Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Friday, May 9, 2025

The Shart of the Deal

 Trump announced a "deal" on tariff reductions with Great Britain. It is not a deal. It is the "concept of a deal." Trump rolled back tariffs on British steel (is there a lot of British steel?) and cars. Britain makes primarily luxury cars. Britain will drop some tariffs - benefitting British consumers who have been hurt by Brexit. America will leave most of our tariffs in place. This is - maddeningly - being reported as a tariff reduction by our persistently gullible press. Markets - those stupid, stupid markets - are reacting favorably to this news almost entirely because they desperately want for tariffs to go away.

We get ridiculously credulous headlines like "Trump willing to reduce tariffs on China" but you have to read it to find out he wants to reduce them from 145% to 80%. But 80% is really, really bad. What's more, would you trust that 80% rate? It could go back up or further down. Why import things when the tariff could be much lower or higher when the ship docks than when you ordered those goods?

Anyway, none of this makes any freaking sense. Markets are trying to force some structure and logic on this nonsense. It does not.

I suppose it doesn't matter, because crypto will still destroy us all when it crashes.

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