Items that contain multiple elements get the highest tariff rate of any of them - a glass window with aluminum frame gets the aluminum rate because it’s the highest one.
It's by value. And it's not just domestic only but USMCA (US-Mexico-Canada). And the tariffs are seemingly prorated by percent 'domestic' (their example math is nonsensical, but I think that was just a math fail on the writer's part) with numerous relief and rebate options available to help ease in the transition period for various auto manufacturers.
GM, Ford, and other companies have chimed in positively.
> GM, Ford, and other companies have chimed in positively.
Given how Amazon tried to start showing the cost of the tariffs on their site, Trump publicly threatened them, and they backed down with hours, I’m not so sure I read too much into anyone praising the policies of this government as it’s clear that companies are erring on the side of staying on this governments good graces publicly regardless of personal opinions.
Wouldn't that be actually good thing for supporting local manufacturing and local buying, if customers could easily see which products are expensive because they are imported and which ones are expensive because they are locally made ?
> Given how Amazon tried to start showing the cost of the tariffs on their site, Trump publicly threatened them, and they backed down with hours...
The facts:
- There was a report that Amazon was going to begin showing prices
- Amazon clarified that was for their low-cost Amazon Haul site, not their main one
- The White House griped about them at a press briefing
- There were reports Trump called Bezos
Amazon has backed off on doing it for Haul after Trump’s press secretary publicly flamed them invoking a direct conversation with him:
> “The team that runs our ultra low cost Amazon Haul store considered the idea of listing import charges on certain products,” Amazon spokesperson Tim Doyle said in a statement. “This was never approved and is not going to happen.”
> Trump told reporters Tuesday afternoon that Bezos “was very nice, he was terrific” during the call and “he solved the problem very quickly.” He added that Bezos is “a good guy.”
If this had already started being leaked to the press I doubt that it “wasn’t going to happen” and was likely past exec review at that point. Then Trump calls Bezos and Bezos overrules the team and PR damage control as if this was some rogue action. Of course it’s pure speculation but it fits the timeline of events we know about better and we know this administration is a completely unreliable narrator as evidenced time and time again (from Trump continuing to lie claiming a photoshopped photo with ms13 overlayed was actually his tattoos to claiming he’s spoken to the Chinese leader with China disputing that any conversations have been had)
1. White House uses machinery of state to force the hand of private enterprise to hide impact of tariffs on prices.
2. Private enterprise acquiesces.
to "The whole thing is murky at best"?
It's pretty clear fascism to me. From wikipedia (while they are allowed to exist): "centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition".
Using "the machinery of the state to force private enterprise" is a rather hyperbolic way of describing a phone call. I do agree in general that the government should be much more strongly separated from private enterprise than it is, but a phone call to exert pressure is a ridiculously low standard of governmental pressure, not even just objectively but also what we've seen over the past several years in completely systemic practice.
A phone call is a bit of a coward way to describe the press secretary moaning about a hostile and political involvement of a (somehow) foreign government intervention to international journalists.
She was referencing this [1] article. And Amazon did indeed exactly what she said. They launched a side gig "Chinese Books", guided by the Chinese propaganda arm NPPA, at the behest of China exclusively in order to further their reach and business in China. That, while complying with ever more onerous requests of the Chinese government including removing reviews for certain Chinese books, granting complete control of "their" cloud services in China to Chinese government approved companies, and so forth.
It creates a reasonable argument that Amazon will do basically anything to get some of that sweet Chinese $$$, which makes their unprecedented foray into politics (at a consumer facing level), in a way that would be completely beneficial to China, look particularly bad. This still has nothing to do with using "the machinery of the state to force private enterprise" or anything like that.
Wait, because Amazon followed the law in China while doing business in China, anything they do in the US that the Orangefuhrer doesn't like is..... something beneficial to China?
The claim was that Amazon wanted to display the added tax due to the tariff separately, which is what the white house histrionics were in response to. There is no indication that only Chinese imports would have been labelled. China is not the only country that Trumpet added tariffs on.
He relies on MAGAs not knowing what a tariff is. He wants to blame price rises on Biden - if it becomes too obvious that the buyer pays the tariffs, he would lose a lot more support.
