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*Fiduciary duties* in a financial sense exist to ensure that those who manage other people’s money act in their beneficiaries’ interests, rather than serving their own interests.
In the short term, everyone is going to have to eat these tariffs because of what we are in the global market and the trade advantages we have secured. Over the long term, everyone is going to start building bridges with countries that don’t have a history of puffing their chests through over leveraged tariffs.
What he’s doing is decentralizing a global market that used to hold us at the center of it. Anyone who can’t see that leveraging 100% tariffs on everybody is insane fails to realize two major outcomes of this (assuming it goes on unchecked):
1: We are irreversibly eroding trust with our trade partners. Political stability is a major consideration for executive decision makers when deciding to expand upon, venture into, or maintain international markets. I have no idea what the full extent of that will be, but you bet your ass there are C suits in every multinational company worth its salt talking about this right now and planning accordingly. That includes companies headquartered in the US, for now at least.
2. This will devastate our ability to project soft power internationally. The skeleton and muscle of our soft power is our strength as a trade partner. Any time we have a problem with a tinpot dictatorship, the most common lever we pull first is we sanction them. What good are sanctions on a country that isn’t trading with you anymore because you pulled the rug out from under them and it’s now more advantageous to get those same goods elsewhere?
Sure we have the largest military force in the world, but how far does that go when your major partners also have enough nukes to blow the world to hell and back? Nobody is particularly antsy to see those missiles fired. Who wants to live on a glow in the dark tennis ball?
You want to know what hits major powers where it hurts without instigating nuclear war? Trade. And up until now we have had the upper hand. These tariffs are honestly the only feasible way I could imagine any single political figure fucking that up. It’s like he’s trying to destroy us.
There's nothing here!