[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.