3 takeaway.
- I’m a millionaire again.
- This is self inflicted. And reversed as seen today.
- Fdt. For volatility.
I’m now ok with trannies. Blue Corruption. And catch and release of criminals.
Just get him out.
Yep, backs down. There’s no way around it. I like that we disagree on many topics and discuss these events but some objective criticism would be welcome.
If you listen to Treasury Secretary Bessent, you will get a very different take.
A week ago, Secretary Bessent told countries, “Do not retaliate and you will be rewarded”, and that is exactly what has happened. Tariffs are being lowered to a baseline of 10% for those countries.
China retaliated and escalated, and China now faces 125% tariffs.
As Secretary Bessent noted, because of the tariffs on China, China has begun to divert many goods to other countries, which those other countries are none-to-happy about, which has reframed the issue as China vs the rest of the world rather than USA vs the rest of the world.
This was never about tariffs, it was about getting fair and balanced trade. Tariffs are a means to an end, not an end in and of themselves. China is the biggest source of the US trade problem, and by reframing the issue as China vs the rest of the world, President Trump has strengthened his hand considerably.
Treasury Secretary Bessent (and Press Secretary) press conference yesterday
I can’t find a transcript online, so any errors in this transcription are mine. The video is 14 minutes long and I’ve only transcribed the start of it:
(Bessent) “And we saw the successful negotiating strategy that President Trump implemented a week
ago today. It has brought more than 75 countries forward to negotiate. It took great
courage great courage for him to stay the course until this moment, and what we have ended up with
here as I told everyone a week ago in this very spot: do not retaliate and you will be rewarded, so
every country in the world who wants to come and negotiate, we are willing to hear you, we’re going
to go down to a 10% baseline tariff for them, and China will be raised to 125 due to their insistence on
escalation.”
(questions from journalists)
(journalist): “is this now all about China?”
(Bessent:) “Well, it’s about bad actors, and what we will see is some of the very early countries are
China’s neighbours, we’re going to see, I’m seeing Vietnam today, Japan’s at the front of the queue,
South Korea, India, so we will see, and as I’ve repeatedly said, and President Trump has been saying
it for years, China is the most imbalanced economy in the history of the modern world and they are
the biggest source of the US trade problem, and indeed they are a problem for the rest of the world
because what’ve we’ve seen is that as the US announced the tariff wall last week, many of those
goods have already started flooding into Europe.”
There’s always a chance that Trump is playing 3D chess while others are playing checkers. However, his actions and decisions seem to be so erratic across the board (tariff reversal, NATO comments, Syria tweets, hiring/firing cycles, RU-UA peace negotiations), that if you keep plugging in these different events into some Bayesian probability calculator, the evident result is that it is highly unlikely that this tariff reversal was part of a well established strategy.
Hence I believe the world wide consensus that Trump&co backed down due to lack of strategic control of events, is a far more likely scenario. The conservative media shift is also a pretty strong signal. When Street Journal editorial pages tap out on spin, it’s probably not 3D chess — it’s checkers with missing pieces.
Occam’s razor also favor my conclusion.
In all honesty, I’d prefer all this to be part of some well planned strategy. The scenario where the world’s most powerful man acts on a whim and changes views on a hour to hour level, is a pretty ■■■■■■■ scary scenario.
Bill Ackman on X:
No gimp suit for me Cliff. If I were president, I would have started with a 90-day period for
negotiations and then brought the hammer down.By doing it President Trump’s way, the entire world and their citizens got to experience the visceral
impact of what massive tariffs would do to their businesses, their stock and bond markets, and their
economies.From @realDonaldTrump’s approach, we were able to learn who are the preferred trade partners and
who are the problems, based on who showed up early and what they offered, and who chose to
retaliate.Every country is now incredibly motivated to make a deal with us as quickly as possible to avoid the draconian consequences they will experience with no deal.
China has been isolated as a bad actor and every American company is immediately moving their supply chains out of China back to the U.S. or to trading partners of the U.S. who are likely to make favorable tariff deals with the U.S.
Time is not China’s friend. As more time goes by, more companies find other and better alternative suppliers outside of China. So China is incentivized to come to the table soon and to be reasonable in their negotiations.
The countries that showed up first and offered zero tariffs will now be rewarded with more business, motivating them to complete their deals with us promptly.
All of the above was accomplished with only a few days of market turbulence.
I am not concerned with whether this was @realDonaldTrump’s plan from the beginning. I instead focus on the outcome.
Looking at the facts objectively, the only word that comes to my mind is ‘brilliant.’
12:58 AM · Apr 10, 2025 https://x.com/BillAckman/status/1910120281403687061
lol say what you will. We went from 24 trillion in 2021 to 30 trillion gdp in 2024. We were clocking 2% plus in gdp growth in 2025. Now it’s negative. That is the trump effect.
Chinas gdp in that same time frame literally when stagnant. For the first time in decades, we were literally winning and beating them.
