October 22, 2025 • 33 mins
Mia looks at the economics behind American and European steel tariffs to explain the push behind the broader tariff regime and how capitalism works.
Sources:
https://www.piie.com/blogs/china-economic-watch/chinas-excess-capacity-steel-fresh-look
https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/misery-and-debt
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
All Zone Media. Welcome to IKE It Happened Here, a
podcast that has increasingly become about tariffs in the second
Trump regime. I am your host, Miil Wong, and oh boy,
it has been a big few weeks for tariff news.
(00:24):
We have tariff numbers on China that I'm not even
going to bother to actually record right now because by
the time this goes out, the numbers will probably be different.
There are supposed to be major negotiations underway between Trump
and the Chinese government to attempt to come to yet
another trade agreement and stave off yet another round one
(00:47):
hundred percent tariffs. Now, if you want to follow the
sort of blow by blow of what exactly is going on,
I'm going to just sort of refer you to my
section tariff talk on Executive Disorder. However, Comma, we need
to take a deeper look at what structurally is going
(01:09):
on in the global economy that is resulting in the
demand for tariffs in the first place. And I think
the place to go if that's the thing that you're
trying to figure out. And we've talked about the sort
of ideological aspects of this in other episodes. We've talked
(01:30):
about the ways that the sort of politics of fascism,
the politics and anti semitism, the politics of masculinity lead
people towards these extremely ulternationalist policies that are specifically supposed
to sort of protect the domestic blood and soil national
industry and are supposed to protect material goods over services.
(01:54):
But there are things that are happening structurally in the
economy that make it such that people would consider things
like the tariffs that have been happening under this regime
as a solution to things that are kind of structural
problems of the economy specifically. And this is what we're
going to be focusing on today. Over capacity and steel. Now,
(02:20):
some of you may be asking, Mia, why are we
talking about steel over capacity? And I think there's a
few important notes here. One, steel is in some ways
emblematic of American tariff policy. It is I guess you
would call it the most material of the tariffs in
the sense that it's the one where there's the most
actual direct sort of material forces and direct lobbying groups
(02:45):
asking for these specific tariffs. The American steel industry has
been lobbying to some extent for some measures kind of
like this Steel is also one of the industries whereas
as tariff rates are fluctuated and up and down and
whole waves of like Liberation Day, tariffs got put into
place and then removed, and some of them we got
(03:06):
put back into place a little bit. The steel tariffs
were set at fifty percent and they've stayed at fifty
percent since they were set. Basically, there's been a little
bit of variation sort of before the final fix percent
number was arrived at, but the steel tariffs had been
one of the most stable tariffs. And the reason why
it's been this stable if people can think back all
(03:28):
the way to twenty eighteen, which I know that was
a long time ago, but there was a miniature trade
war between the US and China in twenty eighteen, and
significant portions of it were focused on Chinese steel production specifically,
and you know, this is one of the sort of
fights that was had out Nothing really structurally changed much
(03:50):
from those There was kind of a back and forth
and then both sides kind of pulled back. But Comma,
that's not happening this time. And what's interesting, and the
reason that I'm specifically talking about steel here is that
it's now not just Trump that is tempting to institute
large scale tariffs on steel. The European Commission for the
(04:13):
EU has released a proposal to double tariffs on imported
steel up to fifty percent, which is matched in the US,
and also reduce the amount of steel that could be
imported into the EU without paying any tariffs at all.
And this is actually massive because this is an example
of the EU effectively following US trade policy for very
(04:35):
very similar reasons as the US. And if we can
get to the bottom of what is going on here,
and I promise we will, and I promise this will
go towards something that is explaining really truly the macro
dynamics of the entire global economy and why it's fucked.
If we can actually trace out what's going on with
(04:56):
these steel tariffs, we can do that. So well, let's
talk about steel over capacity. Over Capacity as a concept
is sort of convoluted. You know, you have to sort
of ask the question, what is the quote unquote correct
amount of steel? Because over capacity, you know, implies that
(05:16):
there's capacity to produce steel over the amount that should
be produced. So, okay, how do you figure how much
steel should be produced? Eh? Very nebulous. It's also very
difficult to measure because, okay, we're gonna try to measure
steel over capacity. There's a lot of ways to do
it that rely on things like utilization rates. Right, So
(05:38):
you look at the steel facilities, you see how much
they're being used at You see how much you know
excess capacity, there is, how many how many factories are
sitting empty BOE percentage of factories, you know, total outputs
being used. This doesn't work because the utilization rates of
these factories of this fixed capital varies seasonally, for example,
and it varies due to not just the season, but
(05:59):
a whole bunch of other factors, things like you know,
labor supply, weather, demand, polls, and a whole bunch of
other factors. Utilization rates of steel producing facilities are very
rarely at one hundred percent, even in Marcus where demand
a shrip supply, and this makes it very, very difficult
to measure China's actual quote unquote overcapacity. I am not
(06:23):
going to even really try to give numbers because it's
extremely subjective. How do I say this? Based on the
research that I have done, I think the numbers you
normally see in the West are inflated because they are
not accounting for things like the weather, because it is
in the interest of sort of Western research institutions, but
for example, Western financial institutions, specifically steel companies, and they're
(06:47):
sort of like allied China Hawk, you know, sort of
like academics to have the number be as high as possible.
You will also see numbers from people who are tied
to Chinese government, and when I say tied to, kind
of in a loose ideological sense, in the same way
as the Chinahawks are of the Chinahawks tend to actually
be more directly connected to the US government. Their numbers
(07:08):
are probably also too low. But I don't want to
give you the impression that I have a extremely certain
understanding of what the exact number of millions of tons
of XSDEO production is happening. What we can sort of
agree on is that there does seem to be some
(07:30):
kind of overcapacity in the Chinese economy, right, and this
is something that the Chinese Communist Party also agrees on.
