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May 7, 2025 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
19:06
China may have solved the EMPTY SHELVES crisis by EVADING Trump's tariffs
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Well, we actually have some good news on the empty shelves front.
It looks like because of actions that China is taking to conceal the country of origin of many of its export products, it looks like a lot of products are going to get in that Trump doesn't want to get in into the United States.
And what that means is the shelves, it looks like, won't be as empty.
As would have been the normal effects of Trump's trade wars.
So the Financial Times publication covered this, and I've seen reports in other places as well.
There are basically two things happening right now that China is doing to evade U.S. tariffs, which are currently 145% or higher, some goods as high as 245%.
At that level, of course, Trump's intention is to just block all those goods from China entirely.
It's basically a blockade.
And then don't forget that Trump also announced that he would block all products from any country that buys oil from Iran.
And, of course, China is the number one buyer of oil from Iran.
So we haven't yet seen Trump drop the hammer on that promise.
But if he does drop the hammer on it, it would mean a complete block of everything from China.
So China is doing two things.
And both of these are actually good for American consumers, but of course they violate the spirit of Trump's trade embargo.
And if you think about it, Trump has actually enacted a trade embargo against America.
He's blocking products from coming to America.
He's not really hurting China that much because China exports all over the world.
And as I understand it, only 15% of China's exports actually go to the United States.
So China can survive this.
I'm not sure that America can.
But again, fortunately for all of us, China is being creative.
And so they're doing two things.
One is China is sending products to Canada and Mexico, just like I thought they would.
And then in Mexico or Canada, the products are being essentially re-boxed, you know, put into new boxes, new labels.
And, you know, this is costly and this takes time.
So this will introduce some disruptions, some delays, and some price increases.
And basically, this is considered country of origin washing, okay?
So Trump's tariffs are supposed to apply to the country of origin, where the product is.
Primarily made.
And even that gets sketchy because, you know, what does making something mean?
Does it mean assembling it?
You know, what percentage of the assembly determines the country of origin, etc.?
It can get quite complicated.
But in Canada and Mexico right now, there are importers that are re-boxing and then re-exporting via trucks to the United States.
And these goods will appear in the U.S. marketplace.
Maybe not on the shelves of Walmart.
I don't know if Walmart's going to work with these sort of, dare we call them, smugglers?
You know?
Like a bunch of Han Solos running around.
They're basically smuggling country of origin, counterfeited, or washed.
I mean, look, I think we should have free trade anyway, so I love the fact that China's doing this because I don't want to see empty shelves.
Now, I do support U.S. manufacturing, just to be clear, I absolutely support that.
I think we should have more entrepreneurs that have incentives to build more stuff.
I mean, I'm one of them, and I'd be happy to build more stuff.
And what Trump needs to do is end the damn income tax.
If you end the income tax, then that alone would cause a massive uptick in U.S. manufacturing and investment in factories, etc.
I mean, who knows?
I might even get into the business of making more stuff just beyond food and supplements and superfoods and things like that.
But because we are just punished by the IRS and punished by the FDA and punished by the EPA, the regulatory burden on American companies is so great that there's almost no point in investing in a factory.
And even if you can, where are you going to get the workers?
Because the workers in America largely don't want to work in factories.
And the only people that did want to work, the illegals, let's say, are being deported.
And I support that, by the way.
I want to be clear.
I do support the deportation of illegals.
I support legal immigration.
I welcome all immigrants who want to be Americans and who don't have a felony record and, you know, who...
Carry the American spirit.
I welcome them to America, no problem.
But the illegals have got to go, and they can try again, legally, if they want, but coming in illegally is completely wrong.
Anyway, my point is, you're going to start to see products flooding in from the north and the south, you know, from Canada and Mexico, that are fabricated on their country of origin.
So it's going to be, you know, really made in China, but it's going to be labeled...
Made in Canada or made in Mexico, okay?
So that's one thing.
The second thing that China is doing is China is moving a lot of products to other Southeast Asian nations.
Let's say, you know, South Korea, even Malaysia, you know, Indonesia, Thailand, you name it.
China is doing deals or Chinese companies are doing deals with these business leaders in those countries.
To basically launder the country of origin and to say, well, these products were made in Malaysia, you know, not China.
And then they export from Malaysia.
So in that case, the trucks, typically a land route, but I guess in some cases it could be a regional sea route, is moving products to, again, let's say Malaysia.
And then the new paperwork is created saying the country of origin is Malaysia.
And then from Malaysia, it's put on a ship and sailed to, let's say, the LA port and dropped off in LA without the China tariffs.
So that's the other way this is happening.
Now, in both of these cases, there is, of course, friction in this, so you get time delays and you get cost increases.
So this is going to cause an uptick in prices, but it's not going to be doubling and tripling of the prices.
And it will allow...
Many products to be on the shelves, products which would otherwise not be appearing at all if China didn't engage in this.
So I know there are going to be some Trump supporters and Americans screaming and crying, little crybaby tears.
Well, China's not following the rules.
What rules?
The U.S. doesn't follow any rules.
The whole idea of sanctions and secondary sanctions, that is lawless.
It's a complete violation of the World Trade Organization, what the U.S. is doing to China.
Don't anybody out there talk to me about, oh, China's not following the rules.
The U.S. doesn't follow any rules.
Not rules on war, not rules, not treaties.
The U.S. doesn't keep its word on anything.
Not rules on protecting the currency, not rules on gold backing the currency, you know, 1971, Richard Nixon, the whole deal.
So if anybody is engaged in breaking the rules or unfair trade, it's...
The United States.
