Remember that story from a couple of weeks ago about all the Big Money Boyz celebrating that mainly Trump and the boys were back and they could treat people like shit in the workplace again. They might have to re-think that a little bit in the not too distance future. Their business is still business. Here come the leopards:
It took less than a month for the second Trump administration to cool the enthusiasm of chief executives and dealmakers. Consumer sentiment is down and inflation expectations are rising, driven in part by worries about the impact of a threatened trade war. The deals market just ended its quietest January in a decade. A Justice Department that was expected to wave through acquisitions instead sued to block a big technology merger.
Corporate bigwigs are now using phrases like “fragility,” “volatility” and “wait and see” to describe their outlooks.
“Nobody knows what’s up,” Nick Pinchuk, chief executive of toolmaker Snap-on, said on a conference call Thursday. “It’s like being on Space Mountain at Disney World. You get on Space Mountain, you get in a car, and you’re in the dark and the cars go left and right, left and right and abrupt turns, you don’t know where you’re going, but you know, you’re pretty confident that you’re going to get to the right place at the bottom.”
The recent whipsaw on tariffs seemed to hit hardest on business leaders’ confidence. President Trump announced plans to stick 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico, only to delay them for a month a few days later. A number of executives, as well as top investment bankers and other industry advisers, have said that priorities have shifted in recent days to navigating tariffs and other policy issues.
They need to settle supply routes, discuss whether to raise their own prices and figure out what is even happening. That doesn’t leave much room for thinking about big bet-the-company deals.The reaction is evident in the deals market. Just under 900 deals were announced in the U.S. in January, according to data from LSEG. That compares with more than 1,200 transactions in the previous January and over 1,500 two years ago.
I’m sorry, did they think that because Trump is a pathological liar he wouldn’t do any of the things he said he was going to do? That the only thing that mattered was owning the libs?
He is a liar but after watching him for the last 8 years in politics if you didn’t know that he was a chaos agent and an imbecile who is incapable of making intelligent decisions then you weren’t paying attention. The economy did fine during his first term because he didn’t disturb the economic recovery and instead just took credit for it. He’s different now. He truly believes that he is omnipotent and that every thought that goes through his head becomes reality.
He badly botched his one big crisis which sent the economy into a tailspin from which his successor had to dig out. (It ruined him because of people like this who just wanted the show back.) Now Trump’s back and he can’t wait to fuck things up again.
Here are few more WSJ headlines from the past week. Are they having fun yet?
Last night he started talking about “reciprocal tariffs”:
President Donald Trump on Thursday rolled out his plan to increase U.S. tariffs to match the tax rates that other countries charge on imports, possibly triggering a broader economic confrontation with allies and rivals alike as he hopes to eliminate any trade imbalances.
“I’ve decided for purposes of fairness that I will charge a reciprocal tariff,” Trump said in the Oval Office at the proclamation signing. “It’s fair to all. No other country can complain.”
The politics of tariffs could easily backfire on Trump if his agenda pushes up inflation and grinds down growth, making this a high stakes wager for a president eager to declare his authority over the U.S. economy.
[…]
The United States does have low average tariffs, but Trump’s proclamation as written would seem designed to jack up taxes on imports, rather than pursue fairness as the United States also has regulatory restrictions that limit foreign products, said Scott Lincicome, a trade expert at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
“It will inevitably mean higher tariffs, and thus higher taxes for American consumers and manufacturers,” he said. Trump’s tariffs plan “reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how the global economy works.”
Trump’s proclamation identifies value-added taxes — which are similar to sales taxes and common in the European Union — as a trade barrier to be included in any reciprocal tariff calculations. Other nations’ tariff rates, subsidies to industries, regulations and possible undervaluing of currencies would be among the factors the Trump administration would use to assess tariffs.
So that should be fun. I’m sure they know what they’re doing. They’re all geniuses.
Trump tried to minimize the likelihood that his policies would trigger anything more than a brief bump in inflation. But when asked if he would ask agencies to analyze the possible impact on prices, the president declined.
“There’s nothing to study,” Trump said. “It’s going to go well.”
He said, “Prices could go up somewhat short term, but prices will also go down so Americans should prepare for some short-term pain.” Well, not so short term. He also says that the only way to fix this is for all the foreign companies to move their manufacturing to the US where they won’t have to pay tariffs. There will be a lot of jobs for Americans then. (Yes, he is even dumber than you thought.)
But sure, no problem. We love King Donald and we know that everything he does is for our own good. All Hail King Donald.