I was pleasantly surprised on Monday: Virtually no one whose job it is to weigh in on matters macro-market — not even Joe Kernen — ventured a full-throated defense of the Trump administration’s tariff “equation.” (Maybe Fox did, and Newsmax, but they don’t count.)

Kernen, a sycophant’s sycophant, told Peter Navarro that the methodology the USTR employed last week in the course of garnering for Trump some of the worst criticism he’s ever faced (including the backlash associated with leading an armed insurrection) “has been universally derided as nonserious” and detached from “the reality of the situation.”

Again, that’s from Joe Kernen whose name translates to “friend” when you select “MAGA” from the language dropdown in Google translate. When Kernen tells you, as a Trump administration envoy, that you’re engaged in something that’s unserious and untethered from reality, you’ve screwed up really, really badly.

In the same segment, Kernen proceeded to berate Navarro on everything from tariffs to taxes. Suffice to say Peter — who, lest we should forget, once maintained an alter ego called “Ron Vara” who Navarro quoted repeatedly, and who had his own e-mail address from which “Ron” circulated memos in D.C. policy circles — is once again emerging as a uniquely despised figure in an administration which prides itself on despicability.

In any case, the derision was universal to start the week. From CEOs to luminaries to strategists, everyone said more or less the same thing: We went from low odds of a US recession last week, to an assured recession this week, and all because of that USTR math exercise.

“We’re probably in a recession right now,” Larry Fink told the Economic Club of New York, citing “most CEOs I talk to.” When that comes from Larry, it’s not just idle musing. It’s not like Trump’s “a lot of people are saying.” If anybody’s talking to CEOs, it’s Larry Fink. He briefly described a conversation he had with someone in the airline industry. “I was told that canary is sick already,” he said.

Writing in a seven-page special dispatch Monday, Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid echoed JPMorgan’s Bruce Kasman in characterizing the “Liberation Day” tariffs as “the largest tax increase for the US consumer since 1968,” on the way to waring that “the arbitrary way they were calibrated… creates a significant credibility issue which is probably just as unsettling to global markets as the action itself.”

Yes, Jim. A thousand times “yes.” Over and over last week I attempted, with some success I think, to drive that point home: That formula — that “equation,” or that “calculation,” or whatever you want to call it — did more damage than anything else, because it validated the market’s absolute worst fears on pretty much every front.

Do note: US 10-year yields rose nearly 20bps on Monday, a session defined by extreme volatility in equities, and some of the shakiest risk sentiment in living memory. That’s fishy or, less provocative, it needs someone to offer a concise explanation.

Higher yields are consistent with equities aggressively paring losses over the course of a rollercoaster session, but something’s up with that chart, and I don’t mean just yields.

For now, I’ll merely offer the obvious joke. Over and over again since January, Scott Bessent — and sundry Trump administration apologists — argued the drama they’re stoking is purposeful, and is in part aimed at lowering long-term US borrowing costs. So much for that.

“Well, the 4D chess to lower 10-year yields didn’t work either,” Marko Kolanovic said Monday. “Turns out if you make it a banana republic, the appeal to own the debt declines.” 30-year yields were 24bps higher at one juncture. Monday was the worst day of 2025 for US bonds.

“Two months of efforts to document line-by-line reviews of the US trading relationships with their partners was essentially overridden by the most basic of formulas that may have borne little relationship to actual trade restrictions,” Deutsche’s Reid went on, lamenting further the USTR rollout.

Importantly, gross incompetence — or the appearance thereof — can overshadow both the merits of a given policy decision and, arguably, override the popular mandate upon which elected officials depended to justify their actions.

It may be a good idea, for example, to implement a dramatically more redistributive tax code in the interest of eradicating extreme inequality in America, and one could easily imagine a leftist demagogue riding such a message to the presidency were the political pendulum to swing back in the other direction. But would the merits of a more egalitarian society and a popular mandate justify any and all means by which to level the playing field, even those which are self-evidently nonsensical, dangerous and counterproductive? No. Of course not.

Reid was diplomatic on Monday. “The desire for change is not without merit,” he wrote. “But with the execution so far, there’s a strong possibility markets will continue to put pressure on the US administration to reverse course either through rapid and favorable negotiations with trading partners, delays to the tariffs or an abandonment of the policy altogether.”

And that really underscores why you can’t have someone like Peter (let alone someone like “Ron”) running the show: Pushing the most extreme version of your policies — which in this case found Navarro and Howard Lutnick over the weekend suggesting Americans might one day work in factories producing cheap apparel like what we import from Vietnam and/or putting screws into iPhones like those we import from China — may well end up undercutting the whole endeavor by making it impossible even for your staunchest supporters, people like CNBC’s Kernen, to defend you.

As Kolanovic put it in a separate social media post, “firing Peter Navarro might be the only way to Make America Wealthy Again.” He didn’t mention Vara, but it’s safe to assume he thinks Ron should go too.