> Despite this, according to export data from the World Bank, the US imported US$1.4m (A$2.23m) of products from Heard Island and McDonald Islands in 2022, nearly all of which was “machinery and electrical” imports. It was not immediately clear what those goods were.
In the five years prior, imports from Heard Island and McDonald Islands ranged from US$15,000 (A$24,000) to US$325,000 (A$518,000) per year.
Maybe someone has accidentally uncovered some kind of tax evasion scheme here?
Bizarre, tax/tariff evasion or "Mistake" does seem like the most likely explanation - yet US$1.4m is too little to bother evading tax on really. I mean that could be a refit on a boat or something -- $1.4Mn is literally nothing.
In the case of Norfolk Island, it was apparently some mislabeled shipments from Timberland (based in New Hampshire, NH <-> NI) and from two companies based in Norfolk, UK.
For Heard & McDonald Islands, it was mislabeled machinery that actually originated in Austria and Germany.
Now it is 1.4 mln, in future this could be 1000 more, if this will help with overcoming tariffs. Check what happened with Germany export to Kazakhstan in 2022.
> Check what happened with Germany export to Kazakhstan in 2022
Can you elaborate? Tried searching for it, all i found is that Kazakhstan reported 500M exports to Germany, when it was actually 7B. But you were talking about Exports from Germany to Kazakhstan, which I wasn't able to find.
Of course, several of these islands with 10% tarrifs are ex-colonies of various EU countries. Of course any french manufacturer will send goods to the islands (0%) then from there to the US (10%) rather than pay 20%. It's obvious, then the US will notice and the island will go to 20% and so on. It's all completely hateful.
I saw a post on X which said it was "vibe tariffing" and I think the person was speculating that the tariffs were probably generated using an LLM and saying "make me a tariff chart with ALL the countries and each one about 25% but randomize them."
That's the only plausible explanation I can see. A human with any brains wouldn't put tariffs on islands only populated by penguins.
I think it's basically reciprocal adjusted for trade deficit, with a floor of 10%.
So obviously you'll end up with 10% on all sorts of places where you actually have a trade surplus and no tarrifs on your goods, or, yes, islands inhabited only by penguins.
> these are all internal territories of Australia. Why they get separate tariffs is weird.
Probably because they had separate entries in a "list of countries" which they picked as a base for their list? I don't really think there was more thought put into that, especially not for the countries who "only" got the "baseline" tariff of 10%. Interestingly though, Russia seems to have been completely left out, while Ukraine gets 10%.
The Orange Emperor has a huge hard on to make Ukraine suffer ever since it led to his first impeachment. Zelenski didn't kiss the ring so down they go.
If you look at the full list (available e.g. here https://www.newsweek.com/trump-reciprocal-tariff-chart-20545...), some countries (most prominently Russia) are not on it. Whether that means anything is debatable, but Mexico and Canada, who were explicitly "spared" from these tariffs (but have other tariffs "tailor-made" especially for them), are also not on the list.
Then that list is wildly inaccurate. Norfolk Island hasn’t been an external territory of Australia for some time (about a decade) - it is literally part of the Australian Capital Territory and they vote in the electorate of Bean.
The Trump admin couldn’t arrange a pissup in a brewery.
Which might explain why the British Indian Ocean Territory - population, one US military base - has such a high tariff. The BIOT, aka Diego Garcia, has the ccTLD .io.
It's what you get if you let people which don't know what they are doing make decision about things they don't really understand without being open for consulting because they know better using only oversimplified statistics which often don't tell even half the story.
Or at lest it looks a lot like this, honestly from its patterns it looks a lot like the decision making done at a previous employee where someone who was expert in one field got a lot of decision power and decided they now know better in every field and dear anyone says otherwise.
Isn't this just common sense? I mean, if there are no people/production/imports in a certain territory, it doesn't mean that all of this won't appear there literally tomorrow, especially when tariffs on goods from these territories are zero.
That doesn't seem likely, because they separately listed parts of France that are wholly in the EU (Martinique, Guadeloupe, Réunion and French Guiana, separate tariffs there are as meaningless as having separate tariffs for Berlin and Munich) but they also did not list those that are NOT part of the EU (EDIT one list I found does list French Polynesia, but not New Caledonia[0]) even though they are the ones where a separate rate would make the "most" sense (if any of this makes sense anyway).
There is trade today between New Caledonia, or French Polynesia, and the US. They are probably going to be tariffed at the rate for France, which is probably going to be the one for the EU, but who knows, neither New Caledonia nor France itself are listed.
It is really apparent that there is no understanding behind this half-assed list.
If that’s the thinking, they forgot Antarctica, the Marianas trench, and the Moon. Someone could, theoretically, take advantage of the lack of tariffs.
I’m all for being charitable but at some point Occam’s razor says it’s just ChatGPT mistakenly including these places.
If there are no people there is no government to trade with, no customs, no regulations.
It takes a lot longer to set all of that up than it takes for Trump to just raise another tariff if that happens. So nobody would invest in that. It would only be a loophole for a week or so.
So why bother doing this pre-emptively (even if that was the reason)?
Same clowns who made blanket cuts to every Federal dept and then had to walk a bunch of them back. There's no nuance or forethought, or realization of the long term damage they're doing.
If this made any sense to begin with, then not excluding any region at all would make sense. Why leave some area which would become a theoretical middleman in trade just for purpose of tariff evasion? At least they'd be covered from the simple workarounds.
Is that commonly done on uninhabited islands? Wouldn’t the shipping cost offset any gains? Where do you even make these small changes if there’s nobody there? And what does the export paperwork look like?
The problem is that the truth, that this was some haphazard nonsense thrown together at the last second using some ChatGPT prompts, is hard to believe, so people try to insert rationality where it doesn’t exist.
It probably already exists and I just can’t find it, but there’s some kind of law here about how some actions are so insane that they compel people to invent elaborate explanations to avoid the discomfort of recognizing insanity.
And a 10% tariff on the Macdonald Islands, which has a population of zero (not including the penguins).
Perhaps Trump thought he was taxing a fast food competitor?
Fun fact: these are all internal territories of Australia. Why they get separate tariffs is weird.