are used to make domestic production economically viable. If you can never produce it tariffs don’t make sense unless you don’t have enough hard currency to import things you really need, usually capital machinery. This last part doesn’t apply to the US.

If domestic production has a better use, tariffs may be a bad idea. Right now the US is ramping up energy production to it can concentrate on AI. Putting tariffs on Canadian energy is thus stupid, since the US can’t build enough energy fast enough. Related: aluminum production is massively energy intensive. Tariffing Canadian aluminum means you need to use American energy for refining. Is that the best use of American energy right now? (I mean, a case could be made that AI is overhyped bullshit, but Trump isn’t saying that.)

Maybe you want to export goods to another country, and they’ll tariff you if you tariff them. Tariffs often need to be negotiated between countries. If everyone just tariffs everything, that’s the end of international trade. Generally the idea is “you specialize in X, we’ll specialize in Y and we’ll trade.” Comparative advantage is overstated and only works when there are no significant free capital flows, but it’s also true that no one can produce everything they need: not even China right now, or the US in 1950. So “tariffs on everything” is moronic.

Tariffs without industrial policy rarely work. If no one can afford to build up industry, or if the regulatory environment makes it hard, all the tariffs do is increase prices. Biden actually had pretty decent industrial support programs going and Trump is dismantling them. He should, instead, have left them in place while putting strategic tariffs in place to further support them.

Needless to say Trump is bad on all these issues, because he’s a tard.

You get what you pay for. This blog is free to read, but not to produce. If you enjoy the content, donate or subscribe.

 

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