The Losing Begins

Who’s in charge of this country? Are there any adults at home? Why is your computer connected to the stove? Are you trying to blow yourselves up?” Those would be the questions one might ask today if one walked into the White House looking for answers. No one has them. They’re not even trying. And the accusations seem to grow by the minute.

Internet users and experts are accusing the Punk administration of using ChatGPT to determine the percentages in the tariff plan he presented yesterday. After spending several hours trying to figure out how the President’s numbers made a lick of sense, someone asked the OpenAI bot ChatGPT to calculate by dividing the trade deficit we have with a country with our imports from that country, or using 10%, whichever is greater. They even showed screen shots of their conversation. And guess what: they matched the President’s numbers almost to the penny. If you thought that there was someone with economic experience working these all-important numbers, guess again!

The sell-off on Wall Street was the worst seen in five years. The Dow Industrials index dropped 1,600 points by the end of the day. The stock market as a whole lost almost $3 BILLION in valuation in one day. If you still have a 401K, you may want to check it and re-think your retirement plans. Most retirement vehicles lost over $10,000 per account.

Will the market take a breather in the morning? Maybe. Many seem to think that the drop will halt as the markets ponder whether Punk will relent and put his wealth-destroying tariffs on hold. If he doesn’t, the S&P 500 and my IRA will nose-dive again. There’s no telling how deep in the crapper we will all be when Punk finally cries uncle or, alternatively, when Congress intervenes to stop the downward spiral. 

At least, that’s what the economists are telling us. What happens if the President refuses to relent and Congress continues to do nothing about it? When we posed that question to two different economists, they both shook their heads. We could be looking for a disaster that would make the Great Depression look like an Easter picnic.

What’s not helping is that nut jobs like Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno are going around saying things like, “I would go out and buy stocks today. Lots of opportunity, lots of companies that have great valuation. There’s no reason that Apple stock should be down.”

Apparently, the Senator doesn’t realize where those iPhones are made. By some estimations, the cost of a new iPhone could jump as high as $3,200. Don’t expect your carrier to cover all that. Even with traditional financing, it would take close to five years to pay one off.

This demonstrates the degree to which too many Republicans are completely out of touch with reality. The S&P 500 plummeted 4%, the Dow Jones tumbled 1,600 points, and the Nasdaq cratered 5.97%, with nearly $1 trillion in market value wiped out—led by Apple’s $321 billion loss as the tech giant took a 32% earnings hit from the tariffs. Major retailers, financial firms, and semiconductor companies also suffered double-digit losses.

This time around, even the discounters are getting hammered. Until this point, packages that had a value of less than $800 didn’t have to pay a tariff of any kind. However, one of the executive orders we didn’t see on television yesterday ends that loophole effective May 2. That means those Temu and Shein deals that looked so good to so many Americans are going to go away. This is also going to be a blow to fast fashion companies such as H&M, Ross, and TJMaxx.

This catalogue of foolishness brings needless harm to America. Consumers will pay more and have fewer choices. Raising the price of parts for America’s manufacturers while relieving them of the discipline of foreign competition will make them flabby. As stock market futures tumbled, shares in Nike, which has factories in Vietnam (tariff: 46%), fell by 7%.

Yet, remaining as clueless as ever, VP Fuxacouch said today that families living paycheck-to-paycheck should just “suck it up” until things get better. The line to punch the VP in the mouth forms to the right.

Should today’s market drop continue with Asian and European markets overnight, we could be well into a bear market (-20 points off the high or greater) by morning. While some companies, such as General Motors, have the capacity to expand work at some US plants, others, such as Stellantis, are hitting the ‘pause’ button as US plants are dependent on parts made in Canada. Anyone who starts a sentence with “All you have to do is…” is a fool.

Unfortunately, our country is full of fools, and one of them is President.