Even Donald Trump would not be able to articulate his own trade policy. But all that matters to Wall Street is that he caved.
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Businesses and investors crave certainty. And that’s precisely what they got on Wednesday. Unfortunately for them, and Americans in general, the only certainty that can be gleaned from the past week is that the erratic US president is completely clueless and will create chaos in the weeks and months ahead.
In the span of seven days, Donald Trump launched an utterly unnecessary global trade war, watched investors lose trillions of dollars, vowed to hold firm, caved, and then claimed victory as though there was some kind of plan behind this madness.
What is the end result of all this?
Nobody knows. Certainly not Trump’s economic team, i.e., the clown posse that has to march out in front of reporters and explain why this spectacle has been awesome and a testament to the president’s savvy leadership and unmatched prowess as a dealmaker.
However, we are reasonably sure that none of them could provide an accurate answer to the question of which country is now subject to which tariff rate.
Is it zero percent, 10 percent, a gabajillion percent? They don’t know. And even if they did, everything could change again in the blink of an eye.
For now, let’s assume that this social media post from Trump is the official policy of the United States.
The amount of falsehoods and make-believe in that statement is off the charts.
Trump is a bully and a shake-down artist, so if there really were all of these countries desperate to strike a deal, he would have raked them over the coals and extracted a heavy price for their subservience.
The reality is that the US’s biggest trading partners, from Canada and China to the EU, were fighting back (contrary to Trump’s assertion that they did not retaliate in “any way, shape, or form”) and that this put the United States on a fast track toward a recession.
Still, Wall Street traders read “90-day pause” and that was good enough for them to launch a massive rally that clawed back some of the losses the markets (and the retirement accounts of Americans) had suffered since Trump’s “Liberation Day.”
What it really means is that US trading partners now have three months to come up with a more robust plan to fight the next round of tariffs, e.g., with a targeted response or by working more closely together and isolating the United States.
Of course, “three months” could also mean “tomorrow” if Trump changes his mind again.
And that’s really the only certainty there is: A volatile and clueless US president will “govern” on a whim and the chaos will continue.
However, it would be wrong to say that nobody could see this coming.
We did.
Even before Trump posted his social media message that started the rally, we had filed a story saying that the president was freaking out, and that his Truth Social activity from Wednesday morning showed that he was feeling the pressure from his own poor decisions.
Therefore, the morale of this story is that you should subscribe to our newsletter to stay one step ahead of the mayhem.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
