After so much talk about the tariffs being “priced in,” it turns out the markets had radically underestimated Trump’s commitment to the bit. And while I was astonished at the stupidity of the “methodology” the White House used to calculate the tariffs announced last week, I was less surprised than many by their sheer size and scope.
As I tweeted a month earlier on February 2:
This is not an endorsement, but I think the "Trump just likes tariffs"-take is missing the forest for the trees.
I think there's a p(=30%) chance that we are instead witnessing the first (albeit somewhat clumsy) phase of a deliberate strategy for controlled de-dollarization.
People will dismiss this as 5D-chessing Trump's economic ignorance, but I've been in or around this world (libertarian-populist fusionism) for over a decade, know many of the relevant thinkers and theories, and have a reasonable track record at interpreting the context clues.
Naturally, many people read this and immediately concluded that I endorsed the tariffs and thought Trump was playing 5D chess. Sigh… As I made clear then and many times since, this was my attempt to issue a warning — a kind of public service announcement — that Liberation Day could have much farther-reaching implications than somewhat more expensive imports.
