CD7 & SD15 Outreach & Inclusion Officers update for March 19, 2025

Trump’s Tariffs: Incompetence or Insider Trading? Or Worse?

After Trumps two day tariff and their might have been a three dayer in their too, Trump’s Tariffs DeJour have us thoroughly confused. But businesses great and small are not confused, they’ve been hauling and stashing away so much stuff we’ve seen record port volumes in the usually dead months of winter and supply chains clogged like it’s peak season. Not two months into Trump’s term supply chain managers have no pencils or fingernails left and stockholders are gnawing their holdings too.

For the stats geeks the stock indexes just sunk below the 200 day moving averages while the couple trillion dollars fleeing the stock market is bidding bond rates down a bit, but auto and loan rates are still too high and credit card rates unsufferable. Insulting the country and people you’re negotiating with while switching from one nebulous demand to an even wackier one is SOP in Trump’s “Art of the Steal” and it’s not going over well with trading partners or investors.

Not that Trump even cares… Today he confirmed that his tweaker tariffs might crash the market and cause a recession, and he’s OK with that.???

‘Cause Trump and his billionaire buddies are in a whole different market called “Private Equity”, where even general admission pretty much requires a million in liquid assets. And unlike the stock market where there are at least some basic reporting and governance requirements Private Equity is just that, private, sorta like the stock market before the market crash of 1929 that we democrats had to clean up. 

Why should we care? Ever hear of “Blackstone”?

Remember age depressed property values of the recession of 2008 or so, when Private Equity like Blackstone was Hoovering up homes and commercial property in such volumes that they could manipulate the housing market? Blackstone has a mere TRILLION+ $$$ under management, dwarfed by ex Blackrock with 11 TRILLION that’s about twice our annual national budget and the GDP of most nations. The there’s the billionaires, all 2000+ of them and their 14 TRILLION+ $$$ of net worth. Throw in the “Family Offices”, Trusts, and other tax dodges and they’ve probably got more trillions in capital than we got national debt.

Bad enough that wealthy day traders can profit massively in a crashing market as Trump’s tariffs DeJour send stocks up and down every day. Beginning to see why Trump isn’t worried about a recession… “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!”

So when the market bottoms and even the million Schwab millionaires are having trouble making the payments and putting food on the table, Trump and his billionaire buddies and assorted low life “disaster capitalists” will be sucking up assets for pennies on the dollar while we hunt rabbits and not for pets. 

Respectfully submitted and discussion welcome, Dyna Sluyter