If you go back to a document that really really
few people in the US have ever seen to have
heard of, which is the wonderfully titled Opinions of the
(07:50):
CPC Central Committee and the State Council on further promoting
the development of Ecological Civilization, which was one of the
founding documentary Chinese Environmental Police and the ideological sort of
underpinnings of this thing called ecological civilization, which is the
basis of Chinese environmental policy. One of the things that
they mentioned a lot is specifically overcapacity. Right, they are
(08:16):
actually very concerned about the overcapacity of steal from an
ecological perspective. And this is sort of fascinating because we'll
be looking at some scholars later who are favorably quoted
in Chinese state media's sources describing how there isn't actually
overcapacity because states say different things in different places, and
(08:38):
this is in fact extremely common. But there does seem
to be some kind of overcapacity, and the Chinese government
was to some extent making attempts to reduce it during
this sort of period of trade war. Now, the other
issue we're talking about overcapacity is that overcapacity is an
extremely political issue. Now, right, It's extremely weird because try
(08:58):
to seal overcapacity is like my most niche thing that
I've studied. I've had like a paper on this sitting
in a drive on my computer for over half a decade.
I have never brought it out until now, but it's
become an extremely political topic because the different theories of
stealover capacity have become a basis for a lot of
(09:24):
genuine trade policy. Now. I think a very very interesting
book at Chinese stealover capacity is from the book Understanding
China's over Capacity. She's written by two Chinese economists that
I think is a really interesting literature survey. This This
is fround By twenty eighteen. But I think what's interesting
about it it's from before the period where everyone in
(09:48):
the West had sort of decided what they think caused
Chinese steal over capacity, and so you can go back.
You know, it's not just useful to sort of go
back in time and look at the other theories that
were sort of floating around academia before a few of
them got specifically selective for ideological purposes. Now I mentioned earlier,
(10:09):
we'd be talking about some economists. You don't think that's
Chinese steel over capacity is real, that's these people. I
think that part of their thesis is not very good.
I think their survey of the literature on overcapacity, though,
is very good and one of the very interesting arguments
they make this doesn't argue with a couple of other economists,
(10:30):
that has sort of disappeared from the literature is in
argument about, Okay, so there's steel production that's happening that
doesn't need to happen. I think it's pretty fair to
say that something is over capacity if it's producing a
bunch of steel that sits there in rots because no
one can sell it, which is a thing that happens
(10:50):
with Chinese steel. And one of the most interesting theses
that has really been abandoned, even though I think it
is actually to a decent extent explanatory of a lot
of very very weird stuff that happens in Chinese policy
circles and a lot of just very baffling investment decisions,
(11:12):
is specifically something about local caudras and their performance incentives. So, okay,
something that's very important to understand about the structure of
the CCP is that Chinese government institutions are sort of
run by these caudras, right, and so if you are,
for example, I don't know, you are the mayor of
a mid size city, right, you get performance evaluations and
(11:35):
those sort of yearly performance evaluations sometimes there's less frequents
than that, but those those performance evaluations rank you at
sort of how good you're doing your job. And obviously
there's political maneuver rank here too, But if you do
a good job of hitting your targets, this is your
path to advance upwards in the party and be moved
from you know, like sort of running a small city
(11:57):
to like being brought into caudra in larger cities, and
you know, moving your way of the party, moving to
national positions. These evaluations are extremely important. You can also
get sort of busted down if your evaluations suck. Again,
there's also why politics are too, but these evaluations actually
do matter. And one of the issues with these evaluations
(12:20):
and these are also policy making implementation tools, right, you know,
the central government can decide what kinds of policies they
want to pursue, and then they can use these codure
evaluations to make people at the sort of local level
who are usually semi autonomous in ways that I think
is not very well understood in the West. These countra
evaluations are ways to try to ensure that Chinese sort
(12:44):
of local and provincial government policy kind of aligns with
national party policy and the waiting on these examinations is
such that it has very, very weird effects. And what
I'm specifically talking about here is that GDP numbers are
very very important to these CAUDRA evaluations, and it matters
(13:05):
that it's specifically gross domestic product because GDP is a
very very weird number, and there's a lot of stuff
you can do to sort of juice GDP numbers that
aren't really necessarily beneficial to an economy. So you can
(13:27):
have a bunch of firms that are basically unprofitable or
doing something that's like not particularly economically or socially useful,
and that can still boost GDP numbers. And one of
the things that happens with this is that you can
boost GDP numbers by making a shit tot of steel
that nobody actually really wants or uses. And because of
(13:47):
the priority that's set on GDP numbers specifically, and there's
also a whole bunch of these sort of weird financial
games that you can play. That's also played a major
role in the way the Chinese housing bubble has played
out and the way that the government has been unwilling
to sort of you know, and when I say the
government here I be in both the national governments and
(14:09):
also sort of these lower level governments have been unwilling
to sort of let a bunch of debt bubbles that
they've accumulated pop because those things prop up GDP numbers,
and the incentive on the local level is to keep
these numbers up. This used to actually be one of
the things that people would talk about when they talked
about Chinese steel over capacity. But it's complicated, like you
(14:30):
can't very very easily explain this to you know, like
a right wing congress person and have them go, oh, yeah, right,
this is unfair to the American market, and so it
kind of has like fallen out of favor and sort
of like the explanation to steal over capacity you see
in places like the New York Times. But I actually
(14:50):
think this is one of the things that does, to
some extent cause Chinese steal over capacity. Now do you
know what doesn't cause Chinese steal over capacity? That's right,
it is the products and services that support this podcast.
(15:13):
So I wanted to talk about the local quadra explanations
because I actually think these are kind of important, and
I want to talk about one other argument that's also
not really used much that used to be a lot
more common, which is an argument that Chinese economist makes
(15:36):
that one of the reasons that there's overcapacity in Chinese
steel production is that upwards wealth distribution leads to lower
levels of consumption and thus over capacity. And so what
what this basically means, And this is something that I
think is actually also I think that's the best structural
problem in in the Chinese economies, that the Chinese economy
is extremely highly unequal and wages, you know, like they
(15:59):
have risen to some extent, but they're not rising anywhere
near you know, like we've everyone in the US have
seen that famous charge of productivity versus like labor gains,
right like wage gains versus prouctivity increases. Wages in China
have gone up. They have absolutely not kept pace with
sort of productivity growth, and they also absolutely like have
(16:20):
not kept pace with the amount of the profit being
produced that is going to a very very small number
of capital owners. And this actually creates a structural problem.
