Congress accused South Korea of discriminating against Coupang. South Korea said no we didn't. Congress said yes you did. South Korea said prove it. Congress said we're thinking about tariffs. South Korea said you wouldn't dare. Congress is now daring.
Coupang is a U.S.-based company that operates in South Korea. Or it's a South Korean company that's based in the U.S. for tax purposes. Depends who you ask and what their lawyer bills that month. Either way, someone feels discriminated against and that someone has friends in Washington.
The whole dispute strains ties between the two countries. Strained ties. That's what we call it when one government tells another government to go f*ck itself using the language of international diplomacy. South Korea dismissed the allegations. Dismissed means they read the complaint, laughed, and went back to building semiconductors.
Now tariffs are on the table. Tariffs are what happens when countries can't agree on who's screwing whom so they just screw each other's economies instead. Very efficient. Very mature. The kind of thing that makes retail traders check their Samsung positions at 3 a.m. and wonder if their stop-loss is tight enough.
It's Coupang. Not a rare earth mineral. Not a military alliance. An e-commerce platform. We're potentially torching trade relations over whether a delivery app got a fair shake from Korean regulators. This is the geopolitical equivalent of filing for divorce because your spouse loaded the dishwasher wrong.
Some guy in Ohio is about to pay 40% more for a Korean-made blender because two governments couldn't settle a pissing match about warehouse logistics. He doesn't know it yet. He's busy reading technical indicators on his Robinhood account, convinced the double-bottom formation on his meme stock means something. It doesn't. But the tariff will.
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