Public sentiment is overwhelmingly negative regarding trade disruptions caused by tariffs, particularly those implemented during the Trump administration. Many commenters express significant concern over the adverse economic impacts of these policies, viewing them as self-serving actions that undermine global trade and foster inequality. A prevalent belief among commenters is that the current leadership's lack of understanding of economic complexities is jeopardizing international relationships and domestic economic stability.

Trump Administration

Global Trade Organizations

U.S. Consumers

International Trade Partners

\[SS from essay by Emily Kilcrease, Senior Fellow and Director of the Energy, Economics, and Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. From 2019 to 2021, first in the Trump administration and then in the Biden administration, she was Deputy Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Investment; and Geoffrey Gertz, Senior Fellow in the Energy, Economics, and Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. From 2022 to 2023, he was Director for International Economics on the U.S. National Security Council.\]

On April 2, a day he dubbed “Liberation Day,” President Donald Trump stood in the White House Rose Garden and announced a sweeping new program of tariffs intended to rebalance U.S. trade. Trump’s tariff rates were shockingly high, triggering a stock market selloff and a flight away from U.S. assets, rare rebukes from some Republicans in Congress, and diplomatic outrage around the world. After a week of mounting backlash, the president announced a 90-day pause on most of the country-specific tariffs, leading foreign counterparts to scramble for deals that would allow them to escape the levies before the clock ran out. U.S. court rulings questioning the legality of the president’s tariffs have added further uncertainty.

The Trump administration’s trade policy chaos has already caused harm, slowing growth, raising prices, and sparking dire predictions about the fate of the world economy. Yet there is a kernel of truth in the president’s insistence that the international trade system needs a reset. Distrust of free trade has been rising in both political parties in the [United States](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/regions/united-states). Governments around the world are more and more willing to intervene in their economies to safeguard national interests. The U.S.-led global trading order, constructed over eight decades following World War II, has frayed.

ForeignAffairsMag

Humanity is not yet at a stage for peaceful coexistence and cooperation on a global scale. Way too much ongoing conflicts. Very high chance of future conflicts. It's only Europe that has learned to coexist in relative harmony after WWII. India became a country from a Europe like subcontinent of warring provinces only after the British. Rest of Indian subcontinent relations are tumultuous. Europe - Russia relations are volatile. Much of Africa is simmering. The middle East. So we as a civilization are far from world peace. 

It is more pragmatic to eliminate economic dependencies on potential rivals. Any strategic dependency can and will be used as a lever. Europe gets nauseous when Trump threatens withholding whatever. China can bring to a halt the economy of any nation that goes against it. They just need to restrict exports from key suppliers - not that hard to accomplish. 

It's like the rise of the populist right. We can virtue signal and pretend righteousness all we want. But the votes speak for themselves. 

Trump's just going about it in a very haphazard self centred fashion. Perhaps he doesn't know better. Possibly manipulating the markets to his benefit in the process. Perhaps it's a task no stable leader could have embarked upon. Disruption is always ugly.

shriand

People tend to forget, take things for granted. Perhaps we need a few decades without global trade to wake people up again.

ApostleofV8

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Australia was on the receiving end of a huge trade deficit with the USA prior to boneheaded tariffs.

China has now cancelled US beef import licences and LNG orders for Australian supply at lower prices due to exchange rate and proximity.

A surging demand for gold in the US has resulted in the poetic justice of Australia now holding a trade surplus.

iyamwhatiyam8000

I think right now US is only feeling the ripples of the storm, its on the horizon and waves are starting to get bigger.  Its still many weeks/months before the storm hits the "Land of the free!".  China has options and the political benefit of every US action, even though its hurting them too.  Trump will either "divert" the storm out to see or straight to the heart of the US.  Only time will tell, but I cant see any positives on the horizon, just a big ass storm.

Fluffyman2715

I saw news with video at the White House, Trump was with an economist, this person told him, if you put customs duties on steel and aluminum, we will no longer be competitive in selling our weapons, Trump thought about it and said oh yes it's complicated!

mimichris

I’m a Canadian investor, I sold half of my American stocks in the middle of February and regret not selling them all. I’ve been ejecting all my money out of American companies because I have zero faith in your leader, and zero faith in your congress and courts to hold him accountable. 

You guys elected a clown and I expect a circus. 

Goodbye American stock market! Thank you for making some money for me, but in the near future I just seeing it sinking and sinking due to poor leadership.

Ghoulius-Caesar

China is sending back Boeing planes. They have 130 planes ordered that are no longer being accepted. This is billions of dollars in trade down the tubes.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/s/omvjm5lXxj

jbochsler

What kinds of things would become in short supply in the US because of this. 


I have searched for us import breakdowns and it seems smartphones and electronics will be high on the list. 


