Summary
U.S. barley farmers face mounting financial pressure as Trump’s tariffs spark fears of losing key export markets.
Canada, the top importer of U.S. malt barley, has already imposed retaliatory tariffs, and Mexico may follow. Farmers warn that rising fertilizer and chemical costs, combined with declining U.S. beer consumption, threaten their survival.
Breweries may absorb or pass higher costs to consumers, potentially raising beer prices.
Experts say tariffs could devastate barley exports, with industry leaders calling them a major blow to struggling American farmers.
It’s all about financialization. Money people don’t care about product fundamentals anymore, they care about line go up.
Craft beer looked like a perfect investment because it was already a premium product with social caché (that incidentally was also addictive). But as the above comment notes, there isn’t an endless appetite for overpriced beer, especially when the market is flooded with shitty imitations from mass market beer companies.
The way to disincentivize it would be to let interest rates skyrocket (financialization only works if the cost of borrowing is effectively zero) but that would hurt regular people first and worst.
We could also vote in a socialist government who was willing to do things like seize corporate-owned housing and piss on the corpse of companies like Blackrock as their portfolios lose a significant percentage of their value but that seems remarkably unlikely.
Couldn’t agree more. There is no solution to this exploitative pattern that doesn’t involve drastically curtailing the profits made by participating in the pattern. The details matter obviously, but the situation is really that simple. There’s no solution for us that doesn’t require ending the rewards of this behavior for them.