One has to be careful, with faced with opposition that ignores facts, not to succumb to the same debasement.
We all have speculation about what might have happened behind the scenes -- but it's just that, speculation.
Disliking Trump isn't license to spin supposition as factual reality.
Hyperbolic phrasing for effect errodes respect for reality, regardless of which side it comes from.
(I realize there's a 50/50 chance I'm going to get a whataboutism spiel in response to this, focusing on your fascism phrasing, and how you believe it is supported. I'd encourage you to take a beat and instead consider places you were reaching past what facts supported in your original phrasing.)
> Disliking Trump isn't license to spin supposition as factual reality.
Evaluating situations in a vacuum and sticking just to confirmed facts isn’t a hallmark of being considered and knowledgeable. One must also consider patterns of behavior and Trump pressuring Amazon to change a policy of both consistent with all of this. Facts in order of events:
* fact: News report that Amazon is going to show tariff impact on their Haul product
* fact: press secretary blasts Amazon in the news indicating she’s repeating a conversation she just had with Trump
* fact: Trump had a phone call with Bezos
* fact: Amazon puts out a clarifying statement they won’t be doing it.
* contradicting fact: Amazon claims they were never actually going to do it
* pattern: quid pro quo is how Trump operates. see the Ukraine call that got him an impeachment in the first term trying to pressure Ukraine to investigate Biden in exchange for weapons
* pattern: businesses and politicians being yes-men to Trump.
So facts + pattern = reasonable hypothesis of what happened. If you have contravening facts I’d love to hear them but you can’t just stick your fingers in your ear and pretend you have to have a confirmed fact before building a hypothesis of the likelihood of what happened.
It’s like trying to pretend Putin isn’t the one murdering dissident journalists or opposing politicians or trumping up fake charges.
I'm not referring to anything behind the scenes, I saw the press secretary intervention and I was embarrassed for America. It's as pathetic as the president complaining about "bad numbers". I miss the times when the free world had an articulate leader.
Probably driven in large part by the expansion of the voting pool. Great political thinkers have no more appeal to the masses at large than Beethoven, Dostoevsky, or Linux.
So we get entertainers and silver tongued devils for politicians whose primary skillset tends to overlap heavily with that of conmen.
Speaking of figures with no mainstream appeal, Plato wrote extensively, and utterly prophetically, about this phase of democracy in The Republic, and how it will inevitably lead to tyranny. It's playing out as if from a script.
Trump's twice election certainly makes a case for universal voting, but maybe different individual vote weights?
Basic stuff, like if you don't know what 5 - 1/4 equals or what cells are. If not, maybe you shouldn't have as loud a say in choosing political leadership?
Universal voting is the opposite of the direction to go. See: Australia. Of course going in the opposite direction is probably impossible, because it's not about knowledge but about susceptibility to typical forms of manipulation, emotional highest among them.
This is the reason that politics has largely shifted from a game of knowledge and vision, to one of mud slinging, ad hominem, and appeals to emotion, fearmongering, and so forth. It's not because the electorate doesn't know enough, but because they have poor emotional control, making them easy to manipulate. It's exactly how conmen, operate with Wiki offering the typical pattern as exploiting "the victim's credulity, naivety, compassion, vanity, confidence, irresponsibility, and greed." [1]
The only murky thing is how far Amazon was in implementing it, but there is no doubt that the White House reacted furiously to it. This is a very sensitive issue for them, and companies should be aware that Trump is willing to make their lives very difficult if they show this information.
Depending on your usage, loosing your password can be irreversible. That'd lock you out of your encrypted email and storage and will take you months to recover your account on some platforms.
1. To allow the merger, Congress imposed some pretty onerous restrictions on any collaboration between the two companies. There is a Lexmark board of former US generals who are supervising the divison.
2. Nine star is the owner, but a lot of the preferred equity used to fund the deal came from PAG, an asian private equity firm. Their investment accrues at a pretty high interest rate and eats into Ninestar’s returns.
