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Your financially clueless and WRONG tariffs are the reason so many of your supporters saw their IRA and 401(k) accounts plummet!

Mr. President, despite your incredibly stupid populist thinking, tariffs cause the LOSS of more jobs than they create.

Investors understand that and reacted accordingly.

In addition, the consensus of most economists is that the true cause of the Great Depression was tariffs.

And, BTW, where in the Constitution does it give you the right to place tariffs on anything?

Answer: NO WHERE!

Isn't that the job of Congress?

Have you never heard of 'Separation of Powers?"

Tariffs are nothing more than a tax on consumers. As anyone with a functioning brain knows, companies do not pay taxes, they only collect taxes. Or, in this case, tariffs.

For every job your stupid tariffs will create in the steel and aluminum industries, more jobs than that will be lost in every other industry!

Well done, you financial ignoramus!

I have to pass this along to the consumer, which is the home buyer.

All of my steel and aluminum have been American products from American mills.

It is my belief that all the tariff will do, is allow the mills to go bananas on pricing. The talk of the tarif has been enough to drive the cost of scrap through the roof.

The American steel mill is who’ll benefit from this and nobody else.

Now, everyone who disagrees, flame away.

Nva whining about a one day 'tank' is not like you.

Nationalism is NOT a sane economic policy!

In fact, what you advocate harms Americans.

Show me how I'm wrong. PLEEZE!

Because I'm sitting here with an arsenal of actual data that proves you wrong.

You're amazingly clueless re. any and all financial issues.

Just admit it , then GO AWAY!

As well as actual FACTS, which populists care not a whit about.

Here are a few initial reactions:

1. How'd Smoot-Hawley work out?

2. Here are some job totals:

Steel industry (2016) = 87,000

Manufacturing employment = 12,555,000

Steel tariffs boost jobs in steel and lower employment in other manufacturing industries.

3. Some economists think the overall trade deficit is important, but I don't know of any who think bilateral trade deficits mean anything. Does it matter whether Korea sends us computers directly, or has its parts assembled in China and then re-exported to the US?

4. Most people assume that the US runs a persistent trade deficit. But if the trade deficit really were persistently negative, properly measured, then this time series should also be negative and falling. Instead, the US surplus on investment income is strongly positive and rapidly increasing. If this is what it means to be a "debtor nation", then lets have lots more debt!

5. Trade barriers hurt export industries, regardless of whether or not other countries choose retaliate. The "retaliation" comes from the normal workings of the market.

6. If someone you know shoots himself in the foot, is it a good idea to retaliate by shooting yourself in the foot?

7. There is no "national security argument" for steel tariffs. The military doesn't use much steel and the US produces orders of magnitude more steel than the military needs. Future world wars will be nuclear, and future smaller wars will in no way restrict US access to Canadian or European steel.

8. All of Trump's competent advisors opposed this move. Every single one.

That said, the goofballs here will now likely crap on us both.

God bless, Steve

Seriously!

Increases price of steel worldwide.

Makes things more expensive.

Higher tarrifs/trade war for OUR steel.

Harder for companies to hire as profit dwindles.

Job loss. Not able to afford US made cars.

Flame away..........:)

Says the financial planner that doesn't even know the origins of central banking.

I think a lot of folks, including the President, don’t seem to understand the “war” part of “trade war.” No, Mr. President, they aren’t “good” like you called them.

No one here who has tried to attack me on this issue has even remotely attempted to claim that tarrifs are a good thing for the country which imposes them.

I rest my case!

When the S&P 500 is down more than 50 points midday and the DOW is down over 1,150 points at the close, that's a 'crash.'

God bless, Steve

And, there is no doubt that the text books and history suggest that tariffs are bad, and specialization amongst nations and free trade between them helps the pie grow for everyone.

However, the economic theories that have governed the past will not necessarily work in the future. It has been said that science advances one funeral at a time, and the same can be said for economics.

