Seth Wenig/AP Photo
Jonathan Mueller works on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange in New York, April 2, 2025.
One of the most famous tweets of all time describes conservative voters’ attempt to punish people they don’t like backfiring on themselves: “‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.” It’s a cliché at this point to cite this, but the tweet is only becoming more relevant as Donald Trump has unleashed the biggest leopard of all on a core source of his support: the financial industry. His deranged trade war with the entire planet is cratering markets around the world and may unleash a global financial crisis.
A great many Trump-supporting financiers and business leaders thought they were ushering in the usual Republican regime of low taxes and lax regulation. Markets soared on the news of his election, reaching a peak in January. “I am quite optimistic that this administration is going to run a very, very pro-growth agenda,” said David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs. “I feel liberated,” a “top banker” told the Financial Times. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled … it’s a new dawn.” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon even supported Trump’s tariff ideas outright. “Get over it,” he said at Davos in January.
Since then, with Trump plainly mentally unbalanced and Elon Musk tearing up the government structures that underpin American capitalism, markets had fallen by about 15 percent as of early April. And now, Wall Street is getting perhaps the most wholly gratuitous market crash in history—touched off not by a business failure or bank run, but by the dumbest president in history dropping a neutron bomb on the global trading system for no reason.
On Monday, European and Asian markets had their worst day since March 2020, when the pandemic hit. In America at the time I’m writing, markets sold off hard initially, but then gyrated wildly based on false rumors that Trump would pause the tariffs. Futures markets, however, are expecting a crash, with S&P 500 futures falling about 15 percent over the last week. If the tariffs stay in place or get higher—while I was writing this article, Trump announced another 50 percent duty on China—that most assuredly will happen.
It’s important to emphasize that Trump’s tariffs straight up make no sense whatsoever on multiple levels. He has said repeatedly that he wants them to bring back manufacturing jobs—like the famously relaxing, high-paid, and rewarding job of hunching over a desk assembling iPhones, as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick recently promised is coming—but Trump has also said he wants tariff revenue to completely replace the income tax, massively shifting the burden of taxation from the rich to the middle and working classes. These goals are contradictory: If manufacturers do come back, then they won’t pay any tariffs, and there will be no revenue. In any case, Trump has set many of the tariffs so high that in many countries trade will likely be choked off entirely, particularly given retaliatory tariffs already coming from several big countries.
Or consider that Trump has said that his tariffs are permanent, which is a precondition for any manufacturing reshoring, because it takes several years to build a factory, and about a decade more for the resulting sales to pay it off. But he and other administration officials have also indicated that they are open to negotiation, implying they might not be permanent. Moreover, Trump has already yanked tariffs up and down so many times for no reason—not to mention telling bald-faced lies with every other word that comes out of his mouth—that any promise of his is worthless. In any case, he can’t guarantee that a future president won’t get rid of them, which is virtually guaranteed to happen. No sane manufacturing company is going to break ground on new American factories so long as Trump remains in power.
Or consider that Trump’s tariffs punish even countries that are doing what he supposedly wants. The utterly asinine (and possibly AI-generated) formula is simply based on half the trade deficit in goods, implying that the way to lower it is to balance one’s trade with the U.S. Trump has also said outright that this is his goal. But his formula also has a 10 percent minimum, eliminating the payoff for doing what he wants. Australia, for instance, has a substantial trade deficit in goods with the U.S. (meaning it imports more from America than it exports to it), yet it still got a 10 percent tariff. This creates an incentive to reverse that deficit into a surplus of up to 20 percent, because that would leave it in the same position.
Leaving out the trade balance in services is also crazy. The U.S. has a large surplus in this sector, coming from industries like transportation, finance, and tourism. Countries angry at Trump’s lunatic attack could target those companies specifically without affecting the tariff at all (though Trump might add new ones, of course). Indeed, tourism is already being hit hard from stories of ICE abducting European and Canadian tourists and throwing them into prison. The European Union is already considering the biggest and fattest target of them all, Silicon Valley. Europeans spend billions on American tech services, and the EU has an “anti-coercion instrument” that grants it sweeping powers to defend against economic attack. Both French and German officials have recommended considering its use, which could include everything from stepped-up regulations to an outright ban on U.S. tech firms.
I have nothing but contempt for the investor-class idiots being caught by surprise. Though no one could have predicted precisely how deranged Trump’s tariffs would be, because he is the most erratic man who has ever lived, tariffs were the core of his campaign platform. He talked constantly about how “tariff” was “the most beautiful word in the dictionary,” mulling huge rates of 30, 40, 50 percent or more. It’s one of his few consistent obsessions: Go back to the 1980s, and he was saying similar things. Yet supposedly savvy investors—whose entire job is supposed to be understanding and managing risk—dismissed the possibility out of hand. “[I] assumed economic rationality would be paramount,” wrote the ultra-MAGA venture capitalist Bill Ackman—whose main fund is down 15 percent this year—on Vichy Twitter. “My bad.” You’d be better off trusting a chimp to manage your retirement portfolio.
My contempt only deepens when remembering how good investors had it under President Biden. The markets soared, profits were fat, investment was flowing powerfully, and industrial policy was increasing factory construction without inducing any market tremors, much less sell-offs. They could have kept the good times going under a President Harris. Instead, we’re blowing up the global economy so bankers can safely say “pussy” at the office.
It only strengthens the case for the next Democratic president, if there is one, to tax billionaires out of existence. There is no point in appeasing these ingrate imbeciles.