3. The whole thesis was that Ninestar would be able to control the amount of counterfeit ink for Lexmark printers. But with another Trump term, and lack of ability to integrate the two, the thesis is broken.
you need a lot more than 2 bidders for the theory to hold. Repeating the auction just seems pointless, but another avenue could be for the assets to not be sold, and the claimants to receive 100% of the equity of the business. Then over time they can potentially see a better recovery than what they are getting from a sale.
> you need a lot more than 2 bidders for the theory to hold
Wrong. Vickrey auctions are well studied in single-item auctions even with two bidders [1]. (They perform between 4/3 and 2 compared to an optimal omniscient auction. Not solved. But not unstudied.)
> claimants to receive 100% of the equity of the business
This is Chapter 7. The bankruptcy estate already legally owns the asset, not Jones.
I am an investor in equifax. Let me clear up a misconception on where the data comes from. Half the data comes from large enterprise customers, who “sell” the data in exchange for Equifax doing I-9 verification for free. The other half comes from 39 payroll companies. Every single payroll company except for Rippling and Gusto sell paystub data to Euifax. (Rippling will start next year). Those are exclusive revenue share deals. You cannot be a competitive payroll provider without the revenue share from Equifax. So before you blame your employer, they might not be selling it directly and even if they opted out, your payroll company will sell it anyway.
The actual buyers of payroll software don't care and if you think people are going to evaluate their potential employer based on what payroll solution they use, you are wrong.
This may not be correct. My current company uses Gusto for payroll. Pulling my data, I see everything. I am confirming with Gusto support its sourced from them.
Confirmed with Gusto. They send data to WorkNumber.
"...for the purpose of automating employment and income verifications. This feature helps streamline the process for employees who may need to provide proof of employment or income for loans, credit, or public aid."
That's good to know. The company I work for currently uses Rippling; I will mention this upcoming change and suggest that we should consider switching to Gusto.
Perhaps you would find it to be more palatable if it were phrased as: "You cannot be competitive as a company if you do not serve the wants and needs of the customer."?
But, of course, that says the same thing. These companies are scumbags because that's how the customer wants them to behave. In this case, because it makes executing payroll cheaper for the customer, which is a highly desirable trait to the customer.
The customer often does not have the luxury of making perfectly rational choices.
IBM for example waits to fly you out to orientation in Armonk before they show you the binding employment contract with dubious clauses.
These businesspeople know this. Introducing pressure and a sense of inevitability of poor conditions is part of the game. And they know that it's scummy. But Ayn Randians will defend them to the grave as they eschew the responsibility to build a stable enduring economy for one that disproportionately rewards them.
Framing it as the customer wants this level of strongarming is the same as saying they want bloody revolution when it inevitably follows. What customers actually want is for scumbags to be banned from leadership roles in the economy, and for toxic business strategies to be regulated out of relevance.
It is indirect instead. The employer tells the payroll company: pay employee $x (and handle deductions, retirement contributes etc ...) The payroll company then has this data and can resell it. I would expect the contract the employer has with the payroll company explicitly allows for the data sharing.
Most highly-paid people have no idea how much privilege this affords them.
You wonder why so many businesses are nice to you? It’s because they’ve already looked you up and know you’ve got a high income and are a millionaire.
Write a personal check for your next automobile? Sure thing, you can drive it off the lot a few minutes later. They won’t even bother cashing the check for a week or two.
Try doing something like that as an hourly worker, even if you’ve got the money in the bank.
You wonder why so many businesses are mean to you? It's because they've already looked you up and believe from the data that you won't be a good customer.
The dealership can also just call the bank to verify funds. Which would be reasonable and non-discriminatory all without needing a third party and wouldn't involve your salary at any level. Aside from this it's the financing company that cares, not the dealership, who only wants the car off their floor credit plan.
So what you're saying is it _shouldn't_ matter if you have money, because if you're a low income earner, you should be treated poorly, and you're happy to be personally invested in a system which creates this outcome.
It not only should be regulated but you should feel a little gross for saying any of this outloud.
I know text can be flat, nuance and tone lost that would not be lost in conversation, but I'm confused by your reply Akira. I can't read any endorsement of the system in the comment you're replying to, I read it as agreeing with you in disapproving of unequal treatment
Last time I bought a car I was surprised to learn I didn't need to go to the bank and get a cashier's check but could just write a personal one. I assume that verification processes have improved sufficiently that they had confidence the money was in my account.
