Now THIS is a good discussion, so I will play. If there is a better way...why hasn't any president done ANYTHING about it...except Trump? Yes..it is painful at this time. (IF you have to sell) But if/when he gets reciprocal tariffs...or other Countries drop theirs, and the auto plants, pharmaceutical companies, and chip manufacturers come back to OUR Country...what will the stock market do then? Personally...this is WELL worth the SMALL risk.
Previous politicians haven’t done anything about it because they were paid not to.
I respect Trump for actually trying to take a hard line, but I do think it’s poorly thought out.
Look at the problem, we as a country buy $2 trillion a year in exports on credit.
We’ve sold off our manufacturing, including in strategic areas (medicine, weapons). This has been going on for about 30 years. To make matters worse, we sold our manufacturing to our biggest global rival that for sure is preparing for hostilities with us. Think about any large scale conflict, first thing you do is take out your enemy’s manufacturing and supply chain. We sold ours off to our biggest competitor.
So, you have to do something. And Trump was somewhat given a crap hand to play.
But if the idea is to completely restructure international trade, with us as a manufacturer for domestic market and as a net exporter (which I support and which was actually what made America great) then as an initial matter I would have been sure to take advantage of our paper wealth. We just wiped out $10 trillion from our stock markets. Why not at least initially approach the holders of that wealth and say: here’s what’s coming unless you invest x percent of that into domestic manufacturing, retraining, infrastructure, whatever.
I don’t get the immediacy announcing these tariffs given that we’re years away from being able to restore manufacturing. Maybe work out some of those details before you announce an effective embargo on importing from China (which by the way is why he had to immediately back off and exempt iPhones, computers, chips).
Then if you’re really trying to organize the world against China, does it make sense to spend the prior 2 months running around and telling everyone that they’re a bunch of pussies and their leaders should be jailed. It plays good for this board but I don’t see how it improves your bargaining position.
So again, I think he thought that all this was just going to go his way because he’s Trump. Just like the Ukraine ceasefire and Israel ceasefire. These people aren’t going to do Trump any favors. Why would they?
So again it boils down to who’s got the leverage. They obviously think they have more than I do. But I think it’s obvious that cratering stock markets and large scale selling of treasuries for gold or a crashing dollar do not improve our leverage.
Bessent himself said they want a strong dollar through these negotiations.