And this is we're seeing a very similar structural problem
to this in the US, where there is a lot
of consumption that if that money wasn't just all going
(16:43):
to a bunch of rich people, people would actually be
spending it on things, And particularly in Chinese context, the
argument was that if if there was a better distribution
of wealth, people would buy more houses, and this would
actually reduce over capacity because suddenly a bunch of the
slack capacity will be being used to like build houses,
except people can't afford the houses. And this is a
(17:06):
structural problem that like economists sort of note about for
decades and decades, which is that China has been for
a very long time. The whole thing was that they
were trying to transition into a consumption economy, which is
to say, they were trying to transition into an economy
that was fueled by its own internal consumption. The US
is to a large extent sort of kind of works
like this, where you know, you want to increase the
(17:26):
level of consumption and the amount of stuff that people
in your country are buying, and this is this is
a way to sort of like create a middle income country, right,
And China has historically not been able to do this
and haven't been able to do this because they won't
raise wages. But you know, if they won't actually raise
wages enough to increase people's consumption levels. Then you're left
for structural overcapacity because demand is being lowered because people
(17:50):
don't have any fucking money. Now, this is another argument
again and I think is also probably correct that is
very much not talked about anymore because the argument that
is used in sort of understanding what's going on with
Chinese seel capacity is about the Chinese subsidization of state
(18:10):
owned enterprises at the expense of sort of private firms.
And the argument here basically said, the state is propping
up a bunch of unprofitable enterprises and they're they're holding
sectors of the economy that should be you know, taken
over by more efficient private firms, but they can't because
they're being subsidized by the government. And this is sort
(18:32):
of true, but this became a massive geopolitical argument because
the argument from the American side, and when you hear
anyone talking about steal of capacity, now this is the
argument that you hear right which that China is flooding
the world with cheap steel because there's a whole bunch
of like Chinese state owned industries or just like Chinese
businesses are just getting money from the Chinese government to
produce steel and they're pumping cheap steel to the rest
(18:54):
of the world. And this is not really I mean,
like kind of this is happening, but it's also not
the reason why there's large scale steal over capacity. And
of course the argument is that China isn't competing fairly
in the market, like this is very silly. Markets have
(19:15):
never worked without large scale state quote unquote interference, Like
American companies also get extremely high level subsidization et cetera,
et cetera, cy all of US COREGN policy. But you know,
this is the political imperative that's behind a lot of
the rhetoric coming out of steel producers and out of
(19:37):
the American right about why there should be terroriists on steel.
Now there's a problem though, which is that all of
these arguments are very specific to China. Right. The argument
is that there are specifically steal over capacity in China
because it's something structurally specifically wrong with the Chinese economy
(19:59):
that's like ma it not a free market, and because
of that, China's like unfairly competing global market. And this
is why there's so much of a capacity of Chinese steel.
This is wrong. There are individual parts of this where yeah,
like there are things where there is excess capacity being
produced by quadre evaluations and by to some extent like
(20:20):
so we subsidization. However, Comma, there's a problem. And the
problem here is that overcapacity and overcapacity and steel is
not just a Chinese phenomena. It is a global phenomena.
It has been a global phenomena for a long time,
and it is largely a product of the fact that
(20:41):
we do not live in a global economy that can
actually support the amount of production capacity that exists in
the world. This has been a problem really since the
seventies and arguably even since the sixties, where as countries
rebuild from World War Two, and as some some sort
(21:02):
of developments in global capital that we're going to be
sort of like talking about soon happens that the product
of all of this is that production has and this
is this is kind of the thing that the sort
of fascist right kind of intuitively understands. Production has become
zero sum. Right, It's very difficult to increase production in
(21:24):
one country without having it, you know, affect production in
the countries. There isn't enough demand in the market to
sort of like fuel all of these things. So why
(21:45):
is there not enough demand to fuel the amount of
supply that would be that would be necessary to make
there not be over capacity. The answer to this, in
sort of marketing theory is that, as they sort of
put it, overproduction and under consumption are doubly constructed. I'm
going to read a quote from end Notes, volume two,
and then we're going to explain a little bit what
(22:07):
that means. The wage allocates workers to production and at
the same time allocates the product to workers. So what
that means is that under consumption and overproduction are in
effect the same thing, right, Because the way that we
allocate workers to what thing they're going to do, and
(22:28):
at the same time allocate products to those workers is
the wage, which is one thing. So overproduction and under
consumption are the same thing, right, and they're caused by
the same structural elements of the wage relation. Now this
means that the Chinese capacity crisis is actually part of
(22:50):
a larger crisis. Right. You know the thing about the
double construction, you know of overcapacity and under consumption, right,
the fact that they are really the two things unified
in the fact that like your wage allocates what kind
of production you're doing and what you can consume the
fact that both those things combined are realized in this
sort of secular crisis in what's called Marxist absolute general
(23:13):
law of capitalist accumulation. So what the fuck is that
the short version is? Over time in capitalist economies, there's
supposed to be an increase of what's called the organic
composition of capital. Basically, they're a composition of capital is
a way to measure how much in the pro labor process.
It's like fixed capital, variable capital, so it's like how
(23:36):
much factory is there relative to the amount of worker
there is. And Marxist thesis, which has generally been born out,
although we'll talk a little bit about that more later,
is that this composition is going to increase, and as
it increases, accumulation also needs to increase in order to
maintain employment levels. This is sort of accomplished by things
(23:59):
like automation, which reduces the size of the labor force.
And thus, to quote and notes again, as accumulation proceeds,
a growing superabundance of goods lowers the rate of profit
and heightens competition across lines, compelling all capitalists to, as
Mark said, economize on labor. So basically, what this means
(24:21):
is like, as capital gets turned into more capital and
larger amounts of capital, this is the accumulation process. As
this continues, right, you get this massive sort of increasing
the amount of goods that are being produced. Eventually that
lowers the rate of profit in a sector. And eventually
what that does is, you know, in order to sort
of economize on labor, capital increases the amount of automation
(24:44):
reduces the amount of people that they need in the
labor process. You know, this is what what's generally known
as automation and the sort of crisis of people getting
kicked out of their draws because of it. As this
process is sort of generalized across sectoral lines across different
parts of the economy, the relative to demand for labor
decreases and workers are spin out of the wage relation,
which is the fancy Marxist way to say they become
(25:06):
structurally unemployed. And you know, the thing that happens when
you get kicked out of the capitalist wage relation is
you get kicked into informal labor and slums, which you know,
decreases demand and increase overproduction. At the same time, over
capacity is skyrocketing, right, because you have increasing numbers of
people who have been spat out the formal economy who
(25:27):
no longer have access to regular wages. The wages they
get in the informal economy are less than the ones
they would get in the formal economy. And as we
were saying, write, access to like the wage, both determines
production and consumption. So if you lose access to the wage, right,
and there's still more stuff being produced because of automation levels,
what you get is a massive, skyrocketing double increase of
(25:48):
overproduction and under consumption, right, because there's just not enough
money to fucking buy the stuff. And the result of
this is a miseration. Everything gets fucking worse. This sort
of used to be an academic argument. It is no
longer an academic argument. It is just the terrain on
which economic policy unfolds. Now. The miseration thesis is this
(26:10):
is you know, it's a sort of like general law
of capitalist accumulation is called has been argued about constantly.
