Trump Toys With Maybe Pausing Wrecking The Economy, As A Treat
Happy worst April stock market since the Depression, kids!
Well, well, well, look who is backing down on tariffs yet again, telling reporters on Tuesday that tariffs on China “will come down substantially,” that he doesn’t want to “play hardball” with China, and furthermore swearing he would never fire Jerome Powell, and never had any such intention, nope: “None whatsoever. Never did.” Don’t believe your lying eyes and ears! Watch him say these things if you want, ugh.
Of course just last week Trump’s economic adviser Kevin Hassett told a reporter that he and Trump were “studying” the possibility of firing Powell, Trump was kvetching that Powell’s “termination can’t come fast enough,” and was plonking on his web platform that “Mr. Too Late” Powell was not lowering interest rates because he is a MAJOR LOSER who has “always been ‘To Late’” which is sort of like being to paradise, Nice and Greece, and never being to me, we guess. But worse!
Who appointed that LOSER Powell? Oh right, him.
Trump is mad that the Fed won’t cut interest rates, and extra MAD MAD the way the stock market threw up mom’s spaghetti on its shirt while Powell talked about how unemployment is fixing to go up, and the economy is about to slow down, Magic 8-ball says OUTLOOK NOT GOOD, and by the way, Trump’s dumbshit tariffs are ENTIRELY to blame for that.
Interest rates are set by the 12-member Federal Open Market Committee, so even if Trump found some way to force Powell out, by threatening his family or whatever, he still couldn’t wheedle the rest of the committee into ignoring economic indicators and voting to lower interest rates just to do him a favor though. And forcing Powell out and ending independence of the Fed would put the faith in the US economy somewhere around the level of El Salvador’s.
And guess we should fact-check here, “Virtually No Inflation” is still inflation that’s 0.5 percent higher than the forecast and target of 2 percent; eggs are up 15.2 percent month-over-month, and the inflation means the price of all “things” are “trending” up. The “things” that are trending way down: manufacturing orders, consumer confidence, bond values, and also the value of the dollar around the world! Trending up again, the probability of a recession, which JP Morgan puts now at 60 percent, yike!
So, the markets did not like the talk of firing Powell, it would seem, nor the things Trump’s had to say, or the chaos or uncertainty, and they extra DO NOT LIKE the fucking tariffs that are “Liberation Day”-ing America from its supply chains in the most epic economic self-kneecapping of all time. So, the markets have been drifting down all month like the hull of the Titanic.
What made Art O’Deal change his mind now? Was it the headlines like “Dow Heads for Worst April Since 1932”? A scathing op-ed in the Wall Street Journal calling the tariffs “the biggest economic policy mistake in decades”? Maybe the International Monetary Fund downgrading its forecast for US and global economic growth?
Or the looming possibility that Chuck Schumer could get four Republicans in the Senate to join Democrats and pass a resolution to end the EMERGENCY Trump has been using to do the BAM! YA TARIFFED, and take his BAM! YA TARIFFED wand away?
Or maybe it was how he had been waiting by the phone for China to call him with tears in their eyes, saying “sir, please, sir, we are but humble peasants, please spare us the tariffs,” but his phone did not ring, and it was them. Instead China’s Ministry of Finance released a statement that the US “will become a joke in the history of the world economy,” the director of the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office said, “let those peasants in the United States wail in front of the 5,000 years of Chinese civilization,” and the Chinese took to social media to post videos of AI Trump working in a factory, and pointing out the origins and prices of Karoline Leavitt’s sophisticated-lady jackets. You may not be able to criticize the Chinese government in China, but you sure can mock the fuck out of ours all day long!
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Or maybe he caved after he let it be known that he expected World Leaders and Business Executives to come and supplicate themselves, but only a few panicking American CEOs came to kiss his ring.
Uh huh. If it would benefit any country to build their own manufacturing and supply chain to rival China’s, they would have already done it by now. No company is going to assume the financial risk to invest in building, say, a baby bottle brush factory in the US. The baby-bottle-brush-making machines would have to be ordered from China at that 145-percent markup! And also in this tariffed imaginary economy to come, the brush market is not expanding, nobody is going to have baby-bottle-brush money, and will be cleaning baby bottles with whatever fingers they have left instead. Maybe companies supplying Walmart will move their operations to India or elsewhere, if they can, but it makes no sense to move them to the US, period. Not even with 500 percent tariffs, because Trump could change his mind about whatever tariffs next week anyway! And, he will HEAVEN HELP US be out of office someday, and we will have someone not crazy in charge, and then you’d be stuck with your factory.
Furthermore, in spite of what Scott Bessent keeps saying, America does not want a manufacturing economy, nobody wants to work 16-hour shifts at the SpaceX Tube Sock and Sexbot Concern, no matter how hard anybody pitches it as a manly job.
None of this tariff strategy seems to make any sense, but if there’s some things we know for sure about Donald J. Trump from all these long, long years we have been forced to pay attention to him: He only cares about his own money, his main talent is bankrupting companies and sticking other people with his bills, and he wants to be king. And one can never really be king without the power of the purse (or in his case, fanny pack), no matter how many people you decree are thrown in a gulag. He fucks with his underlings’ livelihoods because he can, it’s always been among his favorite things to do.
So like the universities and the law firms, he wants to make all the World Leaders and Business Executives come beg him, one by one, to be the exceptions. Or maybe some insider stock tips! That’s how you get a good old Gilded Age patronage and spoils system going! Or if the World Leaders don’t beg him, he’ll just pretend they did and claim victory anyway.
That guy’s unhinged, but always predictable.
Can you imagine the names that MAGAts would hurl at Biden if he played the on again, off again tariff game that the orange stain has forced upon us? No way he would get the same "let's wait and see what happens" or, "give him a chance" courtesy from which the orange a-hole benefits.
Pump and dump is his game.