Not sure what else though, what do you all think ? 

aeontechgod

Unpopular opinion but if this is what’s necessary to finally put an end to hyperconsumption in the US, so be it. If it wasn’t an internal force like war or trade disputes, it was going to be an external force, e.g. biosphere collapse. That’s still coming, but at least this will force people to rip off the easy mode bandaid and start thinking in terms of resilience. Perhaps we’ll slam into the wall going 40 instead of 100.

thehourglasses

Watch US companies just spread the tariff cost across the world though. I wouldn’t put it past them to just increase prices a bit everywhere.

Queen___Bitch

You can’t just have China be allowed to not follow the rules and expect everyone else to play along. They want to subsidize industries and dominate them globally while hamstringing foreign companies in China until they decide to leave (after having given away all their trade secrets to the local partners). At some point the things were going to have to be reset.

Aggressive-Cut5836

The old world is dying; the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.

EDIT: Its an Antonio Gramsci quote, yall. Whom you should read.

Ulthanon

Ray Dalio is a walking embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect. He thought it was sage wisdom to write in a book that nations usually fail due to internal conflict or external conflict. (No kidding.) He has predicted 20 out of the last 2 recessions.

For a more clear-eyed view of this charlatan, read *The Fund* by Rob Copeland.

Review from the NYT has some choice words (gift link)

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/06/books/review/the-fund-rob-copeland.html?unlocked_article_code=1.-U4.kMLM.fnYPID1Sy2hi&amp;smid=url-share

&gt; Most of “The Fund” doesn’t feel like a book about finance. Instead, it is about how a man of surpassing mediocrity used money to control and humiliate, and how much people abased themselves for it. Which, come to think of it, makes it one of the better books ever written about Wall Street.

...

&gt; One of the peculiarities of Dalio’s story is that he just doesn’t come off as very smart at all. His predictions have been wrong as often as right. And as the years passed, Dalio’s advantage “softened, then seemingly ceased. The rise of powerful computers made it easy for any trader to program rules and to trade by them.” Confronted with differing views, he has resisted change.

alberge

[Investors are losing faith in Ray Dalio’s risk strategy after a lackluster five-year run, and pulling out their cash—’it’s been disappointing for a long time’](https://fortune.com/2024/04/23/lackluster-returns-ray-dalio-investing-strategy-investors-pull-billions/)

From April 2024.

ZamboniJ

A lot of our wealth is structured on faith in institutions.  Trump is destroying that faith.  Yes we had preexisting structural problems, but we could have dealt with those with thought, hard work, some sacrifices, and good choices.  The shock and awe approach we are witnessing is bringing the whole house down.

KidKilobyte

Dalia isn’t breaking ground here. The fact is that he and all of the other giant fund “managers” have been playing poker with this information and now the hens are coming back to roost. Now they have to regroup and tell us that they will have to make ever more radical bets on the global market, given that they all turned their backs on the job of running the world, preferring to live it up in the box seats where they can keep their hands clean.

WaitingforPerot

I don’t really buy that “tariffs are symptoms.” Maybe to some degree, but there is literally no other person we could have elected that would be doing these batshit crazy tariffs across the board in the way that he is. 

That’s not a symptom of anything other than one singular person’s derangement, ego, and poor decision making.

BeingNiceHelps

Well crap. But hey, at least even though we were born too late to invade the Middle East, and too early to invade the Middle East, we’ll still probably get to invade the Middle East. 

World orders may come and go, but invading the holy land always remains.

Eodbatman

Ridiculous about tariffs. These tariffs are NOT symptoms. They are the brain fart of a complete business moron. And a "Ron Vara" fantasy. They were not "caused" by the situation.

Mach5Driver

We are in the middle of a coup by a group of oligarchs and Dalio is calling it a debt crisis

Hfdredd

Yeah it's the general issue we face. 

While idiots create new issues out of nothing, we are ignoring the real issues and making them worse and worse. 

There are massive bombs waiting in society to go off, in terms of debt, pensions, climate change, etc. 

And we are ignoring them in favour of dealing with... trans women in sport. 

The fix is in. They know they've doomed the world they're just trying to position themselves to come out on top.

Kaiisim

He may be right (\~1% chance) or not.

Ray Dalio is obsessed with these global cycles and sees them everywhere, including in places they do not exist. That's his pet theory. Attempts to cram the stock market, geopolitics and everything into some consistent model never work. Dalio is no doubt a respected investor, but as a prophet he's like everyone else - a tiny chance to be right and a huge chance to be wrong.

peternn2412

Income matters for debt. Owing someone a dollar if you're my 4-year old is a major deal because he has no way to pay that back. For me it's a triffle because it's only a dollar. 

Debt as a share of GDP has been consistently tanking over the past umpteen years (except where it jumped back up for Covid then continued to fall again).

Also, note how or population is increasing. But the population wasn't increasing as far as additional income from the increased number of people. 

So yes, we're slashing debt now, but we're slashing income at an even faster rate, and we were already on the path to slash debt.

KJ6BWB

I really like Ray but he's sort of been saying this for quite about a decade.

joeyc923

"Tariffs are symptoms, not causes"

I'm sorry, but this isn't even remotely close to true.  Tariffs can be attributed, largely (pun intended), to one man.  donald trump.  That's not a symptom; thats a very deliberate cause that then delivers symptoms; of which we are all privvy to. 

