CSotD: Up Against the Wall Street
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I suppose the best place to begin is with the USMCA which replaced NAFTA which replaced the FTA, NAFTA having brought Mexico under the trade umbrella that began with the US and Canada.
It wasn’t completely clear at the time why President Donald Trump felt compelled to redraw NAFTA, but he saw things in the old deal that needed rearrangement and, as Whamond notes, his administration declared the new agreement to be a great improvement.
The Democrats generally agreed it was better, though the differences seemed somewhat minor.
However, in four years it went from being what that President Trump called “the best and most important trade deal ever made by the USA” to something the current President Trump didn’t like at all, the result being a sort of whiplash that, as Morland says, killed the bull market Biden had begun to build in his final months.
Not that we didn’t have a significant national debt, but contrary to the implication in Benson’s cartoon, it was a bipartisan achievement. While the two largest contributors were Democrats, both Wilson and FDR had world wars to pay for, while FDR was also crawling out from under the Depression. Similarly, George W Bush, who comes in at #4 by percentage of debt, was also spending money on war.
Reagan, at #3, raised debt primarily through supply side tax cuts, a different sort of war and perhaps a warning about the current move in that direction.
Cole suggests Trump might be on firmer ground with his muted prophecy of a slight period of pain before the economy booms if he had not established a reputation for stretching the truth in ways that beggared the imagination before he made economic predictions about moves that threaten to make beggars of the entire middle class.
Duginski suggests that what he calls the “Trump Slump” will be a full-blown recession and his graphic depiction centers it in middle America, which may well be the case, since the experience of ruinous tariffs is that they fall hard upon farmers and blue-collar workers.
Not that you’d know that from listening to the White House: Yesterday, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt declared herself insulted when an AP reporter insisted that tariffs are paid by importers, not exporters, which is a fact but not one that fits within the administration’s definition of acceptable reality.
Wall Street, however, does not appear to have received the memo redefining tariffs and explaining their benefits, and has responded by falling off a cliff and into the maw of a bear market.
It should be noted, parenthetically, that unless you are within a very few years of retirement, you shouldn’t be obsessing over your 401k, which ought to recover before you need it, if the past is any indication of the distant future.
However, if you need the money soon, you might do well to move your investments into some rock solid stocks. At this stage, you’ve likely enjoyed all the growth you were likely to experience anyway, and, as an example, my IRA, which is in retirement mode, has only fallen about one percent in the past three weeks.
But if you do plan to slide your 401k into preservation mode, you’d better do it before Dear Leader stops thrashing around and makes a definitive move to bring back the ruinous tariffs of the Gilded Age, assuming you’re not in a position to become part of the new Robber Baron Elite.
BTW, I keep seeing ads for financial firms that would like to help me if I have a million dollars in my retirement fund. It makes me wonder if their advice involves ownership of a toll bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan. Or, for that matter, of a seaside resort in a Middle Eastern war zone.
And speaking of investments on that level, Chris Riddell comments on Europe’s realization that one of the world’s major powers is at least dropping out if not switching sides and possibly both.
Since the Second World War, Europe has enjoyed the umbrella of American protection, though if you look at defense spending as a factor of GDP, they haven’t been nearly as behind as American hawks would paint them.
Still, they’re going to have to step things up a bit, though they may benefit from Unca Donald’s cunning plan to redefine GDP in order to make the numbers look better. Not sure how that would play out in an actual shooting war, but as long as it wins elections and keeps everyone happy, wotthehell.
As has been observed before, there are some islands on the coast of New Zealand where the people who have all the money can retreat once the munitions begin flying around.
Best of all, if you take Nevil Shute’s word for it, you’ll have months before the weather changes there.
But not to worry: NATO will still be around, even if the Americans pull out.
Juxtaposition of the Day
The immediate question is how much joy and national improvement can America stand between now and the midterms?
Our protection is in the law and the Constitution upon which our nation was founded, and so the real question is how much revocation of wokeness can the old document fend off before it collapses entirely?
Brodner suggests a dystopia in which our Supreme Ruler partners with Donald Trump to actually destroy the thing on the basis of its recognition of human rights and other suspicious concepts. We’re starting out slow by arresting and revoking the citizenship of people who speak out against our policies, defining their dissent as terrorism, and we’ll get around to you before you have to vote in 2026.
Blitt, by contrast, envisions things as more of a silent fade on the part of people who, as Neimoller might have put it, respond to the news by saying “I am not a Columbia graduate student, so I’m going to say nothing” until the Constitution has faded away like Marty McFly’s family photo.
I suppose it will depend on whether, like Odysseus’s crew, we are besotted on lotuses, or wake up and pay attention to the part about someone having hot-wired our brains.
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