Or, as Yogi Berra reportedly said about a St. Louis restaurant: "No one goes there anymore. It's too crowded".

As @ciuriakd.bsky.social says, just set one up across the border in Nova Scotia. Authentic weather, authentic accents.

If the retailers do not pass on the tariffs to the consumers, there is no gain for American manufacturing because there will be no substitution away from imported products. Cue Bart Simpson on the chalkboard. "There's no gain without pain, there's no gain without pain, there's no...."

Isn't Russia trying to adjust borders themselves?

Hi Pasi: Not sure I follow what "a follow" here means! But good to see you on the thread!

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These and other aspects of the Reciprocal Tariff are unpacked in my paper on @ssrn.bsky.social - The Trump Reciprocal Tariff: Design Flaws and Trade Costs - papers.ssrn.com/abstract=521...

So the tariffs calculated by such a model in a partial equilibrium setting with only two countries always comes up with the wrong answer. It turns out very hard to quantify the rip-off in trade - and maybe like we always thought trade is not a rip-off but an exchange.

So now the US is ripping off Vietnam! But there are all the other tariffs to factor into the simulation and for that you need a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model, not a CPE model, which falsifies the USTR assumption that general equilibrium effects can be ignored.

Vietnam still loses big time in exports to the US, but the US picks up less of the action because third parties increase their sales to the US. The US also loses in third country markets because Vietnamese supply is now deflected to serve those markets. Fun fact: the US runs a surplus with VN!

But here is the interesting thing, this framing ignores the rest of the world. So, at a minimum, you have to expand the model to a 3-region model, Vietnam, the US, and the rest of the World. That's easily done in GSIM. So lets rerun the model in this format but with the same tariff on VN.

The discrepancy between lost sales by Vietnam and captured sales by the US is explained by the increase in US domestic prices, which curtail US domestic demand. US producer revenues and price markups (the producer surplus figure) increase but total economic welfare in the US is a loss of $15.8 bn

Vietnam loses $106 billion worth of exports to the US and US producers increase shipments by almost $47 billion. The GSIM framework lets us unpack what just happened.