PC & Gaming Component Prices To Rise By 15-30% As US Tariffs Soar

PC component prices are set to rise courtesy of the new US tariffs that may come into effect from September 6th. Expect hardware costs to rise by 15 to 30%.

[Srhalo]

It's not just PC, under these tariffs consoles will be more expensive TV's phones cars pretty much all manufactured goods. These tariffs will hurt the American citizen far more than it will hurt China.

No tariff has ever helped any economy in the world, if you want to grow a middle class and create jobs you give people more spending power not reduce it. When people buy less it ripples through out an economy, all of a sudden that guy who puts things in a box has less work, the guy who ships it has less work, the guy who sells gas has less work ect. Then all those people have less money so they create less work for other people and the whole thing continues to chain until the whole economy is depressed.

[conanlifts]

I hope it is short lived. Currently Australia is less effected, but the knock on effect will happen if it continues. The other concerning aspect is that interest rates and mortgage rates are often linked to inflation. The tariffs will lift inflation which means an increased risk that interest rates will rise. In that case every household with a mortgage will feel the pinch. The risk of a global recession is therefore growing. Stupid policy that will look good on paper in the short term, but in the long term it will cause a crash.

[kneon]

But interest rates really do need to go up. These ridiculously low rates have seriously skewed the world economies and is putting many people nearing retirement age at risk as they put money into riskier investments because it's the only way to make money.

[conanlifts]

@kneon.
Yes I agree but not because of artificially created inflation. It needs to be gradual and controlled. This has the risk of forcing rapid changes.

[Strafe]

Kneon clearly has an interest in interest rates going up.

[fonger08]

Some tariffs can be beneficial to a country, mostly depending on what resource or economic advantage they may to protect a certain industry. Agriculturally, tariffs can help protect domestic farming from countries who may have significant advantages to producing certain types of food.
All that being said, the tariff policies the US are enforcing are really only going to help a select few small industries (employed) vs the overall damage it will do to the average consumer. While the economy has grown, our paychecks have not, thus the limiting ability to buy things as prices go up due to the tariff retaliations. Protectionism is an economic policy we adapted back after WWI, and well, a few years later we had a bit of a tough time economically to put it mildly.

[jmc8888]

Yes it did. It created American industry and was the basis for America's economy. Hamilton's Report on Manufactures.

~200 years it built America, funny how the last 50 we've been declining when we went away from that.

This is a 50-year problem, expect a couple decades of pain to right the ship, and thank those politicians who created this dynamic (or at least those still alive, like the Clinton's, the Bush's, and Obama).

Otherwise, we can keep going until we're a 3rd world nation.

Outsourcing took people who were making $30-40 an hour in the 1980's and made them ~$7 an hour Wal*Mart greeters in 2010's all when prices are 3-4x higher.

Not to mention how many fell on hard times and got addicted to drugs/alcohol and ruin their and their families lives. How many kids are in prison today because NAFTA destroyed their family? How many are on opioids now because their path to improvement was taken away? Millions.

Ever see Detroit?

What replaced some of this actual wealth? Bubble wealth. Create fake bubbles and create the wall street loans that say a $75-150k house is worth 500k-1.5 million. Take crap.com a company that can't make money and value it in the hundreds of millions if not billions. Let the banks, insurance companies, and investment arms all combine back together (like before 1929) to create the 2 quadrillion

Or Obama's hand-holding of Wall Street over main street for 8 years. Not one executive in jail, but 8 years of 0 percent loans for stock buybacks and mergers and acquisitions. Not loans for CAPEX, but for bubbles. Now Dodd-Frank gave Wall Street the ability to confiscate your deposits to pay off THEIR gambling debts, known as Bail-in. Europe has the law too, and it's already been used a few times. The most notorious example was in Cyprus, but in other countries it has as well. Next time the bubble bursts, it won't just be bail-out, it will be bail-in. The criminals will get us coming and going.

If markets drop 90 percent, we'll be returning back to close to normal. Morons would blame the person who happened to trigger it, not the people who for decades stacked the dynamite.