There have been ways that has been avoided. One of
the biggest ways traditionally has been by capitalism sort of
transforming goods into services. So for example, like the operative
example of this is the transition in the us from
rail lines to cars on something that points out, So
(26:33):
you know, you get these new industries that are both
labor or capital intensive. By replacing train with car, you know,
you can absorb huge populations of workers as well as
incorporate the peasantry into the industrial economy by sort of
like converting these things into services. This has sort of
been what the economy has been increasingly converted into a
service based economy of various kinds. That's kind of what's
(26:54):
happening now, you know, and you and you can see
this process that work in the Chinese economy back when
it was you know, really growing in the nineties and
two thousands. But you know, once the peasantry had been
absorbed as sort of both a new market and a
new labor force with lower cost of reproduction because wages
are cheaper for a bunch of structural reasons, the old
(27:15):
tendencies of capital set in. And so what happens inside
of China was what was happening everywhere else in the world,
which is that as labor saving technology begins to be implemented,
and you know, a bunch of services refused to be
turned into new goods to like bolster the ranks industrial
working class. You know, you get what's happened in the US,
which is this this full transition to service economy shit
(27:38):
that doesn't actually really grow. And you know, if if
you look, if you look at Chinese growth rates, like
they've been slowing for a decade, actually a little bit
longer than a decade. And so you know, as China
was integrated to the global economy, it too became caught
in this cycle of industrial booms where you know, you
get an industrial boom where you have a country with
favorable exchange rates, you a stallar that inevitably set off,
(28:01):
you know, the economies on the bad end of the
exchange rate to collapse as they're forced to bear the
way to global over capacity. As as I've mentioned one
hundred billion times on this show, it is the one
thing I will make sure every it could happen here
listener will be able to explain the Plaza Accords and
the Reverse Plaza Cords. You know, but this is sort
(28:22):
of this is sort of what the Reverse Plazai Cords
and the Plazai Cords were about. Was the US. This
is the last time the US tried to you know,
use its to sort of like pure political power and
military might to be like, eat shit, I'm going to
force all of your countries to fuck with your currency
so that our manufacturing economy will come back. And again,
the US did that successfully and the Japanese economy collapsed
(28:45):
because we needcap Japanese economy to do it right. And
to some extent, Trump is attempting the farce as farce
version of this with with these steel terriffs. Right to
some extent, these tariffs are his attempts to pull the
Reagan maneuver of Okay, we can just like force other
countries to lower their capacity and increase our capacity at
(29:05):
their expense. The problem is that, again, this production is
zero sum, and if you do this, it will annihilate
the rest of the global economy. And this is the
sort of context behind all of the stuff that we've
been seeing for the last like thirty years, which that
(29:25):
actual profit rates have been collapsing for ages. And right
now we're in the middle of a just unbelievably hideously
staggeringly massive bubble that is maintaining the sort of last
like fake vestiges of economic growth where billions and billions
and billions of dollars have been sunk into all of
(29:47):
this AI bullshit, and it's you know, like the tech
driven AI is a significant specifically specifically the AI stuff
is a significant portion of total US economic growth. If
you want to live to why that's all going to
go to shit? Turn on effectively literally any episode of
COOLSI Media's own Exitron's podcast Better Offline and will you
(30:11):
will hear a lot about this. But you know, this
has been that, like tech has been sort of the
escape strategy of the United States. Traditionally, it's going to implode,
it's going to do tremendous damage to everyone. But in
the remains of that, and in this world in which
profit rates are declining, and in this world in which
increasing portions of the population are being spat out of
(30:34):
the capitalist production cycle, in which increasing percentages of the
world population are being kicked into an informal economy, and
in this world of generalized overproduction under consumption, what's happening
is that there is an enormous effort to get everyone
to think that this is because of very specific tendencies
of like the bad government over there, right that you know,
(30:58):
over capacity and steel. Oh, it's just because like the
evil communist government in China is cheating at capitalism by
giving their companies money, and so we're gonna do tariffs
on them instead of that. And again, like it's easier
for these academics to make this argument because there is
kind of stuff going on, right, because there is this
sort of cadure evaluation stuff, because there is to some
(31:18):
extend stay subsidization of steel production. They can present this
boogeyman to sort of pin what is really a global
overproduction and under consumption crisis onto just you know, it's
just as government we don't like, and then you can
sort of implement these ultranationalists tariff policies. It's a way
(31:40):
of deflecting the blame from capitalism onto another country and
using nationalism to paper over the actual economic contradictions of
capital And if you want to escape that, it's not
enough to sort of just get rid of Trump and
go back to the previous retrade regime. You have to
actually structurally change the thing at the center of all
(32:03):
of this, which is the wage relation. Right. You have
to fundamentally change the fact that this economy, the entire economy,
is based on there being classes of people who make
money from owning things and that there's an entire class
of people whose labor is stolen every single day so
that those other people can make money by owning things
(32:25):
who do all of the actual work. And that's what's
actually fundamentally at stake here. It is this question of
are we going to continue to do tariff bullshit? Or
are we going to take power from the people who
caused all of this? From Trump, from Elon Musk, from
(32:46):
all of the billionaires, from Feel, from all of the
tech billionaires that funded them, from all of the Republican
Party Cook Breathern networks. Are we going to destroy these
people completely by getting rid of the social relations of
capital that make this all possible? Or are we going
to sit here and let them continue to produce AI
(33:08):
videos of them shitting all over us while they take
all of our money and commit an ethnic cleansing and
continue to fund genocides abroad. It could happen here is
a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from
cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonmedia dot com, or
check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
(33:30):
wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources
for It could happen here, listed directly in episode descriptions.
