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When President Trump announced his "Liberation Day" tariffs in April 2025, hitting Chinese goods with levies of up to 50%, the goal was straightforward: punish China for what he called years of being "looted, pillaged, raped, and plundered," and force American manufacturing back to life in the process.
China, in his framing, was the problem. Cheap, subsidized exports had been undercutting US industry for decades, and it was time to close the door.
But here's the thing: despite the tariffs, the goods didn't stop flowing.
According to China's own customs data, exports to the US were actually up 0.2% year on year, even after the tariffs. Over the same period, Chinese exports rose 16.8% to the EU, 22.9% to the ASEAN bloc, 26.2% to Africa, and 12.8% to Latin America, with global exports up 17.6% overall.
Since the pandemic, Chinese exporters have ramped up sales to developed markets outside the US, largely by redirecting capacity that used to head to America.
Temu and Shein make the redirection visible in real time. Both platforms' US spending growth collapsed into outright declines by May 2025 — the month the US closed the 'de minimis' loophole that let them ship cheap parcels duty-free from China. Their growth in the EU and UK kept climbing through the same months.
And that redirected flood of cheap goods has helped push prices down in the countries absorbing it.
The mechanism behind it is pretty basic economics. Flood a market with cheap imports, and local sellers can't just ignore it. They have to cut their own prices to compete, and prices across that whole market start drifting down.
Thailand is maybe the clearest example of it in action. Chinese car exports there have surged over the past few years, and the cars and other consumer durables Thailand buys from China have gotten roughly 10% cheaper since early 2023.
That has flattened Thailand's import price index for durable goods and helped drag its core inflation down toward zero, with Thailand's own central bank pointing directly to Chinese import competition as a cause. Headline inflation there has dipped into outright deflation in recent readings.
For everyday consumers in emerging markets and even developed economies, this has turned out to be, on balance, good news.
For every 1 percentage point increase in Chinese exports to a given country since 2024, goods prices in that country fall by around 0.5%. Averaged out, the effect has shaved roughly 0.6% off goods prices across non-US developed markets. In a period where inflation has been stubbornly sticky almost everywhere, that's not nothing.
And therein lies the irony. The tariffs were designed to protect the US economy from exactly this kind of cheap Chinese competition. Instead, they've mostly just rerouted it, sending disinflationary pressure to other markets while the US, having built the wall, doesn't get to enjoy what's on the other side of it.
None of this is a free lunch, of course.
Cheaper imports are good for consumers, but they still squeeze domestic producers who can't compete on price, which is precisely the dynamic Trump's tariffs were meant to prevent in the first place. Whether the trade-off is worth it depends entirely on which side of the register you're standing on.
The Next Breakout Might Be in Your Pocket
Everyone’s hunting for the next Unicorn.
The type of “category disruptor” that grows fast and turns early believers into big winners.
59,000+ investors think that Mode Mobile could be one of those rare finds.
Americans spend 4 ½ hours on their phones daily, and Mode Mobile is monetizing that screentime. With $1B+ earned by over 490M customers and 32,481% revenue growth, Mode’s EarnPhone is turning smartphones into income generating assets.
Their previous raises sold out, and the company is now offering pre-IPO shares at $0.52/share with up to 20% bonus, exclusive to early investors.
Being early is everything, and this window is still open.
*Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com.
Mode Mobile recently received their ticker reservation with Nasdaq ($MODE), indicating an intent to IPO in the next 24 months. An intent to IPO is no guarantee that an actual IPO will occur.
The Deloitte rankings are based on submitted applications and public company database research, with winners selected based on their fiscal-year revenue growth percentage over a three-year period.
Britain voted for Brexit to cut immigration. A decade later, net migration hit its highest level ever recorded: 944,000 in a single year.
Meanwhile, over 1 million young Britons are sitting outside the workforce entirely, not working, studying, or training for one.
In our latest video, we look at how a system built to control immigration ended up expanding it, why the UK keeps reaching for migrant labour instead of fixing wages, skills and productivity at home.
We also dig into the reported "millionaire exodus," and whether it's really as dramatic as the headlines suggest.
Is Britain using immigration to paper over problems it hasn't solved? Or is dependency now baked in?
