The underlying problem is that the two purposes of tariff announcements work on dramatically different time scales. On the one side, a stated goal of tariffs is to get manufacturing to move back to the USA. That is going to take years. Even on something decidedly low tech as building a factory to make toys or board games, planning a factory, buying land, getting building permissions, building the factory, hiring people, organising supply chains, and getting production up and running takes several years. On the other side, the number of tariff changes announced since "liberation day" is staggering, and there is a very clear message from the administration that tariffs are subject to negotiation. Nobody in his right mind is going to start a project to build manufacturing in the USA which is solely based on the current tariff rate, as there is zero certainty that the tariff will still be around when the factory is up and running.

Thus Chip Theory Games, understandably, opted to delay their delivery to the USA, despite being an American company. Anybody would feel rather stupid if he shipped something from China today with a 145% tariff, and next month that tariff is dropped again. Of course, there is a possibility here that the China tariff is staying. Chip Theory Games said that they would then ship the games anyway, and eat the loss, being in a good financial situation due to the success of their previous game, The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era. Not every company will be able to do so. It is foreseeable, that warehousing space in China is going to become rather expensive in the coming weeks, unless the tariffs drop. At some point, the owners of these goods, many of them American companies, will have to decide to either ship the goods and pay the tariff, or ask for the goods to be destroyed or shipped elsewhere. With some companies simply going bankrupt, leaving the fate of their goods stored in China in limbo. Logistics is going to be a huge mess over the coming weeks, you can't just press pause on the China-US trade for weeks or months without things piling up somewhere in huge volumes.

Coming back to an earlier subject in this series, nobody knows right now how much the tariff for a Nintendo Switch 2 made in China is going to be on release day June 5. It temporarily looked as if it would benefit from the "Apple exemption" for consumer electronics, but then the administration that this wasn't an exemption, but just a reclassification, and devices containing microchips would be hit with a different set of tariffs soon. And that might hit the smaller number of Switch 2 consoles being manufactured in Vietnam as well. For the time being, preorders in the US are still delayed. But preorders in the rest of the world are strong. Which opens the possibility to another solution which would be good for other countries, and bad for Americans: Nintendo could reasonably ship more Switch 2 consoles to other countries, and fewer units to the US. Even if the final tariff in June on a console is just 25% instead of 145%, Nintendo might not want to officially raise the retail price in the USA from the currently announced $450. And if they make a loss on the console, it would be in their best interest to sell as few as possible. The other option being to raise the price, which would presumably lower demand, and also result in fewer units being shipped to America. And that is just one example from the millions of goods that are manufactured in China. We might be looking at a year 2025 in which Chinese goods become increasingly cheap and abundant in the rest of the world, due to everything getting directed elsewhere than America.