Thanks for listening,
All Zone Media. Welcome to IKE It Happened Here, a
podcast that has increasingly become about tariffs in the second
Trump regime. I am your host, Miil Wong, and oh boy,
it has been a big few weeks for tariff news.
(00:24):
We have tariff numbers on China that I'm not even
going to bother to actually record right now because by
the time this goes out, the numbers will probably be different.
There are supposed to be major negotiations underway between Trump
and the Chinese government to attempt to come to yet
another trade agreement and stave off yet another round one
(00:47):
hundred percent tariffs. Now, if you want to follow the
sort of blow by blow of what exactly is going on,
I'm going to just sort of refer you to my
section tariff talk on Executive Disorder. However, Comma, we need
to take a deeper look at what structurally is going
(01:09):
on in the global economy that is resulting in the
demand for tariffs in the first place. And I think
the place to go if that's the thing that you're
trying to figure out. And we've talked about the sort
of ideological aspects of this in other episodes. We've talked
(01:30):
about the ways that the sort of politics of fascism,
the politics and anti semitism, the politics of masculinity lead
people towards these extremely ulternationalist policies that are specifically supposed
to sort of protect the domestic blood and soil national
industry and are supposed to protect material goods over services.
(01:54):
But there are things that are happening structurally in the
economy that make it such that people would consider things
like the tariffs that have been happening under this regime
as a solution to things that are kind of structural
problems of the economy specifically. And this is what we're
going to be focusing on today. Over capacity and steel. Now,
(02:20):
some of you may be asking, Mia, why are we
talking about steel over capacity? And I think there's a
few important notes here. One, steel is in some ways
emblematic of American tariff policy. It is I guess you
would call it the most material of the tariffs in
the sense that it's the one where there's the most
actual direct sort of material forces and direct lobbying groups
(02:45):
asking for these specific tariffs. The American steel industry has
been lobbying to some extent for some measures kind of
like this Steel is also one of the industries whereas
as tariff rates are fluctuated and up and down and
whole waves of like Liberation Day, tariffs got put into
place and then removed, and some of them we got
(03:06):
put back into place a little bit. The steel tariffs
were set at fifty percent and they've stayed at fifty
percent since they were set. Basically, there's been a little
bit of variation sort of before the final fix percent
number was arrived at, but the steel tariffs had been
one of the most stable tariffs. And the reason why
it's been this stable if people can think back all
(03:28):
the way to twenty eighteen, which I know that was
a long time ago, but there was a miniature trade
war between the US and China in twenty eighteen, and
significant portions of it were focused on Chinese steel production specifically,
and you know, this is one of the sort of
fights that was had out Nothing really structurally changed much
(03:50):
from those There was kind of a back and forth
and then both sides kind of pulled back. But Comma,
that's not happening this time. And what's interesting, and the
reason that I'm specifically talking about steel here is that
it's now not just Trump that is tempting to institute
large scale tariffs on steel. The European Commission for the
(04:13):
EU has released a proposal to double tariffs on imported
steel up to fifty percent, which is matched in the US,
and also reduce the amount of steel that could be
imported into the EU without paying any tariffs at all.
And this is actually massive because this is an example
of the EU effectively following US trade policy for very
(04:35):
very similar reasons as the US. And if we can
get to the bottom of what is going on here,
and I promise we will, and I promise this will
go towards something that is explaining really truly the macro
dynamics of the entire global economy and why it's fucked.
If we can actually trace out what's going on with
(04:56):
these steel tariffs, we can do that. So well, let's
talk about steel over capacity. Over Capacity as a concept
is sort of convoluted. You know, you have to sort
of ask the question, what is the quote unquote correct
amount of steel? Because over capacity, you know, implies that
(05:16):
there's capacity to produce steel over the amount that should
be produced. So, okay, how do you figure how much
steel should be produced? Eh? Very nebulous. It's also very
difficult to measure because, okay, we're gonna try to measure
steel over capacity. There's a lot of ways to do
it that rely on things like utilization rates. Right, So
(05:38):
you look at the steel facilities, you see how much
they're being used at You see how much you know
excess capacity, there is, how many how many factories are
sitting empty BOE percentage of factories, you know, total outputs
being used. This doesn't work because the utilization rates of
these factories of this fixed capital varies seasonally, for example,
and it varies due to not just the season, but
(05:59):
a whole bunch of other factors, things like you know,
labor supply, weather, demand, polls, and a whole bunch of
other factors. Utilization rates of steel producing facilities are very
rarely at one hundred percent, even in Marcus where demand
a shrip supply, and this makes it very, very difficult
to measure China's actual quote unquote overcapacity. I am not
(06:23):
going to even really try to give numbers because it's
extremely subjective. How do I say this? Based on the
research that I have done, I think the numbers you
normally see in the West are inflated because they are
not accounting for things like the weather, because it is
in the interest of sort of Western research institutions, but
for example, Western financial institutions, specifically steel companies, and they're
(06:47):
sort of like allied China Hawk, you know, sort of
like academics to have the number be as high as possible.
You will also see numbers from people who are tied
to Chinese government, and when I say tied to, kind
of in a loose ideological sense, in the same way
as the Chinahawks are of the Chinahawks tend to actually
be more directly connected to the US government. Their numbers
(07:08):
are probably also too low. But I don't want to
give you the impression that I have a extremely certain
understanding of what the exact number of millions of tons
of XSDEO production is happening. What we can sort of
agree on is that there does seem to be some
(07:30):
kind of overcapacity in the Chinese economy, right, and this
is something that the Chinese Communist Party also agrees on.
If you go back to a document that really really
few people in the US have ever seen to have
heard of, which is the wonderfully titled Opinions of the
(07:50):
CPC Central Committee and the State Council on further promoting
the development of Ecological Civilization, which was one of the
founding documentary Chinese Environmental Police and the ideological sort of
underpinnings of this thing called ecological civilization, which is the
basis of Chinese environmental policy. One of the things that
they mentioned a lot is specifically overcapacity. Right, they are
(08:16):
actually very concerned about the overcapacity of steal from an
ecological perspective. And this is sort of fascinating because we'll
be looking at some scholars later who are favorably quoted
in Chinese state media's sources describing how there isn't actually
overcapacity because states say different things in different places, and
(08:38):
this is in fact extremely common. But there does seem
to be some kind of overcapacity, and the Chinese government
was to some extent making attempts to reduce it during
this sort of period of trade war. Now, the other
issue we're talking about overcapacity is that overcapacity is an
extremely political issue. Now, right, It's extremely weird because try
(08:58):
to seal overcapacity is like my most niche thing that
I've studied. I've had like a paper on this sitting
in a drive on my computer for over half a decade.
