‘We’re Going to Be an Entirely Different Country’
As markets crash and businesses reel, the Wall Street Journal tries to explain the president’s thinking.
Good Morning!
Here are today’s highlights:
“The real fireworks are yet to come,” warns an expert in global trade.
“But then what?” asks a business owner who is considering throwing in the towel. “[I’ve] taken on so much debt to keep things going through the pandemic and to grow.”
Small businesses looking to borrow money suddenly have a new question they will have to answer.
You should expect cuts to Medicaid to send premiums for private employers higher.
INTERNATIONAL TRADE
The Wall Street Journal tries to explain what President Trump is thinking: “The rest of the world has been ripping off the U.S. for 40 years, [the president] told advisers who asked him to articulate his economic vision. It was, he and his advisers would note, an argument he has been making on television since the 1980s. Before his second term ends, he said, he feels he has to right those wrongs. If people complained about the tariffs he was about to impose, Trump told his inner circle to remind the public of his view of how the U.S. once was and could be again: a place with thriving Main Streets and hometowns, where American workers made American products sold to the American public.”
“Trump leaned into that vision with his market-shaking tariff announcement Wednesday. ‘Empty, dead sites, factories that are falling down…will be knocked down, and they’re going to have brand new factories built in their place,’ he said, to an audience that included members of the United Auto Workers union. ‘We’re going to be an entirely different country.’”
“Perhaps the most striking aspect of Trump’s dramatic move to reposition the American economy is the timing. The economy he inherited was the envy of the world with growth of 2.8 percent last year, faster than almost every other major developed economy, an unemployment rate of just 4.1 percent and inflation of 2.8 percent. Stocks were at record highs. Wall Street assumed Trump would prioritize growth-friendly tax cuts and deregulation while delaying and diluting tariffs, as he did in his first term.”
“Instead, Trump decided to administer shock treatment immediately. The economy, he argued, is a sick patient that needs therapy now, regardless of the pain. “THE PATIENT LIVED, AND IS HEALING. THE PROGNOSIS IS THAT THE PATIENT WILL BE FAR STRONGER, BIGGER, BETTER, AND MORE RESILIENT THAN EVER BEFORE,” he wrote on social media Thursday.”
“On Wednesday, Trump affirmed his commitment to both tariffs and prosperity. But the announcement didn’t explain how the first would lead to the second.” READ MORE
