Critical Reading

The White House has put itself and the country in a bad situation but doesn’t realize it yet. Around April 10th China to USA trade shut down. It takes ~30 days for containers to go from China to LA. 45 to Houston by sea, 45 to Chicago by train. 55 to New York by sea. That means that there are no economic effects of what was done on April 10th until about May 10th. Around that time (it’s already started to happen) trucking work is going to dry up. Warehouses will start doing layoffs because no labor is needed to unload containers and some products will be out of stock, reducing the need for shipping labor. All this will start in the Los Angeles area. After about 2 weeks, it’ll start hitting Chicago and Houston. Let’s say the White House, after 3 weeks, changes its mind, on May 31st. “This isn’t working out like we thought it would. Tariffs back to 0.” Let’s say China says “bygones be bygones, we’ll go back to how things were”. Let’s say every factory in China that got screwed by their orders being cancelled says the same thing “no problem, we’ll make and ship”. The problem is, even under the most favorable conditions of China and the factories restarting economic ties as though nothing happened, it will be at least another 30 days before economic activity is revived. And that’s just in LA. In Chicago/Houston, you’ll need to wait another 45 days. New York, at that point, will still be getting containers from before April 10th, they will then have 50 days (May 31 minus April 10) of zero economic activity at the ports, in trucking of Chinese goods, in warehousing. The whole situation is a bit like lockdowns. Once you shut down, it takes a long time to get economic activity back to where it was, if you ever can. And again, this assumes, that China and its factories, which make things you can’t buy elsewhere, will start right back up again as though nothing happened, which is unlikely. It’s almost like we’re speeding towards a brick wall but the driver of the car doesn’t see it yet. By the time he does, it’ll be too late to hit the brakes.