The Gist: Tariffifing Behaviour

OK.

OK. Imagine now that you are a idiot. You are someone who is profoundly stupid and has been all their life. By choice, you are also profoundly ignorant. People have offered you opportunities to learn about the world for decades. In recent years, literally thousands of people have been publicly offering you information about almost anything you choose to speak about.

You reject all that education, expertise and knowledge.

Because you are an idiot, you only value the thoughts you came up with yourself. Because (and I'm sorry to harp on about this but it seems key to everything else) you are an idiot, you believe you are smarter than all these other people. Why would the smartest man in the room need to listen to so-called experts, you think to yourself as you stab yourself in the eyeball with your own pastry fork.

You're not even eating pastry. You were using it to try to pry open the back of the plug, currently inserted into the mains, to see if it really is filled with cheez whiz like you just saw on TikTok, in that briefing on TikTok.

Now, for lamentable and unvirtuous reasons, you were recently elected as President of the United States of America. This is your second go at this. It was either that or likely bankruptcy and possible imprisonment. But this time, you, an idiot, are going to show everyone. You're going to show all the people who beat you last time, obviously, but you also want to show all the people who were working with you last time who kept telling you not to do things.

They kept telling you that you were wrong about things?!

Well, not this time. This time, you've only hired people who tell you that you're right. You've got the support of the richest (and therefore also smartest) man in the world and you let him do some computer things. He showed you his car. Everything's computer. Very impressive, far less on fire than expected.

And now you're going to do it. You're going to bring in the obvious policy everyone told you not to do last time. But this is actually your single big idea. This is the idea you have had for decades. This and wanting brown and black people to die are your top political concepts. You would recognise them as your idée fixe, if you had ever heard of the term.

You're going to make all the foreign countries have to pay money to be able to sell you things. It's a tax, just on foreigners! Literally, the best idea ever. The perfect policy.

I mean, it's a proven model. You can't trade around here unless you pay the Don first.

For some reason, last time, all of the stuffed shirts and that blonde lady, who your House of Wax son-in-law said were actually five different ladies, said you could only do tiny ones. A bit on China, but not on all of China. Just steel or General Tso sauce or something.

This time you asked the interns to work out the biggest numbers, the biggest and the best numbers, for you to announce. The bigger the number, the more money the foreigners would have to pay.

So they came back with a few ideas on how to sell it. Most of them were really long and had footnotes, which are for losers and don't work on TV anyway. But one of them, from the sweaty intern, was just divide one thing by another thing and get a number. And they were all such big numbers. It was perfect.

You explained the idea with a big chart. People need something to look at while listening, you know from personal experience. You can't just say stuff, they lose interest and you start to reach for the TV remote.

Except the people who do money things on Wall Street didn't like it. All their numbers got smaller, not bigger. And the foreigners said they'd make you pay too- as though you were just another country, instead of the only real country. And then millions of losers came out on the streets against you. For some reason there were also a lot of penguins.

And the worst thing- the intolerable thing- was that everyone you saw on TV said you might actually be an idiot. They weren't allowed say that. You had made it that they weren't allowed say things like that by putting a guy in.

But now they were saying it. And somewhere, inside your very stupid, very calcified mind you knew something. You knew something new.

You don't like knowing new things. But you were starting to know it now.

They all thought you were wrong.

And it looked like– even though it wasn't true because it couldn't be true– it looked like you were wrong.

You fish out your phone and start thumbing at it. All caps, so they know you mean it. Like an idiot would do.

"MY POLICIES WILL NEVER CHANGE"

The Stooge Problem

Now, let us return you to your own mind. Not that of an idiot. What a relief.

A political movement or party which reaches a point of unrestrained power gets there by having ranks of stooges they can stuff in at all levels to just do what they're told. But they do a second job. Stuffing institutions with stooges also neuters them. This is great if you want to make sure that you just get what you want without any resistance from checks and balances. This is bad if you encounter a problem that can't be solved by a stooge. Because you've drained your system of all of its effectiveness, you are left just asserting things in the face of reality.

This has been the Republican mode for decades. And it has worked for them, because they are surrounded by media and institutional stooges who are willing to tell the general public that they are right and reality is wrong. The US has never been more institutionally stooged than it is today.

Obviously, for any Irish person who remembers the bank crash of 2007, this is very familiar. A politically dominant body, Fianna Fáil, had recently won its third consecutive electoral victory. It had decades to fill all the institutions of the state with its supporters.

But when the markets crashed they took down the banks. And nothing FF could say could make that reality go away.

Remember Dermot Ahern and Noel Dempsey denying an IMF bailout was coming to take over Ireland's finances. A few weeks later the deal was done.

On Monday, the US markets are going to open again. Nothing they've heard over the weekend gives them a reason to think that this idiot is going to reverse himself. Worse still, even if he does reverse himself the spell of the US as a reliable and predicable investment location is broken. Who knows what the mad king might do next week?

The Money Lake

The EU is letting matters settle for a while before deciding how they will react to theses tariffs. Ireland really doesn't want to see an escalating trade war, given it makes a shedload of US bits, bytes and pills that underpin the tax base.

But there is a step the EU could take that would be a far more devastating response, without impacting trade at all.

The US government funds itself by issuing bonds. Treasury Bonds are a kind of IOU. They promise to pay the bearer of the bond a certain amount of money after a set amount of time. They are the ultimate safe haven.

Currently, $13 trillion is sitting in US Treasury bonds.

Now, imagine there was an equivalent EU bond.

Which system looks like the safer bet? Would you like to leave your money under the care of the European Central Bank? Or under Donald Trump's Fed?

Europe could certainly use a few extra trillions of euros right now.

But the Mad King might not survive without it.