Dow Slides Another 1k Points. Nasdaq on Pace to Enter Bear Market
barrons.com
barrons.com
Following his takeover of Twitter in 2022, he would have been among the first to understand what was about to happen in 2024. Pivoting to the right -- not just pivoting to the right, but actively embracing it -- is something he had no choice in, if he wanted to keep his companies healthy. They were built atop a government that was about to disappear, so the only logical thing to do was to signal loyalty by throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at the Trump campaign.
Of course, his Nazi salutes made no sense in any context, but then neither did cheating at video games or calling Unsworth a pedophile for dissing his submarine idea. I'd chalk his erratic behavior up to drugs or ongoing mental challenges that ultimately don't have much to do with politics.
Zuckerberg and Bezos were slower to catch on but they did catch on in the end. They understood that they had an enormous amount to lose by alienating Trump. If the wires of democracy, from Section 230 to the US Postal Service, were about to be ripped from the wall by Trumpers, they had to get in position to influence those events. See also Sam Altman.
I don't blame any of these people for acting rationally. The question I have is, when are all these big billionaire alpha moguls going to stop reacting to a chaos monkey and start pushing back, if only behind the scenes? Who has more to lose from tearing down the established world order than the people who succeeded so massively under that very system? Don't they understand that while they will continue to be players, their playground will become a much smaller, weaker kingdom, one surrounded by rivals who now have an incentivize to organize against us?
And yet, I do think Musk is actually worse off in his current position than he would have been under Harris. Which shows, yet again, what a "great thinker" he is cough. He acted, because he's under threat, that makes sense, but his actions made his situation worse than it would have been had he done nothing.
Then again, in this market, I bet a lot of people feel like that.
The fact that his "lemonade" tastes suspiciously like pee is his fault, though.
One thing that dictators reliably do is tank the economy to destroy the middle class, which consolidates power for them. That's the most coherent motivation that I have bene able to find.
If you’re familiar with bankruptcy - and the president is - then you know all about reduction of principal…
Consider if you were kind of a dumbass but born very wealthy. You go your entire life running from income tax. Then someone mentions tariffs to you. A complete dumbass in this situation would, obviously, be extremely excited about the idea of replacing income tax with tariffs. And fortunately for him/unfortunately for us, it's one of the few things POTUS can basically do unilaterally.
It has side-benefits like centralizing power so everyone has to come to you for exemptions, it makes it look like you have a chance of moving American industry back a few decades which would be great for a chunk of your constituency, etc.
But fundamentally he's just a dumbass and the people around him are fully indoctrinated into his cult. Very dangerous combination.
https://www.axios.com/2025/02/20/commerce-secretary-lutnick-...
Add modern context of the Attention Economy built on exploiting the fact that people have limited Attention to give anything, but unlimited capacity to Receive Attention. Trump being the textbook example. So we have a double whammy.
> I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord
Yes, the excuse was that sanctions already apply but who would like to place bets on when those are lifted (as a negotiation for Ukraine)
Were it not also the fact that the US just canned the head of the NSA and publicly ceased cyber activities against Russia, it’s hard see this any other way
But even if that's their plan, that doesn't mean they're executing it competently. The specific tariff amounts do not seem well thought through, and fighting a trade war against literally every other country in the world seems like a bad idea.
There's an idea called Hanlon's Razor which states "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". It's a good rule of thumb, but it implies that malice/stupidity is an either/or choice. I think that the Trump tariffs are a malicious plan executed stupidly, and if nothing changes the effects will be catastrophic.
[1] https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1142796795728...
https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/1907456765215588734
I think he’s also surrounded by yes men who are afraid to tell him when his ideas are wrong.
So, we've been hit with the largest tax increase (peacetime) in US history with no coherent explanation. Even the Project 2025 master plan suggests the idea is to devalue the dollar to save hundreds of billions. We've already lost trillions, so that didn't work.
I think the most obvious answer is incompetence, but there are piles of shit and coincidence with MAGA and Russia. I'm not in denial.
His quantitative easing and zero interest rate policy only saved asset managers and corporate balance sheets.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35201728
Yet that didn't happen. We dodged a major bullet, and survived far better than the rest of the world. We must look back at predictions and outcomes with clear eyes, not with the narratives that are being sold in the current day.
I say this because if we had a legislative branch that hadn't completely abdicated its responsibility, they would act to strip tariff power from the president, at least temporarily, which they can do with a simple Act of Congress with a veto-proof supermajority. The Democrats would be on board.
Just remember this: as much damage as the president is causing, Congress could step in at any moment but they don't and won't, at least until things get much, much worse.
Blanket tariffs don't work. The goal here seems to be to reduce reliance on Chinese goods (without setting up any manufacturing to replace it, I might add) and/or to get rid of the one remaining progressive tax: income tax.
We have precedent for all this: tariffs in the early part of the Great Depression. And what did they do? They made everything worse and the US sunk further into recession.
I'm not sure people realize just how dire the situation is. In other countries, this would have us sliding dangerously close to coup territory. Yet a significant portion of our population, who are the most affected and will see their standard of living decline further, celebrate it.
How are those egg prices doing?
"You are going to buy, baby, buy!"
S&P, Dow Jones and most ETFs are down about 8%. Single digits
The global trade order is going to be reconfigured, but not in the way the Trump thinks. The U.S. is throwing up a wall around itself, but the rest world will continue with the current regime and likely move away from the U.S. permanently.
