What he should be doing is negotiating trade deals with our partners . Paly hardball with China all he wants to and our enemies . But what he REALLY should be doing is getting the DOGE findings cemented with legislation so they are not temporary . AND he should be whipping Congress (he can't count on the Repubs to get it done) to get a budget passed and his tax cuts made permanent .

He now has a year and a half . Now he has the damage he has done to the economy on his plate. Clueless Joe owned the recession until this week .

If he doesn't get immediate results then he will lose the House and the Repubs may lose the White House .

This whole thing is a big unforced error in my book . If I am wrong I'll admit it .

The whole GOP agenda is being upended over Bull$hite . The House has not voted on the No Rogue Rulings Act about rogue district judges ;or the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, both vital for the GOP agenda .Why ? Because an internal pi$$ing contest over if pregnant members can vote by proxy. Mark my words . The morons will go on a 2 week Easter break having done nothing.

China is not going down without a fight . The markets were doing great yesterday until Trump announced that since China is not going belly up to his demands ;he was going to up China's tariffs to 104% . Then it ended up being another day of people's lifetime of work getting gutted . I guess it was always Trump's business model playing high risk poker with other people's money .

China has the means to go toe to toe . They hold massive amounts of US debt . Rumor has it they have begun dumping it .
Is China dumping US treasuries?

Treasury yields skyrocketed yesterday .

U.S. Treasury yields spike as midnight strikes on tariffs - MarketWatch

Where is this going ? Trump will wake up soon and be on social media . Buckle up

That means the US will be paying off debt with higher interest rates ;something Trump was trying to avoid.

That means mortgage rates are going up

Mortgage rates slingshot higher as tariff uncertainty roils markets

The tariff calculations were puzzling to me . How could countries be taking such huge advantages of us over these many years ;especially since traditionally the Dems have been pro-tariffs over the years ?

Well the answer is that the calculations that came up with the tariffs were wrong.

Who says so ? That would be the economists who came up with the formula. The Trump geniuses plugged in the wrong number .

Quote:

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But even if one were to take the Trump Administration’s tariff formula seriously, it makes an error that inflates the tariffs assumed to be levied by foreign countries four-fold. As a result, the “reciprocal” tariffs imposed by President Trump are highly inflated as well.
Though in effect the formula for the tariff placed on the United States by another country is equal to the trade deficit divided by imports, the formula published by the Office of the US Trade Representative has two additional terms in the denominator that just so happen to cancel out: (1) the elasticity of import demand with respect to import prices, ε, and (2) the elasticity of import prices with respect to tariffs, φ.
https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploa...425.png?x85095
The idea is that as tariffs rise, the change in the trade deficit will depend on the responsiveness of import demand to tariffs, which depends on how import demand responds to import prices and how import prices respond to tariffs. The Trump Administration assumes an elasticity of import demand with respect to import prices of four, and an elasticity of import prices with respect to tariffs of 0.25, the product of which is one and is the reason they cancel out in the Administration’s formula.
However, the elasticity of import prices with respect to tariffs should be about one (actually 0.945), not 0.25 as the Trump Administration states. Their mistake is that they base the elasticity on the response of retail prices to tariffs, as opposed to import prices as they should have done.

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President Trump’s Tariff Formula Makes No Economic Sense. It’s Also Based on an Error. | American Enterprise Institute - AEI

To us math challenged people ,the formula is complicated . But told that the penalty is 4X too high is simple to understand .

But it does explain how penguins are ripping us off.

Commerce chief Lutnick defends tariffs on islands with only penguins


meanwhile China is not backing down

China raises its retaliatory tariff on the US to 84% as it vows to 'fight to the end'

and a years worth of gains in the market has been blown in less than a week .

Things are moving too fast . The EU announced reciprocal tariifs . Trump backed off and gave a 90 day reprieve to most nations . China called for trade talks

Stocks surged . The conspiracy theorists will say this was the oligarchs buying the dip thanks to Trump . But they have lost $billions and have more likely told him to ease up .

Trump also restored some foreign aid that he said were cut "in error "

He will call all this cr@p a victory