The problem i have with the traditional economic models is that they do not measure the social costs attached to the loss of jobs that is attached to specialization and international trade. By some estimates, 25% of working age men in middle america are un / underemployed, and using opiates. There is a huge social cost attached to that, not to mention other entitlements that go along with the loss of jobs.

The theory behind specialization and international free trade rests on the belief that people will be able to improve their skills, and get better paying jobs if they specialize, and allow lesser skilled jobs to be done in foreign countries. The problem is, this isn't happening. One can certainly blame the government for not providing the educational opportunities etc that would allow people to improve their lot, but i think the real problem is that technology is taking over the world, and simply stated, not everyone has the brain power to work in technology or the knowledge economy, and by definition technology requires fewer people to actually do the work.

the specialization theory states that (for example) if underwear can be made cheaper over seas we should let people over seas make underwear so that all US consumers can buy cheaper underwear.... but as the world advances, i think we are increasingly coming to a point where it makes more sense for everyone to spend a bit more on their underwear so more people can have jobs, and the decrease in the social costs will offset the increased cost of underwear.

the libs will tell you, "the future will be great - Universal Basic Income (UBI) for everyone!" but again, i think that misses the point. People don't feel good about being people unless they can have a good job. Most people - and certainly the best people - don't want hand outs.

I am increasingly of the view that jobs are worth fighting for. the problem - as was pointed out - is that in the near term tariffs can cost jobs due to the ripple effects (tariffs on steel = higher prices for anything with steel in it = less demand for those items = job losses for the people who make those things) but in the long term, the economy will adapt and the supply and demand curve will normalize higher.

also NVA - i am a fan of your posts etc - but i have a hard time believing that you were telling your clients, "the market crashed!" due to the tariff headlines. I suspect that you were actually saying, "don't worry about it - we have developed a plan - and we need to stick to the plan." Or, "some days the markets go up, some days they do down - the best strategy is to not focus on it day to day."

The Rock.............. Every piss deserves a second shake just for good measure.

I know of NO way for people to get the crap beat out of them than faster than to engage in online trading.

Not even close!

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro challenged establishment forces and lobbyists for raising alarms about a “trade war” in response to President Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs.

“Lobbyists on K Street are in full throat against this, who cares?” Navarro said on Fox News on Monday. “We got the politicians, everybody in the swamp is rising up against it at the end of the day we’re getting a bad deal.”

Navarro made his remarks after former George W. Bush budget director Josh Bolten criticized Trump’s decision to level tariffs on aluminum and steel. Bolten is now the CEO of the lobbying firm Business Roundtable.

Navarro said that the current aluminum and steel production in the country was “untenable” in the United States, which was why Trump enacted the tariffs.

“There are virtually no costs here, there’s no downstream price impact,” he said.

He also dismissed the notion that Trump would exclude American allies like Canada from the tariff.

“No country excluded, firm line in the sand,” Navarro said.

Navarro’s argument for tariffs and trade renegotiations won out in a fierce debate with White House economic advisor Gary Cohn, as Trump repeatedly derided the former Goldman Sachs COO as a “globalist.”

“Our Steel and Aluminum industries are dead. Sorry, it’s time for a change!” Trump wrote on Sunday. “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

Mansour: ‘Free Trade Absolutism’ Is Surrender in the Face of China’s ‘Economic Warfare’

Decades of “free trade absolutism” by America’s elites, “where we unilaterally disarm while our opponent commits economic warfare against us,” have undermined American national security, decimated the U.S. manufacturing base, and betrayed middle and working class Americans, said Breitbart News’s Senior Editor-at-Large Rebecca Mansour during a opening monologue on Thursday’s edition of Breitbart News Tonight on SiriusXM.

Mansour praised President Donald Trump’s intention to go “full economic nationalist” by levying tariffs on China to “protect American industry” from China’s dumping of steel and aluminum.

Nearly 60 percent of American voters say imposing tariffs on Chinese dumping of steel and aluminum is crucial to the United States’ economic relationship with China, according to a Tuesday-published Morning Consult poll.

