Feet up on the desk just slurping coffee and watching the stock market in free fall.
So... the new tariffs were announced yesterday. Roundly criticized by every economist not currently being directly paid by the current U.S. administration. I watched the markets collapse this morning and I thought to myself...."I wonder what will happen to the domestic camera market?" Surely, in the next month or two Leica, Canon, Nikon and Sony will all open big factories right here in the USA in order to skirt the high cost of tariffs. It can't be that hard, right? Just round up some of those recently unemployed government workers, train them for a few weeks and then watch them crank out some complex, apo-chromatically corrected lenses. Use that legendary American work ethic to crank out some extremely precise mechanical assemblies and then find some "shade tree" semi-conductor engineers to churn out some state-of-the-art camera sensors from their home workshops. Bingo. A brand new camera industry!!!
Which brings up the pressing question to other photographers; those unwilling to go with the fantasy...
Aren't tariffs supposed to protect domestic markets and domestic producers from "unfair" competition? So what American camera industry are President Trump's latest tariffs on "all" consumer electronic products attempting to protect--- vis-a-vis photography? Have I missed some home grown camera manufacturing sector here at home that's currently making good, mass market, consumer cameras? Are we trying to protect Deardorf's view camera market? Didn't they go out of business in 1988? Is there an American rangefinder camera that's just waiting for a chance to compete once we "tax" those pesky foreign cameras? And then there's the American zoom lens industry. I seem to have missed that one as well.... Can't find one even if I search all day on Google... Didn't Enron emerge from bankruptcy in order to start making zoom lenses for various cameras? I guess not.
I guess we'll all be okay. Until the markets run out of used gear... But I'm not too worried; I seem to have bought way too many cameras in the last few years but maybe it will turn out that I've squirreled away just the right amount to make it through the next three years. Or maybe our dear leader will realize that he's not just "owning the libs" with the new taxes but also greatly pissing off a huge portion of his actual electoral base. Maybe having realized that the only thing that counts in politics is "the money-stupid" he'll declare victory shortly and back away from yet another unforced error. As several right wing pundits have mentioned in many interviews, the kinds of jobs these tariffs were designed to protect were automated a long time ago and will never be coming back. I can't wait for his "We Won!" speech and the resulting rush on the part of companies and consumers to get back to normal times.
So, if we drop half a trillion tax dollars into creating a camera and lens industry here in the USA will you be lining up to buy the products? Ready to embrace that home grown, highly educated manufacturing work force? Ready to onboard an industry directly subsidized by your tax dollars? Maybe Steve Mnuchin and Michael Dell will run it. Like they do the real estate rental markets.
Or would you prefer to see the tariffs die and the markets stabilize? Either way camera prices are going up and once the prices go up they historically never go back down again. Ever.
I'm an optimistic pessimist. I think we're about to see an actual economic depression. That's my pessimistic assessment. But, as an optimist I think I have enough cameras and lenses saved up to work through the worst of it and, if things get really bad, I still have some leather camera straps I can use to make soup.
Can't wait for my 23 element, high precision, zoom lenses to emerge from a newly put up camera maker's plants in the hollers of West Virginia. Should be a revelation!
Is it any wonder that the U.S.A. is the 63rd happiest country in the world?
And that was before the tariff announcement yesterday.
Loving those old, M series rangefinders. I'd better take good care of them.
Now all the good, new cameras will go to the freshly minted millionaires in China and India.
I guess it's their turn...
Everything's coming up roses.
Ah. American Exceptionalism...
My only advice? Don't sell off your 401K at the bottom of the market. It might come right back up. Thoughts and Prayers.
