Stagflation at home. Deflation abroad. If Trump *actually* doubles down on his tariff policy in the long run, the collapse of the American empire is inevitable.
Before we get into any of this, we need to understand the role that the American consumer market plays in the global trade system. Capitalist systems are plagued with the structural contradiction of overproduction relative to aggregate demand, and the declining rate of profit fueled by labor saving technological progress accelerates this problem. America exists to provide the living resolution to this crisis of overproduction, in all its glorious gluttony. Every aspect of American society is developed in the most consumptive, inefficient, gluttonously suburban way to maximize its ability to soak up the trade surplus from the export oriented industrial economies of the world. The reserve status of the dollar is a sponge for the baubles and refuse of the world's export oriented development. Fat, hungry Americans are the keystone that brings jobs and dollars to the rest of the world, keeping them safely away from deflationary recession.
Trump is taking this exhorbitant American privilege and shooting it in the head. His reasons are completely retarded and are actively destroying the American economy, but it's what happens to the rest of the world that becomes interesting. Pointing tariffs directly at America's trade deficit effectively launches a nuclear bomb at the global demand for the dollar and the ability for America's gluttony to absorb the excess capacity of the rest of the world.
If Trump doesn't cuck out, the tariffs will sever these American trade networks and they won't even bring back domestic production, at least not for decades. If domestic production does come back, it won't bring consumer-oriented manufacturing jobs with it. You can't crawl back down the value chain to more labor intensive industries. It doesn't work like that. The only way to make it happen (besides deficit stimulus) is to completely destroy your status and technological superiority, emptying the educated service sector into the factories like Pol Pot emptying Cambodia's urban working class into the countryside. The purchasing power of the dollar will fall. Unemployment will rise. It's the worst possible kind of textbook stagflation. No monetary policy can fix this: you're just picking between flavors of recession. The only thing that can fix this is to go back on the tariffs and to stimu
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