The most powerful economy in mankind’s history operated like normal today, which is to say the new normal is president deals waking up, getting mad at something he saw on the TV, and farting out a Truth Social post that knocked Apple’s stock price down over 3 percent at the open. Trump is mad that Apple isn’t making $10,000 iPhones in the United States, and he is now threatening an individual company with 25 percent tariffs, a good indicator of how he views tariffs and why he is so desperate to repeat one of the chief mistakes of the Great Depression.
President deals has lived his entire life upset that he is not getting the respect he feels he deserves from the global elites, and tariffs are a way for him to force rich people to at least pretend to like him. The man’s soul has an endless void that can only be satiated by the love of an evil billionaire or outright fraud, and Trump’s trade policy is the nexus of both of his primary daddy issues.
A half hour later, he must have heard an accent on Fox Business he didn’t recognize that made him confused and angry (or maybe he finally heard about Greenland’s new mineral deal with the EU), and he posted that he is “recommending a straight 50 percent Tariff on the European Union, starting on June 1, 2025.”
Modeling Trump’s tariff announcements from this morning (raising tariffs on the EU to 50% and putting a 25% tariff on smartphones), they’d hit more than $370B in imports and raise overall US tariff rates by 4 percentage points to nearly 9x pre-Trump levels
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— Joey Politano🏳️🌈 (@josephpolitano.bsky.social) May 23, 2025 at 8:31 AM
If you were trying to ensure that no business invested in new long-term capital expenditures on US shores, this would be a terrific way to do it. The tariff rate hasn’t been consistent for even a few weeks, as president deals is flailing around trying to force the rest of the planet into his very narrow conception of what he thinks 1905 looked like. Companies need certainty more than anything, and saying “everything will be 100 percent more expensive for the next four years” would be a much better strategy to get them investing in America than yanking them around every few weeks like this. Add in the fact that Trump has now proven he is willing to slap tariffs on individual companies, and there is no doubt that plenty of firms have analysts modeling what exiting the US market to varying degrees for varying periods of time may look like.
JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon to ‘deepen engagement’ with China
https://www.ft.com/content/7f925626-a655-47dc-8cb7-623a4a47ed78
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— Financial Times (@financialtimes.com) May 22, 2025 at 10:42 PM
To really drive home how isolated and deluded Trump’s cadre of trade warriors are, here is Howard Lutnick trying to spew dear leader’s propaganda and being told by an audience that he’s a fucking idiot. I cannot understand how a so-called economics expert can ask this question expecting people to affirm his bullshit when consumer confidence is at lows it hasn’t been at in over a decade.
Trump’s initial 90 day pause from back in April expires on July 7th, and whether those tariffs would be added to his new EU ones is anyone’s guess. By that point we may have an entirely new set of tariffs on Antarctic penguins for all we know. Stupid is too kind of a word for how Trump is conducting trade policy. He doesn’t even understand the lack of leverage he has, as he assumes the world can only deal with the United States’ consumer economy when over 50 percent of global GDP is forecasted to come from Asia by 2040 as well as 40 percent of consumption. We need to invent new words for what is shaping up to be the biggest own-goal in economic history, as Trump is doing the unthinkable and attaching a risk premium to the globe’s “risk-free” asset in US government debt. Given the turmoil in the bond market and the thin demand for long-term bonds, a serious financial crisis is much likelier than it was just a few months ago, all entirely due to Trump and the GOP’s inability to understand basic economics.
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The Truth Hurts
