"Donald Trumps legacy"
Irreparable Damage by Trump
There’s No Coming Back From Trump’s Tariff Disaster
America was the world’s economic anchor. Thanks to the president, it may never have that role again.
By Jerusalem Demsas
Watching the wild lines of the S&P 500, U.S. Treasury bond yields, and various foreign markets is how I’ve spent most of the past week. This felt familiar; I’d spent much of 2017 doing the same, following the vagaries of the first Trump administration and tracking the markets’ reactions like a nurse checking a patient’s heart rate.
But despite that familiarity, this isn’t the same as last time. I actually wish it were. This time, there’s no coming back from this quickly. Whoever is elected the 48th president won’t be able to easily rebuild what Donald Trump is busy destroying. Countries can and will move on without the United States. Their firms will establish new supply chains and pursue other markets. Even if the U.S. were the ultra-dominant trading partner it used to be, the credibility of the nation’s promises, its treaties, its agreements, and even its basic rationality has evaporated in just weeks.
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The first Trump administration flirted with protectionism, but nothing like what the second Trump administration is trying now. Those earlier efforts seem quaint in hindsight. Not only were tariffs imposed selectively on specific goods such as solar panels and aluminum, but they were much smaller in size and escalated gradually over the course of 2018 and 2019. This was trivial compared with the plans launched and unlaunched over the past 10 days that have sent bond markets reeling. Usually, investors in search of a haven from a plummeting stock market will flee to buy safe, reliable U.S. Treasury bonds, but the opposite seems to be happening, indicating that investors no longer view the U.S. government as the safest bet in town.
America sports a half-earned cockiness that has mostly served the country well. But as the Financial Times’ Tej Parikh pointed out earlier this week, the United States “isn’t the main driver of global trade growth,” and despite being the world’s largest economy, just over 13 percent of world imports flowed into its borders (as of November 2024). Instead of reshaping trade partnerships to further benefit the U.S., it could be left behind. One analysis Parikh cites—as something of a thought experiment, hopefully—tries to model what would happen to America’s trading partners if the country were to be fully closed to trade in 2025. That analysis predicts that, within the year, nearly 41 percent of U.S. trading partners would have fully recovered from the lost U.S. exports, and by 2029, 100 out of 144 trading partners would have recovered the entirety of their loss of U.S. sales because of the expected growth in other economies.
Questa mattina mi sono alzato
o bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao
questa mattina mi sono alzato
e ho trovato l'invasor.
This morning I woke up
oh bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao
this morning I woke up
and I found the invader.
Rufus Wainwright
# interview
Stevie Nicks
# Gold Dust Woman
Marais on Cello
# Amsterdam Prinsengracht
Concert on Water
George Moustaki
# le Métèque
Led Zeppelin
# Going to California live
Emma Marrone nella Notte della Taranta in Puglia
Tonite Let's All Make Love In London - Interstellar Mix
FIP
# RADIO
en plus:
French Partisan