[ben_w]

Beyond a certain point, the tariffs become meaningless because nobody bothers trading legally anyway.

I don't know where the real cutoff is, but for an extreme example: if the tariffs are 1e6% or 1e7%, nobody's buying anything by lawful channels.

Also, there's not much stopping people from shipping to a country with a 10% tariff, that 10% country taking a 1% cut to slap a different "made in" label on the side and then re-exporting to the US, making it effectively an 11% tariff for whoever originally made it.

[quadragenarian]

I may be wrong but shipping via a third country doesn't work - I believe that Section 301 allows the US to re-assign the correct country of origin. Sure, some product may come in via this trick, but anything at scale would be found out. I doubt anyone in the US would mistake a BYD car from being a product from a country other than China.

I know very little however, so if someone with more knowledge on this can chime in on how this works practically, it would edifying.

[ben_w]

BYD, perhaps. Given the politics, even if BYD build a factory clearly labelled "BYD" in, say, Canada, and did everything above-board with all the components traced to mineral origins having and audited to have never even gone through China at any point in the supply chain, I can believe they'd get such treatment.

I was thinking more like how Amazon has a seemingly endless collection of suppliers you've never heard of with suspicious names whose letters look like they might be attempting to form syllables. I expect those to be harder to keep track of, and to find it easier to fly under the political radar.

[dave4420]

Yeah, at some point it’s just willy waving.