Tag: Paul Krugman

There’s a new tariff in town

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
The “Rubáiyát of Owe-More Khayyám.”

Hoo-lawd. Anybody’s portfolio turn into a postcard yet?

In case you’ve missed Paul Krugman, he’s speculating over at Substack that Elon’s Hitler Youth may have cobbled together the tariff scheme using ChatGPT and/or other A.I. models.

In my post immediately following the Trump announcement I speculated that Elon Musk’s Dunning-Kruger kids might be responsible for those tariff numbers. That now looks like a distinct possibility.

Who makes policy this way? The key point is that Trump isn’t really trying to accomplish economic goals. This should all be seen as a dominance display, intended to shock and awe people and make them grovel, rather than policy in the normal sense.

Again, I’m not being snobbish here. When the fate of the world economy is on the line, the malignant stupidity of the policy process is arguably as important as the policies themselves. How can anyone, whether they’re businesspeople or foreign governments, trust anything coming out of an administration that behaves like this?

Good time to be heavily invested in the knee- and elbow-pad markets.

Your Daily Don: Follow the leader

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments
“Paul Krugman? How many divisions has he got?” (h/t Winston Churchill, “The Gathering Storm.”)

Almost all economists agree that taxes on imports are, in fact, passed on to consumers. Why? Because that’s what the evidence says, and it’s very hard to come up with an alternative story.

On the other hand, Trump loyalists — which these days means almost the entire Republican Party — insist as a group that foreigners, not American consumers, pay taxes on imports. Why? Because Donald Trump says so. — Paul Krugman, “Trumpism, Stalinism and the Tariff Debate.”