Killer Klown Khaos
More adventures in policymaking
It’s the middle of the night in New York, but I’ve having morning coffee here in Italy, so I thought I’d post something short about the latest crazy news. A second conversation with Nathan Tankus will be my main post today, going up after Nathan has had a chance to read the transcript.
So, two items.
First, I’ve read many “news analyses” discussing what they say is the deep thinking behind Donald Trump’s tariff policy. Now, thanks to the Wall Street Journal, we have a scoop on how Trump, having announced a radically destructive tariff plan on April 2, replaced it with an equally radical but completely different plan on April 9:
When I read the headline I assumed that Bessent and Lutnick had pushed for a total revision of Trump’s trade policy while Navarro was out of town for a few days. But no. They rushed in to see Trump while Navarro was having a meeting elsewhere in the White House.
Hoo boy. Next you’ll be telling me that the infamous letter to Harvard, demanding that the school basically destroy itself lest it be destroyed, was sent by mistake. Oh, wait.
Second, yesterday morning I posted about Trump and the Fed, and compared Trump to Turkey’s Erdogan:
Like Erdogan, he has embraced crank economic doctrines to justify his policies, in Trump’s case the ludicrous claim that tariffs won’t raise consumer prices. Does anyone doubt that when inflation rises, he’ll dismiss it as “fake news”?
Just a few hours later:
Of course, I’m far more disturbed by Trump’s attempts to destroy democracy than by his disastrous economic management. But this is still awesome.
Powell will not bail Trump out of the mess he has created. On Monday we will cross the threshold making this officially the worst stock market in over 50 years. And it will go lower. Imports and exports have fallen off a cliff, the damage already is actually worse than covid somehow. The entire world is boycotting America right now. The coming depression he has caused with his insanity will be unlike anything modern America has experienced before. To say the average American is unprepared for what losing our place at the top of the pyramid is going to do to the nation is a vast understatement. A lot of people will die. This is going to a very painful lesson for this country to learn that sociopathic billionaires are not friends of the working class. I would have thought that would be self evident to all by now, but the voters wanted to do things the hard way so here we are.
Paul, We are being subjected to the insanity of the Orange Idiot and a fake economist from the felon Navarro! At this point, economic strategy from an astrologer would be better!!!