Trump doesn’t seem to understand that you can’t just uproot an entire industry and relocate it someplace else overnight. So really, the only choice aluminum-dependent industries have short-term is to pay the damn tariff and keep on importing. Ironically, Canada itself has to pay the tariff too because most canning plants are in the US, and we’re no more able to ramp up canning here than the US can ramp up aluminum refining. Changes like that take significant time and financial investment.
He doesn’t understand much of anything at all.
I don’t remember where but i’ve read a interview with a ceo saying it will take them at least 4 years to make the change they need to stop using canadian aluminum
I’d imagine there’s also a monetary reason they didn’t in the first place too. I’m not sure if it was cheaper to just import from Canada or what, but I’d imagine things will be a lot more expensive for Americans even once things are all worked out (in the unlikely scenario the US ever even returns to being a stable country which seems unlikely at this point)
Bauxite is one of the few minerals the USA didn’t luck into. I’m not sure how the economics of refining are currently structured in the tariffs but the USA simply can’t economically create aluminum from “scratch” the way it can produce almost everything else. The mineral ilmenite (titanium) is another example.
It will be. Canada will find new export partners and will continue to make aluminum more efficiently and profitably than US competitors. Any products requiring aluminum in the US will either pass the tariffs off to consumers or pass off the costs of buying from a less efficient US manufacturer. As you said, if the US doesn’t collapse before all that
I am really not sure the US will last the 4 years of Trumps term, whether he is assassinated by the hamburglar, the senate or Congress does something stupid, or the people finally get feed up and go after him I do not know. 4 years is a long time and we haven’t even seen 3 months yet.
Pretty much any of the changes Trump supposedly wants to effect with these tariffs would take somewhere in the region of 4-10 years to execute.
Which is why they simply won’t. Why invest in that at all when their assumption is that the tariffs will be done by then, because they’ll just make sure a less stupid, more compliant president gets elected?
The whole plan is idiotic and self defeating, plain and simple.
Personally, I’m not sure we can assume there will be an election in four years. Or if there is one, that it won’t be an “election”, like in Russia.
(Likewise, if the US ever did take over Canada by force, I’m sure we would be a territory like Puerto Rico and not have a vote.)
At least a territory can be granted independence by congress if sanity were ever to return. There’s no mechanism for a state to leave. If we are annexed forcibly there’s no doubt an independence movement of monumental proportions will arise.
I hope they can decide not to elect idiots again just as a rule.
Denis Miousse, mayor of Sept-Îles in the Côte-Nord region, says he isn’t expecting job losses because Aluminerie Alouette, a major aluminum producer based in the town, can easily pivot its exports to Asia from the U.S.
Good. They don’t deserve it.
That’s some pleasant and uplifting news :)
rest of the world market is much bigger than US. focus on rest of the world market.
The US has 4.2% of the world population. We can all just keep trading as we please. The US can buy from us if they want to pay the tariffs, or not, doesn’t really matter in the long run.
