As an avid half-pay-attention Bloomberg viewer, analysts figure Q4 is where it really starts to show up, partially because some importers were able to front run the tariffs.

Thing is, it's not even the tariffs themselves that's the issue; it's the uncertainty. Are the tariffs legal, or not? Are they just a bargaining chip or not? How can a company invest without any idea if the tariffs will be around in a year?

▲

InitialLastName a day ago | parent | next [-]

It's even worse than "what will this look like in a year?". If it takes 4-6 months from when you pay the money to build a product to when you have that product available to sell to a customer, and you don't know how much your parts are going to cost OR how much you're going to have to pay to the federal government when those products finally clear customs (or what legal hoops you're going to need to jump through to get that product clear), how can you operate?

	▲	SteveNuts a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> how can you operate? It's much easier for huge, established companies to do this (easier to absorb because they already have huge teams of procurement specialists, lawyers, etc). I think that's at least part of the point in the first place.
	▲	jacquesm a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		To give you one idea of this: Christmas starts in January for consumer stuff. That's how long it takes and if there is any hick-up then you might miss the time slot. These tariffs are wreaking havoc with the planning of just about every major company because there are almost no players that are 100% vertically integrated that just use stuff made in the USA. Everybody is dependent on everybody else and some of those parties are abroad. This tariff thing - to quote Dirk Gently - utterly misses the fundamental interconnectedness of everything.

▲

Terr_ a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> it's the uncertainty

Worse, it's not even "honest" uncertainty, the people in charge of the policies are profiting from keeping everyone else uncertain.

Not only in the crass sense of insider-trading or market-manipulation, but also in terms of the landscape it creates.

For example, look at Trump's Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. While he goes on TV as the administration's tariff-mouthpiece, in the background, his family company [0] is going to US companies and saying: "Wow, those tariff-taxes suck, right? How about we give you a little money to keep you afloat today if you agree to give us any money the government might end up owing you back for illegal tariffs?"

It's hard to see how this will change until Republican federal legislators decide they no longer want to be accomplices [1] to the Executive branch's high crimes and misdemeanors.

[0] Cantor Fitzgerald, Lutnick owned ~50% and was CEO for decades before giving it to his sons.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/09/trump-tariff...

▲

jacquesm a day ago | parent [-]

In a functioning society these people would be in jail. It is worse than the worst cases of insider trading and yet they are just sitting there gleefully counting their money. Utterly disgusting, traitors to their own country.

▲

Eextra953 a day ago | parent [-]

Speaks to the disconnect between our representatives and the people they represent so many of these policies are extremely unpopular and yet they still get pushed through to terrible effect. I don't understand why 'we' can't hold them accountable. Is it due to lack of education in what is happening? A lack of understanding in our political system? Is the populate just completely disconnected?

	▲	Terr_ a day ago \| parent [-]
		https://www.vox.com/2014/4/18/5624310/martin-gilens-testing-... > When the authors look only at the preferences of average citizens, it appears that they do have a pretty big effect on policy change. But when they add the preferences of economic elites and interest groups to the analysis, the impact of average citizens vanishes entirely. Basically, average citizens only get what they want if economic elites or interest groups also want it.

▲

danans a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> How can a company invest without any idea if the tariffs will be around in a year?

They can invest in methods that will lower costs in a way that will outlast tariffs, like replacing/reducing domestic headcount with the more physical automation (for manufacturing work) and more AI-enhanced workflows (for white-collar work).

In the short term, it could help offset the cost of the tariffs. In the long term, it lowers the need for human labor.

▲

KoolKat23 a day ago | parent | next [-]

The high capex however needs to be paid, if tariffs are dropped, instantly imports become cheaper and they're less likely to compete. They'll probably play it safe and not make any investment at all. Wait it out.

	▲	danans a day ago \| parent [-]
		> They'll probably play it safe and not make any investment at all. Wait it out. Yes, but they will fire many workers in the interim to save costs, and put more load on those who remain. That's happening now across many industries, including tech. That doesn't require much capital, just a transfer of time/energy from (now fearful) workers to corporations. We are already seeing billionaire execs extolling the virtues of 60 hr workweeks and the rise of "996" culture. Labor is getting squeezed.

▲

axiolite a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> replacing/reducing domestic headcount with the more physical automation

But if wages continue to fall, due to the looming recession, your automation may be more expensive than headcount.

▲

bryanlarsen a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Stuff like physical automation is going to require a lot of capital investment in equipment coming from outside the US. If that's going to be 15%+++ cheaper if the Supreme court rules against the tariffs, or when Trump chickens out, any sane company is going to delay that automation.

▲

danans a day ago | parent [-]

> Stuff like physical automation is going to require a lot of capital investment in equipment coming from outside the US. If that's going to be 15%+++ cheaper if the Supreme court rules against the tariffs, or when Trump chickens out, any sane company is going to delay that automation

Either way, more automation is coming sooner than later, and manufacturing workers probably aren't going to get the return of jobs that they were promised.

The US administration's epileptic tariff policies are a serious but short term problem for corporations, teaching them how to be resilient against this sort of thing in the future (i.e. by thinning payroll).

Corporations are also winning rhetorically via the administration's hamfisted bungling of tariffs (by making them so broad), giving them fuel to argue against any future administration (esp. a left-leaning one) from using tariffs at all, even if used surgically.