Stop listening to these dickb$gs in finance.  They exist to swindle you, and that's all they see us as; financial cannon fodder.  

F@ck these people.

markelis

This seems like ignoring the gunshot wounds to complain about the patients high blood pressure and sedentary lifestyle.


Or ignoring the mans knee on his neck for 9 minutes because he has opiates in his system.

InfoBarf

Governmental debt is not the same thing as Human debt. We don't make monthly payments to china or other countries who buy our debts. The US owns debts in other countries too. What they actually buy are *bonds*, it's not like any of the countries can try and *collect* on this "debt".

You wanna know what will actually cause a recession and depression? People not spending money because they can only afford necessities, because wages are stagnant, inflation is rising, the rich aren't putting their money back into circulation via taxation, and housing is a commodity instead of a basic right. All the tariffs are doing is making the long term problems come a lot fucking sooner than wall street folks were hoping.

Airanuva

Tariffs are neither a cause nor a symptom. They are a weapon. How can you say that trade wars are a cause of this, and say tariffs are a symptom? Are bullets a symptom of war? No, death and injury is a symptom, bullets are the weapon.

But saying that helps point to who is doing all of this. Who has agency, and isn't just a byproduct.

The warnings are useless unless they point to the *humans* causing this stuff. This isn't the weather. People have control over what's happening.

Grow a backbone, Dalio.

ringobob

Shit was just fine until you know who came along and decided tariffs were a cure for literally everything.  He’s like the guy in my big fat Greek wedding that uses windex to cure everything

cybercuzco

&gt; *While tariffs and their market impacts dominate headlines, the deeper, more critical issue is the breakdown of the global monetary, political, and geopolitical order—a rare, once-in-a-lifetime shift driven by unsustainable debt, inequality, and deglobalization.*

Why is Dalio separating Trump's tariffs from the wider breakdown in the global order? Most of the "key forces at play" result from a series of disastrous, short-sighted, ill-informed policy decisions made Trump and the Republicans. Tariffs are just another part of that same self-defeating package.

TheRC135

The massive US government debt was also caused by Republicans. It started with Reagan's tax cuts. Somehow Clinton was able to balance the budget. Then we had Bush Jr.'s tax cuts and very expensive wars and an occupation that lasted over a decade. Then we had Trump's tax cuts in 2017. Now they want more tax cuts for the wealthy. The problem is Republicans just trying to rip off the American people for themselves and their wealthy donors.

findingmike

I put no stock in what a hedge fund manager has to say (pun intended).  They're basically just scam artists who swear up and down that they have "a system" for playing the market, when in reality they typically fail to beat the market long term.  Anyone who claims to be an expert stock picker is delusional.

Generico300

I've put this question to askeconomics more than once and they always tell me the debt is perfectly sustainable. I've come to the conclusion that this is mostly propaganda that rich guys are using in order to justify cutting the government to the bone. They want the government out of the way of their businesses so they've invested a lot of resources into anti-government propaganda and are doing everything they can to dismantle its ability to check their own power.

Cannavor

Am I wrong to think the manager of the world’s largest hedge fund is likely the last person we should believe, due to the overwhelming amount of personal interest they have regarding this issue?

Seems like they have the world’s largest stake in this, and would support whatever arguments benefit their portfolio. 

It’s a genuine question. Not a rhetorical attack. I hope someone more knowledgeable will now educate me.

JDS150k

Boss im tired of going through so many once in a lifetime events and I'm not even 50 yet

pncoecomm

"Once-in-a-lifetime"? Words keep losing meaning. How many times now?

SsooooOriginal

Of course he believes that, he's been saying it for decades.  It's part of his identity.

The question is if it would have come about but for Trump.

ragnaroksunset

I don't mean to be cynical but this sounds like something Marie Antoinette would have said right before that cake part.

CaptainZ42062

So someone who has a significant interest in a particular outcome is a person to listen to... because?

This is like a fox telling you that the door to the hen house should *always* be left open. 

There isn't a more biased individual out there than this guy as to which way they want the market to go.

IndyPoker979

I’m a millennial. PLEASE, tell me about this new once in a lifetime crisis I’m about to go through. I’ll add it to my scrapbook.

No-Chemical4791

Would you be shocked to learn that the billionaire hedge fund manager does not suggest raising taxes on the wealthy to deal with the debt crisis?

40ouncesandamule

Ray D, eh?

You mean the guy who made MUCH less in returns that the market...or even me?

"As of March 2025, in the previous 30 Years, the Ray Dalio All Weather Portfolio obtained a **7.55% compound annual return**"

Think about that. He's a cult leader and sales person - not an investor. I won't even both to quote Warren Buffets return since then......

RosieDear

Key Question....

Why would people listen to a guy who didn't even make 8% compounded over 35 years?

Don't answer, please. Nothing could make it make sense. 