That is likely to be reversed moving forward.
I’m staring to dislike this Ackman fellow.
Ray Dalio’s post ( Ray Dalio on X: "Don’t Make the Mistake of Thinking That What’s Now Happening is Mostly About Tariffs " / X)
At this moment, a huge amount of attention is being justifiably paid to the announced tariffs and their very big impacts on markets and economies while very little attention is being paid to the circumstances that caused them and the biggest disruptions that are likely still ahead. Don’t get me wrong, while these tariff announcements are very important developments and we all know that President Trump caused them, most people are losing sight of the underlying circumstances that got him elected president and brought these tariffs about. They are also mostly overlooking the vastly more important forces that are driving just about everything, including the tariffs.
The far bigger, far more important thing to keep in mind is that we are seeing a classic breakdown of the major monetary, political, and geopolitical orders. This sort of breakdown occurs only about once in a lifetime, but they have happened many times in history when similar unsustainable conditions were in place.
More specifically:
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The monetary/economic order is breaking down because there is too much existing debt, the rates of adding to it are too fast, and existing capital markets and economies are supported by this unsustainably large debt. The debt is unsustainable because the of the large imbalance between a) debtor-borrowers who owe too much debt and are taking on too much debt because they are hooked on debt to finance their excesses (e.g., the United States) and b) lender-creditors (like China) who already hold too much of the debt and are hooked on selling their goods to the borrower-debtors (like the United States) to sustain their economies. There are big pressures for these imbalances to be corrected one way or another and doing so will change the monetary order in major ways. For example, it is obviously incongruous to have both large trade imbalances and large capital imbalances in a deglobalizing world in which the major players can’t trust that the other major players won’t cut them off from the items they need (which is an American worry) or pay them the money they are owed (which is a Chinese worry). This is a result of these parties being in a type of war in which self-sufficiency is of paramount importance. Anyone who has studied history knows that such risks under such circumstances have repeatedly led to the same sorts of problems we’re seeing now. So, the old monetary/economic order in which countries like China manufacture inexpensively, sell to Americans, and acquire American debt assets, and Americans borrow money from countries like China to make those purchases and build up huge debt liabilities will have to change. These obviously unsustainable circumstances are made even more so by the fact that they have led to American manufacturing deteriorating, which both hollows out middle class jobs in the U.S. and requires America to import needed items from a country that it is increasingly seeing as an enemy. In an era of deglobalization, these big trade and capital imbalances, which reflect trade and capital interconnectedness, will have to shrink one way or another. Also, it should be obvious that the U.S. government debt level and the rate at which the government debt is being added to is unsustainable. (You can find my analysis of this in my new book How Countries Go Broke: The Big Cycle.) Clearly, the monetary order will have to change in big disruptive ways to reduce all these imbalances and excesses, and we are in the early part of the process of it changing. There are huge capital market implications to this that have huge economic implications, which I will delve into at another time.
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The domestic political order is breaking down due to huge gaps in people’s education levels, opportunity levels, productivity levels, income and wealth levels, and values—and because of the ineffectiveness of the existing political order to fix things. These conditions are manifest in win-at-all-cost fights between populists of the right and populists of the left over which side will have the power and control to run things. This is leading to democracies breaking down because democracies require compromise and adherence to the rule of law, and history has shown that both break down at times like those we are now in. History also shows that strong autocratic leaders emerge as classic democracy and classic rule of law are removed as barriers to autocratic leadership. Obviously, the current unstable political situation will be affected by the other four forces I’m referring to here—e.g., problems in the stock market and economy will likely create political and geopolitical problems.
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The international geopolitical world order is breaking down because the era of one dominant power (the U.S.) that dictates the order that other countries follow is over. The multilateral, cooperative world order the U.S. led is being replaced by a unilateral, power-rules approach. In this new order, the U.S. is still largest power in the world and is shifting to a unilateral, “America first” approach. We are now seeing that manifest in the U.S. led trade-war, geopolitical war, technology war, and, in some cases, military wars.
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Acts of nature (droughts, floods and pandemics) are increasingly disruptive, and
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Amazing changes in technology such as AI will be highly impactful to all aspects of life, including the money/debt/economic order, the political order, the international order (by affecting interactions between countries economically and militarily), and the costs of acts of nature.
Changes in these forces and how they are affecting each other is what we should be focusing on.
For that reason, I urge you to not to let news-grabbing dramatic changes like the tariffs draw your attention away from these five big forces and their interrelationships, which are the real drivers of Overall Big Cycles changes. If you allow yourself to be distracted by them, you will a) miss how the conditions and the dynamics of these big forces are causing these news-making changes, b) fail to think through how these news-making changes will affect these big forces, and c) fail to keep focused on how this Overall Big Cycle and the parts that drive it typically transpire, which will tell you a lot about what is likely to happen.
