[throwaway63467]

Does anyone think they’re doing it on purpose to profit from short selling stocks? I mean they peddled two sh*tcoins right on Inauguration Day so it doesn’t seem too far fetched they would intentionally tank the stock market as well. It’s hard to see any other angle to this ridiculous policy. If you know where stocks are going you can profit regardless whether they go up or down, and making them go down is easier than making them go up, as a president.

[sorcerer-mar]

Another angle: he's a very stupid person.

Consider if you were kind of a dumbass but born very wealthy. You go your entire life running from income tax. Then someone mentions tariffs to you. A complete dumbass in this situation would, obviously, be extremely excited about the idea of replacing income tax with tariffs. And fortunately for him/unfortunately for us, it's one of the few things POTUS can basically do unilaterally.

It has side-benefits like centralizing power so everyone has to come to you for exemptions, it makes it look like you have a chance of moving American industry back a few decades which would be great for a chunk of your constituency, etc.

But fundamentally he's just a dumbass and the people around him are fully indoctrinated into his cult. Very dangerous combination.

https://www.axios.com/2025/02/20/commerce-secretary-lutnick-...

[rapnie]

Another angle: The planned demolishment of democracy involves a recession/depression.

[mls4o4]

He is not just stupid but he has unlimited energy so the famous Hammerstein-Equord quote about 4 types of officers applies.

Add modern context of the Attention Economy built on exploiting the fact that people have limited Attention to give anything, but unlimited capacity to Receive Attention. Trump being the textbook example. So we have a double whammy.

[Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe]

Had to look it up, that's great thanks:

> I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord

[mingus88]

There is also the obvious angle to destabilize the world economy to benefit Russia, whose name was not on the tariff board at all.

Yes, the excuse was that sanctions already apply but who would like to place bets on when those are lifted (as a negotiation for Ukraine)

Were it not also the fact that the US just canned the head of the NSA and publicly ceased cyber activities against Russia, it’s hard see this any other way

[epistasis]

Nobody has come up with anything halfway rational to explain this behavior. The closest, the so-called "Mar-a-lago Accord", is filled with so many holes that it cannot be a coherent theory. (See, for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfDKbWA1NzY for an explanation of it and why it's obviously wrong).

One thing that dictators reliably do is tank the economy to destroy the middle class, which consolidates power for them. That's the most coherent motivation that I have bene able to find.

[rsync]

The best explanation I can think of is that sanctions relief will be exchanged for haircuts (restructuring) of foreign held debt.

If you’re familiar with bankruptcy - and the president is - then you know all about reduction of principal…

[epistasis]

That is roughly the Mar-a-lago accord idea, but the both the financial leverage for that and the negotiating tactics have been completely mismanaged if that's the goal, it really doesn't make any sense.

[pjc50]

Someone is probably insider trading on this, but so far they look more like True Believers who don't expect it to go badly than 5D chess manipulators. In particular, Musk tying his reputation so strongly to the far right has been nothing but bad for his stock holdings.

[CamperBob2]

Musk's case is at least somewhat understandable. The critics who call him the "ultimate government welfare queen" are not wrong; practically every dime he has earned has either come from government contracts or subsidies, or depends on maintaining a good working relationship with agencies ranging from NASA to the Department of Transportation.

Following his takeover of Twitter in 2022, he would have been among the first to understand what was about to happen in 2024. Pivoting to the right -- not just pivoting to the right, but actively embracing it -- is something he had no choice in, if he wanted to keep his companies healthy. They were built atop a government that was about to disappear, so the only logical thing to do was to signal loyalty by throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at the Trump campaign.

Of course, his Nazi salutes made no sense in any context, but then neither did cheating at video games or calling Unsworth a pedophile for dissing his submarine idea. I'd chalk his erratic behavior up to drugs or ongoing mental challenges that ultimately don't have much to do with politics.

Zuckerberg and Bezos were slower to catch on but they did catch on in the end. They understood that they had an enormous amount to lose by alienating Trump. If the wires of democracy, from Section 230 to the US Postal Service, were about to be ripped from the wall by Trumpers, they had to get in position to influence those events. See also Sam Altman.

I don't blame any of these people for acting rationally. The question I have is, when are all these big billionaire alpha moguls going to stop reacting to a chaos monkey and start pushing back, if only behind the scenes? Who has more to lose from tearing down the established world order than the people who succeeded so massively under that very system? Don't they understand that while they will continue to be players, their playground will become a much smaller, weaker kingdom, one surrounded by rivals who now have an incentivize to organize against us?

[spwa4]

Musk is explainable. Tesla WAS going to fail, and that became inevitable long before the election. Musk was going to lose big whether Trump or Harris (or Biden) got elected. Granted, probably less dramatic and slower failure than what we see now, but it was always going to fall big. Musks' new design, the cybertruck is a disaster, and he would have been the first to know. BYD is eating Tesla's lunch ... and BYD is merely the first and currently highest profile of 10 Chinese companies coming out with electric cars.

And yet, I do think Musk is actually worse off in his current position than he would have been under Harris. Which shows, yet again, what a "great thinker" he is cough. He acted, because he's under threat, that makes sense, but his actions made his situation worse than it would have been had he done nothing.

Then again, in this market, I bet a lot of people feel like that.

[CamperBob2]

Agreed that Musk would have been vastly better off with Harris, but I think his actions are purely reactive. It's not his fault that Harris lost. He's just trying to make lemonade, having seen early on that life was about to hand us all a lemon. For every normal person who refuses to buy a Tesla, he has to sell one to a MAGA cultist, and that is never going to happen.

The fact that his "lemonade" tastes suspiciously like pee is his fault, though.

[orionsbelt]

Trump seems to have legitimately held this position for a longtime. Look at this clip from decades ago:

https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/1907456765215588734

I think he’s also surrounded by yes men who are afraid to tell him when his ideas are wrong.

[fzeroracer]

Trump posted on his Truth Social account that he's crashing the market on purpose this morning [1] so, you know. Take from that what you will.

[1] https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1142796795728...

[mysterydip]

I could also see a plan to transfer a large portion of corporate ownership to a smaller number of individuals with a lot of wealth by tanking the stocks and buying when they're rock bottom, then implement "recovery plan B" and let them go back up.

[aixpert]

I didn't expect this to be the top comment so I posted an identical take without reading first

[HelloAll]

Maybe. There were exemptions to the tariffs. The exemptions included Russia. If the tariffs remain, companies are incentivized to invest in places with no tariffs to USA (as Trump removes Russia sanctions whenever it's convenient).

So, we've been hit with the largest tax increase (peacetime) in US history with no coherent explanation. Even the Project 2025 master plan suggests the idea is to devalue the dollar to save hundreds of billions. We've already lost trillions, so that didn't work.

I think the most obvious answer is incompetence, but there are piles of shit and coincidence with MAGA and Russia. I'm not in denial.

[ARandumGuy]

It's possible. The wealthy are a lot better positioned to make a lot of money during a bear market then the average person, as they can afford to buy a lot of stocks when they're cheap. Just look how much money billionaires like Bezos or Musk made during COVID.

But even if that's their plan, that doesn't mean they're executing it competently. The specific tariff amounts do not seem well thought through, and fighting a trade war against literally every other country in the world seems like a bad idea.

There's an idea called Hanlon's Razor which states "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". It's a good rule of thumb, but it implies that malice/stupidity is an either/or choice. I think that the Trump tariffs are a malicious plan executed stupidly, and if nothing changes the effects will be catastrophic.