merc

People seem to be missing the one positive piece of news here: She's literate!

The only person who would make this mistake is someone who read "AI" in an ambiguous font. I know it's a low bar, but this means that the secretary of education is able to read.

I don’t think him to be clever at all. He has handlers. They tell him what to do.

Sure, but they don't all speak with one voice. Some of them are trying to pull one direction, others pull in another direction. Sometimes he listens to one advisor, sometimes he listens to another. It probably depends on how good they are at manipulating him.

They just don’t want to tank things too early

Again, you seem to think there's a plan here. It's much more likely that there's just chaos. One faction of advisors was listened to, and Trump liked them because he always liked tariffs. And a lot of the most effective advisors (i.e. the best at kissing ass) are the most deeply stupid. His main tariff adivsor, for example, was caught quoting an "expert" in his book that was just his own name with the letters re-arranged.

he is the mouthpiece for the cabal of evil idiots

And I don't think there's a cabal. There are people trying to influence him, but they don't agree with each-other, and many of them don't know what they're doing. They're near him because they're good ass-kissers, not because they're really clever.

And now the US is in a no-win situation.

IMO the most important thing for a business is stability.

Some businesses can do incredibly well in a high-tariff environment. Some businesses require a low-tariff environment. Some businesses need a light touch with regulations. Some businesses need a lot of government regulation to make long-term investments pay off. Businesses can even thrive in times of war, in times of government censorship, in times of prohibition. Businesses can even find a way to adapt under a dictator who rewards loyalty and punishes traitors, as long as they know what the rules are.

What they can't handle is uncertainty. If you don't know what's going to happen next year, or next month or even next week, you can't make any plans. This absolute chaos is making doing business next to impossible.

The only constant under Trump is more chaos, so even when he backs down from a bad decision, it's yet another change that people have to cope with.

Economic uncertainty is now literally off the charts, twice as bad as it was under COVID.

I wonder if even that is giving him too much credit. IMO it's more likely that people freaked out, so he changed his mind, then different people freaked out, so he changed it again.

He may well have informed some people in advance about what he was about to do, and they made a lot of money as a result. But, I don't actually believe that he's clever enough to have done this intentionally as a plan.

What's wild is that they can't even plan for this. If they'd had 5 years of lead time maybe they could have transitioned to an American-made alternative. Maybe your company could have opened an American manufacturing plant or something.

The way things are now, the tariff is likely to change between the time they place the order with you and the time the item arrives. If they could somehow delay delivery for another week, maybe they could avoid being charged the tariff. Or, maybe the tariff will double.

Even if tariffs were a good idea (and for the most part, they're not), the chaotic vibes-based way they're being implemented is so incredibly destructive.

I completely agree. It's like one of those supposedly uplifting news items about a kid selling their rare stamp collection to pay for their bus driver's surgery. Sure, it's nice the kid did that, but what kind of dystopia are we in where someone with a steady job can't get the health care they need.

There's a reason I didn't say "hairs". I believe he has one and it gets wrapped around and around and around and around and around...

Bold of you to think there's going to be a "back up".

Can you imagine being a company, or even just a small business owner trying to make long-term plans in this environment?

Say you run a pest-control business in Texas. Things are going well, so you're thinking about hiring your neighbour's fat son to do some work during the summer. Then the tariff chaos starts. Do the chemicals you need for your business get more expensive? You buy them from DuPont, a good American company, but where does DuPont get the raw materials? The tariffs change week to week, sometimes day to day, so it's really hard to know what your costs are going to be, and what you'll have to charge. One of your other neighbours, Americans, but originally from Laos, have been good customers over the years, but what if ICE deports them? Your wife's massage therapist has been snatched twice by ICE now because he "looks Mexican" even though everybody knows he's Native American.

And there's your best buddy who works in propane. You'd think that that would be safe from tariffs, but it turns out a lot of the accessories he sells are manufactured in China. If he loses his job, his wife's salary as a teacher isn't going to be enough to keep them afloat.

Yeah, that's the BBC's headline. I didn't like it either, I guess it seems like "soaring" if you're looking at the 1 day view. If you're looking at the 1 week view it looks like "recovering". If you're looking at the 3 month view it's more "recovered slightly".

Most real online brokers let you buy and sell currency.