On the menu today: The markets, and the economy, don’t care what you think of President Trump. They do seem to care about what Trump says, or what trade adviser Peter Navarro or Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says. But if the markets don’t like what the president and his men are saying, they will react quickly and intensely. The markets don’t care if you think a policy like the sweeping tariffs announced last week should be given a chance, for a couple weeks or a couple months, to see if it works as intended. Economic news has traveled fast and furiously since last Wednesday, and the administration would be wise to heed these hard-learned lessons.
Hard Lessons, One After Another
For much of the past week, if you objected to the complicated, sweeping plan for tariffs on every U.S. trading partner, you were told, “You’re rushing to judgment.” The problem is that the world’s financial markets make judgments fast, and act fast, particularly when they don’t like something.
It’s not just the stock markets, but we can start with them. The day Trump took office, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 43,487.83, the tech-heavy Nasdaq ...