I have never brought it out until now, but it's
become an extremely political topic because the different theories of
stealover capacity have become a basis for a lot of
(09:24):
genuine trade policy. Now. I think a very very interesting
book at Chinese stealover capacity is from the book Understanding
China's over Capacity. She's written by two Chinese economists that
I think is a really interesting literature survey. This This
is fround By twenty eighteen. But I think what's interesting
about it it's from before the period where everyone in
(09:48):
the West had sort of decided what they think caused
Chinese steal over capacity, and so you can go back.
You know, it's not just useful to sort of go
back in time and look at the other theories that
were sort of floating around academia before a few of
them got specifically selective for ideological purposes. Now I mentioned earlier,
(10:09):
we'd be talking about some economists. You don't think that's
Chinese steel over capacity is real, that's these people. I
think that part of their thesis is not very good.
I think their survey of the literature on overcapacity, though,
is very good and one of the very interesting arguments
they make this doesn't argue with a couple of other economists,
(10:30):
that has sort of disappeared from the literature is in
argument about, Okay, so there's steel production that's happening that
doesn't need to happen. I think it's pretty fair to
say that something is over capacity if it's producing a
bunch of steel that sits there in rots because no
one can sell it, which is a thing that happens
(10:50):
with Chinese steel. And one of the most interesting theses
that has really been abandoned, even though I think it
is actually to a decent extent explanatory of a lot
of very very weird stuff that happens in Chinese policy
circles and a lot of just very baffling investment decisions,
(11:12):
is specifically something about local caudras and their performance incentives. So, okay,
something that's very important to understand about the structure of
the CCP is that Chinese government institutions are sort of
run by these caudras, right, and so if you are,
for example, I don't know, you are the mayor of
a mid size city, right, you get performance evaluations and
(11:35):
those sort of yearly performance evaluations sometimes there's less frequents
than that, but those those performance evaluations rank you at
sort of how good you're doing your job. And obviously
there's political maneuver rank here too, But if you do
a good job of hitting your targets, this is your
path to advance upwards in the party and be moved
from you know, like sort of running a small city
(11:57):
to like being brought into caudra in larger cities, and
you know, moving your way of the party, moving to
national positions. These evaluations are extremely important. You can also
get sort of busted down if your evaluations suck. Again,
there's also why politics are too, but these evaluations actually
do matter. And one of the issues with these evaluations
(12:20):
and these are also policy making implementation tools, right, you know,
the central government can decide what kinds of policies they
want to pursue, and then they can use these codure
evaluations to make people at the sort of local level
who are usually semi autonomous in ways that I think
is not very well understood in the West. These countra
evaluations are ways to try to ensure that Chinese sort
(12:44):
of local and provincial government policy kind of aligns with
national party policy and the waiting on these examinations is
such that it has very, very weird effects. And what
I'm specifically talking about here is that GDP numbers are
very very important to these CAUDRA evaluations, and it matters
(13:05):
that it's specifically gross domestic product because GDP is a
very very weird number, and there's a lot of stuff
you can do to sort of juice GDP numbers that
aren't really necessarily beneficial to an economy. So you can
(13:27):
have a bunch of firms that are basically unprofitable or
doing something that's like not particularly economically or socially useful,
and that can still boost GDP numbers. And one of
the things that happens with this is that you can
boost GDP numbers by making a shit tot of steel
that nobody actually really wants or uses. And because of
(13:47):
the priority that's set on GDP numbers specifically, and there's
also a whole bunch of these sort of weird financial
games that you can play. That's also played a major
role in the way the Chinese housing bubble has played
out and the way that the government has been unwilling
to sort of you know, and when I say the
government here I be in both the national governments and
(14:09):
also sort of these lower level governments have been unwilling
to sort of let a bunch of debt bubbles that
they've accumulated pop because those things prop up GDP numbers,
and the incentive on the local level is to keep
these numbers up. This used to actually be one of
the things that people would talk about when they talked
about Chinese steel over capacity. But it's complicated, like you
(14:30):
can't very very easily explain this to you know, like
a right wing congress person and have them go, oh, yeah, right,
this is unfair to the American market, and so it
kind of has like fallen out of favor and sort
of like the explanation to steal over capacity you see
in places like the New York Times. But I actually
(14:50):
think this is one of the things that does, to
some extent cause Chinese steal over capacity. Now do you
know what doesn't cause Chinese steal over capacity? That's right,
it is the products and services that support this podcast.
(15:13):
So I wanted to talk about the local quadra explanations
because I actually think these are kind of important, and
I want to talk about one other argument that's also
not really used much that used to be a lot
more common, which is an argument that Chinese economist makes
(15:36):
that one of the reasons that there's overcapacity in Chinese
steel production is that upwards wealth distribution leads to lower
levels of consumption and thus over capacity. And so what
what this basically means, And this is something that I
think is actually also I think that's the best structural
problem in in the Chinese economies, that the Chinese economy
is extremely highly unequal and wages, you know, like they
(15:59):
have risen to some extent, but they're not rising anywhere
near you know, like we've everyone in the US have
seen that famous charge of productivity versus like labor gains,
right like wage gains versus prouctivity increases. Wages in China
have gone up. They have absolutely not kept pace with
sort of productivity growth, and they also absolutely like have
(16:20):
not kept pace with the amount of the profit being
produced that is going to a very very small number
of capital owners. And this actually creates a structural problem.