This is also why certain homes get hit in high-end burglary crews. There are multiple crews hitting those who purchase precious metals with physical delivery (like gold American Eagle coins). It is not all positive. Considering how few victims even bother to report such crimes, it is terrifying.
From what I understand from my cousin, a career criminal, there are entire theft rings working off of databases such as these. He knew mostly of car-related theft rings, but I hear about safe-cracking burglaries quite often, usually stealing Rolex watches or precious metals.
Because they get details on items in your safe, that you thought were hidden. The second you buy precious metals with physical delivery, you get not only the criminals who break into houses in your wealthy area, but also the criminals who specialise in stealing and selling the things you just bought.
And if they dont have the data they can monitor behavior towards you from those who do have it. Those who get to drive of with their new car vs those who may not.
What? Criminal gangs have access to databases of purchasers of jewelry and precious metals? Then they B+E, safecrack, and rob them? That’s an insane claim to make without any source besides your cousin.
We shouldn't be oblivious to those advantages and disadvantages, since then we can't decide as a society whether those advantages and disadvantages should remain or be altered. That alone is a good reason to regulate this away.
Or at the very least, require Equifax to send free physical mail notifications to everyone when their data is accessed, stating when, by whom, why, and what answer was given. (Physical mail because there's no other predictable way for the general population.) Yes, I realize this would be financially unsustainable for Equifax as they currently operate, but that's their problem to solve. Even as someone who myself has excellent credit and many years of high income in my file, they're creepy and shouldn't be catered to at the expense of our privacy.
True, but when do you even have it explained. Last time I was purchasing a car for wife, the clerk simply made a crack about how my information is now all theirs ( I forgot the exact phrasing ). And those are people who are motivated to make sure you buy so thus incentivized to make sure you are not put off.
And don't even get me started on an average person. I get blank stares when I go on a privacy rant. At best, they simply do not have time to care.
That sounds like the most unappealing exchange imaginable. Yes, let me lose both bargaining power with new jobs while simultaneously painting a target on my back, all in exchange for companies being more willing to take my money.
Now this is some remarkable gymnastics. Are you also an investor in Equifax or have some other financial interest in similar services? If not, I'm very curious to hear how you tied yourself into this knot.
I find that I have struck a nerve with some folks.
I have no connection with the industry at all. But that doesn’t prevent me from understanding the implications.
Equifax does this stuff because it is profitable. It is profitable because companies buy it. Companies buy it because they can put the information to use for their benefit. In doing so, some consumers are harmed and others benefit.
Also, for the record: I don’t often buy cars, but when I do I choose the best financial option. Sometimes that would be financing, other time it would be writing a check. One factor that everyone should consider it that your free time has a higher dollar-per-hour value than your work time.
Sure, consumers benefit so much that the example you were able to produce is the ability to write a personal check to purchase a car. Totally notable benefit relative to the violation of a person's expectation of privacy.
Last time I bought a brand new car (~8 years ago?), the dealer told me I couldn't pay more than $X amount, using credit cards, on the car, so I still needed a bank check for the rest (they wouldn't accept a personal check either).
In my experience, it used to be a cashier's check for the balance (if there was a deposit). But a couple years ago at least the dealer I bought from was fine with a personal check. Don't know if it was just this dealer or if personal check verification processes have improved.
Haven't they heard of bank transfers? In Europe you can use SEPA and if you warn the bank in advance, they're basically instant even for large amounts.
I recently bought a car and they were happy to let me put up to 100% of the purchase on a card so long as I paid the card processing fee (something like 2 or 3%).
My regular dealership even has a card surcharge for service these days. Given the rebate I get it's pretty much a no-care for smallish bills. But when I bought the car from another dealer was a bit surprised I didn't need to run to the bank to get a certified check.
I'm not going to pay by card for a huge purchase, and have the card company take 3% off the top. That's just a dick move when you can just write a check that does the same thing.
Why would I care if I'm not paying for the surcharge and I get a rebate from it? I've had a few large purchases recently where a credit card was the norm. If the business prefers a check that's fine too. I'm not going to push it. It's just business. A lot of businesses want my money and are happy to take a credit card number which is often simpler for them. I don't know their costs associated with handling checks and it's not really my concern.
