There is an economic feature I HOPE isn't followed following all this tariff junk, which will eventually settle out. And that's the never-ending "fee adjusting" by companies. Last time I shipped with UPS a good while ago, they were STILL doing it with their fuel cost adjustments. Remember when there was super-high fuel prices a while back and UPS (and some others) put a fuel tax on the price of shipping goods? It may be gone now, I don't know, but it hung around LONG after the fuel prices subsided. Some restaurants were putting a 50 cents per egg fee on breakfast plates and stuff recently. WTF? If they go away after the crisis is over, fine. But watch it. Once the prices rise, they get rather sticky on the upside.
Nobody has ever tried to do a "correction" in the trade balance before and rather than ease things down gently, it just got shoved down the stairs and the band-aid got ripped off. Last I checked, China was listed as an "emerging economy" which enables them to get all sorts of concessions from the WTO and other entities. Don't know if that's still happening, but anyone in their right mind still think they're still an emerging economy? The crazy slant against U.S. trade by nearly everyone has almost led us to being a service economy only, with everything else farmed out. That's no way to be. Imagine if you relied on your neighbor for all your drinking water, and one day you get in a spat with him. He cuts your water off. What you gonna do? China's already threatened that with rare earth minerals and even pharmaceutical components. While we don't need to keep from farming out anything, we don't need to farm out everything. We need the capability to be able to manufacture what we need for ourselves in a relatively short time.