Your Discomfort Means It's Working

It has been one whole day since President Trump implemented his tariff agenda.

With the amount of squirming and outright panic in the news media, markets, and on social media, you’d think we were 50 years into a 100-year bout of famine, plague, depression, and pestilence.

Let’s all just gather our heads for a second.

At a very basic psychological level, people are opposed to change. It doesn’t matter whether it’s changing their cable provider or taking a detour in traffic. Extrapolating from this, people are really opposed to bigger, more consequential change.

Extrapolating from this, in the world of finance, I have consistently argued that market participants have been falsely conditioned by our monetary and fiscal policy in this country to always expect comfort and never expect interruptions from the market moving higher, or the quality of life status quo that we believe we are entitled to here in the United States to suffer.

This concept was the basis for my article explaining why I thought the next market crash would “break the brains” of market participants.

Now let’s zoom out and think about what President Trump is trying to accomplish with his tariff agenda. He is essentially saying that the status quo in the United States isn’t working and large changes need to be implemented—changes that will shock the global economy—to remedy the issue.

“Who is the status quo not working for?” some of you will ask me from your Porsche, driving down PCH, or from your desk overseeing your millions in the market.

If I had to venture a guess, I’d say it’s not working for people in towns like this:

Or people whose grandparents used to work at places like this:

And the status quo definitely isn’t working for the bottom 50% of Americans here, represented by the yellow section that is so small you have to zoom in to see it:

Billionaires (other than Trump, it seems) have a difficult time answering questions like “What happens when we run out of middle American towns to gut?” and “How has your quality of life been negatively impacted by monetary policy over the last 20 years?”

The reason they can’t answer these questions is because they don’t have any idea. Monetary policy helps them accrue more wealth and power, and they don’t live in middle America. But if you take a trip to a place like Flint, Michigan, or Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the answers to these questions become a lot clearer.

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