The method behind the Trumpist tariff madness

The Maga masterplan is spooking the markets Trump is looking longer-term

- Jonathan Prynn

To misquote the late Republican senator Everett Dirksen: “A billion here, a billion there and pretty soon you’re talking about serious money.” It would take quite a few of those billions to affect the living standards of the five most unfeasibly wealthy men who lined up to kiss the ring at Donald Trump’s inauguration in January.

Yet this quintet of tycoons, Tesla’s Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, the CEO of Facebook owner Meta Mark Zuckerberg and Bernard Arnault, the French billionaire behind the LVMH luxury goods empire, are already some £160 billion worse off than the day they paid homage to the 47th US President.

The plutocrats can take it on the chin — for now — but for millions of ordinary Americans whose wealth and savings are tied up in the stock markets that have plunged over recent days, these are worrying times.

Wall Street’s main share indices are all down since Joe Biden formally handed over to his successor — and predecessor — in Washington DC’s Capitol Rotunda on January 20.

The tech-focused Nasdaq index has been worst hit, losing almost a tenth of its value since the start of the year, with the fall on Manic Monday wiping out $1 trillion of value. Shares in Musk’s Tesla are down almost 40 per cent this year. The more broadly based S&P 500 index is about five per cent lower this year.

This is not crash or even “bear market” territory… yet, but, emphatically, neither is it the “boom like no other” promised by Trump, who trilled at an investor conference less than a month ago: “The stock market is going to be great.” It appears to be part of a newly minted, long-term Maga plan.

Tone shift