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2025.04.14 'Bearers of good news shall be stoned'. Funny money, barron investors & MAGA tariffs

unaltnimeni
Apr 14th, 2025 (edited)
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  1. 2025.04.14 'Bearers of good news shall be stoned'. Funny money, barron investors & MAGA tariffs
  2.  
  3. [N.B. 2025.05.12 The'Preamble' to this paste, written on 04.04, 04.08, now on PasteBin here
  4. https://pastebin.com/zmVzf2rH]
  5.  
  6. Outis comment at
  7. Donald Trump's Looney Tunes Trade Policy
  8. Ron Unz, 2025.04.14
  9. https://www.unz.com/runz/donald-trumps-looney-tunes-trade-policy/#comment-7082047
  10.  
  11. Published in two parts on Parler
  12. https://app.parler.com/post/01jrskce7ncar7ff6r5ch8q3bm
  13. https://app.parler.com/post/01jrskkc1wv2324552bscme0t2
  14.  
  15. At the bottom, part 3, a Parler original, and a 'final thought', PasteBin original.
  16.  
  17. *
  18.  
  19. Preceding it, a 5-part argument for Trump tariffs
  20. https://x.com/altnimeni/status/1907850895074930838
  21. continued here, criticizing market and pundits' response
  22. https://x.com/altnimeni/status/1907850895074930838
  23. Summarized on Parler
  24. https://app.parler.com/post/01jqxscbt8b1mj6nhp442r9z40
  25.  
  26.  
  27. ***
  28.  
  29. Nothing an intellectual likes best than to smirk. I should know, because I was one. But what makes one intellectual evolve, is to learn when he should refrain from smirking. This is one of those times. Trump is doing what's in principle right, although not by the right expedient means. To not see this difference is to throw the baby with the bathwater. One can do that when one has no interest in the well-being of the baby. Intellectuals are arrogant bystanders, a.k.a. kibitzs, a.k.a. of the kind who have 'no skin in the game' worth mentioning (Taleb). The proverb says that 'the duty of the kibitz is to shut up and to have no stinking feet'. So, there may be some truth to it...
  30.  
  31. Not in the literal sense of 'shuting up', of course, but in the sense of perceiving that a veneer of piecemeal knowledge about this and that is no substitute for understanding. And the understanding here, since the aftermath of the financial crisis 2008 ff, is that markets have decoupled from the economy. In other words, markets are skinnerian adaptations to monetary policy, i.e. 'funny money', QE and all the acronyms, having forgone their function as correctives of bad policy. Casino markets, financialization, speculation replacing valuations - these are all notions capturing the same underlying phenomenon. See the work of Robert J. Shiller. To stare at the ticker tape hoping to understand something about the world is just as futile as divination, as even greenhorn traders know.
  32.  
  33. These are the 'markets' in action last week. Trump, Bessent, Lutnick, Navarro were expecting the markets to reward their policy, as it should have been by right. It should have been a field day for America (the notion of 'tariffs are taxes' is nonsense, and I addressed in different comments, https://www.unz.com/runz/president-donald-trump-and-chairman-mao/#comment-7069894 and https://www.unz.com/rpaul/liberation-or-obliteration/#comment-7072178). Contrary to that, the 'easy money', 'always up', inflationary markets freaked out like an addict put in therapy. Literally, as no retranching from risk (stocks) to safety (dollar, bonds) occurred - as it should have been normal. Instead, everything was sold (see my Xpost with charts, https://x.com/altnimeni/status/1910593672053432798).
  34.  
  35. We still have to understand in full the significance of this new phenomenon. My guess is that the 'easy money' is leaving US shores for the greener pastures of EU, where there is no end in sight to QEs: to the contrary, as Germany will remove it's cap on debt, and the EU announced a trillion in new stimulus. As a matter of fact, these capital flows into EU were already noted in march, mostly by 'dumb' ETF flows (Bloomberg->ZeroHedge->ANotepad https://anotepad.com/notes/6fgaqrf6). There you have it, the crowd of speculators moving where the going gets easy. Good riddance, I'd say...
  36.  
  37. Pushing out these bad, flammable, easy, funny money, call them as you wish, I think it is a very good thing. Markets would recuperate their valuation function, the dollar would regain real strenght (not as a carry trade vehicle) , inflation (always a monetary phenomenon) will reduce, a deflationary regimen will ensue (good for prices, for people, for savers, bad for debtors). What we should wish for is for the FED to stay out and for Trump to not call on them to intervene (as he always does, 'lower the rates'!). The cleansing of monetary excesses has begun.
  38.  
