Thoughts On The Current Market Chaos

Markets and businesspeople hate uncertainty, and this is uncertainty cubed.

16 thoughts on “Thoughts On The Current Market Chaos”

  1. The only certainty we had before was the hollowing out of our middle-class due to jobs & manufacturing fleeing overseas. As unsustainable as our debt-bomb. I don’t really feel for Wall St. Consider it a buying opportunity.

    1. My greatest fear is that our adversaries decide they can wait out a one term president. And so our tariffs only punish without the requisite negotiation phase. Probably our greatest constitutional flaw right now is the length of a presidential term. 4 years is clearly not enough time. 8 is barely enough. Maybe we should extend the presidential term to 6 years, max of two terms or 12 years.

      1. The time crunch is why Trump is moving with urgency. He has to squeeze two terms into one.

        There is also the Stray Voltage tactic at play, which adds to the confusion.

      2. OTOH 6 years is way too long to wait to replace a Bidenator.

        OK, so this is going to cause TDS heads to explode. But what about amending the 22nd Amendment to allow a president to serve 3 terms max. At 4 years per cycle that’s a total of 12 years tops.

          1. Or for the Democrats, every 4 years skip the primaries and pick someone at random at the end of July.

        1. There’s no need for an amendment–the 22nd seems to be carefully worded to allow and end run if the president is popular enough (run as VP with the understanding that the nominal president would resign). This was floated as a way to let The 0 have a third term. It would pretty much trigger a civil war under current circumstances

          1. That’s so bogus. Grow a pair and amend the damn thing. We can’t because we’re too corrupt and/or chickenshirt.

          2. The last sentence of the 12th amendment scuttles that idea:

            But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.

    2. Yeah, it’s hard to get excited about toasters being a couple bucks cheaper when the US toaster factory was closed and production moved out of the country. The people touting this sort of thing most loudly are almost always those who’ve never done a real day of work in their lives.

      1. Trump’s always been clear he wants industry to come back to the US. How feasible that is in a global economy of deeply poor people is, at least conceptually, another problem. But it’s worth noting that it’s not just a US thing; the EU’s internal version of the same issue is well known, if not talked about by the bien pensants.

  2. People should be a little freaked out but also remember the market goes through corrections every several years.

    Right now, everything is too divided based on people’s views of Trump and we won’t get any dispassionate analysis. Trump didn’t break the market, he broke the collective OODA loop.

    This is a good thread and he will be doing an interview today.

    https://www.hudson.org/events/chairman-council-economic-advisers-stephen-miran-trump-administrations-economic-agenda

    https://x.com/SteveMiran/status/1856745675943207362

  3. Globalism is a dead end. The Trump administration is clearly reconfiguring the US for a multi-polar world where the US is strong and self-sufficient in our continent. Tariffs are the economic part of that reconfiguration. Those who complain the most are aligned with the globalist multi-national corporations.

  4. American stock, bond and commodities markets ceased even pretending to be repositories of collective wisdom four decades ago when the earliest forms of program trading appeared and the volume of robot trades quickly swamped those made by actual human beings.

    These days, “the market” mainly reflects the “collective wisdom” of a few dozen “quants” who work for the big banks, brokerages, hedge funds and aggregators like Black Rock. They all went to either Harvard or MIT and they all live in the tonier precincts of Manhattan.

    Most of the time, they imagine “the market” to be under control – theirs. It’s only at times like this, when some Black Swan event – in this case, Trump’s second term – makes it plain that they are not entirely in charge that they lose their shit and their minds and run in circles, yelling and shouting.

    With luck, maybe at least a few will emulate their near-century-gone predecessors and make a final use of some of the more prominent features of the famed Manhattan skyline. One can only hope.

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