Nope, not Israel.

"Not on the list? Russia. Also absent: Belarus, which has been actively allied with Russia in its ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

Ukraine is on the list, as are many other former Soviet satellites and republics. Multiple social media accounts posted about Russia’s absence from Trump’s list of the new tariffs."

Russia, Belarus Not on List of Trump's New Tariffs - Mediaite

Okay, I'll concede. But it's still funny.

Just figured out where these fake tariff rates come from. They didn't actually calculate tariff rates + non-tariff barriers, as they say they did. Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country's exports to us.

So we have a $17.9 billion trade deficit with Indonesia. Its exports to us are $28 billion. $17.9/$28 = 64%, which Trump claims is the tariff rate Indonesia charges us. What extraordinary nonsense this is.

James Surowiecki on X:

This tweet is correct, but it's actually worse than I thought: in calculating the tariff rate, Trump's people only used the trade deficit in goods. So even though we run a trade surplus in services with the world, those exports don't count as far as Trump is concerned.

James Surowiecki on X

This is truly amazing. The Deputy White House Press Secretary is claiming that I'm wrong, and that the "tariff rates" on Trump's chart were calculated by "literally" measuring every country's tariffs and non-tariff trade barriers.

To prove it, he screenshots the formula the USTR says was used to calculate the reciprocal tariffs we imposed on other countries. And when you back out the Greek symbols, what is that formula? Trade deficit/imports - exactly what I said it was.

I don't know if the Deputy Press Secretary was misinformed, or is just being misleading. Either way, the Trump administration did not "literally calculate tariff and non tariff barriers" to determine the tariff rates it's imposing on other countries. As I said, it divided our trade deficit with a country by our imports with that country, and then multiplied by 0.5 (because Trump was being "lenient").

Oh, and if our trade deficit/imports with a country is less than 10%, or we have a trade surplus with a country, Trump slapped a flat 10% tariff on that country.

James Surowiecki on X

This might be the first large-scale application of AI technology to geopolitics.. 4o, o3 high, Gemini 2.5 pro, Claude 3.7, Grok all give the same answer to the question on how to impose tariffs easily.

May Have Used AI To Come Up With The Numbers - Rohit on X

Here’s what the White House and its crack team of trade investigators seems to have done: Take the US’s goods trade deficit with any particular country, and divide it by the total amount of goods imported from that country. Cut that percentage in half, and there’s the US’s “reciprocal” tariff rate.

We can confirm this fits* the numbers for the first 24 countries listed, which we checked by hand because we could hardly believe it and also because we refuse to use AI for anything. Kudos to @orthonormalist and James Surowiecki, who both put it together, more or less.

Is the US . . . implying that all trade deficits are the result of unfair practices or currency manipulation? What about comparative advantage? David Ricardo is surely spinning in his grave. What about bananas? They don’t grow in the US! Is it worrying that some posters got this method when they asked major LLMs about easy ways to impose tariffs? This is bananas.

*The only discrepancies we found in that group were Sri Lanka, which had 87 per cent instead of 88 per cent, and what could be some messy rounding. The next 24 countries were a little messier, but could still more or less be explained by sloppy rounding, with the exception of Jordan, Tunisia and Kazakhstan, which were all off by a percentage point or two.

You Won’t Believe How They Came Up With The Numbers - The Financial Times

We already learned during the first Trump term that he believes that a trade deficit means that another country owes money to the USA. I must that the collective stupidity of people in Trump's administration is impressive, because this application of tariff rates is so very basic that you'd expect that there would be at least one person who might have spoken up and against it.

This is why Trump will never live up to his idol Putin. Putin may overestimate his own and Russia's abilities at times, but his evil schemes do contain logical plans to harm the people he wants to target. Trump and his team have evil intentions, but they are stupid. In the span of a couple of months they have delivered more comedy material than Putin did during his 20+ years tenure.

Markets opened 5 minutes ago.

Anddd....Dow is down 1,200 points.

Reminder, tariffs don't take effect until April 5th and the jobs report is tomorrow!

No surprise, whether willingly or not, everything Trump has done since taking office has weakened America and a lot of it has either benefited China or Russia, Trump's fanbase is too stupid to see America being dismantled right before their very eyes. But don't worry, Trump is "frustrated" that Putin broke a ceasefire, then rejected a ceasefire, he is very "frustrated" he will do something about Putin soon!

It’s the third-highest monthly total behind April 2020 (671,129) and May 2020 (397,016).

Dow is down 3.49%, if it hits 7% then the first circuit breaker will be pulled.

August 2024: Trump Warns of 1929-Style Stock Market Crash If Harris Wins | The Independent