As someone who was highly critical of Biden and was known to have had the balls to predict a Trump win in 2016 on the JPM rates floor, let me actually give some predictions here:
When things get ugly in politics, attitudes harden. I expect that in the short-to-medium term, Trump's supporters are going to be all-in on the tariff strategy. They will say it's working as intended. Countries are coming to negotiate. Money will be pouring in from the tariffs. We'll be rich any day now.
For those observing the right, it will be a strange journey as the behavior will be oddly similar to the Harris campaign when the wheels were falling off down the stretch, or how the DEI folks doing untold damage to race relations were screaming "I have a plan!" like Dutch in Red Dead Redemption 2 all the way to an electoral wipeout.
Why is this? Because of the nature of political tribalism.
But what is going to actually happen? If you're a CEO, if you work in supply chain management, if you are involved in any industry that sources anything from anywhere outside the United States at any part of your value chain (so, hint, do you ever touch raw materials or processed goods anywhere like 95%+ of industries? If so, I mean you), you are about to go into crisis mode.
Capital planning is a multi-year process. Opening new plants, relocating, hiring and training staff, setting up new legal entities, negotiating new arrangements, hell just fukking renting space all take time. None of this is happening in the next month or two. A lot of that takes years. With an s. Multiple.
In the meantime, everything costs way more and productivity slows down. Companies hoard cash during times of uncertainty and bunker down. They expect sales to crash and demand to dry up. The supply chain becomes brittle. Essentially, they go into survival mode. That is going to lead to job losses and bankruptcies, and do you know who that hits the hardest?
That's right. The exact people Trump is claiming to help here. Those who are making posts like the one I quoted below. Those who most trusted him to save them, and instead he is consigning to the fires of economic devastation while cackling madly at his genius. Those left behind in America are about to be incinerated on the pyre of hubris and economic ignorance by the one they thought was their savior (something something false idols).
Starting a trade war of the exact kind that drove the Great Depression with the end goal of reshoring jobs that would force the average American man to stitch together shoes in a sweatshop for $5 per day (not an exaggeration - go look at wages in Vietnam if you don't believe me), while also putting huge tariffs on goods that literally cannot be produced at scale in America (like coffee - hope you didn't enjoy that, or vanilla) is not going to save anyone.
It's going to do exactly what it did in the 1930s: produce unemployment, homelessness, and starvation. Ideally this time we avoid a world war (I don't predict that will happen) if we continue down this path. But the great irony is that those that Trump is claiming to help are actually going to suffer the most on the path he has charted.
The insanity of the economic ideas behind these policies (that somehow Vietnam is being poor just to fukk with us, which is why we can't run a trade surplus with them, because they are literally too poor to buy anything from a country with a labor cost of $15 per hour when their daily wage is 1/3rd of that) is for another post, but the sad truth is this: We are about to witness shocking levels of economic deprivation in rural America and the rust belt cities that elected Trump to save them. Instead, he will purge them.
NEVER
, but let's be realistic), run on the economy, and drop the weird fakkitry
www.businessinsider.com