I also urge you to think about the interrelationships that are critically important. For example, think about how Donald Trump’s actions on tariffs will affect 1) the monetary/market, economy order (it will be disruptive to it), 2) the domestic political order (it will likely be disruptive to it as it will probably undermine his support), 3) the international geopolitical order (it will be disruptive to it in many obvious ways that are financial, economic, political, and geopolitical) 4) climate (it will somewhat undermine the world’s ability to deal with the climate change issue effectively), and 5) technology development (it will be disruptive in some positive ways to the U.S., like bringing more technology production into the U.S., and in some harmful ways, like being disruptive to the capital markets that are needed to support technology development and in too many other ways to innumerate here.)
As you do this, it’s helpful to keep in mind that what is happening now is just a contemporary version of what has happened innumerable times throughout history. I urge you to study the actions that policy makers took in analogous past cases in which they found themselves in similar positions to help you build a list of things that they might do—things like suspending debt service payments to “enemy” countries, establishing capital controls to prevent the free flow of capital out of the country, and imposing special taxes. Many of these things would’ve been unimaginable not long ago, so we should also study how these policies work. The breakdowns in the monetary, political, and geopolitical orders that take the forms of depressions, civil wars, and world wars, that then lead to the new monetary, political orders that govern interactions within countries, and the geopolitical orders that govern interactions between countries until they break down, have all happened repeatedly and are the most important things to understand well. I described them in detail in my book Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order so you can see it clearly laid out there. The Overall Big Cycle is described in six clearly identifiable stages that unfold as one order becomes the next. It is laid out in such detail that it is easy to compare what is now happening with what typically happens, so it is possible to identify what stage the cycle is in and what is likely to come next.
When I wrote that book and my other books, I hoped, as I still do, that I would be able 1) to help policy makers understand these forces and interact with them to produce better policies so we get better results, 2) to help individuals who can collectively but not individually affect policies to deal with these forces well so they could get better results for themselves and those they care about, and 3) to encourage smart people who have different views than mine to have open, thoughtful exchanges with me so that we can all try to get at what is true and what to do about it.
I think that was a pretty good overview of the situation. The media’s focus on daily volatility of equities is kinda stupid and leads nowhere. What a time to be alive when all this is unfolding. I just wish it was someone else than Trump leading the fighting. Time to buckle up and work on that antifragility, everyone!
It had to be Donald Trump. When others tried to run on a similar platform in the recent past (think Patrick J Buchanan, who worked for Nixon, Ford, and Reagan, as well as CNN, MSNBC, and PBS, and who unsuccessfully sought the presidency), they were smeared by the neocons and the mainstream media as “Nazis,” using tactics right out of the Trotskyite playbook. The smears were untrue, but the mud stuck. When the same tactics were tried against Donald Trump, the mud didn’t stick, because Trump was an icon whom the public knew and loved.
Teflon Don!
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This is a big question mark to me, as I’ve written here multiple times before. Why does the US alienate the EU with aggressive rhetoric? Business is business and I understand the US’s frustration with the EU, the tariff game, even the RU-UA peace negotiations that bypass the EU. But if the grand target is to beat China, what purpose does it serve to also be rhetorically aggressive towards the EU? China is taking massive advantage of this and playing its cards so that the EU will start feeling the lure of the East.
China, EU must oppose tariff ‘bullying’, Xi tells Spanish PM
“Xi, in his first public comments on the issue since Trump launched his tariff offensive last week, said there could be “no winners” in any trade war, and he said the EU had a key role to play in ensuring global economic stability.”
The idea that Donald Trump is in control or operating with strategic foresight is, frankly, difficult to take seriously. Take, for example, the situation surrounding the Mar-a-Lago documents — a case that requires delicate legal maneuvering, a thorough understanding of diplomatic implications, and a level of discretion that Trump and his team have repeatedly failed to demonstrate. This administration has consistently shown a lack of both nuance and discipline when it comes to handling sensitive matters, whether domestic or international.
Trump’s approach often appears reactive rather than strategic. He seems more interested in riding the wave of public sentiment than making hard, principled decisions and seeing them through. A good leader must sometimes take unpopular stances for the sake of long-term national interest — something Trump has rarely done. Instead, he frequently reverses course when pressure mounts, abandoning original plans or modifying positions based on short-term political gain.
Moreover, his communication style — often bombastic, dismissive, and riddled with contradictions — undermines whatever message or policy he’s attempting to push. For instance, his handling of relationships with NATO allies, or his interactions with authoritarian leaders like Putin and Kim Jong-un, have raised serious questions about his judgment and diplomatic competence. Rather than strengthening America’s global standing, these actions have, at times, alienated allies and emboldened adversaries.
In truth, leadership isn’t just about dominating headlines or commanding rallies — it’s about having the courage and consistency to lead with vision, clarity, and responsibility. Trump’s inability to follow through on complex initiatives, coupled with a style that often comes across as erratic and self-serving, only reinforces the perception that he is not the steady hand needed in moments of real consequence.
Mark my words: Trump’s legacy will be the one chaos and regret