Let's talk about Trump's new economic blunder with the EU and your questions.... - Belle of the Ranch

[TexasTowelie]

Well, howdy there Internet people. It's Belle again. So, today we're going to talk about Trump's new economic blunder.

Ever since Trump announced his plan to impose new tariffs on Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, and Finland we've been absolutely swamped with questions about what it would do to the economy in various ways from the markets to inflation and so on. We'll answer the questions as best we can and add some context.

One of the things to remember as we go over this is that US markets are pretty detached from reality right now. Eventually, something will retether them, but we have no idea what will cause it or when that might happen. It could be this, or the markets could just pretend like this didn't happen.

One idea floating around that might help the markets continue to pretend like everything is fine is that Trump's new tariffs won't matter because he's not that bright. Seriously, that's what it boils down to. Trump's tariff scheme left a loophole so big you could drive a truck or a container ship through it. He listed out countries he's going to tariff, not the entirety of the EU. So tariffed countries can just reroute their trade through EU countries not subject to the tariffs. The idea that everything will be fine rests on Trump's entire administration being too dense to see this coming.

You also have the TACO trade happening. The New York Stock Exchange doesn't reopen until tomorrow because of the holiday. You could look at the FTSE for a slight preview. The FTSE is kind of a London-based Dow FTSE. I'm at the point that the bigger worry for the market is if it doesn't go down significantly over this because realistically it should.

The next question is inflation. Will this make it go up faster? It's hard to say just yet because that giant loophole does exist. At the same time, companies haven't passed on the cost of all of the first round of Trump's tariffs yet and it's unclear how much they can continue to absorb while they try to slowly raise prices. It's a tariff. Its function is to raise prices. So, I'd expect some, but it's too early to tell how much yet. The holiday weekend is slowing responses and indicators. We'll have a better picture as the week progresses.

Gold and silver have been hitting a lot of new highs lately. So, another question that came in is, is this going to kill the precious metals run? That seems unlikely. I think most people expect them to go up faster now. People feel safe in precious metals when the economy goes bad. So take from that what you will about the state of the economy.

All of these questions are about relatively short-term outlooks. It's important to remember that this move caused long-term damage driving the EU further away from the US. Here's the big variable at time of recording, we may not have seen Europe's full response yet. There's significant talk about the EU using its anti-coercion instrument, which is commonly called its trade bazooka. If they use the tool designed for use against adversarial nations against the US, it'll change a lot of math. Once it's all charted, it was a bad foreign policy move in support of an absurd foreign policy goal using a bad economic tool and it'll hurt the US economy. The question is how much?

Anyway, it's just a thought. Y'all have a good day.