John Law (20:20)
All right, that is it for what the right and left are saying. Which brings us to Isaac's my take, which I'm gonna read in first person, but this is all Isaac. So skipping any preamble Today, here are 16 thoughts on what just happened. 1. Trump blinked in the moments after Trump blinked, many of his sycophantic fans insisted that we were observing the art of the deal that he had won, had isolated China, had brought our trading partners to the negotiating table, and that this was the plan all along. This obviously is nonsense. Trump was watching the US Bond market and stock market collapse simultaneously and the treasury yields refused to come down, realized he was cornered and folded his hand. 2. Nevertheless, a lot of people pretended that Trump capitulating was actually him conducting his grand opening gambit to reform global trade. And then the president got in front of a microphone and to remove any doubt about what had just happened, he said the obvious and frightening truth out loud. He decided to pause the bulk of his reciprocal tariffs because people were getting a little bit afraid. He said he watched JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon warn about the market reaction and a possible recession on tv. He said he was making tariff decisions, quote, instinctively, had to be flexible and was keeping an eye on the markets. So in case there was any doubt, that's Trump's real reasoning for the tariff reversal. Trump was not executing any grand plan. This was not the art of the deal. He saw the stock and bond markets collapsing, people around him got afraid and he backed down. 3. Now let's back up and revisit some questions that we had from a few days ago. I wanted to understand the Trump administration's grand plan and it turns out they did not have one when they said they were rolling out global tariffs to negotiate new trade deals, but also said the tariffs weren't a negotiation tactic. That wasn't for dhs. It was the lack of a plan. When they said the plan was to end up with zero tariffs and total free trade and also said they wanted to raise tax revenue, that wasn't 4D chess. It was a lack of a plan. When they warned about the need to be tough and take our medicine and promised that under no circumstances would they back down and then back down. That wasn't 4D chess. It was a lack of a plan. 4i Again, Isaac, am a political moderate. My political ideology is drawn from a wide range of thinkers across the classical liberal, progressive conservative and Trumpist ideologies. I like some of what Trump I do not like some of what Trump does. I am not a sycophant. I am not a hater. So I want to be clear as I can. Criticizing the absurdity of the last week is absolutely essential for anyone who values intellectual honesty. We should plainly and repeatedly call out the stupidity of the past week with great clarity. Doing this does not make you a partisan hack. It does not mean you have Trump derangement syndrome. In the insanity of this information cesspool we all live in, it has been a very embarrassing, contradictory, nonsensical and unproductive week for the Trump administration. We should all be able to call that out without fear of criticism or accusations of partisanship. Otherwise, this great big wild nation might completely and utterly lose its collective mind. I think maybe nothing was accomplished. What deal did we make? What did we win? The administration says representatives from other countries are calling to negotiate. That's great, but to negotiate for what? Previously the White House has said this is not a negotiation and now they won't say who has called to negotiate. But also, this isn't a negotiation. It's about rectifying unfair trade practices, which Trump has defined as anytime we have a trade deficit. I explained why that's nonsense a couple days ago, but today that just seems to be China. We'll see if this 90 day pause brings about a slew of incredible new trade deals, at which point I will pause publicly, eat my words, and concede this global brinksmanship was all worth something. But for now, we should not be pretending a deal was made when we've seen absolutely no proof of deals that have been made. Things are still not great. The market rallied yesterday, but that did not make up the ground from the major sell off that preceded it. Any middle class American with a stock portfolio or 400. One has probably seen something in the ballpark of a 10% shave off their investments over the last week or two for no good reason. We also know from a rare moment of clarity from the administration provided by Scott Bessant that one key objective of high tariffs was bringing down the yield on treasury notes. Instead, yields kept climbing until Trump paused the tariffs, so they got the opposite result they had hoped for. And we still can't expect treasury yields or the Federal Reserve's interest rate to come down. We still have massive tariffs on China, Mexico and Canada and a flat tariff for the rest of the world, which are likely to stymie growth and increase prices in the coming months. Also, these, quote, reciprocal tariffs aren't gone, they're just paused for 90 days. And Trump can undo that pause at any moment, which creates a great deal of uncertainty. Small businesses are still scrambling amid the volatility. Some manufacturers have already canceled huge contracts, and who's to say whether they can trust the future and come back to the United States? 7. Are we all comfortable with one person having this kind of power? Does Congress have any interest in wresting its constitutional power of the purse back from the executive? I'm really asking. Some random X account with Bloomberg in its name moved trillions of dollars of market wealth earlier this week just by posting an inaccurate tweet that Trump was going to back off the tariffs. Then when Trump actually did post a tweet backing off the tariffs, the market absolutely exploded. How comfortable are you with any one person with an iPhone being able to impact the economy this way? 8. It seems very obvious that some people knew this announcement was coming and profited from it bigly. Market sleuths have documented absolutely massive, unusual market buys just minutes before the announcement was made. People placing risky and totally irrational bets on a quick turnaround of the market. That only makes sense if they knew the President was about to make a market shifting announcement. To me, this should be front page news and launch a serious fraud investigation. Thankfully, some members of Congress agree and are calling this out. 9. What did we learn? I'll go first. The bond market did not behave as a lot of people thought it would, which seems somewhat alarming. It appears countries like Japan and China have a lot more influence over us and our policies and our financial viability than we are ready to admit. Also, many, many smart people will apparently defend the President no matter how silly it makes them look. The S&P 500 and Dow Jones and all other real markets we attach value to can look a lot like volatile crypto stocks under the right circumstances. Oh, also applying massive across the board reciprocal tariffs on nearly every nation on earth while also hammering one of our largest trading partners with tariffs in excess of 100% is a very good way to immediately crash the economy. So if you ever want to do something like that, you now have a good playbook to follow. 