Well, at least folks have (by and large) stopped dancing around it: We’re in uncharted territory and the waters here are dark indeed.
Of course, analysts and strategists are still loath to call a spade a spade. No one who cares about their cushy, $250,000+ job narrating the oscillations of lines on a Bloomberg terminal’s going to wake up and exclaim, to clients, “You know what? I’ll say it. He’s a dictator. America has a dictator now, and we’re all gonna die.”
But the careful obfuscation that typified market color during Donald Trump’s first term in the Oval Office is gone three months into his second. Frankly, I’m not sure he’d have it any other way.
In case you spared yourself, Trump’s televised meeting with Nayib Bukele earlier this month was something else, where that means an outright spectacle. Both men are plainly (avowedly, openly) proud of their autocratic tendencies, and they want everyone to know it.
So, although I doubt the Trump administration will take kindly to Wall Street research notes which question the economic wisdom of the tariff push, calling Trump’s various and sundry encroachments what they are — i.e., brazen attempts to consolidate power in a king-like executive — probably won’t offend the big man.
I’m intimately familiar with how that psychology works. A friend of mine in the mainstream financial media — in fact, she’s one of the biggest names in the business, which is to say she’s a household name in market circles — asked me last year why I can’t embrace who I’ve become over the past decade, preferring instead to define myself by who I was 20 years ago. The truth is… well, “Damn it feels good to be a gangster.” Trump agrees.
At this point, it’s fairly obvious — to this observer, anyway — that his lust for the powers of an autocrat, if perhaps not those of an outright dictator, overrides nearly all other concerns, including ostensible imperatives like the maintenance of the dollar’s reserve status, preserving the world’s faith in US Treasurys and ensuring US equities are a one-way trade higher.
You might (very reasonably) argue that the latter shouldn’t be an imperative in the first place. That a stock market which only goes up isn’t a “market.” But if what you want is price discovery in publicly-traded corporate equities, there are ways to go about facilitating that which don’t involve jettisoning democracy.
In the earliest trading this week, the dollar was lower. So were Treasurys. So were stocks. Headlines like, “Trump’s Push Against Powell Adds to Doubts of US’s Haven Status” were plastered all over the financial front pages.
Although analysts did their best to keep things diplomatic, the pretense is generally gone now.
“Considering the extent to which Trump has already pushed the boundaries of the powers of the executive branch of government, we’d be remiss to conclude that the President’s rhetoric [about dismissing Jerome Powell] won’t lead to action,” BMO’s Ian Lyngen wrote. “At a moment in which the Administration has already instilled ever-higher levels of uncertainty into the economic outlook, any attempt to remove Powell will add to the downward pressure on US assets.”
The madness of king donny…..We are in trouble.
And now he is sending out posts calling Powell a “major loser” – on top of the WSJ story on having to trick Navarro into attending another meeting in order to get a tariff pause.
People might not have thought they were voting for an emerging market economy but thats what we are now becoming.
Everyone really should read this article about how Hitler used tariffs to force Germany to stop importing goods.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/04/nazi-germany-tariffs-trade/682521/?gift=YwCmpcxUgNAYD-oV2wySqYwzfoxGyMbkC1za8W0GzMk&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
So many parallels. Trump and his handlers bum rushing towards a Depression, as was done in the 20’s and early 30’s, to get to where Hitler went post-tariffs?
America being made great again…
Funny, but we are all screwed
The direction of the market before the orange dictator was up. Now I believe it will be down, in fact I believe the up days are an opportunity to short.
Blood clot take him away.
Or me.
He doesn’t deserve such a quick and painless end. A massive stroke leaving him to live a long and harmless life as a vegetable – unable to speak, tweet or enjoy Melania’s affections (if any remain) – would be more deserved!
The Joe Kennedy fate.
Just him
Coming soon: the wealthier Trump voters lamenting about the impact on their businesses, portfolios, etc: “I really like a lot of his policies, but I didn’t sign up for this.” Or, to paraphrase: “I came for the racism, but I thought I’d just get some more tax cuts and a good economy.”
My bellwether on this is an old friend who votes his pocketbook (read: always Republican) but thought that transgender athletes were one of the major threats facing the US. When HE folds — and he will if this bloodbath continues, I’ll know we’re nearing the bottom. That might be after it’s too late to go back up, of course, and I mean for democracy, not the market.