Like everyone else I met on an overnight meeting in the Bahamas, I am worried about a recession. The world’s largest economy could dip into one, and very quickly, said a multibillionaire attending the same party as me. Personally, I have never understood much about economics. I have always left such matters to people who can tell the difference between a hedge fund and a mutual fund, duties and tariffs, and so on.
So, let those of us who regularly read this column and know as little as I do about economics try to figure out what The Donald is doing: Is he taking us down a black hole, or is he making those of us living in America better off? All I am certain of is that good faith in the U.S. dollar is what the government runs on, which in turn is based on “business as usual.” Where change must be introduced, it need be in slow increments. When upended, there’s a danger of recession. The tariff plan includes duties on many countries, but the planned start dates for many of those changed abruptly last week, with a ninety-day pause for goods from many places except China. This is very disruptive and roils global markets. U.S. debt and U.S. budget deficit are also big—in fact, enormous—worries. The reason I am worried is that I’m not at all the type who worries. Still, the naysayers can get to one, especially when reading an old bag like the Dowd woman, whose proof that Trump doesn’t get math was by recalling The Donald’s appearance on Howard Stern’s show and when asked what’s 17 times 6 answered 112. I’m pretty certain if Einstein were asked the same question and had to answer in a jiffy he might well have also missed the mark. Such are the joys of reading old hags like la Dowd about The Donald.
“Is The Donald taking us down a black hole, or is he making those of us living in America better off?”
Now let’s get back to economics, or finance, or the stock market, or even tariffs. Nobody knows “nuttin’,” as far as I’m concerned, and the so-called experts are always getting it wrong. The only thing I am sure of is that Trump is imposing tariffs on certain goods that Uncle Sam does not and cannot produce. Such as manganese from Gabon that American companies need to make steel. On the other hand, I am sure that once this is pointed out, Gabon will be excluded from the tariff burden. Or so the great economist Taki believes. Also making the great economist lose sleep are higher interest rates, because higher interest rates make the federal debt harder to repay. Oy vey, as Einstein would say. Uncle Sam owes trillions—37, to be close to exact—and the plunging dollar is not helping. What happens if the almighty buck suddenly goes the way of the Mexican peso or Bolivian Bolivar, if that’s the currency of that faraway and very “high” country. Americans will have to start growing their own drugs because they will not be able to afford buying them from those nice guys down south. Sure, reviving domestic manufacturing is my dream—Pat Buchanan and I wrote at length about it when Clinton and Obama and the idiotic W. were going globalist—but factories take years to build, and not many people are ready to plunge their money into projects when The Donald’s successors might not maintain his policies.
See why I’m worried, jelly bean? Tariffs are like guns—they can make you win big and lose even bigger. In the meantime the stock market is going up and down like a drunken sailor who is being refused entry to an upstairs whorehouse. A 10 percent loss in the market is enormous when felt by 60 percent of American adults who own stocks or mutual funds. The only ones benefiting from this chaos are the Democrats, who got a shellacking last November and now have been given a reprieve on a golden platter. What I think The Donald should do is keep the screws on China and take it easy on the rest of the world. China is a hostile global power but one that can be tamed easily because the Chinese are intelligent people who simply dislike the West because of what the West did to China for a couple hundred years.
And now for a happy ending: Lift the tariffs for everyone except China, force Israel to stop the genocide or else, and watch the stock market reach 50,000 and The Donald proclaimed the greatest president since my favorite, Warren Harding. Yippee!
This originally appeared on Taki’s Magazine.
Taki is an ex-Greek Davis Cup player as well as a former captain of the Greek national karate team. He has won the U.S. national veterans judo championship twice, and in 2008 was world veterans judo champion 70 and over. Since 1967, when he began his career with National Review, he has been a columnist for the London Spectator, the London Sunday Times, Esquire Magazine, Vanity Fair and Chronicles Magazine. In 2002 he founded The American Conservative with Pat Buchanan. He has covered the Vietnam War as well as the Yom Kippur War and the Cyprus conflict of 1974.
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