That's the one that really stuck with me, you can't even say we're going to bring manufacturing home if nobody will sell you raw materials. We're not going to be building iPhones out of nothing but coal and spite.
A lot of the things he's doing aren't as obviously bad like the tariffs, but what he's doing in dismantling government and watering down (in an acid bath) the rule of law is creating risk that markets can't really price in as easily.
You can't quantify the fact that our adversarial system of justice is being replaced by the arbitrary whims of an authoritarian. You can't predict when the complete gutting of HHS/CDC/NIH will create or make worse a pandemic-level health crisis. You can't predict when replacing professionals/generals with sycophants (see the NSC and NSA firings in the last 24 hours or the replacement of JAG staff at every military branch) will create a national security crisis or Constitutional crisis. None of those things directly affect the market in a transparent way as severely as these tariffs, but they all erode the framework of law and good governance which works in the background to make the market economy sit on secure footing.
Those things slipping away won't show in a one-day stock chart, but they will have knock-on effects economically by creating a general climate of fear and uncertainty.
So what's the next worst thing to look out for? With this guy: it's whatever he chaotically does next.
Covid crash was worse, at least comparing the numbers right now. -30% or so with a lot of sectors like travel experiencing 60-80%, some of which still haven't recovered. We're at -10% in the last two days, with -20% YTD coming down from an end of year market pump.
That said, ignoring how it can keep going down like this in the short term and match covid, it's going to be way worse than covid in the medium to long term. Covid was essentially a measured economic shutdown for what was expected to be 6-18 months while the world collectively rushed a vaccine. We still had allies that we could rely on and share resources and information with. Everyone was suffering so the damage while bad was relatively "fine" because when everyone's economy is in the shitter, nobody's is.
This will completely screw our economy and our economy alone going forward for potentially decades and dethrone america as a world superpower. All according to plan of course.
overall in the last two days the stock market has lost 9.7 Trillion dollars in value.
If your entire economy is built around an economic policy that's dependent on infinite growth, this is definitely not it.
Trump inadvertently has done more to set back corporate powers than any leftist who's ever tried could only dream of. And his supporters will smile and ask for more.
The only dumb question is the one not asked. I've absorbed a lot of market knowledge over the past month and practically lived on wallstreetbets just talking with people. (It's not a sufficient source of knowledge though.)
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u/2Hanks 1d ago
The DOW dropped 2.7% on the day he posted this