On Friday morning, in my daily column for Dealbreaker, I suggested that making sense of Donald Trump’s trade “strategy” is probably an exercise in futility at this point.
That’s because either i) he’s playing some kind of complex game of three-dimensional chess that the rest of us don’t understand, or (far) more likely, ii) his “strategy” doesn’t make any fucking sense.
BofAML seems to think the latter is the case:
LOL pic.twitter.com/dnK4vlrDff
— Heisenberg Report (@heisenbergrpt) June 22, 2018
This week has been defined by trade tensions both with China and with Europe and on the heels of Daimler’s guidance cut (and the associated plunge in European autos) just about the last thing anyone needed was for Trump to tweet something else about car tariffs on Friday. Alas…
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1010166772912320513
And so Trump decided to remind everyone that he’s still planning on ridding 5th Avenue of German cars, leading directly to a new leg lower for the beleaguered STOXX Europe 600 Automobiles & Parts Index.
But to truly appreciate the schizophrenic, nonsensical nature of this entire thing, don’t let it be lost on you that Friday’s OPEC decision to boost output was of course a concession to Donald Trump. And when that decision came down, we had just one question:
The question now is how long it will take for noted commodities strategist David Dennison to deliver his quick take on the deal.
Sure enough, just 15 minutes before the tweet shown above, Trump said this about OPEC:
Hope OPEC will increase output substantially. Need to keep prices down!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 22, 2018
Let that sink in. In the space of 15 minutes, Donald Trump tweeted in support of lower prices at the pump and higher prices for cars.
It’s time for this clip again:
trump summing up this month so far… pic.twitter.com/SBWf5Z7zMl
— Heisenberg Report (@heisenbergrpt) April 5, 2018
And yet oil spiked to over $68/barrel.
What the fuck is going on here. I thought a cartel was a cartel. Why haven’t past presidents made the same demands. This smells of international corruption. BTW, Trump can go fuck himself.
Because the regimes in SA and its allies are getting a lot of military aide from this admin and they want us to do their dirty work for them vis a vis Iran. It makes sense to give a little lip service and in return get billions back in military aide and a favorable geopolitical tac, which you can’t put a price tag on.
As was pointed out in this post, this won’t have a long-term effect on oil prices. It will however buy political good will which is what this move was about.
That’s what you get if you follow that troll.
Here’s a good (non-troll) tweet I saw recently:
“Twitter is haeven to those who tweet and hell who those who follow them.”
They don’t teach you that at Harvard.