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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

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    > 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/?promise_group=trumpometer&ruling=promise-kept 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/?promise_group=trumpometer&ruling=promise-broken 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 2y ago
> 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 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      > 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.

silverquiet 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  > 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/?promise_group=trumpometer&ruling=promise-kept 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/?promise_group=trumpometer&ruling=promise-broken 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 2y ago

> 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 2y ago
> 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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    > 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.