That's not a tip. It's a "processing fee" assessed by credit card companies (a revenue stream). The 3% charged on top of a large purchase like a vehicle goes to the payment processing provider (the credit card company). To cover the cost of professing fees, most dealerships often offer a cash discount (meaning they will quote a lower price if paid by check).
1. The guy who owns the dealership doesn't get the credit card fee
2. If they charge you extra for using a credit card, they're breaking even
3. If they _don't_ charge you extra for using a credit card, they're paying 3% of the purchase cost to the credit card company (so, $1,000+)
So yes, it's a dick move to pay via credit card for any purchase in the thousands of dollars, if you have the option to pay by check or debit card. I always offer to pay by check if I know the money for the CC will come out of their pocket.
Don't really care. It's not my responsibility as a customer to make assumptions about how businesses prefer to get paid. They can add surcharges or just not accept credit cards at all. As someone who has been making some large household purchases this summer, my experience is that it's perfectly ordinary and expected to pay by credit card.
I'd just add that I routinely book flights, hotels, and so forth in the thousands of dollars range on credit cards and I doubt they would want anything different as a payment type.
If you get your personal data report, you'll see that it tells you who looked you up. It is not every business you've worked with. It is not even every background check that has been done on you.
I'm not saying that rich people do not have privilege - they do. But it isn't because your local car dealer looked up your earnings data.
"Oh, aren't you happy we live in a world where the rich are explicitly treated better because they carry around a big sign saying 'I am rich' when interacting with corporations?" No. I am not.
I don't think that's generally the case, AFAIK the example of the matrix exponential example a bit further up would not be really distinguishable as a type from a regular matrix (with exponential elements).
Not to overcomplicate things, but anyone planning to save money for >12 months should be using the BOXX ETF (https://etfsite.alphaarchitect.com/boxx/) to convert the interest income into a long-term capital gain. Even if you end up cashing out before the 12 months, you are still going to pay the same taxes as with a savings account, so there is truly no downside.
For a detailed report on the mechanics behind the BOXX ETF, Bloomberg just published this article:
https://archive.is/8kq0G
It is not a perfect solution for everyone. You do need to take into account your income tax rate and your capital gains tax rate.
The archive owner wants takedown requests to be forced to be cross-border, so he wants to know where the request is coming from so he can serve from a server in a different country.
Cloudflare blocks the extension to DNS that allows that. If you don't care, you can set your DNS to bypass Cloudflare for those domains only.
I’ve known this for a while now but it never ceases to amaze me. This must be up there with “no copyright intended” in terms of misguided compliance strategies.
It's always appeared to be a matter of perspective, to me.
That being said, by "Cloudflare has issues with archive.is" I very literally meant that they have issues with the DNS records served to them by Archive.is. (i.e. They do not support EDNS.)
Can someone explain it a bit better? I am not quite sure why in addition to spx this fund buys options on Bookings? Also, where is the risk in this strategy, besides counter parties risk.
The Bookings options are explained in the Bloomberg article. They use offsetting bets so that one generates a large gain and the other generates a large loss (either way the stock moves). Then the gain is offloaded through an in-kind redemption (not a taxable event for an ETF) and the loss is kept on the books to offset any other taxable gains in the fund. I guess you could worry what happens if the stock doesn't move, but since they get to pick the timing, that seems unlikely to be an issue in practice.
I can think of at least a few risks that one would not have with T-bills besides counterparty risk. You have management risk: they have said what their strategy is and what they will do, but what if they don't? I would also ask who is on the other side of these trades and how big that market is or can be. Alpha Architect's own explainer implies that box spreads can also be used to borrow money and that this might be cheaper for the borrowers than margin loans, which makes some sense, but it seems like a pretty esoteric instrument to use for that. Most of their argument is an appeal to the efficiency of markets, which might be true until it isn't. Finally, there's regulatory risk. They think this works under the current rules, but a regulator might disagree with that. If someone does not like it a sufficient amount the rules could be changed, just like there's already an exception for "original issue discount" that makes zero-coupon bond income like Treasuries count as interest income, not capital gains, even though no interest payments are ever made.