It's not wrong to expect the idiotic industries that benefitted from free trade to fall on hard times, that's just inevitable. The moron thing would be to continue using the economic equivalent of heroin because the withdrawal pains are too much.

Glass-Steagall, and worldwide is absolutely the #1 issue in the world. But the bubble, has made people forget that. That's on you if you allow people to get you to forget the obvious through lies.

[Vanakka]

Korea is exempt and tariffs apply to Steel, if they raise prices they they are just using it as an excuse!

[vladstad]

i know before the tariffs were in place my reel mower was 68 dollars and now it sells for 90 on walmart.com

[ssmilloy36]

it's battle vs war at the moment. I don't think China caves like others. e.u. caved and soon free trade to follow.

[kneon]

The USA has already lost the war.

The rest of the world now views the USA as an unreliable trading partner, and will for years to come. In the mean time the rest of the world is busy strengthening trade among themselves since you can't count on the USA to not behave stupidly, in fact right now you can just assume anything the government will do is stupid and you'd be right 99% of the time.

[CarlDechance]

lol.....the US doesn't have a monopoly on stupidity. It is just our turn until we elect new leadership. But don't worry. When stupidity leaves the White House, trading will return to norm.

[kneon]

You're right, no government is short on stupidity, but right now the US is doing stupid bigly, they've got the best stupid, stupid like the world has never seen.

[CarlDechance]

No argument there. This trade war is bullshit. Trump didn't run a campaign to get elected saying he would start a trade war. No one elected him to do this crap. Most of the crap he is doing is not even supported by his own party. It is to the point now that his OWN STAFF is writing anonymous columns in the NY Times about how senior officials are actively trying to subvert the Trump administration. This is unprecedented.

This is the shit you get when you elect stupidity.

[Shikoku]

Thanks Trump...phuck sake

[kneon]

What can you expect from someone so thoroughly incompetent? Just imagine how much worse it would be if his staff actually let him do what he wants.

[Shikoku]

Mmmm never thought of that

[jmc8888]

Well as a lifelong Democrat I can tell you.

Like Obama....
He can drone bomb American citizens
He can drone bomb American born children
Throw journalists in jail
Drastically increase the illegal spying Bush created
War on Whistleblowers necessitating Snowden to leave the country
Fund, Arm, and train terrorists (including Al-Qeada) for geo-political gain for unjust and illegal wars (wait isn't this supposed to be the reason we *need* to have the spying?)
Support literal Nazi's in Ukraine
Fight on behalf of Saudi Arabia in court and against the victims' families of 9/11
As said above, allow the bail-in of your bank deposits
Run an intelligence operation against political opponents and whose underlings are running a coup d'tat against.

The list goes on and on. Each and every one of these things is 100x worse than the worst of what Trump has been accused of. It is also only a partial list.

Obama the squeaky clean guy sure has a lot better record than Trump, who has done none of this. It really shows you how easy it is to fool people. The people that committed the crimes are prosecuting the people that didn't and have convinced a large portion of the citizenry that THEY are the just and rightous and those trying to stop them are the evildoers.

It's quite sad really. Especially after us Democrats vowed to prosecute Bush for his war crimes... instead, we cheered on Obama's. (well not me)

Obama was literally Bush's 3rd and 4th term, and idiots love him for it.

[TeamIcoFan]

But...but...her emails Shikoku, her emails! :(

[Shikoku]

I know right. Muller probe like 20 indictments, Hilary email probe 0 anything but the email, the evil emails.

[Qdog]

I dont understand... please forgive my ignorance, but the only tariffs I can find that have an effect on PC components are a 25% tariff on steel and 10% tariff on Aluminium.

Exactly how much steel even goes into PCs and consoles anymore with majority of the components being comprised mainly of copper, gold, platinum, polyamides(plastics), solder, and aluminium. The screws and PCIe brackets might be steel and the 10% tariff would lessen the profits on units sold depending whether components use aluminium, but I fail to see how an actual 15%-30% price increase is warranted or justified when the tariff are less than the price increase and only applicable to certain components.

At 30% MSRP increase, it's basically a manufacturer markup at that point and purely for profit, right?

[Strafe]

'At 30% MSRP increase'

There's your answer.