<p class="ql-block"><span style="font-size:18px; color:rgb(0, 0, 0);">Remember the speech not long ago? As a matter of fact, only 1 week ago to this exact day, the Orange King declared “this is Liberation Day! April 2, 2025, will forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn, the day American destiny was reclaimed, the day we began to make America wealthy again!”</span></p> <p class="ql-block"><span style="color:rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size:18px;">Remember that? The day the Orange King unleased his tariff war onto the world indiscriminately, even a 99% tariff to the penguins of the Heard and McDonald islands!</span></p> <p class="ql-block"><span style="color:rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size:18px;">It would have been laughable if the consequences were not so grave and cataclysmic.</span></p> <p class="ql-block"><span style="font-size:18px; color:rgb(0, 0, 0);">We all watched in horror as the stock market crashing down, losing $6 trillion market value in 2 days, while the Orange King went golfing, and left his puppets to assure the market that the King had a strategy, the King knew what he was doing, the King was firm with his tariff plan, the King would not change his plan and the King would not capitulate.</span></p> <p class="ql-block">The Dow Industrial Average as of 4/10/25</p> <p class="ql-block"><span style="color:rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size:18px;">However, on Wednesday morning, the bond market started showing signs of cratering (the 10-year bond yield rose sharply while the bond value plummeting), a clear early sign of tariff-induced “Lehman moment” for the financial system. This forced the Orange King to reduce tariff for all countries (including the penguins) except China and pause at 10% for 90 days. The market breathed a sigh of relief temporarily.</span></p> <p class="ql-block"><span style="color:rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size:18px;">In less than a short week, the King caved from his strong man posture, left his sycophants to perform the contorted act of explaining away the King’s erratic behavior: “this is exactly the outcome he wanted, now 75 countries are lining up to negotiate with the US”; “the president is the master at making deals, he knows the art of deal”, etc.</span></p> <p class="ql-block">Want to know what I think? </p><p class="ql-block">First of all, for anyone with the basic understanding of economics (or having taken a class econ 101 in college), TARIFF is not a tax that exporters pay to the US (unlike the Orange King suggested), it is a tax the importers pay and pass onto consumers through price hikes. By increasing the tariffs on goods the US imports, the US government will collect the tariff as revenue, but the American people will pay a higher price on the goods they consume. So tariff is essentially a tax levied on the ordinary people by the US government.</p><p class="ql-block">The Orange King’s trade tzar Peter Navarro, the brain behind the King’s tariff policy, should have known better. If not, both Navarro and the Orange King truly deserve Musk’s spitting for being a “moron”, “retard”, and dumber than a sack of bricks.</p> <p class="ql-block"><span style="font-size:18px; color:rgb(0, 0, 0);">Secondly, the Orange King did not appear to have a plan, let alone a thought-through strategy. He merely wanted to wield his power to the world to bully others into submission, to satisfy his small man’s outsized ego: “I am telling you, these countries are calling us up, kissing my ass, they are dying to make a deal…”, as he bragged at the National Republican Congressional Committee Dinner. Whether it is true or not (he has a habit of lying on things big or small), this is disgusting. How insecure would a person have to be to demonstrate this kind of childish behavior! I want to tell him that bully is a sign of weakness, bully won’t win you respect, bully will never work!</span></p> <p class="ql-block">The chart unveiled on 4/2/25. </p> <p class="ql-block">Thirdly, when asked, the King’s sycophants show a Greek formula (without any explanation of what the letters stand for), to demonstrate there was theoretically support for the reciprocal tariff calculation. This reminded me of the 2008 financial crisis, then some investment firms used a formula to calculate an option cost without understanding the meaning of the parameters or the appropriateness of the input assumptions. </p><p class="ql-block">True enough, on April 7, New York Times published an article by Brent Neiman titled “The Trump White House Cited My Research to Justify Tariffs. It Got It All Wrong”. The conclusion of the article was that had they done it correctly, the calculated tariffs would have been smaller than ¼ of what they were.</p><p class="ql-block">Needless to say, for a policy with this far-reaching and widespread impact, it was rollout out so hastily and without much deliberation. I even spend more time to research and plan out a one-week vacation than what they seem to spend on this tariff “policy”. </p><p class="ql-block">This kind of recklessness is beyond comprehension. One shouldn’t be surprised if the King bankrupts the country in less than 4 years. Bankrupting a business seems more of his expertise<span style="font-size:18px; color:rgb(0, 0, 0);"> than anything else.</span></p> <p class="ql-block">Fourthly, a deficit is not a loss. The King’s advisors, please drill it into his head. The US don’t grow coffee beans, we import them from Africa and South America. We run a deficit on coffee beans, and that’s okay. Don’t use a deficit to incite nationalism if you have any brain at all. </p><p class="ql-block">The Orange King was handed over a booming economy, a bull stock market, and a low unemployment rate at the start of the year, in less than 80 days into his administration, he has turned it upside down. His destructive power is limitless. </p><p class="ql-block">Somehow I don’t feel liberated. April 2 2025 may very well be remembered as the “day of infamy” in the history book. </p>