NEW YORK - President Donald Trump’s tariffs have spooked investors, with fears of an economic downturn driving a stock market sell-off that has wiped out US$4 trillion (S$5.3 trillion) from the S&P 500’s peak last month, when Wall Street was cheering much of Mr Trump’s agenda.
It’s important to remember that the rich in the US will profit off this as the working class gets fucked, it’s not “haha trump dumb,” it’s a planned thing to increase the wealth of the super rich
Buy puts on the way down use the profits to buy the underlying asset at the new low price
The prior generation of neoliberal economics was doing this just fine. Trump is being buoyed, in large part, by a generation of middle managers, professionals, and small business owners who have eaten shit through a generation of consolidation and de-skilling of advanced labor.
But his policies still suck. His neglect of critical infrastructure and his race to defund public goods and services and his clumsy implementation of pseudo-scientific economic policies won’t benefit anyone in the US, rich or poor. The rich will endure the catastrophes better (probably). And they’ll have the resources to flee when shit really starts to hit the fan (for the most part). But the idea that the biggest shareholders of Boeing, Microsoft, Exxon, and JP Morgan Chase are somehow positioned to come out ahead on a massive contraction in real economic production is delusional.
American kleptocrats have made the choice to rule in hell, rather than to pay a 36% marginal tax rate in heaven. And you only have to look as far as Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and Israel to see where this miserable policy ultimately leads. Sergey Brin and Eric Prince are going to trade places with Ahmed bin Abdulaziz and Yevgeny Prigozhin, entirely for the opportunity to avoid dealing with the IRS.