National Review‘s Andrew Stuttaford writes of “the Trump slump.” A slice:
The market rallied on Trump’s election as investors celebrated the approach of the (formal) conclusion to the Biden presidency, the defeat of Kamala Harris, and, they reckoned, a reprise of Trump’s first term. But sentiment began to sour with the realization that Trump envisaged his second term as a very different adventure.
There is a tendency, at least among those whose 401(k)s are a respectable distance away from their holders’ retirement age, to think of turmoil in the stock market as some bust-up among the perpetually hysterical. But no one should be complacent about what’s taking place now.
In an attempt to persuade the skeptical that the stock market’s ructions do not matter overmuch, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Tucker Carlson that the “top 10 percent of Americans own 88 percent of equities. Eighty-eight percent of the stock market. The next 40 percent owns 12 percent.” Translation: This is a problem for rich folk. Except that’s so only if wealth distribution is all that counts — but it’s not. According to a Gallup survey published in May 2023, 61 percent of American households (including 29 percent with incomes under $40,000) have some exposure to the stock market, whether directly or through mutual funds, exchange-traded funds, 401(k)s, or the like. It will be of no comfort to them that some rich person is losing more money than they are. It’s worth adding that, though only about 2.5 percent of Americans held stocks in 1929, the year of the great crash, that did not spare countless numbers of them from the Depression that the Wall Street meltdown did so much to cause.
Lurking just beneath suggestions that less attention should be paid to stock market woes is the conviction, shared by populists on both left and right, that the U.S. is “over-financialized.” And lurking beneath that is the conviction — a venerable populist conspiracy theory — that Wall Street and Main Street are at odds, with the former parasitic on the latter, rather than different parts of the engine that drives the American economy forward. Perhaps the truth about the U.S. economy is more easily visible from beyond its shores. The EU is not known for lavishing praise on the American way of business, making it all the more striking that, in a recent report on the bloc’s failing competitiveness, Mario Draghi, a former Italian prime minister and past president of the European Central Bank, noted how much the success of the U.S. tech sector owed to American financial markets.
David Henderson blogs about the Anti-Tariff Declaration.
The Anti-Tariff Declaration is now attracting media attention. Two slices:
Some of the high-profile signatories of the anti-tariff declaration include Nobel laureates James Heckman and Vernon Smith, the economist and former Republican Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, and N. Gregory Mankiw, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors under President George W. Bush.
The signatories were especially critical of Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs. “The ‘reciprocal’ tariff rates being threatened and imposed by the United States upon other countries are calculated using an erroneous and improvised formula with no basis in economic reality,” the letter reads.
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The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Business Insider.
Eric Boehm continues to report on just how deranged is Trump’s trade ‘policy.’
Of course, one of the impacts of tariffs is increased economic uncertainty and decreased demand for products like the ones Mack Trucks makes. That’s a tidy illustration of how higher tariffs are hurting American businesses in more ways than one: higher prices for imported goods and component parts on the front end, coupled with lower sales expectations on the back end. In an environment like that, layoffs seem almost inevitable.
USTR will also require use of U.S.-built vessels to export liquefied natural gas starting in 2028. The lack of U.S.-built LNG carriers will raise costs for American LNG exporters and make them less competitive vis-a-vis Russia and Qatar. Vladimir Putin sends his thanks.
As a small salve, vessels will be exempt from fees if they are traveling 2,000 nautical miles or less from foreign ports. Perhaps the Administration doesn’t want prices for avocados and other fresh produce soaring right before winter. Carriers can also get fees waived if they order a U.S.-built ship. This is a de facto subsidy for U.S. shipbuilders.
None of this industrial policy is likely to make American shipbuilding great again. Like the tariffs, they will be a deadweight on the U.S. economy.
Matt Yglesias is correct: “Trade war is going to be bad for American manufacturing.”
George Will hopes that the U.S. Supreme Court will “rebuke schools’ bullying wokeism.” Two slices:
The plaintiffs, who are arguing only for notification and opt-out rights, say parents should not be sidelined to facilitate government telling children how they are supposed to think about gender and sexuality. The parents ask: Are there no limits on a government school’s power to impose whatever curriculum it pleases? If so, parents who cannot afford private schools surrender their right to direct their children’s religious upbringing.
Forty-seven states protect parental opt-out or opt-in rights. Three are silent on this. No state bars such accommodations. Montgomery County [Maryland] does by bureaucratic sleight of hand, declaring the controversial material part of a curriculum where opt-outs are not permitted.
When parents protested, board members denounced them as “hate”-promoting “white supremacists” and “xenophobes.”
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Also in 1925, a unanimous Supreme Court overturned an Oregon law requiring parents to send children to public schools. This was, the court said, an unreasonable interference with the “liberty” of parents to “direct the upbringing and education of children.” The Ninth Amendment (“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people”) was not mentioned, but the court affirmed an unenumerated right.
Politics is a uniquely human activity because only humans are opinionated — and egotistical: They think their opinions are superior to others’. A primary purpose of politics is to keep the peace among such turbulent creatures. Government, especially in its schools, should, as much as possible, practice a neighborly neutrality, eschewing the promotion of orthodoxies concerning matters that divide the community.
