Ryan Peterson:
I think it’s still coming. I think we’re at the point where, if the administration changes course or starts to de-escalate on these 145 percent duties from China, which all indications are that they will do that, but it’s a question now of how low do they bring it and how fast, when do they do that?
So, there’s still time. And there’s still — if they were to change course quickly and bring the tariffs way down, I think it would be a — we wouldn’t have to worry about this, but every week that goes by, you increase the chance of businesses failing en masse.
And some of the rumors are that they will bring it down to call it 50 percent duty on China. Well, that’s still really extreme. I think a lot of companies will still be at risk of failure there. But it’s very hard to know what’s the right duty level. We have seen duties on the rest of world come in around 10 percent.
During this current pause, it’s 10 percent. That seems like a nonissue. The market’s been able to absorb that. Volumes, in fact, from rest of world into the United States are up about 5 percent since April 9, when this was announced. So it seems like companies are OK with the 10 percent. So, somewhere between 10 and 145 is where the system seems to really break.
