Dear Editor,
The USA has a poor grasp of how world trade operates, and when I ran a company with UK distributorship of a well-known American guitar, exporting these to us was regarded by them as merely a way of dumping stock they could not sell at home.
We would order thousands of guitars, by specific model, for delivery over a coming year, carefully based on what we could sell here, and what they could make best in America. We might as well have said please send us 6,000 assorted guitars, because that is what arrived. Even when I got together with them to rationalise and focus their production, the result was the same.
We also made a range of guitar amplifiers, and tried to sell these to dealers in California, but their legislature operated a ban on UK imports to protect their own manufacturers. Dealers were keen to buy our products, so we simply shipped them via Canada.
In those days, trade barriers and import tariffs existed worldwide, but we managed to avoid them by trans-shipping and other tariff and import duty-avoiding methods.
Businesses worldwide will soon implement schemes to evade the Trump tariffs and only his own people will suffer as his actionswill either deny his own people goods they need, or will put prices up to pay for ways round his tariffs and thus trigger wage demands.
Also many components needed by American manufacturers will become expensive and further increase the price of US-made products.
I am sure President Trump will soon feel the negative domestic effect of his actions, and they will be quietly scrapped.
Malcolm Parkin
Kinross
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