Skip to main content

Did the US flower market dodge a bullet?




The US and Colombia nearly began a trade war on January 26-27.

Colombia refused to take in planeloads of migrants that the Trump administration has decided belong there. Trump announced ginormous tariffs on Colombian exports to the US [the legal traffic -- chiefly this means coffee and cut flowers] and after some mutual posturing Colombia backed down.  The migrants will go 'back' to Colombia.  [I am not at all confident that is where they came from -- no vestige of due process or diligent inquiry seems to have been involved. But I'll ignore that right now.]

What about those cut flowers?  There has been a fair amount of commentary about how US florists and their customers have dodged a bullet.  Prices will not skyrocket just before Valentines Day, after all. Whew. 

EXCEPT.  That isn't how it works.  Prices at the retail level tend to react to risks of supply chain obstruction.  They don't wait for the reality of the obstruction to show up.  Try pitting Trump in an analogous brief shouting war with Saudi Arabia, and a two-hours-long boycott of Saudi crude oil.  Then one side or the other blinks, the matter is resolved, and there is no actual physical obstruction of the movement of oil from one country to the ports of the other at all. Will it leave the price of oil unaffected?

Heck no!  Nor, if one wishes to make moral judgments here, is there any reason why it 'should'! Such a brief drama would heighten market participants' sense of the risk of what they are doing, and the possibility there will be some tariff hike or blockade in response to some other catalyst down the road. 

My guess is: there will be some increase in Valentines' Day bouquets this year -- if you buy them late.  If you've already ordered then for your sweetheart by now ... good for you.  

If you are a retailer and are marking prices up because of your heightened sense of risk ... likewise, good for you.  You owe no one the debt of dupery.  And your actions help the necessary adjustments to the volatility of the lunatic in power. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
22 comments
Read more

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
10 comments
Read more

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable a...
Post a Comment
Read more