Rather, talk to me about what Warren Buffet says. Thanks!

Oh ray thinks it's about debt? The guy that wrote the book on high debt being the the problem?

whif42

Now we’re supposed to feel pity for hedge fund managers? Get outta here lmao

cptchronic42

So what you’re saying is that we’re in the endgame of the dollar?

LonelyAndroid11942

Fine, there is a historical moment occurring.  That doesn't make Trump's tariffs a *good* thing.

I think it's perfectly cromulent to focus on the tariffs, in as much as they are helping to disrupt the geopolitical power balance that has been incredibly valuable to the US, and that they fuel nationalistic tendencies in ours and other nations to break down democratic institutions.

THSSFC

Uhh, one problem Dalio, the fuckin tariffs started this and it did not have to be this way. 🤦‍♂️

MakimaToga

I've been waiting for this to happen for a long time.   

Every time there is a recession or a near recession the media gives credit to the "strength of the US consumer" for pulling them through.   Meanwhile what is really happening is banks are lending more and more money to US consumers on the basis of their stock portfolio and real estate holdings, both of which rely on a bigger fool to pay more than the last fool (them) that bought it.

The other thing that has been floating this boat is historically low interest rates.   Stupidly low interest rates.  People chasing yield with the assumption that loan default risk is essentially zero.

Most of the money funding this cycle has come from China, who has been enamored with the US dollar.  If there was one country in which the US should not piss off, it is China.  And which country does Trump put squarely in the cross hairs ?  China. 

You can't make this stuff up.   You can't make up Trump not going to trial for any of his crimes.  You can't make up how stupid his rally speeches were.  You can't make up the US electorate for making him President.  And you can't make up all the idiotic stuff he is now doing as President. 

FAFO.   And here we are.

yycTechGuy

tax billionaires who just gamble when we don't. there, solved.

dibship

This is the same thing Ray Dalio has been saying for years now at this point.

JonathanL73

In fairness, tariffs aren't necessarily a symptom of anything other than the addled brain of an octogenarian who understands nothing about global finance and trade.  

I'm not saying Dalio is wrong, per se, but that if literally anybody else was in the Oval Office they would not have self mutilated like this.  It takes a unique asshole to be this stupid.

52ndstreet

Ray dalio wrote a pseudo scientific book about historical cycles and trends and is trying to pump his bags. Nothing to see here

lysis_

When you have a cow and loan it to your neighbor on paper there is a negative cow in your field. Debt is imaginary. It is a delusion of the mind. Dalio needs to let it go. If he really sees "debt" as a problem he can just stop collecting the interest payments on all the debt he has bought over the years. It's ironic to be the problem and complain about the problem existing. 

The concept of debt bondage stems from religion. The idea that you suffer in life to get a place by God in heaven. We've built our entire financial system around "negative cows."  The why and how this came to be is too long to explain here but basically the concept of capital and debt replaced slavery in the post Roman world. Then religion took hold of it and what is money but a unit of faith.

It's complete bullshit but still very powerful psychological manipulation.

EventHorizonbyGA

the head of a hedge fund talking about inequality is rich to say the least!

nthnyjsn

Explain this to me: whenever there's talk about how dangerous the debt is, the solution is to always take from what the poor have and never about raising taxes on the rich. Rich people telling poor people they need to sacrifice what little they have without being willing to sacrifice their own wealth seems just a tad self-serving to me. The biggest jump in debt came from the last tax cut, but we're in the position we're in now because of their desire to extend the same tax cut, adding another huge bump in the debt.

Pramathyus

Doesn't help when the political party currently in charge in the U.S. is genuinely really bad at maintaining order, and is also intentionally sabotaging things.

Debt is the problem and the U.S. just voted in a guy who famously doesn't pay his debts.

rKasdorf

Look I can't necessarily disagree with some of the core problems here, but what we're seeing today, this week, is not that. It's direct torpedoing of the economy by a single man-child who thinks everyone's assets are his playthings. The other issues are indeed risks, but those risks can be mitigated and crises averted with thoughtful planning and a little patience. Our current president has no capacity for such "radical" ideas.

NickCharlesYT

Ray Dalio is a parasite who profited from the conditions that created this need for a hard financial reset to clear out all the leverage from the system. 

Fuck him and the rest of the billionaires, the political class and the class traitor simps who are too wrapped up fighting culture wars and hustling for pennies to see reality for what it is.

SomeTimeBeforeNever

I certainly won't pooh-pooh Mr. Dalio's billions -- but there's gotta be some point where, after 48-60 months of trumpeting the same sky-is-falling tune, the audience starts to glaze over, and, when he finally jumps up, 72 months in, crowing "SEE I TOLD YOU," everyone responds "Yeah, you've been saying it for 6+ years, including pre- and post-Covid, pre- and post-peak Dow, everything dips eventually, broken clock, twice a day, blah blah blah."