The status quo of trade between the U.S. and China — pushed by Washington and Wall Street elites — has harmed America’s national interest, said Mansour:

These policies of the free trade absolutists have put us in a dire situation. This free trade absolutism – where we unilaterally disarm while our opponent commits economic warfare against us – is not what our founders envisioned. And it is certainly not what made this country great. The American system that made this country great, that built this country into the strongest economic superpower the world has ever seen, was based on protecting our manufacturing and having a financial system that lends to our manufacturers.

Trump’s tariff proposal is about our national security and our economy. You have to understand, folks, the loss of our manufacturing base, which our founders clearly saw as crucial, is dangerous and destabilizing, not only because it hurts our workers, but also because it weakens our sovereignty by making us dependent on foreign nations. That’s what is happening right before our eyes. We’ve become dependent on China for the necessities of our national life and for the loans to pay for them.

I want to share a passage from a book that was written in 2011, by one of the smartest commentators, I think, of our times. It was called Suicide of a Superpower. It’s by Pat Buchanan. I want to read some of these passages for you to give you a picture of the state that we are in.

Mansour read from Pat Buchanan’s Suicide of a Superpower:

In the first decade of what was to be the Second American Century, a net of zero new jobs was created. Average households were earning less in real dollars at the end of the decade than at the beginning. The net worth of the American family, in stocks, bonds, savings, home values, receded 4 percent. Fifty thousand plants and factories shut down. As a source of jobs, manufacturing fell below health care and education in 2001, below retail sales in 2002, below local government in 2006, below leisure and hospitality — that’s restaurants and bars — in 2008, for the first time. Be it shoes, clothes, cars, furniture, radios, TVs, appliances, bicycles, toys, cameras, computers, we buy from abroad what we used to make here. Our economic independence is history….

Starting in the 1980s and accelerating with NAFTA and GATT, the United States set out to meld its economy with those of Europe and Japan and create a global economy. We decided to create the interdependent world envisioned by such nineteenth-century dreamers as David Ricardo, Richard Cobden, Frédéric Bastiat, and John Stuart Mill.

That experiment did not work out well for the free-trade British in the nineteenth century, who were shouldered aside in the struggle for world primacy by America. But our generation would make it work for the world. What happened was predictable and was, in fact, predicted. With the abolition of tariffs and with U.S. guarantees that goods made in foreign countries would enter America free of charge, manufacturers began to shut plants here and move production abroad to countries where U.S. wage-and-hour laws and health, safety, and environmental regulations did not apply, countries where there were no unions and workers’ wages were below the U.S. minimum wage. Competitors who stayed in America were undercut and run out of business, or forced to join the stampede abroad.

In that same first decade of the twenty-first century, the United States issued 10,300,000 green cards inviting foreigners to come compete for the remaining jobs of U.S. workers.

Mansour paused from the reading to emphasize the added betrayal of open borders immigration to working class Americans already harmed by bad trade policies: “As if they did not commit enough of an economic hate crime against us, our elites opened the gates and invited everybody else to fight for the scraps. And that number has only increased, folks.”

Mansour continued reading from Suicide of a Superpower, closing with a passage describing the national security danger of “our dependence on computers and vital components of our high-tech industries and weapons systems produced by a rival power run by a Communist politburo.”

As Buchanan notes, the consequences of these trade “imbalances” have been the “deindustrialization of America. A growing dependence on China for the necessities of our national life and the loans to pay for them. A loss of millions of the best jobs Americans ever had. A median wage and family income that have been stagnant for a decade. A steep decline in the global purchasing power of the dollar. A loss of national dynamism. A debt bomb that went off in our face in September 2008.”

Buchanan quoted former South Carolina Senator Fritz Hollings who wrote in 2010, “The defense industry has been off-shored. We had to wait months to get flat panel displays from Japan before we launched Desert Storm. Boeing can’t build a fighter plane except for the parts from India. Sikorsky can’t build a helicopter except for the tail motor from Turkey… Today, we can’t go to war except for the favor of a foreign country.”

