Subject: Re: Watching Trump and Tariff speech
Your board brethren fall into the trap of assuming that the White House never games out scenarios and outcomes. I’d caution you not to do the same.

It's possible, sure. Or equally possible, that none of these tariffs will stick - maybe he just wants every country on the top part of the chart to have to call him up and "deal" to reach some outcome that lets him posture that something important has happened, whether it is or not.

But I'd caution you not to fall into the trap of assuming that every bad idea that Trump has is in service of some grand strategy, where scenarios and outcomes have been gamed out. Sometimes, the contents are just what it says on the tin. Sometimes, it's just a bad idea that he happens to believe is a good idea. Exhibit A is Greenland, where despite your belief that he didn't really want the country and was only pretending to want to acquire it to pursue some more achievable strategic purpose, it's pretty clear that no - he just actually wants to acquire Greenland.

This is, BTW, in itself a major part of the problem. While Trump seems to think that his unpredictability is an asset in negotiations, it also vastly increases the damages that policies like big tariffs will cause to the economy - because people and firms can't adjust to them. When he imposes a 30+% tariff on imports from Taiwan, companies like AAPL or WMT have no idea whether that tariff is going to last through his term - or even through the end of the month. Because he is inconsistent, he has no way to convincingly communicate to American firms what his actual policy plans are - which means they suffer more economic damage than they would if they had visibility into what he actually intends to do.

So while one hopes that this actually is just a gambit, and that he doesn't mistakenly believe that tariffs are costless benefits to US, I'm far from optimistic that this is the case. As well as worried that it doesn't entirely matter, because even the uncertainty may well be enough to cause significant harm to both the American and the global economy even if he does back down.