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Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
augieray ("Augie Ray") wrote:

Trump's Liberation Day is liberating me from my retirement plans. Screen caps are from The Financial Times, The Economist, and the Wall Street Journal. Make America Poor Again. 😡

If it endures, Donald Trump’s decision on April 2 2025 to enact sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs on US trade partners will go down as one of the greatest acts of self-harm in American economic history. They will wreak untold damage on households, businesses and financial markets across the world, upending a global economic order that America benefited from and helped to create.
IF YOU FAILED to spot America being “looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far” or it being cruelly denied a “turn to prosper”, then congratulations: you have a firmer grip on reality than the president of the United States. It's hard to know which is more unsettling: that the leader of the free world could spout complete drivel about its most successful and admired economy. Or the fact that on April 2nd, spurred on by his delusions, Donald Trump announced the biggest break in America’s trade policy in over a century—and committed the most profound, harmful and unnecessary economic error in the modern era.
The President’s ideological fixation on tariffs is crowding out rational judgments about the consequences. Americans are being told to accept the pain of higher prices, a slower economy, and shrinking 401(k) balances in the name of Mr. Trump’s project to transform the American economy into what he imagines it was like in the McKinley era of the 1890s. We wonder if the working-class voters who are supposed to be the vanguard of the new GOP will feel as good about the pain as they try to make ends meet paycheck to paycheck.