President Donald Trump’s campaign promises to combat the status quo of international trade brought him to the White House, said Mansour:

That’s what we’re talking about when we say, “national security.” President Trump ran on this issue, and he won on this issue, and God bless him, he’s sticking to his promise despite all of these Wall Street Goldman Sachs guys around him who are trying to tackle him, saying, ‘No, no, no. You can’t do that. You can’t follow the crazy things you told the American people you were going to do, Mr. President. Let’s continue these policies that have brought us to this ridiculous point.’ You just heard what I read to you, folks. I’m not making this up. That’s there for anybody see.

Decades of losses of manufacturing jobs have wrought economic ruin across the Rust Belt, said Mansour. Adversaries such as China are “laughing” at American political incompetence, she added:

You take a car drive throughout the heartland and you go look at the closed factories, the rusted out factories that I grew up looking at in the Midwest. I grew up looking at these factories, and looking at the devastation that the policies out of Washington, DC, and out of Wall Street have done to the heartland of this country. They have committed an economic hate crime against the American working and middle classes. Let me tell you something, either they committed it, or they sat by and didn’t do anything about it.

Mansour closed by saying the policies of America’s political and financial elites confirm “that famous quote from [Vladimir] Lenin: ‘The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.'”

“That’s what the Chinese are doing to us,” said Mansour. “We’re selling them the rope they’ll use to hang us. They’re laughing their asses off as we sit here and allow them to cheat us and do nothing to fight back.”

Mansour revisited the importance of protecting America’s domestic steel industry from China’s “economic warfare” in response to a caller on Friday’s show:

Steel is not just any other industry. We need steel for a plethora of other things. It is vital to our national security. We cannot build planes [or] vehicles to fight our wars without steel. And it is not an industry where you can just let it die and then in the middle of a war just spring it into life. No. This is something that has to be already established. It takes a long time. This is not something like flipping a light on and letting go.

What China is doing, they are willing to take a loss on steel and dump steel below the price of what it costs them to make it simply because they want to destroy our industry for a strategic reason. They want the world to be dependent on them. They want to take the market, that’s why they’re dumping steel. This is an act of war. This is economic warfare.

There is literally no way that our industry can fight, innovate, or do anything to a country that is willing to undercut us so much that they will sell at a loss in a marketplace just to drive us out of business. That is warfare. You cannot bring a butter knife when someone is bringing an Uzi and spraying you. They are dropping the equivalent of an atom bomb on us and we want to go at them with what, a Nerf football? It doesn’t work that way.

This is not about subsidizing an industry. It is about fighting back against a country that is committing economic warfare against us in order to destroy an industry that is vital to our national security.

Keep in mind, folks, if it weren’t for our steel industry and manufacturing base, this whole world would be under totalitarianism and Nazism because World War II would have been lost. The thing that won World War II was the American arsenal of democracy. It was the fact that we could build these planes and get them over there. We could build the tanks and arm the western and eastern fronts. We armed our allies, and we kept arming them… That’s what won the war. That is our security. You cannot have a secure nation without a secure manufacturing base. Steel is important to that. That’s what’s going on here.

Ya know, it’s increasingly funny to watch the Wall Street crowd going bananas simply because POTUS Trump does exactly what POTUS Trump said he was going to do. I mean it’s not like the administration has been hiding the trade policy plans and objectives for the past year; yet, the financial class acts shocked, SHOCKED, when it actually happens.

Cue the audio visual demonstration….. Was anyone paying attention in January at the Davos World Economic Forum when Commerce Secretary Ross said exactly what the administration was going to do in the coming months? ….Apparently not.

Against the backdrop of current financial and corporate media running around like blindfolded zombies with forks in their eyes – hysterically bumping into walls, it might be worthwhile to revisit Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s purposeful remarks at Davos:

I have heard it tastes like the number yellow.

