Reply to Market Manipulation Friday May 23, 2025

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]At some point markets are just going to stop reacting to this stuff.  We all know he’s going to cave on this, just like he has for every prior tariff announcement.  It’s just an old crazy man yelling at the sky.[/quote]

The markets reflect actual conditions eventually. The cat is out of the bag and Trump will not be able to reel it in. He can lie about unemployment and it doesn’t matter, but let’s also see if consumer confidence continues to fall off a cliff. [/quote]

+1. In the last 2 months, I upgraded my iPad to give my college kid my 2 year old one, we replaced my other college kids 5 year old laptop, and both kids got new noise cancelling headphones for their birthdays (both had 5 year old ones that were absolutely falling apart.  Apparently college is loud). I also bought several pieces of nice, classic clothing from a niche brand I love, US company manufactured in Korea.  My daughter is a rising college senior whose weight has stayed very stable. We also bought her some high quality core pieces of a classic capsule work wardrobe. Normally I would have waited until around college graduation. But she’ll work before grad school, need things to interview, and well tailored black pants aren’t going out of style.

And with that our family’s electronics purchases and high end clothing for the next 3+ years are done (DH is 100% telework software engineer still wearing t-shirts from 2005). Everyone has an iPhone that will last that long. DH and I have work laptops. Other kids is only 2 years old.   And I keep my wardrobe small, but high quality and classic. My workout gear is good. I may buy nothing clothing wise but socks, underwear and probably a new pair of workout shoes for the next 2-3 years.  My DD is largely covered and can fill in with a few pieces of fast fashion (she wears classic clothes to death and also has a small wardrobe).

This says two things, neither of them good for Trump. One— if you look at April-May consumer spending in my house, the economy is still okay and our consumer confidence is high. But that’s deceptive. It actually reflects a lack of consumer confidence and a desire to get ahead of price hikes on purchases that we would have spread out over 18+ months.  And we have the savings to suck it up and make the purchases now, and avoid inflated prices later.  But you also see it with, well, everything at Costco too. People are buying everything from TVs to TP now in anticipation of not buying later and supply chain disruptions.

Which leads us to 2. We only needed to do one big order, and we’re done for 3 years.  If that holds and isn’t just us, it means that the Consumer driven American economy is in for a bad three years. It’s great for May numbers that there is a rush on imported electronics. But, it’s really just front loading months or years worth of purchases.  Add in tanking tourism?  Bad.

You would have thought that COVID would have taught us something about disrupting supply chains, the complexity of the global economy, the importance of tourism in some places, and the importance of consumer confidence to small business. I guess not.

Pain is coming. And unlike COVID, there won’t be bailouts of the 99% and the pain will have been entirely self inflicted. [/quote]

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