Trump’s Trade War Fallout EXPLAINED: What It Means for Inflation, Tariffs & Economic Chaos

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God willing someday, someday I hope to have grandkids. I do, I hope to have grandkids and my grandkids are gonna come and they’re gonna talk to me about their homework, business homework, economic homework, and we’re gonna discuss one of the greatest, we’re gonna argue one of the greatest economic policy errors of all time. And I’m gonna tell them, yes, yes, yes, I lived through that. I watched it unfold. I watched one of the dumbest things

of all time, self-inflicted stupidity of all time. All time. Anyway, yeah, how’d that market bounce back work for you kids?

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I was watching it late afternoon. again, I was off to my, uh, my daughter’s game. Um, and I knew exactly what was going to happen today. Knew we’re going to have a sell off. Um, Ken, you had a short squeeze, a lot of computerized trades taking the market in one direction. Um, Oh, Oh, he, but he took the tariffs off.

look at, they were all excited on the five on Fox News. And what did Ainsley say? And what did all those other mental midgets have to say? it was great. it was a genius move by Trump. my God, art of the deal. Art of the deal, that’s what Caroline told us, right? classic art of the deal. And did see Trump yesterday? yeah, look at the market. It’s gotta be some sort of record.

Yeah. Again, we’re not dealing with the sharpest tax in the box by any stretch of the imagination. Again, I I think the Santa’s putting out fires left, right and all over the place. Yeah, tariffs are up 25%.

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Just because we took them off certain countries doesn’t mean our effective tariff rate is 25 % over 150 % on China.

How do you think that’s going to affect?

millions

banging down our door, looking to make deals. What is these deals that you speak of? What was the last deal that you cut, Last time I checked, I thought the Ukraine-Russia thing was supposed to be done on day one. Because you’re a brilliant deal maker.

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Let me walk everybody through what happened this past week. Tuesday night, Tuesday night, and again, I talked about this, watched Trump giving completely off the rails speech, but he does that from time to time. they’re begging us, begging us, begging us to cut deals on and on and on. You watch the spreads and you watch the bond market fall out of bed, fall out of bed.

Somebody made Donald Trump an offer he couldn’t refuse. Just that simple. Whether it’s a bond market, whether it’s donor, his donors, whatever it may be. Somebody made him an offer he couldn’t refuse and said he had to do something. He did something. look at that, 90-day reprieve. Yeah, it didn’t really do much, quite frankly, because there’s a ton of uncertainty out there.

Um, yeah, I’m drinking right now. I’m gonna be shut. I’m drinking a diet Coke.

Coca-Cola is a pretty pretty big brand, right? maybe young people not remember, but back in the 1980s, Coca-Cola, at a misstep misstep, it decided that it was going to come up with a new recipe, new Coke. Didn’t go over well, didn’t go over well, and then they had to bring back their old formula that was called classic Coke for a while.

Brand destruction, mud light, look what they did. The greatest brand in the history of the planet, well, I’m gonna take this outside of religion. I think one of would be the USA.

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USA and the president has damaged our brand.

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I don’t know other way to put it to you, but the brand is damaged. listen, okay, I see what’s happening in the credit markets right now, and it’s no bueno. It’s no good. It’s a mess out there. People have lost confidence.

They’ve lost confidence in what’s going on and what might be done next. If you think this is good for the country, you’re crazy. Recession is firmly on the table for crying out loud. Trump even said that, all right, I will deal with some pain, deal with a recession. He was worried about causing a depression.

Dude, stop. Stop what you’re doing. You are screwing everything up. And then, okay, of course, of course, you’ve got the fast response from the White House on social media and all the little influences out there. they’re becoming more more scarce. inflation was way down. Great numbers today. You know that if last Wednesday didn’t happen,

the markets would have ripped. Where we’d be at right now.

But no, no, no, no, okay. No, it’s right. Trump’s fighting against Wall Street, Fighting against Wall Street, Let me tell you who’s gonna get hit in a recession. Middle class and poor people.

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They’re the ones that are gonna get hit by recession. How would you feel? How’d you feel if you are someone installs flooring, commercial flooring, and you’ve got various different contracts ready to go. You gave bids, you put bids out and you got ready to go, you’ve got your staff, you’ve got your workers ready to go, and all of sudden you get an email telling you that the flooring that you ordered,

is going way way up because of tariffs.

What do you do? What if you go to the person who you did the deal with and said, hey, listen, I can’t do anything about this. The chairperson went up and they’re like, nah, cancel it. You get stuck with a lot of flooring, don’t you? You think that this is good for the country? Yeah, this is strengthening national security. Fantastic. Again, it boggles the mind.

And again, I didn’t even look at this. was an actual paper, position paper put together by Steve Moran. You see him from time to time. He’s one of Trump’s lackeys about trade in our country, in our position. Arnard Bertrand actually did a good piece on this. I want to basically highlight how ridiculous

our position is right now when it comes to our reserve currency status. Marin’s argument, he says, is to reposition the global reserve currency status of the dollar, not as a privilege, because it is a privilege, but a burden that the rest of the world needs to compensate us for bearing.

