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Comment by __MatrixMan__ | Hacker News Reader

It makes plenty of sense if you consider that it wasn't designed to benefit the US, but rather to drive US trade to our competitors.

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Considering how open they've been about their clear conflicts of interest (Trump launching a cryptocurrency on day 1 of his presidency, being in charge of a publicly traded company that he's made no effort to remove himself from, and the Diablo cheater being in charge of a department that gets to determine "efficiency" while also bidding on government contracts), I think we should really consider the possibility that Trump and Musk shorted or bought Puts on companies that would be hit especially hard by tariffs.

I debated doing that. I wish I had, I would have made a bit of money in the last few days.

Too bad oversight is "inefficient"

Would the tariffs make more sense if this were true?

I mean, I don't doubt that it's true, but it seems more like an opportunity to make some money on the side than a reason to do it in the first place.

> I debated doing that. I wish I had, I would have made a bit of money in the last few days.

The details weren't public. You can stop feeling being bad about yourself.

Well, he announced when “liberation day” was going to happen. I debated buying one that expired on Friday.

this is “due for a big one” gambling logic

Yeah, which is why I talked myself out of it.

Plan for the tariffs to reverse course once enough political pressure mounts. Calls for say, three months out.

calls for 3 months out only make sense once the stock price is decimated, and there's no certainty that prices will recover given the bumbling antics of this administration.

If they give the Federal Reserve the DOGE treatment next week, negative interest rates could always save stock prices.

Under normal circumstances, the chair cannot be removed without cause. And appointments must pass the Senate.

But, fanatics can intimidate and stalk Fed employees, with the executive conveniently withholding law enforcement response.

Don't forget that bigballs was fired from one of his last jobs for... selling company secrets to a competitor.

It's designed to destroy America's position in the world and is almost certainly a dictate from Russia. I mean they didn't even put tariffs on our most antagonistic supposed adversary, and why would they do that other than he has Trump by the short hairs? for god sakes they put tariffs on penguins on a virtually unknown island nation.

I think that Russia was omitted to give something to use in the peace talks alongside the secondary sanctions that have been threatened. Regardless there should be zero trade happening with Russia because of the sanctions so why would tarriffs make sense.

I also feel that this is a ripping the band aid off approach to destroying globalism. The Biden administration was already toning down the globalism of Peter Ziehan was correct, as we saw with their tepid responses to the red sea fiasco but now Trump has upped the attacks on the houthis too so I'm not quite sure what to think.

Currently the omission looks like it's a message being sent from Russia:

> Hey look, we write US policy, don't mess with Russia or we'll have the US mess with you.

If that's not the case, why not take the zero-cost step to avoid making it look like that's what it is?

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