For himself. He also managed to bankrupt a whole lot of companies and has a strong history of eroding shareholder value for those that invested in him. It still boggles my mind that so many people think he's actually a good businessman. He's a good businessman like Kanye West and Kim Kardashian are good business people -- they make millions and millions of dollars off of their name and reality TV, and they are good at doing that. It doesn't necessarily mean they have a sound understanding of economic principles or are good "business people" in the classic sense. There's lots of rich people in the world that really don't have a clue about running a company, or a country.

What could you as a comparable knave ever have in common with a billionaire?

Name the companies that Donald Trump has personally bankrupted. The answer is not ONE. The ill informed do not realize the benefits of bankruptcy and believe bankruptcy to be a personal failing. Nothing is further from the truth.

The Rock

I have a lot in common with Donald Trump, like we both have MBAs and we both like golf. Unlike Donald Trump, I am not a reality TV star, I’ve never bankrupted a company, and I didn’t have a wealthy father to give me my start.

You have nothing in common with Donald Trump, and a MBA, a dime a dozen today, is yesterday's Bachelors. Come back to earth. Sorry for the crash.

The Rock

Buddy, I’m way down here on Earth. And I promise I can sit down to dinner with our President, regardless of how I feel about the man, and find plenty of common ground - ideological, lifestyle, professional, and experiential.

The same is true for everyone on this site. You’re only, metaphorically speaking, looking at the tip of the iceberg if you think otherwise.

The Rock

Sure, there are plenty of MBAs in the world - not all MBAs are created equal, though, both in the quality of education they provide and the network they connect you to. Getting an MBA from the University of Phoenix is not the same as one from HBS, Wharton, or Booth. Idealogically I’m a libertarian, not a liberal. Which means I’m happy with plenty of things Trump has done (for example, lower taxes and fewer regulations are a generally good things). Yeah, lots of people play golf and no I don’t live at Mar-a-Lago. I have stayed and played at plenty of his resorts and courses, here and abroad (Doral, Turnberry, International) and I’m sure we’d have a lovely chat about that. No, I don’t run a billion dollar company (and neither does Trump), but I do work in one of the largest corporations in the world supporting plenty of multi-billion dollar projects with a departmental budget that is larger than about 99.999% of the companies in this country. I have plenty of experience leading teams that are solving large scale problems rife with technical, economic, commercial, organizational, and political risk.

Obviously I am not a billionaire reality TV star President. But I still maintain we’d have plenty of things in common. And I feel plenty qualified to question the man on any of his decisions and statements.

Matt

Funny. Nearly every financial site is attributing today's early sell-off to concerns over Cohn's resignation. But, I'm sure your "expert" analysis is more accurate.

Matt

You might want to check it again, Piggy.

Matt

Now this…

US Steel will restart two blast furnaces and recall 500 employees in Granite City, Illinois following President Trump’s decision to tax steel and aluminum imports.

“The Trade Partnership puts the number of jobs expected to be gained at 33,464 and the jobs lost at 179,334, resulting in the net loss of 145,870 jobs.”

The flip side to a trade deficit is the fact that you have the capital to send overseas. The best way to reduce a trade deficit is to send the economy into recession. The trade deficit is the biggest red herring out there. Does that mean that there aren't unfair trade policies and they shouldn't be addressed? Absolutely not. But it doesn't mean we should enact dumb policy to do so. A tax is not the answer.

To bad less than 5% of your portfolio is benefitting, Piggy. Perhaps you should hire a different financial advisor.

;-)

Matt

Protectionism is not the way to go BUT we need fair and open markets and we aren't getting them with the current trade deals. I'm all for Trump pushing back a bit.

Also guys, can we stop the constant “tis for tat” back and forth? Everyone has good and bad days. Build each other up, and be happy the USA is kicking ass. It’s not only refreshing, but beneficial for our future generations to benefit from it too.

Every acct I have is in the green today. DOW +367 all markets green.

....and you never waste an opportunity to tell us so. ;-)

Matt