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He says, having the dollar as a reserve currency has caused persistent currency distortions and contributed, along with other countries, unfair barriers to trade, to unsustainable trade deficits, which have decimated our manufacturing sector. So he wants to give up, wants to give up the reserve currency status of the dollar. No, he doesn’t want to give it up. I mean, people don’t understand what the reserve currency status of dollars.

basically means we can print as much money as we want.

we have a magic money machine. So no, he doesn’t wanna get rid of the magic money machine. He says that America’s and I quote, financial dominance cannot be taken for granted and the Trump administration is determined to preserve it. But this same financial dominance comes at a cost and other nations need to pay for it.

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Why? He basically said that countries should write checks to the treasury to help us finance global public goods. Now, let me try to put this in a different way just to see just how ridiculous is this is kind of like I’ll use a well, I’ll use a modern pop star that I like. She happens to be a fairly attractive, very talented star, let’s say.

Let’s say Dua Lipa. Dua Lipa comes out and says that, I look like this, know, I’m good looking, I’ve got all of this talent, all of this stuff. You know, it’s quite the burden to bear. And I think you guys should pay me for this burden. You I know you guys, you look at me all the time, you watch me, I stage, listen to my music.

You know, it’s quite the burden that I have to bear. I think you should pay me for that!

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dumb, Bertrand Bertrand puts it he says it’s the equivalent of Samson asking everyone to pay him to keep his hair.

Yeah, this allows us, basically the rest of the world kind of subsidizes us.

It’s it’s kind of beyond the pale. Again, look at it your way as a private individual, you cannot one cannot indefinitely buy more from others than what you already earn. At some point, you got to pay unless unless you’re paying with your own currency. That’s your pain. It’s a currency that everyone uses.

Again, so when that happens, basically all normal rules of economic gravity are suspended. Other countries have to balance their books eventually. Our reserve status gives us the ability to consume and consume and consume and consume more than we actually produce. And the world will accept our dollars. Again, that to me is a bit of a

privilege, is it not? We can print our own money and spend as much as we’d like. Yeah, again, I, Muren’s piece is so ridiculous at its face. Again, it boggles the mind.

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It really does. We’re looking at a situation right now, situation right now where, you know, everyone thought, OK, you know, we’re all set. Everything’s good. No, we’re more than likely going to be heading towards a recession, self-inflicted, self-inflicted recession. Maybe we’ll escape. I don’t know. I continue to expect more and more.

volatility until the president eventually finds a way to save face because that’s what he needs to do. You know, he can’t he can’t have any bad public perception of himself. To me, the right thing to do is that, you know, again, fire Lutnick, fire Navarro, fire everybody on your trade staff, apologize, apologize, and then look to cut a real deal.

Because this

This is a mess. It’s not done, people. We’re gonna mess moving forward. Again, you had the House passed the GOP, the Senate budget plan. Again, it’s basically turning it to reconciliation stage and then they gotta hash out the cuts and taxes and all of that stuff. That, for all intents and purposes, should have been good news. Inflation numbers way down today should have been good news. It’s not.

It’s not, there’s just too much uncertainty. You had Andy Jassy today from Amazon saying, well, know, somebody’s gotta pay, ain’t gonna be us. Basically, that’s what he said. He was in that line from Wall Street. Someone’s gonna pay, he’s telling me, well, I’m paying him. He said the price is gonna go up for the consumer. That’s on you. That’s what we have to deal with at this point in time. And until…

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Till the president wakes up, I don’t really know what to tell you. We’re in a very, very frustrating situation. Again, I mentioned before, I have no control over what the president does. that’s, Congress doesn’t have any control over this. These tariffs are gonna hurt many small businesses. I’ve been speaking to them and people wonder why. They’re like, Chris, there you go.

Embrace the suck out there. No, I don’t like embracing stupidity. And quite frankly, I’m speaking to business owners and they’re appalled. They’re appalled. I don’t know if you saw Trump’s approval ratings. They’re tanking.

Just just he can’t do it. He’s not capable. He’s not capable of admitting a mistake. Just go out there and say this screwed up. You’re fired. You’re fired. You’re fired. Pull an apprentice right there. Move on. Move on. Live to fight another day. No one likes any of this crap that’s going on except for your sycophants and the influencers that are pushing crap on social.

The reality is this is, it’s not over, okay? None of this is over. We’ve got a lot we’ve got to work through. I’ve already told investors, I’ve been telling investors out there, you know what, the best way, know, you gotta go through this.

Best way out is through. And that’s what we’re gonna have to continue to do. Then again, it’s frustrating to me. You know what’s frustrating to me?

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I talk about wasted talent. That line from the movie Bronx Tale, saddest thing in the world is wasted talent. Think about the things that we had lined up. Trump’s doing an amazing job on the border. Maybe we’ll get an immigration bill, an immigration reform, and sensible immigration. The job that Doge is doing and cutting government waste and highlighting and finding out where it is. Honestly, that’s basically it at this point in time.

But again, in a short period of time, that’s a lot.

It’s lot. We were fired up, we were excited because we’re gonna get rid of regulations, we’re gonna make it easier to do business in this country. And what did you do? You slapped the country with a tax.

slap the country with an enormous tax and a boatload of uncertainty. That’s what we wanted to get rid of. Taxes, uncertainty, regulation, and you keep piling on. Watch Dogs on wallstreet.com.