Every day I write that the stock market is going to hell in a handbasket, Mr. Market says:
“I’ll show you. And my stocks go through the roof.”
Like today!
It’s clear that I cannot predict the future. None of us can.
Nor is there always a correlation between bad news and the direction of the stock market.
So, for now, I will highlight some of Trump’s policies — what they’re causing to business confidence and, hence, our stocks (longer term than today):
Some quotes I’ve found from my reading:
+ A poll of 220 CEOs by Chief Executive magazine, fielded March 4-5, found that the outlook for business conditions in 12 months fell to the lowest level since November 2012.
+ Trump officials have implied that, at least for the metal tariffs, deal making is not on the table. Asked what it would take to remove steel and aluminum tariffs, Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, said Wednesday that Mr. Trump views metals as “fundamental for our national security.”
“The president wants steel and aluminum in America, said Lutnick, “And let me be clear, nothing’s going to stop that until we’ve got a big, strong domestic steel and aluminum capability.”
+ From the Wall Street Journal: “We said from the beginning that this North American trade war is the dumbest in history, and we were being kind.”
Now, would some wise person explain to me (Harry Newton) how this aluminum plant inBécancour, Quebec could be built economically in the U.S. The plant uses cheap hydroelectric power. According to Perplexity, This aluminum plant utilizes Quebec’s abundant and cost-effective hydroelectricity, which is a key competitive advantage for the facility.3. The use of hydroelectric power allows the Bécancour smelter to produce aluminum with a low carbon footprint, making it one of the most environmentally friendly aluminum production facilities in North America.
According to Perplexity,
The production of aluminum is an energy-intensive process, with electricity consumption being a significant factor. Based on recent data, it takes approximately 13,000 to 17,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity to produce one metric ton of aluminum
+ Europeans are up in arms. Here’s Senator Claude Malhuret’s brilliant speech to the French Parliament
I love this headline:
And this is from the New Yorker:
I
If there’s one truth Donald Trump seems to have absorbed in his seventy-eight years, it is that there are advantages to lying all the time—foremost among them that no one knows when you’re bluffing and when you actually mean what you say. Imposing crippling tariffs on allies? Selling out Ukraine? Using the government to enact retribution on political enemies?
The President may have threatened all these things, may have said—over and over again—that he is, in fact, intent on carrying them out. But even now, after he has opened his second term with a spate of remarkably destabilizing actions to accompany his inflammatory rhetoric, there persists a degree of uncertainty, in part because no one can ever really offer a definitive answer to the question: How far, after all, is he prepared to go?
Already, Trump’s endemic lack of clarity has produced a significant amount of real-world backlash. During the past month, amid the near-daily barrage of contradictory information about the President’s trade war, the S. & P. 500 index has fallen more than ten per cent from its February record high, putting it in official market-correction territory. A new Reuters/Ipsos survey, published this week, found that fifty-seven per cent of Americans believed Trump’s economic policies are too “erratic.” The federal government itself has descended into a Trump-induced state of confusion that has no precedent. On Thursday, a federal judge ordered the government to rehire thousands, if not tens of thousands, of workers across six federal agencies who have been caught up in the purges ordered by Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency. The fact that it was not immediately clear how many fired employees would be affected underscored the point.
No response was forthcoming, though I guess it was an answer of sorts to hear Trump repeat his demand, less than an hour later, that Canada become America’s fifty-first state. (Generously, he said that the Canadians could keep their national anthem.) As for the G-7, Trump has said repeatedly that, in his first few weeks back in office, the group should readmit Russia—the adversary whose invasion of Ukraine the other members of the group and the United States, until recently, have been spending hundreds of billions of dollars to counter.
No wonder I haven’t been able to stop thinking about a remark I heard from a former senior Pentagon official this week, apropos of Trump’s pivot toward Vladimir Putin. Quoting the late whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg about the Vietnam War, he observed “It wasn’t that we were on the wrong side. We were the wrong side.”
A few weeks ago, I attended a lunch at a Washington think tank, where supporters of Ukraine wondered whether Trump would actually abandon the country for Russia. The session took place a few days after Trump publicly blamed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Ukraine itself—and a few days before Trump’s now-infamous Oval Office confrontation with Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, which resulted in Zelensky getting kicked out of the White House and an abrupt, albeit temporary, cutoff of U.S. military and intelligence assistance to his country.
Even so, it was clear to me that many participants were shocked and dismayed that, in the face of so much evidence to the contrary, Trump appeared to be proceeding with what he had long threatened to do. My host noticed this, too—afterward, he quoted a favorite line of his, from the poet William Carlos Williams, about “the rare occurrence of the expected.” How perfect. More elegant than “he told you so,” the line might as well be an epigraph for these Trumpy times.
The will to believe otherwise is a sad truth about human nature that a cynic such as Trump has learned to exploit. Hope may not be a strategy, but it remains a default setting. The President’s doublespeak, his purposeful confusion and endless equivocations about how seriously to take his pronouncements, don’t only serve to keep doors open and to maintain plausible deniability; they provide cover to those looking for a way to support his unsupportable actions. I think part of what seems so drastic and different about Trump 2.0 is not the radicalism of his agenda but that he is moving so quickly to act on it. It has become harder and harder to rationalize his words away as merely the empty posturings of an accidental President. For the first time in the more than eight years that he has dominated our politics, America—and the rest of the world—is coming to terms with the idea that Donald Trump might really mean it. ♦
What does Canada think of all this?
Mark Carney was just sworn in as Canada’s new prime minister. Here’s an interview he did recently with Jon Stewart of the Daily Show.
Here are Bessent’s dumb remarks:
To watch Bessent, who is not the brightest pebble on the beach, click here.
These anti-Tesla events are heating up.
Here’s one in Hawaii:
I still believe Tesla is a good short, despite the fact that Donald Trump may have actually bought one. Others, however, aren’t.
Stocks today
Nvidia, ET, NFLX, Meta, Google and Amazon and gold are doing well today. I have sold some stocks recently, but held these. I still hold a big position in NVDA. My remaining stocks are listed on the web site.
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— See you soon. — Harry Newton.
