Too late for everyone who spent massively on flying in stock ahead of the tariff deadline. Too late for those forced to sell financial assets in order to pay margin calls. Too late for those working on projects involving foreign manufacturers which have now been cancelled due to tariff uncertainty. Too late for those who lost sales while they figured out pricing. Too early for the people fundraising to build US manufacturing capabilities. What a mess.
Is there any reliable instrument to find out? This seems so obvious, given the only alternative option seems to be believing they are completely insane.
You could look at https://www.capitoltrades.com/ in a few days. Of course you'd probably expect the average senator/congressional representative to be smart enough not to go insider trading on their own monitored account...
Buy the NASDAQ at 1:17PM. Sell at 2PM. You’ve just made 10% without doing any work. If you’re doing any kind of leveraged play, you can get even higher returns.
my point is that's the exact same if its a random microcap, just massively magnified. The president can easily cause triple digit swings. Doing a broad market movement is inefficient from this point of view.
He owns his own social media stock (DJT), where he post this morning "THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT" to his followers. Attracting more to his social media company.
He has a meme coin in cryptoland, and now via tariff manipulation, he can guide select people to place big bets on the largest derivatives market.
Derivatives had huge moves based on these announcements. Out-of-the money SPX E-mini puts went up 10x after tariffs were announced. Near-the-money E-mini calls doubled after today's announcements. These are zero-risk insider strategies.
It’s worse than that. Everything leading up to this and this reversion right now is a perfect demonstration that the current US administration cannot be trusted and behaves in irrational ways. You cannot expect consistency and enduring policies. It’s all fickle and capricious. How are you supposed to do any planning with this?
This is all so obviously dumb and I’m frankly astounded by so many people (especially here on HN) playing devils advocate or, I don’t know, honestly believing that this all makes sense.
Even if you agree with the stated (also somewhat incoherent, by the way) goals why do you think this implementation can achieve any of that?
I believe the point is power, and from that lens everything makes perfect sense. Trump is exercising available levers of global influence -- for good or for bad -- in a way that hasn't occurred since Hitler initiated World War II.
Tariffs are appealing to him because they are incredibly forceful blunt instruments over which he alone has almost complete control. They give him immense, immediate influence over the entire world. What we're seeing is that the US President today, if the full capacities of that office are pushed as far as possible without violence, is arguably one of (if not the) most powerful human beings ever.
Beyond this, Trump has said that one of his greatest weapons is uncertainty. He wants to be feared. Having people genuinely afraid of you is the next step of power that he is already flirting with by posting videos of people being blown up in warfare on social media.
And what will he do when China and rest of the world tired of his untreated Narcissistic Personality Disorder will start selling US debt, like $trillions in bonds in say less than a week? I bet you finally someone broke the secret to him today, so he reverted the policy.
The White House can pressure red states to offer companies sweetheart deals so the President can take credit. If they refuse, he pulls his support for them come election time.
Yes they will, because when industry can't bet on being tariff free outside the US, they'll hedge their bets and have at least some manufacturing here. The damage is already done in that regard. The instability is the warning across the bow for companies that import.
> Too late for those forced to sell financial assets in order to pay margin calls.
That's the true aim behind all of this constant course shifting. The ultra rich, those who have large amounts of liquid assets or outright cash, can make bank at the moment... buy the dip. Even if the markets dip another 20%, they'll rebound soon enough.
>Too early for the people fundraising to build US manufacturing capabilities.
It's a good idea to hedge against future trade uncertainties.
After COVID some Danish and German companies began looking for non-Chinese alternatives for electronics manufacturing. The only area where China is the absolute better alternative is PCB manufacturing without mounting chips/components. The Danish and German companies get tens of thousands of these bare PCBs from China. The chips/components are from Taiwan, South Korea, the US, Italy, and Germany and can be cost effectively mounted in Denmark and Germany.
Not really sure why you left out the tens of thousands of people who were almost immediately laid off when companies and their suppliers idled factories?
In the automotive sector alone - GM, Ford, and Stellantis all flipped the master breaker to "off" on a number of plants and sent everyone packing.
That hire-back will not be instant. People are going to miss payments for rent/mortgage, car loans, utility bills, etc.
Let's not forget that many companies hit the brakes, hard, on exporting goods to the US - so there's going to be the shipping equivalent of those traffic "waves" because two hours ago someone on the highway panic-braked
In my defence I mentioned it was "Too late for those working on projects involving foreign manufacturers which have now been cancelled due to tariff uncertainty" which I think covers these auto workers?
Still I'm sure I unintentionally missed many examples of people who've been negatively affected by this saga. I didn't mean anything by that, it's just ignorance or lack of thought on my part.
Markets are celebrating. How long before they realize that the China tariffs will destroy the profits of companies like Walmart, Apple, Dollar Store, Harbor Freight, etc, and a 10% tax hike on consumers across the board on all other imports? We are still headed for a recession, and the destruction from the greatest deal maker who ever lived will be lasting.
Let's not forget everything else he's doing because there is nothing good in the plan.
Not many companies have the margins to shrug off 10%, and if there isn’t a cheap domestic alternative everyone in the market will be raising prices.
Take coffee, tea, or chocolate: Americans buy a ton of those, there’s almost no domestic production, and most of the market lives on tight margins. Trump’s tax hike means that the average consumer’s choices devolve to paying more or buying less.
If they raise prices by 10%, consumers will buy significantly less. There's a sweetspot somewhere for max profit, it's not 10% and probably not 0% either.
Coffee and tea are very cheap when you buy from a retailer and make it yourself, 10% is nothing anyway. Stuff like starbucks have crazy profit margings. Chocolate is a delicacy that shouldn't be consumed in large quantities anyway. That shit should have a 200% tax.
trump's base is seniors counting down to social security, the rich, malcontents, and feds (his staff in other words) have gov pension plan. none of those care about the 401k people.
There is also a bond market collapse for those people not invested in stocks precisely because they're close to retirement.
I think that was the real reasons that tariff effects were postponed, the increase in interests in the bond markets would have been too fatal too quickly.
The stock market is a barometer for future predictions.
Stocks going down meant we were on track for everyone to have reduced buying power, which would impact company's bottom lines, which would make them less valuable.
Trying to see this as class warfare between investors and average people is missing the point.
Furthermore: Stocks are up, but yields did not drop. If this holds, it's still not good for the average person. Expect mortgage and auto rates to go up, combined with that 25% tariff on autos that wasn't delayed.
