It's 'very, very difficult' to decouple US from China on chips

As investors assess the impact of former President Donald Trump's proposed tariffs on China after he secured reelection, Bernstein managing director and senior analyst Stacy Rasgon joins Market Domination Hosts Julie Hyman and Josh Lipton to discuss where a second Trump term leaves the semiconductor industry and top chipmakers, like Nvidia (NVDA). "There's a number of areas where I think Trump is probably going to have an impact [on the chips sector]," Rasgon tells Yahoo Finance, explaining "one is certainly tariffs" and "one is the CHIPS Act because it does sound like at least the Republicans maybe have a different vision for what that ought to be." He adds, "There's a there's a lot of things that he can do beyond just sort of the general volatility around the economy and everything else, both in the US and globally, that is likely to increase under a Trump administration." On the campaign trail, Trump criticized the Joe Biden administration's CHIPS Act and proposed a 60% tariff on all Chinese imports. The semiconductor industry is "one of the most global industries," the analyst says. On the prospect that the US can completely decouple from China in the chip sector, he says "I'll hesitate to use the word impossible, but it's very difficult. But clearly, even from the first Trump term, that was where they were trying to go." He explains, "The actions that the Biden administration took, I would say, were more surgical. They went after specific things. They went after high-end AI chips. They went after semiconductor equipment for advanced logic and memory, but they weren't really trying to necessarily blow everything up. It was it was manageable. With Trump, he's more like a bull in a china shop." Rasgon says Trump's 60% tariffs "would have massive implications both in and out of semis." He notes that there wouldn't be "a lot of direct impact for semis on tariffs" since most of the chips coming into the US from China are in other products like smartphones and PCs. " It's almost like a secondary kind of thing, if he puts massive tariffs on to make it up on smartphones and PCs, that's going to raise the price of those products in their end markets, and is that going to reduce demand [which,] will certainly roll down to the semiconductors." To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Market Domination here. This post was written by Naomi Buchanan.