We Are Being Liberated From Our Money By Extremely Stupid People

Fear and cowardice in the USA.

Photo by David Vives on Unsplash

Good morning from Asia, where I spent my day watching various economies crash and burn. Markets in the US are opening now, and it seems virtually guaranteed that the day won’t be much brighter in America. Donald Trump’s tariffs are an enormous, unmitigated disaster, and the only thing more infuriating than watching the global economy collapse is watching the very smart very rational mostly-men of finance react with frustration and confusion. How, ask the fleece-vested men of Wall Street, could this have happened?

After all, Trump was supposed to bring boom times back to big business, or at least liberate the good men of finance from the woke requirement of having to treat other people with basic respect. “I feel liberated,” a top banker told the FT back in January. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled… it's a new dawn.” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg went from moderately liberal wunderkind to mop-haired chain-wearing midlife crisis machine hanging out at the fights and going on The Joe Rogan Show to complain about how companies became “culturally neutered.” The CEO of Goldman Sachs waxed on about Trump’s “growth-y playbook.”

Now, a Goldman Sachs leader is begging someone to stop the president because, whatever he’s playing at, it is not growth-y. Bill Ackman, one of Trump’s biggest backers, is flummoxed and wondering why he’s not hitting pause on this. One billionaire hedge fund manager tweeted (and then deleted): “It was fun while it lasted.”

It was not, of course, particularly fun for the international students getting shoved into unmarked vehicles for exercising their free speech rights, or the immigrants getting deported (sometimes in a big oopsie) to Salvadoran prisons, or the millions of children in the developing world who are facing down starvation and illness because the richest man to ever live decided America was wasting its money on them. But sure, for the men watching their bank balances tick up and the bar for their behavior fall ever lower, times were good — at least for a few weeks.

Now, though, Trump has done precisely the thing he said he would do, and it is having precisely the effect everyone said it would have, and the men who fancy themselves among the smartest in the world are stunned.

Can we just say it? These people are very, very, very stupid.