Dalio is also big on "mental models" -- what are he + his trusted advisors basing their advice/predictions on, how trustworthy is that advice, how much (or little) should their inputs be weighted based on fluctuating trust -- this is why Bridgewater used a "personal points" rating system for many years, where staff would score (upvote/downvote) each other during the course of workweek meetings.  Ray was very big on reiterating that "His \[Ray's\] reliability score was **the highest in the company**" during that time, and would occasionally call a no-work day so that all employees would spend eight hours studying the Dalio Principles, so as to take a pop quiz on said principles later that afternoon, etc.

All of which to say -- Dalio's operating metier is a mix of "timely personal instincts," "access to government-facing insiders," and "creation of a centered-round-self cult institution."  I interviewed at (and received an offer from) Bridgewater in 2013;  Copeland's book *The Fund* wasn't even a twinkle in its author's eye at that time, but, even back then, the glaring symptoms of do-whatever-I-want, everyone-gets-a-point-score, my-point-score-is-highest were obvious to even casual observers.

sskoog

I'm currently reading The Fund, and Ray has consistently had bearish view from the start of his career.

fearlessalphabet

Really amazing how many people here call Dalio a crank and confidently state that the US isn’t in fact an empire in free fall. A little more reading of history shows many empires and their falls from grace are not dissimilar to the present American moment.

_BabyGod_

He's been harping about debt cycle for 10 years, we just have the memory of a gold fish

spitz6860

I mean it's all self-inflicted. The rich bought politicians and sucked up all the money. There's plenty of money. It's just not in people's hands. It's in f****** rich people 's lairs.

Bean_Boy

A Facebook post(from Oregon’s Bay Area) explained his fascination with tariffs! Here’s their post: “We finally have our answer. After years of vague slogans and red hats, Donald Trump has revealed exactly when he believes America was great: 1789. Yes, the year George Washington became president. The year the U.S. Constitution took effect. The year “we the people” meant wealthy white landowners, while women, Black people, Indigenous peoples, and the working class were denied basic rights, voices, or dignity. That’s the America he wants to bring back, not just in spirit, but in economic policy.

In what may go down as the most chaotic and economically incoherent press conference in modern history, Trump took to the White House Rose Garden to announce sweeping new tariffs that immediately sent markets into a tailspin. The plan? A blanket 10 percent baseline tariff on all countries, effective April 5, with even steeper “reciprocal” tariffs for specific countries based on whatever Trump perceives as “cheating.” What the market expected was a moderate, maybe even symbolic gesture. What it got was Trump doing economic cosplay with a magic marker and a flimsy chart, channeling the ghosts of mercantilism and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act like they’re founding fathers.

Wall Street reacted like a cat thrown into a bathtub. Dow futures plummeted more than 1,000 points. The S&amp;P 500 dropped 3.6 percent. The Nasdaq? Down 4.5 percent. This wasn’t a mild correction, it was an after-hours crash. Shares of major multinationals like Nike and Apple each fell around 7 percent. Retailers that rely on imports got obliterated: Five Below cratered 14 percent, Dollar Tree fell 11, and Gap dropped 8.5. Even tech giants weren’t spared, with Nvidia shedding 5 percent and Tesla down 7, ironic, considering Trump’s awkward love-hate tango with Musk.

The administration tried to clarify, but only made things worse. According to a White House follow-up, countries like China could now face an effective 54 percent tariff rate once you add Trump’s new “reciprocal” logic to existing penalties. Traders had hoped for a capped rate of 10 to 20 percent across the board. Instead, they got a fever dream of vengeance tariffs, delivered like a kindergarten show-and-tell, complete with oversized charts and half-formed math.

Art Hogan, chief market strategist at B. Riley Wealth Management, didn’t mince words. “What was delivered was as haphazard as anything this administration has done to date,” he told CNBC. “The level of complication on top of the ultimate level of new tariffs is worse than had been feared and not yet priced into the market.” Larry Tentarelli of the Blue Chip Trend Report echoed that if Trump had simply stuck to the 10 percent, markets might have gone up. But Trump can’t help himself. He had to go big, chaotic, and wildly unpredictable.

Then came the history lesson. Trump declared, with his usual smug certainty, that from 1789 to 1913, the United States was the wealthiest it’s ever been, purely because of tariffs. According to him, we were collecting so much money so fast that the government didn’t know what to do with it. Of course, he left out the part where most Americans lived in poverty, where wealth was concentrated in a few monopolists' hands, and where child labor and 14-hour workdays were the norm. The “wealth” he refers to was largely theoretical for the average citizen and absolutely real for the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, and other Robber Barons of the Gilded Age. Tariffs weren’t some magic goose laying golden eggs, they were regressive taxes that hit working people hardest, all while padding the profits of a corrupt elite. Sound familiar?

In the same breath, Trump launched a bizarre tirade against Canada, yes, Canada. Our closest ally, trading partner, and the only country that says “sorry” when we mess up. He claimed the U.S. subsidizes Canada to the tune of $200 billion a year, and that it’s time for them to fend for themselves. Canadian officials, not surprisingly, are now organizing boycotts of U.S. goods and tourism. That’s what you get when you treat allies like enemies and think you’re negotiating a Manhattan real estate deal instead of running global trade.

