Political Memes

And it's going to be a lot worse this time, especially for the stock market. Even early in the pandemic, we had a decent understanding of the fatality rate of covid. Even in the worst case, if we never got a vaccine, and everyone got it, we would have been looking at losing 1-2% of the population. Absolutely horrific, but that's the kind of pandemic that humanity has gotten over many, many times before. We would grieve, bury the dead, and move on. But economically speaking, we would be back to normal within a few years. Even early on, we knew we weren't facing like, Black Death levels of mortality. This is why the stock market did pretty well during covid, especially once the stimulus started rolling out. Pandemics by their nature are temporary. In the long term, unless you're looking at a massive chunk of your population dropping dead, they don't do permanent damage to an economy.

But Trump? He's unraveling the entire post-WW2 economic and political order. And he doesn't have any rational or coherent vision he's trying to replace it with. He's not starting some 20 year campaign to return to mercantilism. He's not some Marxist revolutionary trying to implement international communism. He's not trying to rationally and gradually transition the US economy to autarky. He's just blindly lashing out like the senile old man he is. His brain is jelly, and he's just throwing random bombs at the foundations of the global economy.

If he was just trying to shift things to a new system, if he had some coherent vision he was aiming for, the economy could adapt. Businesses could adapt to the new normal, shift the priorities for their investments, and the world would move on. But the way he is doing things? What company wants to spend millions to move production back to the US? Sure, the tariffs of today may make that idea viable. But all it takes is the right bribery or flattery of Trump by a foreign leader today, and that tariff can disappear tomorrow. Companies can't afford the risk of spending the millions it takes to return to domestic manufacturing, as there is no guarantee these tariffs will remain in place. Businesses need certainty. And certainty is the last thing you have in a nation ruled by a mad king.