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Notes -
Trump tariffs McDonald's:
BBC article for a more detailed overview.
Highlights or lowlights include:
I'm not an economist, but I don't think it's a good idea to throw out tariffs with such clear absence of rigor. The only saving grace is that Trump is fickle, so if enough people yell at him from his in-group, he might pivot in a week. If not, bloody hell.
On Trump
As @IGI-111 says below, and as I said before and after the election, Trump’s position on tariffs is his only true ideology. On everything else he is malleable. On tariffs he is a zealot.
That is not to say that he might never change course. As the actual tariffs show, his grasp of the math is limited or nonexistent. If a foreign leader flatters him, praises him, and manufactures some no-more-fictive numbers that show that America is not [anymore] “getting ripped off”, then there is a reasonable chance of capitulation.
But this is real ideology in play. The sad thing is that it is this that he truly believes in, and not immigration reform.
On the economic consequences
A major asset price correction is long overdue. These may trigger it, or something else will. In the long term I am more sanguine; the great economic disruption of the next decade will not be tariffs but AI, and if anything front-loading some mass unemployment for more mundane economic reasons might well spur some innovative and forward-thinking planning for the coming (far greater) employment crisis.
Bringing manufacturing back to Western countries is also critical in the age of AI because service exports will decline when professional services are fully automated and software can be developed for tiny fractions of the current cost, which will benefit those with large domestic manufacturing sectors that can be quickly automated and hurt countries reliant on white-collar service sectors.
I could imagine a feedback loop where anything that boosts wages boosts housing prices, as sellers and landlords try to capture that value. So a labor shortage, a minimum wage hike, that kind of thing. Then the labor shortage ends and wages slow down, but housing stays expensive.
What I don’t get is what actually triggers an asset price correction. How does the market stay, apparently, uncorrected, and why does it stop? Why can’t houses depreciate without an apocalyptic event?
A more cynical commenter than me might suggest it's because it takes an apocalyptic event for the federal government to stop propping up house prices.
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