According to the WSJ, the "transshipment" provisions will in reality be rules of origin that limited embedded Chinese content -- 1/

This potentially matters quite a lot, as the primary impact of the tariffs on China to date have been a reallocation of the point of final assembly inside Asia -- so rising imports from the ASEAN countries and the NIEs (Korea, Taiwan) 2/

This is obvious in a graph showing the bilateral trade deficits with different parts of Asia. The initial trade war led to a reallocation of the deficit away from China -- not a reduction in the overall deficit with "manufacturing" Asia 3/

Just as there used to be an argument that the bilateral deficit with China was overstated because China assembled parts made elsewhere, now the bilateral deficit with China is understated -- I would bet that a third of China's manufacturing surplus is due to US end demand 4/

But there is no sign that the Trump administration's rules of origin are going to result in a coherent regime -- raising the tariff on Vietnamese goods with lots of Chinese content to 40% doesn't achieve much if goods can come straight from China face a 30% tariff 5/

So the full nature of the tariff wall that will emerge from all of the administration's deals isn't yet clear ... 6/

A reminder that the tariffs on goods from China aren't uniform. Somewhere between a quarter and third of current imports faces a 25% tariff because of the term 1 301 case, and maybe 20% face a 7.5% tariff from term 1 -- with the rest untariffed until March ... 7/

And then the 20% fentanyl tariff and the 10% base tariff were stacked on top of the 301 tariffs (with electronics and pharma exempted from the base tariff for now). so goods from China generally have tariffs between 20% and 55% ... (& EVs are at 100% + ) 8/8