Let's not forget that there are effective uses of tariffs - if narrow and paired with industrial policy to build domestic capacity for strategic industries.

▲

Analemma_ a day ago | parent [-]

> Let's not forget that there are effective uses of tariffs - if narrow and paired with industrial policy to build domestic capacity for strategic industries.

Has the United States ever had an effective tariff policy though? All I’ve ever seen is a lengthy history of bumbling fuckups that make things worse for the consumer for no benefit. The Jones Act has not saved American shipbuilding from a moribund, barely-alive state; the chicken tax just makes people buy stupidly huge and overpriced trucks which can’t be exported and contribute to the international effectiveness of the US auto industry; sugar tariffs make us all unhealthier by giving bailouts to corn farmers to put HFCS in everything, and so on.

I can’t think of a single case of the United States surgically using tariffs to build a healthy domestic industry that benefits American citizens— I don’t think even competent adults could pull this off, never mind the clown circus we have now.

Maybe some better-run country could use tariffs well; when you have doofuses like ours it’s probably best to stick with the safe route of free trade and friendshoring.

▲

tim333 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe you need an independent tariff setting body like how the federal reserve is independent. I can't think of a US example but apparently South Korea has done quite well with them.

▲

danans a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> Has the United States ever had an effective tariff policy though? All I’ve ever seen is a lengthy history of bumbling fuckups that make things worse for the consumer for no benefit.

The primary point of narrowly applied tariffs coupled with industrial policy is to help critical domestic industries become domestically and internationally competitive, not to to immediately reduce consumer costs.

An example of this is the Biden Administration's 100% tariff on Chinese EVS, coupled with the industrial policy that was part of the inflation reduction act.

The goal of that tariff and the IRA was to prevent domestic auto manufacturers from being pushed to bankruptcy by the clearly superior and more cost-effective EVs from China, while making the necessary investments in domestic supply chains and manufacturing efficiency to allow domestic industry to catch up to China.

With the new administration, the EV tariffs have stayed in place, but more have been levied against the supply chains for all cars, not just EVs, and the domestic investments have stopped, all but guaranteeing higher prices and lower quality for US consumers for all cars (ICE and EV), while also all but guaranteeing and uncompetitive US auto industry globally.

Thanks to this, the world is going to be buying BYDs, not Chevys.

	▲	ethbr1 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The issue with strategic industry building tariffs is that they need to be time limited, so industry has a clear incentive and timeline for capital investment. The issue with politically-controlled tariffs is that politically sensitive industries (the ones that get tariffs in the first place) are happy to play chicken with politicians to keep them in place. To wit, the Jones Act is a bit over 100 years old and the chicken (aka light truck) tax lasted for 30 years! It'd make more sense to hand tariff policy to an independent entity.

▲

qrios a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> it's the uncertainty

Anecdotal reports from Europe (one insurance company, two banks, one systems integrator, one consulting firm; all multinational): All values in the risk assessment systems must be reassessed if an American partner is involved. For two companies, this must be done on a monthly basis.

A chancellor in Germany once proclaimed a ‘policy of steady hands’ when the opposition accused him of unsettling the economy with his many reforms.

▲

jacquesm a day ago | parent [-]

> All values in the risk assessment systems must be reassessed if an American partner is involved. For two companies, this must be done on a monthly basis.

Very similar to what I'm coming across, including parties that are out of nowhere tasked with making everything they've got as cloud agnostic as they can with budgets available that they could not have dreamed of less than a year ago. As long as it gets done, not so that they will move out tomorrow morning but so that they could move out if they wanted to. I'd love to see some internal figures from AWS or MS about their serverless offerings and other such lock in mechanisms, what the trend in adoption is.

▲

alephnerd a day ago | parent [-]

> from AWS or MS about their serverless offerings and other such lock in mechanisms

IME in Cybersecurity/Enterprise SaaS, F1000s largely eschewed serverless capabilities and control plane lock-in features (eg. Fargate, Autopilot) because they wanted to be able to reduce single vendor risks as well as negotiate better contracts.

Most firms I've dealt with that size tend to have at least 2 hyperscalers used internally, plus an on-prem footprint that is increasingly being reduced.

The firms I've seen use serverless and lock-in features the most tended to be smaller shops (eg. Mid-markets, hyper scaling startups) that simply don't have the bandwidth to invest in a large DevSecOps org but are also technical enough to not get locked into an MSSP contract.

Also, OCI is on an absolute warpath right now - a LOT of very large tech-first F500s are getting and signing OCI sweetheart deals as we speak. They've replicated GCP's GTM approach, which is ironic because Thomas Kurian is ex-Oracle and was the de facto "keeps the lights on" guy there, until Catz and Ellison pushed him out.

	▲	jacquesm a day ago \| parent [-]
		Interesting. So, the largest serverless installation that I'm aware of is one that has a massive number of in the field sensors posting data every five minutes, think many millions of sensors. They're in a complete panic there. And they're not exactly small, rather the opposite.

▲

yibg a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Or even if legal or not means anything. Lower court ruling so far is a lot of the tariffs are illegal. But the supreme court as so far ruled overwhelmingly in favor of the administration, so that is very likely to get overturned anyways. So many layers of uncertainty.

	▲	vkou a day ago \| parent [-]
		Only a few years ago, I was told on this very forum that it would be foolish for the Dems to try to pack SCOTUS. It's pretty clear now that it was foolish of them to not have.