As Trump spun his globetrotting list of economic enemies, from Vietnam to Taiwan to the European Union, he declared this moment “Liberation Day.” Liberation Day!?! He actually said that years from now, we’ll all look back on this press conference as the day we got “so rich, so fast.” You know who else promises riches if you just believe hard enough? Cult leaders.

And while the markets reeled and global confidence in American leadership sank, Trump rambled about plastic Easter eggs. You read that right. Midway through the economic collapse, he paused to thank someone named Brooke for ensuring there’d be enough plastic eggs for Easter. He praised the term “groceries” as a beautiful, old-fashioned word. These are the thoughts swirling around in the mind of the man who just launched a global trade war.

And just when you thought it couldn’t get more absurd, Trump forgot to sign the executive order he had spent the entire press conference hyping. An aide had to remind him. He ambled back, scribbled his name, then wandered off again, apparently satisfied that he’d just rescued the economy by detonating a stick of dynamite under it.

This is economic sabotage. Whether through malice or incompetence or, more likely, both Trump is isolating the United States on the world stage, tanking the markets, worsening inflation, and burdening working families with the cost of his 18th-century cosplay. These aren’t policies. They’re performance art. And the rest of us are footing the bill.

History won’t remember this as Liberation Day. It will remember it as the day America’s last shreds of economic sanity were tossed into a bonfire of delusion, lit by a man who thinks tariffs are magic beans and “groceries” is a fancy word for freedom.”

GT45

This is a Dump &amp; Pump scheme. They create an environment where the economy tanks and stocks plummet. Then Trump, his billionaire friends, Russian Oligarchs, and anyone else in this scheme can buy everything back up again at severely discounted prices. Then they change policies that allow the market to go back up. In the end, money is consolidated even further into the very top and everyone else gets screwed. 

With Trump it's all about making more money for he and his friends. He's been doing schemes like this his entire life. He is managing power by enriching Putin and his oligarchs because deals were made that Putin would help get and keep him in power for a price. Trump has chosen to become a Russian agent for power and money.

[deleted]

He's a moron.  Period.  


His teachers have told us.

His relatives have told us.

His ex employees have told us 

Generals have told us.

Security officials have told us.



Don't try to analyze it.  At best he's being manipulated.

Bosfordjd

Why are people still asking this question? TRUMP IS A RUSSIAN ASSET, PERIOD!

CryptoMemesLOL

Musk, and JD Vance are part of the Tech Bro Billionaires who are trying to tank the economy. Trump is intentionally ruining our economy.  

Republicans want to privatize and very rich people will own these businesses.  Plus tech billionaires want to rule and control the masses.

They support https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin

DeltadWin

To enrich himself, and enact the plan of his masters. He’s definitely following the project 2025 playbook.

Handyhelping

In his muddled mind, he was sold old economic theories that came from Russell Vought as part of Project 2025.  In the late 19th century, tariffs were in vogue, and worked to an extent under the conditions at that time.  As an added bonus, tariffs distorted the income distribution in favour of the rich and gave him a chance to sign Executive Orders in front of the cameras.

HEHENSON

Assuming he isn't literally a Russian asset doing this to purposely damage America:


He believes the US can and should make everything it needs.


He believes trade barriers will force America to make everything it needs.


He has somewhere between disdain and contempt for everything not American. 


He doesn't understand how dependent America is on global trade.


He doesn't understand what his tariffs will do.




Tariffs made America what it is today for the same reason poorer countries have high tariffs: they protect nascent and developing local business from advanced, overwhelming foreign competition. Back in the first 75 years of the USA, they needed tariffs because British industry was overwhelmingly advanced by comparison. Today though America is on top and generally when you are already able to be competitive you don't need protection.


He may be thinking that tariffs will MAGA, but the circumstances today are radically different than in 1790 and they'll likely not due to their indiscriminate and sudden nature.


Like..suppose he wanted to revive US steel, the way to do it would be gradually raise tariffs, maybe a point or two per year, to give US manufacturing time to get back to spec without causing shocks.

democritusparadise

Look up Trump's plans to create a US Sovereign Wealth Fund, and it will start to make sense. He's repeatedly said he wants to fund it using tarrif collections. This wealth fund will become his personal slush fund!

Razasid

I’ve read that Navarro is the genius behind the tariff scheme. I’ve also read the numbers Navarro is quoting, in the hundreds of billions of dollars, that the tariffs will raise. What is never mentioned is who will be paying those dollars, which will disproportionately be the masses. So an enormous tax hike on the American people, the largest in the history of the country, larger than the increases to pay off war debt from the World Wars.

And what will that trigger? Trumps tax policy overwhelmingly favours the 1%, and this will be no different. Americans are standing by while Trump, Musk and the DOGEbags go after Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security to fund Trumps tax breaks for the wealthy, last estimate I read was $880 billion in cuts.

