Liberation Day!
I hope everyone is feeling liberated today! I feel liberated from the burden of seriousness. Lets get to it:
"European Union won't take chicken from America...they hate our beef because our beef is beautiful and theirs is weak." - Lutnick
Whenever I think of US chicken, I think of that “canned whole chicken” abomination…which incidentally is how the Market looks like after Liberation Day!
“Liberation Day” will have wiped out >$2 Trillion of Value from the US Market, in exchange for a Trade War that MAY generate $400-600bn in annual Revenues depending on who you believe, but will more likely generate a stretched consumer and quite a few Margin Calls…
I don’t even want to go into the Mafs behind the new Tariffs. Frankly, it’s embarrassing. Instead of doing Trade Wars, governments throughout the world should focus on teaching basic Mafs to their kids.
Per the NYPost, the US tariffs on each nation is calculated by taking the current US trade deficit with each target country and dividing the deficit by half, to get the resulting tariff imposed.
I reckon they just threw the data into ChatGPT and asked for a Tariff calculation!
Meanwhile, the real losers out of this will be the low income consumers:
PCE will jump to 3.8-4.3% per JP Morgan…
…which will put Powell in a tough spot as Inflation picks up and Economic Data weakens…
I won’t say it, I won’t say it, I won’t say it… Ok, I’ll meme it:
The other major losers out of this are the BAG7-itis sufferers (terrible disease, we wrote about it here), though, lets be fair, we’ve been warning all year that they didn’t stand a chance anyway. But now, Bessent himself is calling them out, saying that the Equity Market selloff is “a Mag7 problem not a MAGA problem”!!!
…which shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone reading Shrubstack…
…after all, we have our Memes to guide us and we give thanks…
Ok, now for a really serious point in this unserious situation: