If the problem is that no one knows what US trade policy will be from one day to the next — forget from one month to the next — it wasn’t solved on Wednesday. The opposite, in fact.

Donald Trump’s decision to “pause” the draconian tariffs he announced a week ago only underscored the notion that this administration’s so mercurial you can’t even decide when it’s safe to step away from your monitors for a sandwich, let alone determine when and where to build a factory.

“It is tragic to see the United States following banana republic policy approaches and market patterns,” Larry Summers said, in the wake of Trump’s farcical about-face. “The Administration was crowing over the weekend about all the countries that wanted to talk. No postponement then,” Summers wrote, on social media. “Now they are rightly scared after collapsing markets.” Summers proceeded to decry Trump’s “reckless improvisation” and the “total dishonesty” about what’s behind the policies in the first place.

Needless to say, I agree wholeheartedly. As I wrote in “Trump Folds,” the administration might be able to reverse stock losses, but Trump “can’t put the genie back in the lamp in terms of the damage he’s done to America’s reputation over three months, nor can he so easily convince the bond market that US Treasurys are the same asset they were when he took office again in January.”

That latter point’s absolutely critical. The bond market, which is anyway enamored with its own sway and capacity to break policymakers and world leaders, surely took all the credit for Trump’s climb down. The White House was flirting with the unthinkable as of Wednesday morning: Scott Bessent had apparently lost control of the US long-end, and the dollar was lower. It was the Liz Truss trade, only in the US. The keeper of the world’s reserve currency was experiencing an EM-like “market pattern,” as Summers somewhat awkwardly described it.

By Wednesday afternoon, following a 10% rally for the S&P, a 12% gallop for the Nasdaq 100 and a 3,000-point Dow surge, what was a vicious bear steepener in the US curve had morphed into a dramatic bear flattener, as the short-end rapidly priced out panic Fed easing on the assumption it won’t be needed now because — and try not to laugh — Trump’s come to his senses. (The March FOMC minutes were released on Wednesday too, but they were an afterthought.)

Market pricing for 2025 Fed easing reflected ~80bps of cuts, versus ~105bps Tuesday. So, traders took out one whole 25bps cut. We’ve now round-tripped back to pre-“Liberation Day” pricing. Get this: The 2s30s, which had bear steepened 27bps in just a few sessions, bear flattened on Wednesday by 16bps. In a single session.

Naturally, Trump took credit for what, by the end of it, was one of the largest rallies for US equities in modern history. Big-tech had its second-best day ever.

Only Trump — I mean, I guess I shouldn’t say “only” Trump, because there are surely other people who’d do this too, but this is quintessential Trump — would crash the stock market 15% in 15 trading hours, then turn around and congratulate himself for sparking a rally by reversing the policy decision which caused the crash.

Sadly, there are untold millions of American voters who don’t understand why that’s so slapstick. This is like someone chopping off four of your fingers, reattaching two of them, and saying “You’re welcome.”

Jokes aside, this isn’t funny. America, and the world, has a really big problem on its hands. If the scope of that problem wasn’t clear following Volodymyr Zelensky’s ill-fated trip to The White House, it was after “Liberation Day.” Trump’s operating with no guardrails whatsoever and it’s undermining the debt and the currency.

Consider how Wednesday could’ve gone: Trump was one bad 10-year auction away from the Fed having to step in and buy bonds to cap long-end US yields. Bessent had lost control. The dollar was lower with yields sharply higher. The world was abandoning US assets.

No one’s going to forgive and forget, not in bond land, particularly given the nature of the concerns there. It wasn’t deficit worries, or even political dysfunction of the sort which helped trigger the 2023 Fitch downgrade. Rather, it was concerns about the rule of law, Trump’s geopolitical views and, as I put it earlier Wednesday, questions about America’s commitment to the implicit terms of the deal behind the dollar’s reserve status, if those terms were found to be at odds with Trump’s agenda.

“US administration policy is encouraging a trend towards de-dollarization [and] we are now seeing this play out in real-time at a faster pace than even we would have anticipated,” Deutsche Bank’s George Saravelos said early Wednesday, when the Treasury market was ablaze. “The whole Mar-A-Lago Accord framework [is] flawed because it impose[s] fundamental inconsistencies in the desired economic objectives of the administration and we are now seeing those inconsistencies exposed in broad daylight,” he went on. “Only one thing can stabilize some of the more medium-term financial market shifts that have been unleashed: A reversal in the policies of the Trump administration itself.”

A 90-day pause on tariffs doesn’t count as such a “reversal.” The whole agenda’s infeasible at best, and something far more dangerous than infeasible at worst. Summers was direct about that. “We are far from being out of the woods,” he said. “Be afraid.”

So, as you toast one of the largest single-session stock rallies you’re ever going to witness in any context, I implore you: Don’t lose track of what’s been lost over the last few weeks. Because what’s been lost is everything.