I'm not in finance, though, I'm just some guy, so take all of the above with a grain of salt.
This is hilarious. It's not as risk-free as an FDIC insured HYSA account though. I don't care what the ETF tracks - being an ETF that tracks something comes with some additional risk.
Yes to that. And this may be my own risk-averseness, but I don't have complete confidence in all these derivative instruments anyway. I don't have time or sufficient interest to look into the construction of ETFs and how their holdings are managed, so I will opt for a mixture of stock-picking, index funds, bonds, ETFs, and just plain old savings accounts at banks I can see on the cold hard cement of the city. I try to be diversified in which financial instruments I choose. It seems most people have blind faith that X or Y instrument are constructed, managed and regulated in a reliable and trustworthy way. They entrust their money into weird mechanisms where they believe they own AAPL stock but actually it's just a derivative slice on precarious terms (fractional shares or other slimey broker-made nonsense).
You can certainly over-engineer your solution, but just watch the world and see how "you would have fared" in situations that affect others.
For example, everything goes to shit if Rogers goes down so hard that no electronic payments of anything works; so maybe some percentage of an emergency fund should be literal cash on hand.
What's the rate of return that way? The 5% coming from the bank is pretty nice and is easily understood. I scrolled to the end of that BOXX page and even watched the video, and I still don't understand it.
The short answer is that if you could answer that question in advance to a high accuracy, you could make billions as bond trader. In theory, you get paid similarly to regularly going out into the bond market and buying US government bonds that expire in the next few months, but with a potential tax savings twist. (I am a random Internet dude, not a tax lawyer.)
The returns supposedly track the short end of the yield curve on US Treasuries. That would make sense, as theoretically, the net premium of a box spread is equal to the net present value of the payout (under the no arbitrage assumption). That net present value should be very close to the yield on a zero-risk asset over the same time period. They're using 1 to 3 month options, so in theory, they get yield close to short-term US Treasuries (the market prices a near-zero probability of the US defaulting on its bonds in the next few months).
I haven't looked into the tracking error between SPY box spreads and the short end of the US yield curve. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_spread#cite_note-2 says the yield averages about 0.35% above holding equivalent maturity US Treasuries.
Though, it sounds like they're using box spreads composed of American options, so I wonder how they deal with early exercise risk. You only get bond-like performance from a box spread if you don't have early-exercise risk. The further out of the money they place their strikes in the box spread to avoid early exercise risk, the lower the liquidity they get, and higher trading costs.
The tax trick is that they also enter into a delta-neutral trade on a high-value single stock. (They don't use and index for this part because they want the difference between the winning and losing parts of this trade to be as large as possible, so they want volatility in the underlying asset.) At certain points, they realize the losses on the losing half of that trade (reducing tax liability), and perform a tax-free in-kind exchange of units (shares) in their ETF for the winning half of that trade. Of course, they don't know in advance which half will win and which will lose, but it doesn't matter. The brokerage buying their ETF in order to make the tax-free exchange bumps up the price of the ETF, very close to the value of the winning leg of the tax-saving trade.
Note the several caveats above (and probably some I missed) in comparing with US Treasuries yield.
Which is before taxes. Just like the 5% HYSA is before taxes. In the case of BOXX this is going to be 0-20% (depending on your income) whereas the HYSA tax will be 10-37% (depending on your income).
I only just learned about this in Matt Levine's newsletter [1], and assuming they don't get regulated out of existence, it seems almost too good to be true. The effective tax-discounted rate of return on a 5.6% interest-bearing account is really only 3.5% because it's ordinary income (paying taxes of .37 * 5.6). But as long-term gains it becomes 4.3% (paying taxes of .238 * 5.6). And while it is compounding you pay no taxes at all.
I keep thinking about parking cash in box spreads on SPX directly -- pay net $98,000 in option premium now and earn $100,000 in a few months, effectively lending to the market at the rate implied by highly liquid option prices.
The section 1256 tax treatment is especially cool not so much because of the 60/40 taxation but because if you have several consecutive years of 60/40 gains you can edit your past year's income by incurring a current year loss and having a carryback loss.
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