well… exactly what we expected to happen.. happened…
On wednesday, Trump announced the details of his tariff plan. With heavy import tax rates with many countries the US does business with.
The trump adminastration as claimed that the preposed rates reflect what each country is taxing us in tariffs but this could not be further from the truth. Calling the rates reciprical is to deceive. For some countries the preposed rate would be about 50 times greater than the tariff rate they have on us.
As a lot of people have already pointed out, the rates line up exactly with or very close to our trade deficite calculated as a percentage per country. If that calculated percentage would be less than 10, the tarrif rate would just be set to 10% instead.
There is no way this doesn’t tank the economy. And they must know this.
As the markets opened thursday morning the Dow dropped 1600 points. And total market capitalization lost 2.2 trillion dollars.
Regardless if this was Trumps intention, market instablility will help the elite buy more power. As the economy slows and trade falls, banks will lower interest rates allowing for a leveraged buyout of the entire US economy.
At the very least, the US has lost any fickle of respect from extra-national markets. We are in a bad place.