From Sophie's front desk — Friday, August 28
BBC News — read the full story
Tariffs. Year one, done. What's next? B.B.C.'s looking at what households and businesses in Canada and the U.S. have already paid — a year deep into tariff shock — and what happens if the walls go higher still. Supply chains have rewired themselves. Prices have moved through the system. Consumers are shopping differently now. Seneca has the first word today, then Benjamin Franklin.
Lucilius, I read of two great houses taxing each other's grain and the baker in the forum pays. I remember Corsica , eight years watching merchant ships pass, their holds full of wine and oil that never reached our table because Rome had closed the route. The magistrate does not starve. The widow buying bread does. The mechanism is old: power quarrels, commerce reroutes, the cost settles on shoulders that cannot shift it. A ship captain changes course.
A factor finds a new supplier. The price rises in the market by the weight of a denarius per modius, and the senator calls it policy while the freedman counts coppers for his evening meal. We have seen this before. The annona failed under Claudius, and the mob burned the prefect's house. The grain came from Africa all the same... but the journey grew longer and the poor ate less.
What changes when the dispute hardens is not the principle... but the velocity. Adaptation has a limit. The merchant who once sailed to Baetica now sails to Alexandria , his ship holds the same, his risk doubles, his margin vanishes. At some point he stops sailing. The quarrel belongs to princes.
The hunger belongs to us. Write me , have you noticed the olive oil in Sicily tasting different this season?
less, since the price is settled by custom and the rate of the market, not by the uses and powers of the merchandise. What would you state to be the proper payment of a man who crosses the seas, holding a true course through the midst of the waves after the land has sunk out of s…
some in a calm: the general differences, or different estates of things, some, that are now first upon being; the several and mutual relations of those things that are together; and some other things that are at their last. Their lives also, who were long ago, and theirs who shal…
physician beyond his paltry fee, nor to your teacher, because you have paid him some money; yet these persons are all held very dear, and are very much respected." In answer to this I should urge that some things are of greater value than the price which we pay for them. You buy …
commonwealths. We may also foresee things future, for they shall all be of the same kind; neither is it possible that they should leave the tune, or break the concert that is now begun, as it were, by these things that are now done and brought to pass in the world. It comes all t…
is an enormous mass of things without names, which we do not speak of under distinctive names of their own, but by the names of other things transferred to them. We speak of our own foot, of the foot of a couch, of a sail, or of a poem; we apply the word 'dog' to a hound, a fish,…
I read this morning that your northern border has been taxing each other's wares for a twelvemonth now, and the merchants on both sides have taken to hopping the line like boys at a fence , buying here, selling there, wherever the duty falls lightest. We saw this in the colonies when the Townshend Acts laid their hands on glass, lead, paint, and tea; the Boston smuggler grew rich, the London merchant grew poor, and the Crown grew angry. The pattern is older than the printing press. A tariff is a tax the consumer pays twice , once at the customs house, once at the shop counter.
The manufacturer raises his price by the full duty and a little more for his trouble; the retailer adds his margin on the swollen sum; the householder feels it in the flour barrel and the firewood. I calculated once that four million industrious Britons could shoulder twelve millions in war costs by each retrenching a few idle hours. Your two nations have rather more shoulders now... yet the arithmetic holds: ...
the burden divides... but it does not vanish. The supply chains you speak of , they are only the old peddler's packhorse with a ledger instead of a satchel. When the Stamp Act made legal paper dear, we wrote on the margins of old almanacs.
the coming winter will have a crisis again in it. In this summer season, news spreads very slowly and imperfectly, at least through London; but we shall soon get together again. However I cannot possibly tell you the obligations we have to those, who have furnished our newspapers…
lengths are some things carried, it is not sufficient to pay the duties here when the goods arrive; in some instances (as in the case of wines imported from Lisbon) we are obliged to carry the goods to England, there unload them, and then reship them to America; as if it were not…
salt works together will in a few months, I hope, yield a tolerable supply to our People and at pretty reasonable rates compared with those which have obtained for some time past: perhaps the private Saltmakers may afford to sell salt at 30s. per bushel; the undertakers of the pu…
Sir, When people consider the supply of Twelve Millions as necessary for the service of the ensuing year, the greatness of the object astonishes; and they are apt to say, Whence can so vast a sum arise? Can England possibly bear the continuance of a war at so enormous an expence?…
all paid by the consumer. If these nations over whom we have no government, over whose consumption we can have no influence, but what arises from the cheapness and goodness of our wares; whose trade, manufactures, or commercial connections are not subject to the controul of our l…
The story ran in B.B.C. News. After a year of tariff shock, the real question is whether supply chains have stabilized or merely delayed the reckoning. That's Old News for today.