[crazygringo]

Trump said a million contradictory things on the campaign trail. Even the smartest businessmen who donated money to him didn't think this was coming. After his election, the market didn't expect it at all either.

If you look at polls and read interviews, the #1 reason voters gave for voting for Trump was that he was a businessman who would lower inflation after Biden had raised it. Now he's doing the polar opposite. This is not what Trump supporters voted for.

[silverquiet]

My coworkers and I have been discussing how to prepare our company for tariffs since last November. I didn't realize that we were smarter than then smartest businessmen. Perhaps that is no great feat.

Trump promised his voters "vengeance"; that is what they voted for.

[crazygringo]

That's fantastic for you.

But yes, you can clearly see from the market that you have been much smarter, if your company was confident enough to take action to spend a lot of money to hedge against this. You'll make out like bandits if the tariffs remain, so congratulations. Truly, anyone who saw this coming and shorted stocks appropriately is now rich. That's how unexpected this was.

But Trump was promising vengeance on cultural issues and immigration. Not on prices. Again -- voters expected him to follow through on his promise to lower prices. Not to raise them massively.

[disgruntledphd2]

The global 10% tariff was mentioned repeatedly. As was the constant focus on trade deficits.

But he's been saying crazy stuff for a decade now, and didn't implement stuff like this before so I can see how people were surprised.

[Marsymars]

> But Trump was promising vengeance on cultural issues and immigration. Not on prices. Again -- voters expected him to follow through on his promise to lower prices. Not to raise them massively.

This is easy to reason through if you just remember that Trump and his cronies are not smart or competent. They have basically no concept of how to follow through on a promise if there’s any complexity to it.

Take a look at the list of kept promises from the first term: https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/list/?prom...

And the list of broken promises: https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/list/?prom...

The kept promises are trivial, while the broken promises include everything that can’t be accomplished by executive diktat. (Such as lower prices, unless he directly puts a price limit on goods in an executive order.)

Basically the only value in reading into his non-trivial promises is in considering “how could he make things worse if he follows through on attempting this?”

[ModernMech]

> Even the smartest businessmen who donated money to him didn't think this was coming.

At some level being "smart" means having the foresight to predict these things. How smart can you really be if you didn't see this coming? Certainly not amongst the "smartest".

Because it's not like no one predicted it. Yes Trump say contradictory things but it's not at all hard to read the man. People like George Conway have been correctly predicting his moves since 2017, because although Trump is inconsistent in his words, he's actually very consistent in his actions.

[crazygringo]

> How smart can you really be if you didn't see this coming?

Pretty smart. We judge intelligence as the ability to predict thousands of different things in lots of different scenarios, and nobody ever gets everything right 100%.

The idea that you would define intelligence solely by your prediction on tariffs isn't a definition most people will share.

[ModernMech]

You're right intelligence is multifaceted.

But when you say things like "Even the smartest businessmen who donated money to him didn't think this was coming", I cannot agree because as I said, plenty of people saw this coming. The smartest businessmen did think it was coming, they were right. They got the signal from the noise. They put the puzzle together.

The ones who didn't think it was coming were not among the smartest. They were fooled by the noise and didn't connect the dots.

[crazygringo]

> plenty of people saw this coming

But as a percentage of smart people, it's miniscule. And people can get things right for the wrong reasons. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, as they say.

> The smartest businessmen did think it was coming

Prove it. Show us the list of smartest businessmen according to some independent metric in 2024, and then show me how many of them shorted the market because the saw tariffs coming at these levels, because that would be the obvious action to make tons of money.

Unless you can do that, you're retroactively defining "smartest" by this one issue, and hindsight is 20/20 as we all know...

Because the market reaction already proves that the smart money hadn't priced this in. You're the one who needs to demonstrate the contrary here.

[disgruntledphd2]

Warren Buffett sold a bunch of his US stocks recently so I guess he counts.

[ModernMech]

> But as a percentage of smart people, it's miniscule.

Yeah, which makes them the smartest. The top is usually small compared to the whole.

> And people can get things right for the wrong reasons. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, as they say.

Except people have a now decade-long track record of calling Trump correctly. I already gave you a name George Conway. You want a list of people who called this before it happened, look into the people he follows and retweets.

> Show us the list of smartest businessmen according to some independent metric in 2024, and then show me how many of them shorted the market because the saw tariffs coming at these levels, because that would be the obvious action to make tons of money.

That evidence would not prove what I said because as you stated, even a broken clock is right twice a day. WSB is making bank on this event as you must know, but I wouldn't put them in the "smartest" category because someone is always on the winning side of these kinds of events and being there doesn't make them smart necessarily.

> Because the market reaction already proves that the smart money hadn't priced this in. You're the one who needs to demonstrate the contrary here.

All it proves is the market is irrational and doesn't understand the nature of Trump.

Because here's what it comes down to: yes, Trump did say a lot of things during the election, and perhaps people heard what they wanted to. But they key realization that anyone has to understand about Trump is that he's not a sane individual. The smartest people understand this and they can accurately predict his moves. Not as smart people refuse to acknowledge this, and they try to ascribe rationality to his motives, which he continually confounds, because.... he's not a rational individual. The smart move would to stop trying to fit a rational peg into an insane hole.

And so you can be the richest business man, with decades of experience, and huge portfolios, but you cannot be the smartest if you continually for a decade, allow this massive blind spot to infect your reasoning w.r.t. Trump.

The exact mistake these investor made was thinking "gee, I made a lot of money his first term, it wasn't that bad. It should be the same this term. He's crazy like a fox, not crazy crazy."

The error is that this line of thinking ignores the giant gaping insurrection that Trump caused, and the massive distorted reality he created to justify it. Trump does not live in a rational world anymore, he lives in a world he made up to soothe his own ego that he lost in 2020. And because these big brain investors with more money than sense had $$$ in their eyes, they forget to recalibrate their expectations from a president checked by rational institutionalists, to a guy who is clearly on a power trip and supported by a compliant Congress and no one to say "no" in the White House.

So at the end of the day, the people who need to prove they're amongst the smartest business people are those who are blindsided, confused, and disoriented while others are clear-eyed, can explain this whole situation from first principles, and are using the current events to validate their model of Donald Trump to better predict him in the future.

[crazygringo]

> That evidence would not prove what I said because as you stated, even a broken clock is right twice a day.

That's my point. The tiny number of people you can identify just got lucky.

> The smartest people understand this and they can accurately predict his moves.

No they can't. You can't predict the behavior of someone who isn't sane, as you put it. Their behavior is random and impulsive, not predictable.

People who predicted tariffs at these levels aren't smarter. Just "lucky". Or maybe not even, since during our exchange, Trump has suddenly and unpredictably rolled back most of the tariffs...