What's sad is, the Congress could simply revoke the ability for Trump to single-handedly make these tariffs, but they appear too cowed to do anything about it.
Right now there are suits in the courts to declare that fentanyl crossing from Canada is not a national emergency. That's a tough case because there is no definition for national emergency, so the court will likely defer to the president's definition. However if Congress says it isn't a national emergency then the courts have the option to defer to Congress's decision rather than the president's. And once the national emergency declaration is gone, Trump needs Congress's support to pass tariffs.
Canada's likely new Prime Minister Carney: "Canada must be looking elsewhere to expand our trade, to build our economy, and to protect our sovereignty. Canada is ready to take a leadership role in building a coalition of likeminded countries who share our values… If the US no longer wants to lead, Canada will"
France's Macron: "It was important for us to meet as quickly as possible after last night's announcement from President Trump, which are a shock to international trade, not just for the EU and France, but fundamentally for the proper functioning of global commerce. What's important is that we pause future investments, or these announced in recent weeks, until we've clarified things with the United States. What would be the message of having big European players investing billions of euros in the American economy at a time when they are hitting us? So we need collective solidarity." https://bsky.app/profile/rpsagainsttrump.bsky.social/post/3l...
There is much room for further decline. Stocks remain highly valued.
What would Trump do differently if he were a Russian asset? I mean, besides trying not to be so obvious about it?
> A poll of more than 220 U.S. CEOs finds business confidence at lowest level since November 2012—and recession fears on the rise.
> Consumers’ expectations for the future at a 12-year low
https://chiefexecutive.net/ceo-optimism-plummets-in-march-am...
Simplest way to make my point is to look at the confidence during covid vs January of this year.
There’s no such thing as an “actual indicator.” The economy isn’t a real thing that exists. It’s all correlates, some leading, some trailing, some accurate, and some inaccurate.
The contents of the shopping cart of the person in front of you is an indicator.
yes.
> It’s all correlates, some leading, some trailing, some accurate, and some inaccurate.
no. some things are actually measured, like employment rate.
sentiment also can be measured, but is meaningless, because it can contradict behavior, which actually affects the real world. sentiment certainly is correlated to behavior, which is why it's a good leading indicator, but is often wrong about what is happening (see the USA 2024 election, and covid).
Sure, employment rate is measured though uhh, via a survey just like consumer sentiment. The relationship between employment rate and "the economy?" A correlation.
The rest of your comment is umm... internally contradictory.
That has always been kind of questionable, and now it's laughable.
These two statements can't both be true for very long. The Democratic Party is going to reinvent itself. Turbulent and uncertain though it may be, this is how it works.
The GOP just used its generational transformation, has been given free rein to prove their ideas, and lo and behold: they suck!
I used to be more hopeful but if they won't act now, in the direst of times, then they must actually be completely bought by corporate interests.
> then they must actually be completely bought by corporate interests.
This is a non-sequitur. I know it's an easy out to avoid thinking through the actual mechanics at play here (one of which is certainly corporate interests), but it's worth being more curious about this stuff and the individuals' motivations.
It seems like their plan is a repeat of 2016, 2020, and 2024- to hope that Trump will be so unpopular that they can get elected without changing anything.
There's a distinct resemblance here between Putin's position, and Trump's.
Also I think you mean agent, not asset. He’s obviously an asset.
So I take this in the dialectic sense - that it is not destructive but self-destructive.
Also the opposition's obsession with Russia points to their loss. The average American doesn't give a damn what Putin thinks. Trump is focused on the US (or maybe Canada or Greenland) while the opposition is focused on Russia. Liberal Denocrats disliked Russia when Khrushchev was in charge too, they just have some anti-Russian animus that you can read about in the New York Times back to 1925 and before.
Mitch McConnell, arguably the most powerful Republican senator in a generation, has also recently issued a rare criticism of Trump and his alliance with Putin, deeply damaging his own standing in his party.
We can also add many other conservative leaders who are no longer in power to that list, because there is no space for dissent in a fascist party.
But please continue to try and strawman the left as having no good reason aside from loss to raise the alarm on an obvious Russian asset controlling the worlds largest superpower
This continues to mostly be harm from him just constantly going back and forth on the notion. It can get so much worse if he sticks with it this time.
I mean, yes. So, fair trade then? I mean who uses money from their stock market investments to buy eggs?
Though I suppose if you can preserve them, perhaps it's time to re-balance your portfolio and include them in your asset allocation?
A medium to large potato weighs roughly 1/2 pound. https://lovingnaturefarm.com/how-much-does-a-potato-weigh/
Eggs are about $0.44 / egg average https://eggprices.org/national-data
So depending on where you live, your potato costs more than an egg! (But only because egg prices have gone back down a bit!)
This was always caused by corporate middlemen--as much as I'd like to blame Trump/Republicans, the egg cartel is the real problem here, and Trump/Republicans are only to blame inasmuch as they don't have the will to break up the monopoly.
Problem with the US is that no one seems to care enough to act.
Trump has made the GOP more populist and in response the Dems have become more institutionalist. Long-term tariffs could lock in this trend, with finance and business resigning themselves to settle for the latter political camp. Basically, business would trade vicious efficiency for reliability/predictability, while the dems would trade Bernie bros for the business class.
Now that their retirement account has fallen +10% thanks to Trump, I will have to find out what they think. Could be a risky question if I decide to ask them.
Also I am surprised Wall Street is not revolting against the GOP. My guess is they are praying for the big tax cuts first.
Between this and the tax cuts, Zimbabwean Dollar is looking good /s