This is the guy who bankrupted every business he ran, and used the courts and the lax tax enforcement to keep himself wealthy while destroying others. For America’s working class, you voted for  your turn in the barrel.

mgyro

Don't worry T🤡m L ee says the market will still be up 10% this year.

LOL

Life_is_too_short_

Tariffs are easy to understand, and do work well to protect the interest of small economies.

The Tariffs were likely not trump's ideas but was that of legacy business owners in America's heartland.  Such as the ford's family or large American corporate farming families.

People who understands business and want to leverage their influence in the American government to obtain an advantage over foreign competitors.  However legacy American families who are good business owners don't make them good economist, and they don't understand why tariffs are bad for large economies.  They only see that it's successful in smaller economies like Vietnam and Finland.

They genuinely don't understand why this is a bad idea, then think that the other liberal parts of America are lying to them about how economy work.

This is also why the tariffs are mainly focused on manufacturing and vehicles; Japan and EU will be hit the hardest because they are the main competitors to American auto manufacturers.

And the likely retaliation from foreign nations will likely focus on punishing American manufactures and states that voted for Trump.

00x0xx

I’m one of those who truly believe that Trump is working for Russia AND the White Christian Nationalist (WCN). These two entities have overlapping objectives.

Why do I think this? Because that’s literally the only thing that makes sense. Everything he has been doing has done NOTHING for the MAGA base. In fact it’s going to hurt them, a lot. Other reasons I believe this is that when Trump was looking at his last bankruptcy he could not get a loan from anyone. He was toxic and all the NY banks didn’t want to touch him. Then comes Deutsche Bank from the blue loaning him 200+ million. This bank would get in trouble years later for money laundering for Russian oligarchs. So they were using him to laundry money, and he understood that. He accepted that he was bought and paid for. Second major reason is project 2025. 

The WCN saw a fantastic opportunity in controlling an idiotic president and an idiotic fan base. All they had to do is piggyback on Russian propaganda and convince enough people to vote for him. Trump also wanted to get out of jail and really needed the presidency to do so. So the WCN funded his campaign and  amplified Russian propaganda to get him into office. At best he is now nothing more than a carnival yeller for them with the Elon acting as the CEO.

Jim-be

It's about wages specifically on young white men. Because they are the largest group of low-cost workers.

Working age populations have decreased. That makes the cost of labor go up. 

A good way to drive down the cost of labor is to have a deep recession. An easy way to trigger a session is to do exactly what Donald Trump is doing. 

I guess the calculation is, wages go down. It puts equilibrium on the inflation rate Vs wages.

That's why this administration appears to not know what they're doing because it's a tough idea to sell politically as a plan. It's kind of like what the Reagan administration did in the early '80s. However, instead of Volcker's strategy of aggressively raising the interest rates to make everything more expensive to ease spending with the caveat that it could trigger a recession. 

They are in essence raising the cost of everything by increasing taxes through tariff. The only difference is this won't ease spending. This will jolt the economy. Probably set back wages 15 years.

It's literally modern monetary theory flipped on its head. 

Just to be clear, I'm not a big fan of this plan. I think it's going to put a lot of people in very difficult situations. However, what this appears to be is a wage clawback by a businessman. With the purpose of making it profitable to make things in the continental USA. Thus creating a new manufacturing sector for the United States. That process will start seeing effect in about 5 years. 

The next two years are crucial to the plan. If we sink into a depression rather than a recession OR, the rest of the world stops trading with the United States. Both which have a strong possibility of happening. Either one of these events or both could possibly sink this plan and make things even more depressed or worse yet into something unknown that's just not this. 

This probably has a lot to do with why I'm not a big fan of this idea. I'm not worried about things getting worse, that would only go so far, before things will correct themselves. It's if things get different from any distinction of normal, that truly is, the scenario that scares me. In all honesty, there is a small part of me that does want to see this swing for the fences strategy play out. I guess that's the part that really scares me.

Classic-Soup-1078

Because 35% of the USA blindly supports him and 35% of the USA doesn’t care.

Substantial-Order-78

So he and his billionaire friends can buy everything up at a fraction of the price and with low aprs. Since during a recession values drop and so do interest rates. Also so they can employ all the people they fired for the lowest pay, to make everybody who is desperate for a job accept shit pay and working conditions.

ZealousidealKiwi2165

He literally ran on this, and enough dumbfucks believed it was going to be good for themselves, so here we are.

Just take a look at the imbecile farmers that were threatened with losing everything they’ve got, still said they support him

aeolus811tw

I do think Trump is an idiot when it comes to policy, but I also think there are people in the White House that aren't policy idiots that are pushing the tariffs.  

The best I can tell the strategy is to tank the economy through tariffs, have the Fed lower interest rates and then if/when the bond market tanks try to refinance the national debt.  The tariffs have other perks (to him) in that I think they genuinely believe they will bring manufacturing back to America and raise revenue. Combined with really big tax cuts and mass deportations this will restructure our economy back to being "self-sufficient".  In addition, these people do not believe in the multilateral Post-WWII order and want to destroy it in favor of going back to a "sphere of influence" situation. 