And this is we're seeing a very similar structural problem
to this in the US, where there is a lot
of consumption that if that money wasn't just all going
(16:43):
to a bunch of rich people, people would actually be
spending it on things, And particularly in Chinese context, the
argument was that if if there was a better distribution
of wealth, people would buy more houses, and this would
actually reduce over capacity because suddenly a bunch of the
slack capacity will be being used to like build houses,
except people can't afford the houses. And this is a
(17:06):
structural problem that like economists sort of note about for
decades and decades, which is that China has been for
a very long time. The whole thing was that they
were trying to transition into a consumption economy, which is
to say, they were trying to transition into an economy
that was fueled by its own internal consumption. The US
is to a large extent sort of kind of works
like this, where you know, you want to increase the
(17:26):
level of consumption and the amount of stuff that people
in your country are buying, and this is this is
a way to sort of like create a middle income country, right,
And China has historically not been able to do this
and haven't been able to do this because they won't
raise wages. But you know, if they won't actually raise
wages enough to increase people's consumption levels. Then you're left
for structural overcapacity because demand is being lowered because people
(17:50):
don't have any fucking money. Now, this is another argument
again and I think is also probably correct that is
very much not talked about anymore because the argument that
is used in sort of understanding what's going on with
Chinese seel capacity is about the Chinese subsidization of state
(18:10):
owned enterprises at the expense of sort of private firms.
And the argument here basically said, the state is propping
up a bunch of unprofitable enterprises and they're they're holding
sectors of the economy that should be you know, taken
over by more efficient private firms, but they can't because
they're being subsidized by the government. And this is sort
(18:32):
of true, but this became a massive geopolitical argument because
the argument from the American side, and when you hear
anyone talking about steal of capacity, now this is the
argument that you hear right which that China is flooding
the world with cheap steel because there's a whole bunch
of like Chinese state owned industries or just like Chinese
businesses are just getting money from the Chinese government to
produce steel and they're pumping cheap steel to the rest
(18:54):
of the world. And this is not really I mean,
like kind of this is happening, but it's also not
the reason why there's large scale steal over capacity. And
of course the argument is that China isn't competing fairly
in the market, like this is very silly. Markets have
(19:15):
never worked without large scale state quote unquote interference, Like
American companies also get extremely high level subsidization et cetera,
et cetera, cy all of US COREGN policy. But you know,
this is the political imperative that's behind a lot of
the rhetoric coming out of steel producers and out of
(19:37):
the American right about why there should be terroriists on steel.
Now there's a problem though, which is that all of
these arguments are very specific to China. Right. The argument
is that there are specifically steal over capacity in China
because it's something structurally specifically wrong with the Chinese economy
(19:59):
that's like ma it not a free market, and because
of that, China's like unfairly competing global market. And this
is why there's so much of a capacity of Chinese steel.
This is wrong. There are individual parts of this where yeah,
like there are things where there is excess capacity being
produced by quadre evaluations and by to some extent like
(20:20):
so we subsidization. However, Comma, there's a problem. And the
problem here is that overcapacity and overcapacity and steel is
not just a Chinese phenomena. It is a global phenomena.
It has been a global phenomena for a long time,
and it is largely a product of the fact that
(20:41):
we do not live in a global economy that can
actually support the amount of production capacity that exists in
the world. This has been a problem really since the
seventies and arguably even since the sixties, where as countries
rebuild from World War Two, and as some some sort
(21:02):
of developments in global capital that we're going to be
sort of like talking about soon happens that the product
of all of this is that production has and this
is this is kind of the thing that the sort
of fascist right kind of intuitively understands. Production has become
zero sum. Right, It's very difficult to increase production in
(21:24):
one country without having it, you know, affect production in
the countries. There isn't enough demand in the market to
sort of like fuel all of these things. So why
(21:45):
is there not enough demand to fuel the amount of
supply that would be that would be necessary to make
there not be over capacity. The answer to this, in
sort of marketing theory is that, as they sort of
put it, overproduction and under consumption are doubly constructed. I'm
going to read a quote from end Notes, volume two,
and then we're going to explain a little bit what
(22:07):
that means. The wage allocates workers to production and at
the same time allocates the product to workers. So what
that means is that under consumption and overproduction are in
effect the same thing, right, Because the way that we
allocate workers to what thing they're going to do, and
(22:28):
at the same time allocate products to those workers is
the wage, which is one thing. So overproduction and under
consumption are the same thing, right, and they're caused by
the same structural elements of the wage relation. Now this
means that the Chinese capacity crisis is actually part of
(22:50):
a larger crisis. Right. You know the thing about the
double construction, you know of overcapacity and under consumption, right,
the fact that they are really the two things unified
in the fact that like your wage allocates what kind
of production you're doing and what you can consume the
fact that both those things combined are realized in this
sort of secular crisis in what's called Marxist absolute general
(23:13):
law of capitalist accumulation. So what the fuck is that
the short version is? Over time in capitalist economies, there's
supposed to be an increase of what's called the organic
composition of capital. Basically, they're a composition of capital is
a way to measure how much in the pro labor process.
It's like fixed capital, variable capital, so it's like how
(23:36):
much factory is there relative to the amount of worker
there is. And Marxist thesis, which has generally been born out,
although we'll talk a little bit about that more later,
is that this composition is going to increase, and as
it increases, accumulation also needs to increase in order to
maintain employment levels. This is sort of accomplished by things
(23:59):
like automation, which reduces the size of the labor force.
And thus, to quote and notes again, as accumulation proceeds,
a growing superabundance of goods lowers the rate of profit
and heightens competition across lines, compelling all capitalists to, as
Mark said, economize on labor. So basically, what this means
(24:21):
is like, as capital gets turned into more capital and
larger amounts of capital, this is the accumulation process. As
this continues, right, you get this massive sort of increasing
the amount of goods that are being produced. Eventually that
lowers the rate of profit in a sector. And eventually
what that does is, you know, in order to sort
of economize on labor, capital increases the amount of automation
(24:44):
reduces the amount of people that they need in the
labor process. You know, this is what what's generally known
as automation and the sort of crisis of people getting
kicked out of their draws because of it. As this
process is sort of generalized across sectoral lines across different
parts of the economy, the relative to demand for labor
decreases and workers are spin out of the wage relation,
which is the fancy Marxist way to say they become
(25:06):
structurally unemployed. And you know, the thing that happens when
you get kicked out of the capitalist wage relation is
you get kicked into informal labor and slums, which you know,
decreases demand and increase overproduction. At the same time, over
capacity is skyrocketing, right, because you have increasing numbers of
people who have been spat out the formal economy who
(25:27):
no longer have access to regular wages. The wages they
get in the informal economy are less than the ones
they would get in the formal economy. And as we
were saying, write, access to like the wage, both determines
production and consumption. So if you lose access to the wage, right,
and there's still more stuff being produced because of automation levels,
what you get is a massive, skyrocketing double increase of
(25:48):
overproduction and under consumption, right, because there's just not enough
money to fucking buy the stuff. And the result of
this is a miseration. Everything gets fucking worse. This sort
of used to be an academic argument. It is no
longer an academic argument. It is just the terrain on
which economic policy unfolds. Now. The miseration thesis is this
(26:10):
is you know, it's a sort of like general law
of capitalist accumulation is called has been argued about constantly.