  39. This is a time for the intellectual to be contrarian, to ditch the mainstream sources, prejudices, elitist biases, the vociferation of the ackmans (barrons of easy money). In effect, this means to understand what Trumps aims to accomplish. So, stay the tariff course! :)
  40.  
  41. ***
  42.  
  43. [part 3, Parler original]
  44. https://app.parler.com/post/01jrspz945npw4df1tgf2w7mnr
  45.  
  46. The mistake of Trump, Bessent, Lutnick and Navarro (his two faithful lieutenants in the 'Operation Tariffs'), in spite of the fact that they are seasoned investors (or perhaps _precisely_ because of that, _old school_value investors, Buffett style) was to not understand the fundamentally distorted nature of the contemporary markets, which have long ceased being instruments of valuation (Buffett style) and watchdogs of policy (classic liberalism style). They missed the fact that markets had become inverted casinos, in which the customer (the speculator) always wins! This is what the markets/economy decoupling thesis of Robert Shiller essentially says (see his Nobel Prize lecture 2013 on 'Speculative Asset Prices', https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2013/shiller/lecture/).
  47.  
  48. Now, on Liberation Day, they were the fabled bearers of good news: but not all evangelists (εὐαγγελιστής, euangelistes, "bringer of good news") are met with joy.... The sick markets stoned them instead. So, the tariff engineers had to back off...
  49.  
  50. It's much like Elon Musk, doing a good thing with DOGE, and then seeing in shock his Teslas vandalized en masse. Like in Harrison Bergeron, America had its handicaps removed but the ackmans and the iphoners did not rejoice ('the ackmans', as Bill Ackman was both the great doom sayer about tariffs and the greeter of their evisceration; 'the iphoners', as Apple benefitted most from the evisceration).
  51.  
  52. So, if Trump policies will fail to succeed and the final darkness clouds America, then we know who to blame. A comedian understands that (Theo Von, Breitbart; https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2025/04/13/comedian-theo-von-backs-trumps-tariff-plan-if-we-dont-try-this-i-think-its-a-wrap/), but not the coryphaei, barrons and aristocrats of funny money markets. Because the first cares - they don't.
  53.  
  54. [Cover pic, Grok rendition of Harrison Bergeron, handicaps removed
  55. https://app.parler.com/post/01jrsq5qydgrx29jp1e2h9y9c5,
  56. https://ibb.co/6RdkqLCH]
  57.  
  58. N.B. Integral comment so far at the Conservative Treehouse
  59. https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2025/04/13/president-trump-exempts-most-chinese-consumer-electronics-tech-products-and-components-from-reciprocal-tariffs/#comment-11721063 (pending approval)
  60.  
  61. ***
  62.  
  63. [Part 4, Pastebin original]
  64. https://app.parler.com/post/01jrswn5hpna4q1nvfyzmk2bkx
  65.  
  66. Final thought on the 'tariff war' thread of today.
  67. Trump/Bessent/Lutnick/Navarro have learned the hard way the lesson that they should not expect cheers from the 'funny money markets' and that they are, in fact, ennemies to be contended with. They, and us, the interested observers, have to figure out how.
  68. The often used syntagm 'tariff wars' herein finds it's deep and disquieting meaning...
  69. Entire thread and possible updates, on PasteBin https://pastebin.com/edit/YQcvyS5C
  70.  
  71. [Part 5, PasteBin exclusive]
  72.  
  73. The second lesson is that the ackmans and the iphoners work hand in hand with the CCP: _their interests side with China_, not the USA.
  74. The third lesson being that a. general intellectuals such as Unz, b. libertarians 'by the book' such as Rockwell and the Pauls are on the same side as the globalists and the democrats. At least this should give them pause for thought. But, it doesn't. They relish the fact that they can thrash Trump. Not cool.
  75. That pretty much rounds it up.
  76.  
  77. _______________________________________________________________________________________________
  78.  
  79. N.B.
  80. At the time of the pastebin writing, this was an unpublished comment to the article. I have uploaded the comment twice, and got no notification of 'waiting for approval', 'moderation', etc. From that and the aspect of the URLs, the comment was probably sent directly in the spam can. I use free Proton VPN and Wordpress often spams their IPs:
  81. https://www.unz.com/runz/donald-trumps-looney-tunes-trade-policy/#comment-7082047
  82. https://www.unz.com/runz/donald-trumps-looney-tunes-trade-policy/#comment-7082067
  83. Publisher notified by email, should he care to retrieve it and publish it.
  84. Publisher uploaded the comment, to be found here
  85. https://www.unz.com/runz/donald-trumps-looney-tunes-trade-policy/#comment-7082047
  86.  
  87.  
  88.  
  89.  
Tags: trump MAGA tariffs Robert A. Shiller
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