Friday, March 2, 2018

Stock Market Dives After Crazy Trump Tweet



In pre-market opening activity, the Dow Jones Futures dove after President Trump tweeted that "trade wars are good, and easy to win."

Of course, trade wars are horrific and only shrink an economy and make consumer products more expensive. Further, there is nothing "to win"!



Trump is exposing himself as the economic Neandrethal he is.

  -RW 

8 comments:

  1. Has there ever been a president who’s been worse on trade than this guy? Tom Woods, who can you dig up?

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    1. FDR at least gave some lip service to free trade in his attacks on the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act.

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    2. But he was truly awful on domestic trade.

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    3. Evan, I realize your original comment was aimed at "international" trade, but my point is that there is only a political difference, not an economic difference, between international and domestic trade. So while some presidents, such as Trump, may be awful in terms of interfering with international trade, others may be as awful, if not worse, in terms of interfering with domestic trade (such as nearly all of them, through taxation and regulation).

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  2. How can we attribute one tweet in particular to the immediate drop in the market? Sometimes I feel the media is too quick to grasp at an explanation for daily variances in the market. After reading headlines for years like "Pileup on I-20 Eastbound - The Market Reacts" I begin to have doubts.

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  3. "In my opinion, that degree doesn’t prove very much, but a lot of people I do business with take it very seriously, and it’s considered very prestigious. So all things considered, I’m glad I went to Wharton." Trump quote from The Art of the Deal, speaking of his bachelor’s degree in economics.

    It proves he can get a degree in economics and still be an economic Neanderthal.

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    1. I think this is more a statement about what is taught at so-called "elite" schools. Unless they're teaching Austrian economics at Wharton, which I highly doubt, everyone who went to Wharton and studied economics is an economic Neanderthal in some way.

      And he's spot on about the signaling effect of getting one of these degrees (see Bryan Caplan's new book).

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