There have been ways that has been avoided. One of
the biggest ways traditionally has been by capitalism sort of
transforming goods into services. So for example, like the operative
example of this is the transition in the us from
rail lines to cars on something that points out, So
(26:33):
you know, you get these new industries that are both
labor or capital intensive. By replacing train with car, you know,
you can absorb huge populations of workers as well as
incorporate the peasantry into the industrial economy by sort of
like converting these things into services. This has sort of
been what the economy has been increasingly converted into a
service based economy of various kinds. That's kind of what's
(26:54):
happening now, you know, and you and you can see
this process that work in the Chinese economy back when
it was you know, really growing in the nineties and
two thousands. But you know, once the peasantry had been
absorbed as sort of both a new market and a
new labor force with lower cost of reproduction because wages
are cheaper for a bunch of structural reasons, the old
(27:15):
tendencies of capital set in. And so what happens inside
of China was what was happening everywhere else in the world,
which is that as labor saving technology begins to be implemented,
and you know, a bunch of services refused to be
turned into new goods to like bolster the ranks industrial
working class. You know, you get what's happened in the US,
which is this this full transition to service economy shit
(27:38):
that doesn't actually really grow. And you know, if if
you look, if you look at Chinese growth rates, like
they've been slowing for a decade, actually a little bit
longer than a decade. And so you know, as China
was integrated to the global economy, it too became caught
in this cycle of industrial booms where you know, you
get an industrial boom where you have a country with
favorable exchange rates, you a stallar that inevitably set off,
(28:01):
you know, the economies on the bad end of the
exchange rate to collapse as they're forced to bear the
way to global over capacity. As as I've mentioned one
hundred billion times on this show, it is the one
thing I will make sure every it could happen here
listener will be able to explain the Plaza Accords and
the Reverse Plaza Cords. You know, but this is sort
(28:22):
of this is sort of what the Reverse Plazai Cords
and the Plazai Cords were about. Was the US. This
is the last time the US tried to you know,
use its to sort of like pure political power and
military might to be like, eat shit, I'm going to
force all of your countries to fuck with your currency
so that our manufacturing economy will come back. And again,
the US did that successfully and the Japanese economy collapsed
(28:45):
because we needcap Japanese economy to do it right. And
to some extent, Trump is attempting the farce as farce
version of this with with these steel terriffs. Right to
some extent, these tariffs are his attempts to pull the
Reagan maneuver of Okay, we can just like force other
countries to lower their capacity and increase our capacity at
(29:05):
their expense. The problem is that, again, this production is
zero sum, and if you do this, it will annihilate
the rest of the global economy. And this is the
sort of context behind all of the stuff that we've
been seeing for the last like thirty years, which that
(29:25):
actual profit rates have been collapsing for ages. And right
now we're in the middle of a just unbelievably hideously
staggeringly massive bubble that is maintaining the sort of last
like fake vestiges of economic growth where billions and billions
and billions of dollars have been sunk into all of
(29:47):
this AI bullshit, and it's you know, like the tech
driven AI is a significant specifically specifically the AI stuff
is a significant portion of total US economic growth. If
you want to live to why that's all going to
go to shit? Turn on effectively literally any episode of
COOLSI Media's own Exitron's podcast Better Offline and will you
(30:11):
will hear a lot about this. But you know, this
has been that, like tech has been sort of the
escape strategy of the United States. Traditionally, it's going to implode,
it's going to do tremendous damage to everyone. But in
the remains of that, and in this world in which
profit rates are declining, and in this world in which
increasing portions of the population are being spat out of
(30:34):
the capitalist production cycle, in which increasing percentages of the
world population are being kicked into an informal economy, and
in this world of generalized overproduction under consumption, what's happening
is that there is an enormous effort to get everyone
to think that this is because of very specific tendencies
of like the bad government over there, right that you know,
(30:58):
over capacity and steel. Oh, it's just because like the
evil communist government in China is cheating at capitalism by
giving their companies money, and so we're gonna do tariffs
on them instead of that. And again, like it's easier
for these academics to make this argument because there is
kind of stuff going on, right, because there is this
sort of cadure evaluation stuff, because there is to some
(31:18):
extend stay subsidization of steel production. They can present this
boogeyman to sort of pin what is really a global
overproduction and under consumption crisis onto just you know, it's
just as government we don't like, and then you can
sort of implement these ultranationalists tariff policies. It's a way
(31:40):
of deflecting the blame from capitalism onto another country and
using nationalism to paper over the actual economic contradictions of
capital And if you want to escape that, it's not
enough to sort of just get rid of Trump and
go back to the previous retrade regime. You have to
actually structurally change the thing at the center of all
(32:03):
of this, which is the wage relation. Right. You have
to fundamentally change the fact that this economy, the entire economy,
is based on there being classes of people who make
money from owning things and that there's an entire class
of people whose labor is stolen every single day so
that those other people can make money by owning things
(32:25):
who do all of the actual work. And that's what's
actually fundamentally at stake here. It is this question of
are we going to continue to do tariff bullshit? Or
are we going to take power from the people who
caused all of this? From Trump, from Elon Musk, from
(32:46):
all of the billionaires, from Feel, from all of the
tech billionaires that funded them, from all of the Republican
Party Cook Breathern networks. Are we going to destroy these
people completely by getting rid of the social relations of
capital that make this all possible? Or are we going
to sit here and let them continue to produce AI
(33:08):
videos of them shitting all over us while they take
all of our money and commit an ethnic cleansing and
continue to fund genocides abroad. It could happen here is
a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from
cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonmedia dot com, or
check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
(33:30):
wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources
for It could happen here, listed directly in episode descriptions.
Thanks for listening,
It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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