And I love the fact that there are creative people all over the world who figure out a way to engage in the free market practice of getting products to people who need them.
Basically, it's turning into a kind of a global black market, you could say, or an underground economy to bypass Trump's economic insanity.
And that's a good thing.
So to summarize this so far, the good news is we may not have shelves that are as empty as I first feared because of the creativity of the Chinese manufacturers who are laundering the country of origin through other countries.
And ultimately, that is a good thing for U.S. consumers.
It's going to keep prices down more.
It's going to, in essence, put a pause on some of the vectors of inflation.
And it's going to prevent shelves from going as empty as Trump intended.
I mean, for whatever reason, Trump's policy was indeed intended to cause empty shelves all across America.
That was the desired effect by blocking China.
Knowing that China supplies, let's say, 70% of the items to Amazon.
Sure, through U.S. resellers, but the country of origin of those products, about 70%, it's being reported, is actually China.
So this creativity on the part of Chinese factories is thwarting Trump's empty shelves plan.
Why is our president placing America under a trade embargo?
And then I hear people say, well...
China engages in currency manipulation.
Yeah, it's just repeating Fox News.
You probably didn't hear that the U.S. is demanding that Taiwan engage in currency manipulation in order to favor the U.S. dollar and to basically increase the value of the Taiwan dollar, the NT dollar, by about 400% against the dollar, obviously weakening the dollar versus the Taiwan NT dollar.
And causing Taiwan-exported goods to cost a lot more in the U.S., while U.S. goods exported to Taiwan would be a lot less expensive to the Taiwan people.
So that's currency manipulation, and that's just one of many Trump demands involved surrounding currency manipulation.
Also, by the way, endless money printing is a form of currency manipulation, and the U.S. does that every day.
And it's the U.S. that cut off Russia from the SWIFT system.
That's an illegal manipulation, an attempted economic embargo or a banking embargo of Russia, which didn't work.
You know, it's U.S. and the Western countries that stole $300 billion of Russian money that was held in Western currencies in Western banks, mostly in Europe.
It's just straight up piracy, man.
That's just...
The U.S. and European countries just straight up stealing $300 billion from Russia just because they can.
And now they're even taking the interest on that money and giving the interest to Ukraine to fight Russia.
How about that?
We'll steal money from Russia and use the interest on that money to kill Russians in war.
Like, that's what the West does.
So the West has nothing.
That you would call fair trade, or free trade, or free markets, or world trade, nothing of the kind.
The U.S. and Western countries manipulate absolutely everything to the extreme.
To bully the world, threaten the world, coerce the world, bomb the world, you know, color revolutions, CIA assassinations.
Economic warfare, famine, agricultural bioweapons, you name it, okay?
That's what the U.S. does.
Now, finally, this idea...
Well, let me put it this way.
I've had people ask me, well, what would you do, Mike?
What would you do to increase U.S. manufacturing?
Well, I would go back in time to the 1990s, and I would not...
Elect Bill Clinton, for one thing, and I would not offshore all the manufacturing.
But guess who did that?
U.S. business leaders did that.
That was already done, and that was actually endorsed by many political leaders and, of course, all the top CEOs of companies engaged in a lot of manufacturing because they knew that they could make more money if they could make the products offshore.
If they could have the manufacturing done in China.
And so they did that.
And the American people went along with that.
The American people went shopping, and instead of buying the $40 toaster made in America, they bought the $20 toaster made in China.
And so they voted with their money to end U.S. manufacturing.
This whole issue of why don't we have very many factories in America?
This is the combined fault of the political leaders, the business leaders, and the consumers who kept voting for low prices instead of domestically made.
And this has gone on for, you know, 35 plus years.
So you've got to understand the origins of how we got here.
Now, in that 35 plus years, we lost the skill sets.
I know there are exceptions to this, but by and large, you don't have people who know how to run the equipment of factories.
It's not really just part of the wheelhouse of what Americans do anymore.
Yeah, there are plenty of Americans who can work as a barista at Starbucks and they can make a double frappe, latte, crapola, whatever, but they don't know how to run a lathe.
They don't know how to run a router.
They don't know how to run equipment, hydraulics, nothing.
So as a result, we are at least one generation removed from even having domestic manufacturing at any large scale.
You could build the factories, which would still take many years, but you can't fill those factories with competent, qualified people who have the skills and experience.
To run the factories.
They just don't exist.
Not in the numbers that would be necessary to replace any significant portion of all the things that are made in China.
So, I'm not sure that Trump is aware of this.
I do think that Trump, like a lot of people his age, not all of them, but many of them tend to live in the past.
Still live in the 1980s.
Like, oh, America can make everything better than everybody else.
You know, America's got the strongest military.
America can run around the world and threaten everybody, and they'll do what we say.
That seems to be what Trump believes.
And all of that is obsolete, actually.
That's not the way the world works now.
It's very different.
And so you can't just pop up instant factories and have them staffed by people.
And you might say, well, the robots are going to come in and make stuff.
Yeah, but that's years away.
They will eventually.
I've talked about that.
But that is many years away.
And the scaling up of the robots depends on a key mineral called neodymium.
And neodymium is made by China.
So, I mean, mined and exported by China.
So if you don't have that mineral, you're pretty much screwed.
So the bottom line here, folks, is, well, get ready.
It's going to get interesting.
And, you know, have backup supplies, have alternative sources, be ready for whatever empty shelves might occur, because they are going to occur at some level, but maybe not as bad as we thought.
So just be ready for all the scenarios.
And thank you for listening.
I'm Mike Adams here, The Health Ranger, naturalnews.com, and brighteon.com.
And thank you for listening.
Take care.
Take care.
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