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Brace for Impact: Trump is crashing global stock markets. Krugman nails it: MAGA is bad for business [1]
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Date: 2025-03-31
Paul Krugman has a short piece at Substack commenting on the delusion in the business community that Republicans are good for business.
One odd feature of U.S. politics is that businesspeople, especially small business owners, always seems to believe that they will do better under Republicans, even though history shows that business does better under Democrats. Small business owners supported Trump in the last election, despite ample evidence that he would be very bad for business. And now they’re getting a rude awakening.
Krugman starts by talking about price controls — and Trump’s threat to carmakers that they’d better not dare raise prices because of his tariffs. (The official ‘truth’ is that tariffs are tax cuts. Go figure)
A few weeks ago Viktor Orban, Hungary’s de facto dictator and a darling of the MAGA set, announced that he was imposing profit-margin caps — basically price controls — on groceries. I intended to write something about that as a warning that something similar might happen in the United States, that businesspeople were fools if they assumed that Donald Trump was on their side. Unfortunately, I never got around to writing that post. So I missed my chance to be prophetic, because it has already happened: Trump reportedly told auto executives sometime in March not to raise pricesin response to tariffs. He denies that he said it, but the reporting looks solid. His headline-making assertion that he “couldn’t care less” about rising car prices seems to have been about imported autos, not domestic production.
Global stock markets are reacting to Trump’s “Liberation Day” on Wednesday when tariffs are supposed to go into effect. The problem is, as Krugman points out, no one can count on what’s going to happen. Will Trump change his mind at the last minute or announce exceptions? Will he accept some token concessions and declare victory, or will he go balls to the wall and raise them even more?
Krugman pulls no punches:
The reason I expected Trump to follow in Orban’s footsteps is that Trump, like Orban, clearly doesn’t have any fixed principles other than power and self-aggrandizement. Under Trump, policy won’t reflect any consistent ideology. It will, instead, change with his perception of personal advantage, his temper tantrums, his whims and his malignant narcisissim. If he doesn’t like rising prices, he’ll try to stop inflation through bullying. In short, MAGA will be very bad for business.
emphasis added
Business people are screwed. Do they plan for tariffs? Do they cross their fingers and hope it doesn’t happen? It’s impossible to make any plans for the future.
ETTD — Everything Trump Touches Dies.
p.s. If that wasn’t enough fun, I’m starting to see scattered reports that people are not getting their Social Security payments. Anyone relying on a 401k to fund their retirement is getting hit with a double whammy.
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/3/31/2313717/-Brace-for-Impact-Trump-is-crashing-global-stock-markets-Krugman-nails-it-MAGA-is-bad-for-business?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web
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