Not sure how this happened but it was not meant for you guys. It is
good info for those of us who are living it.
On 4/14/25 7:57 PM, Maureen Thomas wrote:
Excellent read.
-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Chaos
Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2025 08:02:12 +0000
From: Robert Reich <robertre...@substack.com>
Reply-To: Robert Reich
<reply+2o044j&1r7vz7&&b066015c6bcca76c901c6243c210e9ab6eda44a70105eaa8ef1450a458c5b...@mg1.substack.com>
To: silver...@verizon.net
Chaos
The American oligarchy is petrified by Trump’s economic chaos but
careful not to criticize him directly
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Chaos
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The American oligarchy is petrified by Trump’s economic chaos
but careful not to criticize him directly
Robert Reich <https://substack.com/@robertreich>
Apr 14
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Friends,
As tens of millions of Americans hussle to pay their taxes, Trump has
put the entire global economy into chaos. 401(k)s are tanking, savings
are shrinking, treasury bonds are losing value, supply chains are
convulsing.
Even America’s oligarchs are petrified. They contributed millions to
Trump’s inauguration. Many invested heavily in his campaign. They
lavished praise on the new president and have supported his every move
— in order to benefit from his promised big tax cut.
But the chaos he’s unleashed on the world economy is causing many of
them to go public with their worries.
“Obviously,” Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, said in a
conference call with reporters, “the China stuff is significant. We
don’t know the full effect.”
But we do know that global investors are fleeing Treasury bonds, which
had been the safest place to put money in the world. That may not be
the /full/effect, but it’s a huge and frightening one.
By Friday morning, Dimon was warning that the economy faced
“considerable turbulence” from the tariffs, while echoing Trump’s
assertion that the immediate turmoil was nothing to worry about. “I
really almost don’t care fundamentally about what the economy does in
the next two quarters,” Dimon said. “That isn’t that important. We’ll
get through that. We’ve had recessions before and all of that.”
Oops. The word “recession” coming out of the mouth of the CEO of the
largest bank in the United States? That itself is extraordinarily
worrying.
Notably, JPMorgan has added nearly half a billion dollars to its
financial cushion, preparing for losses from customers who won’t be
able to pay credit card debts and loans.
Other oligarchs are repeating the R word.
In a Friday interview on CNBC
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BlackRock’s chief executive, Laurence D. Fink, warned that the
American economy was “very close — if not in — a recession now.” Fink
admitted that in its push for tariffs, the United States had become
“the global destabilizer” and that the trade war “went beyond anything
I could have imagined in my 49 years in finance.”
Yesterday, Dan Ives, an analyst for Wedbush Securities, told investors
that “the mass confusion created by this constant news flow out of the
White House is dizzying for the industry and investors and creating
massive uncertainty and chaos for companies trying to plan their
supply chain, inventory and demand.”
Many oligarchs continue to kiss Trump’s derriere while at the same
time trying to signal to major investors that they’re sane. It’s
tricky. “A willingness to adjust a strategy based on new facts and
data is a sign of the strength of a leader,” Bill Ackman, the chief
executive of the hedge fund Pershing Square, pirouetted on social
media yesterday. “It is not an indication of weakness.”
No. It’s an indication of insanity.
“Sentiment has obviously deteriorated,” Robin Vince, chief executive
of BNY, one of the world’s largest banks, said in an interview. “Time
is not our friend.”
When they speak in the passive tense like this, you know they’re
pulling their punches.
None dare come right out and say it: Trump is f*cking out of his mind
and crashing the entire world economy. “It’s not smart to criticize
the president,” said Robert K. Steel, a veteran Wall Street executive
and top Treasury Department official under President George W. Bush.
Not smart because Trump has too many ways to punish them.
Last month, the Trump Organization sued the giant financial services
company Capital One for shutting the organization’s accounts after the
January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
The oligarchs know Trump has many ways to reward them, too.
On Friday, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, got a reprieve from Trump’s tariffs
on China, which would have just about killed Apple’s iPhone profits.
(The exclusions apply to smartphones and other electronics.)
Cleverly, Cook and Apple had announced last Monday that, as a result
of a conversation between Cook and Trump, Apple would be investing
more than $500 billion in the United States over the next four years
and creating thousands of jobs, in what looked like “a bet on America.”
It was BS. The $500 billion figure was simply what Apple had already
planned, including everything from Apple’s day-to-day activities with
thousands of suppliers in all 50 states to the operation of its
domestic data centers, as well as its investments in Apple TV+ and
other projects already manufactured in the country.
The announcement mentioned a new advanced manufacturing plant in
Houston to produce servers that support Apple’s AI, but the plant is
owned by Foxconn, which is doing the investing. (Apple has perfected
the art of outsourcing capital expenditures to its partners without
risking its own money.)
But yesterday, Trump backtracked even on the electronics reprieve,
calling it “temporary.” China, meanwhile, put a stop to shipments of
rare earth materials critical to semiconductors and much of our
military technology.
Where and how will this chaos end? The oligarch’s main line in to
Trump is through Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who apparently
talked Trump down from the worst of his tariff craziness last week.
But Bessent himself is part of the chaos. He and others inside the
White House are all saying radically different things. No one is in
charge. Some, like Elon Musk and trade adviser Peter Navarro, are
openly taking pot shots at each other.
Bessent, a member of the billionaires club, doesn’t even get what this
economic chaos is doing to average Americans. Last weekend, he said on
NBC’s “Meet the Press” that people who want to retire now aren’t
paying attention to the stock market: “They don’t look at the
day-to-day fluctuations of what’s happening.”
Hello?
The oligarchs won’t tell Trump how much chaos he’s unleashed, and they
don’t even know how the chaos’s is affecting average people. The
oligarchy is almost as incompetent and out of touch as is Trump.
But average people comprise the real economy. They’re also taxpayers.
And their worried discussions over their kitchen tables spell even
worse trouble ahead for the economy — and /far /worse ahead for Trump
and his Republican Party.
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