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I'm not sure we've really digested what the last week's political actions really means for the US economy let alone the bike market. If this administration can't find an off ramp to the pending trade war + levying crazy high tariffs fast, I predict this will make the COVID hangover look "not so bad" with respect to bankruptcy in our little world. As to who is at risk, it has a lot more to do with the quality of the balance sheet and a lot less to do with the underlying size of the company. What a mess.

Hi y'all, Longtime reader, though I rarely post. Some context I run a small non-bike company in Sheridan, WY. We make a ton in house, import a little, and outsource a bunch to other companies in the US. We do about 40% of our sales in Canada. These tariffs will put the brakes on the entire economy. My business is well positioned to make 100% of our product in the US, which would seemingly be a boon for us. But who is going to be able to buy it? Will our customers in Canada want to buy our products at...

If orangeasaurus was really trying to fix the US debt problem, he wouldn’t let IRS agents get fired that have a 26x ROI on their salary when recovering taxes from the rich. I’ve said this before, but it’s relevant again. When the first Trump Taxes were added to foreign made aluminum, we were manufacturing bike frames in the US at GG. With the manufacturing already in operation, it absolutely hurt us, as the aluminum with “Made in the USA” printed on the bar stock went up 30% in price. These tax increases camouflaged with a different word do not help...

Jokernomics is the perfect name for how the "reciprocal" tariffs were calculated. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93gq72n7y1o

probably enforcing the existing tax code would be enough... but yeah, carried interest is complete BS, and loads of other shenanigans that should be obliterated.

or you could just tax the rich, but what do i know, right?

i hope europe will hit back where it really hurts, invoke some export taxes on ASML lithography machines going to the USA. same thing for ARM licences. change the tax laws so american tech companies need to pay taxes in the country they operate in. force them to adhere to OUR privacy laws. especially with those ai server farms. make them operate them on our continent, no euro user data processing in the usa anymore.

This goes without saying, but I do not like what this administration is doing with tariffs. I won’t repeat in detail what many of you have already nailed but to summarize: these policies are destabilizing, costly, inflationary, and may very well lead to higher interest rates (all very bad for a very global bike industry). And for what? I’ve yet to see a compelling argument, even a theoretical, about the long-term upside. For fun, I'll give you my "best case" scenario, but this isn't so much what I think will happen, just what could hapen. Oh, and in case nobody...

As a former recipient of the award, I hereby nominate TEAMROBOT for 2025 VitalMTB Commenter of the Year.

Glad I stocked up on bikes and parts for cheap in the past couple years. Truck Fonald Dump and the idiotic sycophants who still support him. This is beyond stupid and if you don't realize that by now, you never will, even as you're struggling to feed your own children.

Tariffs won’t be a concern when we are all cashing those DOGE refund checks! Right?! Right? Right??? 😞

To be fair, it's also possible that competitively priced and highly specialized manufacturing will pop up in the U.S. at enormous scale with armies of knowledgable, specialized non-immigrant workers in the next month to save us from these high costs. That's all we need. Well, that and in-country raw material extraction for materials that often don't exist in our borders in the quantities we need, like bauxite, rubber, lithium, cobalt, rare earth elements, etc. But if we can figure out those two aspects in the next month we'll be fine.

Largest tax increase in US history can't be good for anyone's business.

Don’t worry, 32” wheels will get us back on track!!!