[notahacker]

This belief seems to disregard the fact that the billionaire crowd hates markets being spooked far more than it cares about 10 year Treasury yields (which in any case went up precisely because markets were spooked; if you wanted to do something about reducing long term bond yields, committing to just about any other economic policy would be more credible). Even some of the most sycophantic billionaires were evidently furious about the tariff policy.

Also, Trump has been obsessed with the idea of tariffs since the 1980s.

[magicloop]

My listening to such billionaires explains a different attitude.

Small investors, and medium investors hate market turbulence for sure. But when you are a billionaire, you can easily profit from short term uncertainty. For example, Chamath recently disclosed a (potentially large) Credit Default Swap position (meaning he makes huge upside if USA debt position deteriorates). But he was the same person deeply concerned about USA long term debt. He is a well connected person to the executive branch.

The reason is that if you are a billionaire (tied to the USA financial system) then you can't escape the system when the entire system falls due to (God forbid) a collapse of the USA financial system in 10 years time. It is like they are the dinosaurs worried about a Meteor strike, but not worried about tigers and snakes (that can't hurt them).

[notahacker]

If the billionaires were genuinely concerned about a complete collapse of the USA financial system in 10 years, they wouldn't have bet on a president with a track record of expanding debt to pump the stock market in the first place, and it would be hard to imagine anything less likely to stave off a crash than launching a trade war or threatening to annex your neighburs. Frankly the only only credible cause of the US economy completely collapsing within a decade is called Donald.

Getting a short term interest rate cut makes very little difference to the robustness of the US economy in a decade's time, and even if it did, there are many ways of getting a short term interest rate cut that don't involve massive economic disruption and permanently sabotaging US trading relationships (most obviously, the president nominates the chair of the Fed...). You could see what the likes of Ackman and Elon actually thought about the tariffs from them breaking ranks to moan about them.

The billionaires who backed Trump like standard right wing stuff like tax cuts, deregulation and/or racism, or figured he was going to win anyway so they might as well get credit for being seen as his ally. Some of them might actually be well informed enough to place shorts (and hey, the ones who own trading shops rather than manufacturing and services companies might be able to win more than they lose in equity value that way) but that's a completely separate issue from the idea that chaos now could have positive effects in a decade's time, which only one billionaire in the world is dumb enough to believe...