[techpineapple]

Something I often think that politically naive people over-index on is the ability to bully people when you have no leverage. I see comments on the left all the time about this “why doesn’t Biden just pull Joe Manchin into his office and threaten him! Because Joe Manchin would come out of the office, tell his voters Joe Biden threatened him and he told him to f* off, and gain like 100k new voters!

It’s wild to maybe watch our president make the same mistake. This conservative attitude of throwing bout weight around in the world, leading through strength, not realizing everyone has other options.

In a weird way, I think some of this might be healthy for the world? To create a more anti fragile world order? But it’s not great for us.

[toomuchtodo]

There are people who will learn from this lesson, and people who love the bullying and could not care less. Regardless, friendly US trade counterparties are making rational decoupling decisions to prevent further weaponization of trade against them, which is just good policy. If it impairs the US economic outlook, well, better choices could've been made. But this is what the unsophisticated voted for, so let them have it.

[alabastervlog]

Meanwhile, deglobalizing might increase domestic manufacturing, over time (years)... except there's going to be minimal activity on that for a while, unless businesses are sure Trump-like policies are going to last a decade or more.

Since he's flip-flopping day to day on trade policy, it's hard to see how they'd be sure of that, even if he personally was going to be directly setting trade policy for the next decade, which is itself a pretty pessimistic assumption about rule of law (so, political and economic-system stability) which doesn't help with the "pulling the trigger on major capital investments" thing.

There's no clear high-confidence route forward at all right now, so businesses will be stuck in a holding pattern until things stabilize, and instead of any meaningful material benefits (setting aside whether they outweigh the harm) from these policies, we'll only feel pain.