10. Politicians can be dishonest and predictable and vapid in ways that we know about but are still infuriating. For example, there's this freshman congressman from Pennsylvania whose race I followed because it was in my home state, competitive and of course very expensive. He spent his campaign demanding that members of Congress stop trading stock and hammered his opponent for not co sponsoring a bill to ban stock trading in Congress. It was a very convincing populist kind of shtick, but a lot of people took it seriously, including me. Now that he's in Congress, he's not only not co sponsoring any bills to ban stock trading, he's become one of the most prolific stock traders in Congress. This is a certain genre of politicking that is so insulting to our intelligence that it takes all my willpower to stop my blood from boiling. This is the same kind of hypocrisy that can lead a politician to shamelessly spend all week touting the line that tariffs are good, that they will make us rich, that they will restore American manufacturing, that they'll create jobs, and then say after the President pauses tariffs, that this is great, that we have reformed global trade, that we're winning. This is all part of the plan. It's that same genre of let's see how gullible all of you really are politics. And it's one of those things that causes me to just lose my cool. 11 brief interlude just to take a breath, noting that's 10 points of basically nothing but harsh criticism for the administration. All well deserved, but maybe it's getting a little repetitive and a little boring. So let me try to steel man Trump's decision making without debasing myself by detaching from reality and pretending this is all part of some kind of master plan from the start. And the Trump God, what do you want? All right, here it goes. Number 12. Putting aside for a moment the path he took to get there, Trump is now pursuing the tariff route that a lot of mainstream pro tariff people wanted him to pursue in the first place. For instance, Orrin Cass cheered this specific outcome. An across the board 10% tariff on all imports, some tough love to Canada and Mexico. In an all out confrontation with China, Cass put it like this quote Phasing in the reciprocal tariffs strengthens them considerably, retaining the benefits of negotiating under credible threat and making the threat more sustainable and thus credible, while reducing costly disruptions before firms can adapt. End quote. China is poorly positioned to weather this storm and in the US the biggest economic issue, inflation, seems to be improving. And of course you could argue that Trump would never have gotten the world's attention and China's unless he had taken an untraditional route to open negotiations. 13 in other words, with the more outlandish tariffs paused or hopefully off the table, we'll now get a chance to see a more evidence based tariff policy. Cass and others have been advocating for Congress to formalize an across the board 10% tariff, and Rep. Jared Golden, Democrat from Maine, actually proposed a bill to that effect in January. So I'm interested to see what the impact of that more purposeful strategy will be. What happens when we actually confront China? How much revenue does a 10% across the board tariff actually raise and does it meaningfully help with our government's budget issues? What does it do for American manufacturing and job markets? We've been completely locked into Trump's instincts and whims for the past week, but now we can test the mainstream pro tariff economic plan. 14 Rep. Golden isn't the only Democrat who supports broad tariffs, and it wasn't so long ago that tariffs were an almost exclusively left wing proposal. Michigan's Democratic governor and 2028 presidential hopeful Gretchen Whitmer was welcomed to the White House in an oddly positive fashion yesterday, with Trump heaping praise upon her. Rather than hammer Trump publicly over the tariffs, Whitmer has emphasized their common ground and insisted there's a way to enact tariffs that is helpful for Americans. That's interesting. Trump's approval on the economy seems to be creating for the first time ever outside of the pandemic, and at least the faction of the opposition party appears hesitant to break with him on the issue that is driving that unpopularity politically. To me, not voicing a unified opposition to the president nearly driving the economy off a cliff seems pretty idiotic, but ideologically it at least has some intellectual honesty. They're not pretending they hate the policies they've been supportive of simply because Trump is now backing them. 15 A remarkable story about Gary Cohn and Trump was making the rounds yesterday. Cohn is Trump's former chief economic adviser and he wrote in his book that he used to spend a great deal of time trying to convince Trump that Americans didn't want to work in factories anymore. In Cohn's telling, he'd regularly bring Trump economic data to make his point, explaining why an average worker would prefer to be at their desk in an air conditioned office rather than working in front of a 2000 degree blast furnace. But Trump was unconvinced. He seems earnestly attached to an outdated vision of the American worker, which very well might be the thing that is driving all the tumult we've experienced over the last few weeks. 16 I'll conclude by saying what I've said from the get go. While I've been very critical of the administration over the last week, I still don't think we can reasonably pass judgment on the efficacy of Donald Trump's tariff policy. However it ends up for some time now. Maybe economists or tariff experts can, but I definitely do not feel equipped to the uncomfortable truth for most journalists, pundits and politicians is that this is a project whose long term results in six months or six years matter a lot more than the market's reaction over the course of six days. I'm skeptical. I think this was a ham handed and unnecessarily chaotic rollout, and I ultimately believe Trump's tariff policy is potentially economically ruinous. But it would be dishonest of me to pretend this story and its ending is already written.