Also china has 125% tarriff but the reason that they couldn't originally give 10% to Vietnam was trans-shipment of Chinese goods.
If it wasn't happening before, it certainly will be now.
What's actually wrong with them.
If it wasn't happening before, it certainly will be now.
What's actually wrong with them.
Market manipulation. 1. Sell. 2. Threaten tariffs. 3. Buy. 4. Walk back tariffs threats. 5. Repeat.
With the secret step 0: Pay enough of an Indulgence to get in the loop of when those are going to happen, and to stay in their good graces so the DoJ doesn't hit you for insider trading.
This was Monday morning when it was trading ~$40. It is at $53 now. What is 20% increase on $1.5 Billion? $300,000,000.
[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/gutsy-traders-make-1...
It's a pretty gross thing to think about.
Money is not an end. It’s a (one) tool to get there. To the ends you want. To some sort of change in the world you want to achieve.
On that front this is incoherent. I vote incompetence.
A lot of the finance folks work in an M-C-M' world, where Money (M) is the alpha and the omega, so you see this kind of (IMO) perverse behavior.
I've found this mental model helpful in explaining these kinds of behavior.
Maybe for the overwhelming majority of the population, but it simply isn't the mindset of the billionaire class that supports Trump.
There's a reason the dollar weakened in this crisis instead of strengthening like usual. Everyone can see that the US will be hurt far more by this idiocy than other countries will.
Maybe there's something to this theory of Trump being on the dole in Kremlin... ~
look at global trends. no one thinks anyone can make money without the world's leading per capita consumer spender fully on-board. That is leverage.
Every government that has to do something undesirable to their citizens have been given something to blame: a beautiful excuse that will be milked relentlessly to the disadvantage of the US.
Businesses get screwed by flaky management - and now we get to see the US get screwed by its unreliable self-centered Prez.
If anything, it showed the leverage the US has.
Even countries like Singapore, hit with a 10% tariff (marginal, and far lower than most countries) absolutely panicked.
Interestingly, I looked up the size of consumer markets - the US is twice the size of the next biggest market, the EU.
So I don’t blame countries for panicking.
And if you’re really conspiratorial, one could question whether the push for free trade was really an attempt to put the US into a situation where it had leverage against most of the globe.
"I bought $200 worth of stuff from your store and the store bought $0 worth of stuff from me. To punish them, I'm going to pay myself $100 every time I buy anything from the store in the future - that will show them!"
If you tarriff them 10% they'll tarriff you 10% which means your companies lose out more than theirs and you've also pissed off an ally?
Why?
I'm thinking about Australia, UK those kind of folks.
That's a little like what's going on now.
Pissing off your allies is good because if they're happy, that means you didn't squeeze them enough.
And it may hurt us and our companies more than theirs, but it doesn't hurt Trump personally, and that's all he cares about. He's going to be fine, so he's more than happy to cause us pain if it cause them pain as well.
Pissing off your allies is good because if they're happy, that means you didn't squeeze them enough.
It's the reason a "trade deficit" is seen as a bad thing by him. Trade deficits are the result of a mutually beneficial transaction, but that's not enough for Trump. It can't just be mutually beneficial, it has to be beneficial more in our direction than theirs.
Or look at how he treats contractors. He hires a person to do a job, they agree and deliver the work, and that should be the end of the mutually beneficial deal.
But not for Trump, his MO is to stiff contractors, force them to sue, mire them in a legal quagmire, and get them to settle at a loss. This is the kind of deal Trump likes because it's a win for him -- he gets the contracted work at a fraction of the price; and a loss for them -- they probably wouldn't have agreed to do the work had they known what they were in for upfront.
Is this a great way to run the largest economy in the world? Of course not! But that's how it's happening now because that's the kind of guy who is in charge.
He knows very little about government and policy, but tariffs and dollars and percentages feels familiar to him. He's got a lever, and he can't resist yanking on it to show that he's in charge.
Whether yanking on the lever actually benefits the country or him is entirely besides the point. He's a narcissist and narcissists can't let go.
except of course Trump brought a knife to a gunfight :)