Obviously this is all absolute insanity.  There's a serious argument to be made for targeted tariffs and subsidies for industries that we really want to re-shore like ones involved in the supply chain for defense.  But across the board tariffs will not do what they think they will do.  That's not even to mention why they think it will help Americans to go from higher paying service industry jobs to working in a t-shirt plant.

FifeDog43

The rule about Trump is that he doesn’t do anything except to benefit himself. 

Whatever he is doing right now, it’s 100% for his or his family’s benefit, but mostly him.

oberynmviper

I’d say it’s mostly because he’s a GDDMN MFKN MORON which should be a shock to nobody

ThePugz

8an5

My theory is that he isn’t very smart and he thinks tariffs are good for the USA despite historical evidence.

He’s surrounded by yes-men and manipulators who are unwilling/unable to talk Trump out of it.

dejour

Romano16

He’s definitely acting out of irrational behavior and not reason. Look no further than his midnight tweet storm on his media platform. He throws daily temper tantrums when things don’t go his way and it’s all the previous administrations fault. One of his goals is to get cheap money. The FeD do not take orders from him and are not bringing down rhe borrow rates where he and his constituents can take out cheap loans.

This is how billionaires work, they simply want cheap money to take out loans against their assets and use to consolidate more power (acquire more assets). Then, tax the poor so that they can hoard more wealth. All this gets overlooked when Trump starts spewing bullshit things like “government spending is riddled with fraud” or “we won’t tax on tips”. This is the typical GOP playbook which is strictly based on greed and taking from the working class who contribute over 80% of government revenue (income and payroll taxes).

Skotland85

They want to crash everything so his cronies can come and buy up everything and make it all private. 
Apparently, billionaires aren't happy with what they got and want to take everything.

DEPMAG

Because he’s a convicted criminal and an anarchist.

LaughingBob

Operation collapse of Roman empire, USA edition. R u rdy 🤗 /s

Noeyiax

Making a case to gain revenue from tariffs in order to remove or drastically reduce income taxes so he and his rich friends can profit more. 

Basically further shifting the tax burden on the working class again. He’s a cunt.

Zealousideal_Baker84

It's because he's stupid/Evil which is the worst kind of Evil

rothmal

I think the most reasonable explanation comes when you look at the psychology of the people who support Trump.
It is well known that open borders and  international trade creates winners and losers. On aggregate trade is good, but if you do not actively compensante the losers of trade, they will end up worse off. In case of the US, the losers are traditional manufacturing industries and their workers in the red states and winners are mostly educated city dwellers and tradeable service workers and professionals. (This is documented in seminal China shock paper of Autor, Dorn, Hanson (2013) for example) 

Now some would argue that we embraced globalization without actually trying to do that compensation for the losers of it, instead we deceived ourselves into thinking that this is all result of living in a meritocracy where anyone deserves what they get. (Michael Sandel is one of the famous proponents of this idea) so as the inequality grew, we ended up adding insult to injury to those left out of the globalization growth train.

One way to address this issue was trying to fix the redistribution problem. But US didn’t do thy. This all created a backlash in which people chose the stupid solution: to close borders. Which is what we see now. 

There is no master plan behind it. There is no evil conspiracy to dump and pump the market. It is as clear as it plays out: a backlash response to open trade from those who were left out of it. And it will end up hurting us all.

Professional-Wolf849

I'm going to steel man this administration's argument for tariffs, although I dont personally agree with them.

1. Free trade is largely seen as a positive for many business owners but a huge negative for working class people. A lot of small cities and towns in America have been really struggling since manufacturing fled the US, and tariffs are seen as a way to bring back domestic manufacturing. This explains why these communities tend to be rabidly pro-Trump. It is a matter of survival 
2. The tax revenue collected from tariffs can remove the need for federal income taxes. Taxing income is seen as a tax on productivity, which is generally bad
3. Free trade makes America reliant on the global supply chain, which COVID showed is weak to sudden shocks. Domestic production is seen as more reliable. This might be doubly true if America intends to engage in warfare that would disrupt this supply chain e.g. war with China
4. Tariffs can be used as a bargaining chip. America may be able to get further concessions if a country is desperate to have the tariffs removed, which would imply Trump's "bad deal" rhetoric has some merit. Economists focus too much on the flow of money and not enough on power dynamics. 

Anyone who wants to argue against tariffs has to address these points. Calling Trump an idiot might be true, but it isn't sufficient.

technocraty

why does EU charge 10% tarriffs on our cars and we charge them 2.5% is the real question, what are the tarriffs china imposes on US goods, what does canada tarriff US dairy? so the real question why can they tarriff our goods way higher then we do and theres no outrage but if we want equal tarrifs ya'll freak out, and if all the mainstream media is saying the same thing it's defeinetly not in the best interest of the regular person, same with all these expersts and economists that haven't gotten a single thing right ever

stocktwitmike

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