this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2025
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I genuienly think Trump is so stupid that he thinks what he is doing will work and makes sense.
Of course, many smarter people with lots of money, inside of his orbit or outside of it, are capable of being comparatively better off after this all blows up... but I really do think this is more hubris and incompetence than intentional evil.
Like, I wouldn't say Warren Buffet is a big Trump fan, but he started pulling huge amounts of his investments out into just liquid cash, and has just been sitting on that cash... over 6 months ago now.
I would think you'd want to be smart enough to lie, to intentionally obfuscate, but Trump has been lying so egregiously, for so long, and so often that he just created a cult of personality where he is a God King, and he just now believes ... that he really is, that there is no need to worry about a cover story because many people are saying he is always right.
But yeah, Theil, Putin, many others have, can and will continue to manipulate Trump, and the wider economy he is currently immolating.
I don't disagree, but I hear the same sentiment often and it downplays the reality of the fact they keep succeeding in various ways, like trump staying out of prison and the supreme court getting stacked.
Yes, those things are very important as well, the fact that he has basically avoided serious punishment (actual jail time) for all of the numerous crimes he's committed his entire life... teflon don thinks he can get away with anything.
A lifetime of that and you get a delusional megalomaniacal personality.
I'm not trying to say he isn't evil in general.
I am just trying to say on these specific things (tariffs and 'deficit'), I think he has gone past the event horizon and is basically just senile/delusional.
Well, a good 'smart money' investor ... doesn't tell you their exact reasoning... because then everyone else knows what you know, and you lose your advantage of being able to do something first.
But uh basically, even before the tariffs... pretty much every possible warning sign that exists has been flashing red for years now.
I am not Warren Buffet, but uh... as I see it:
The housing market is now starting to crash.
Consumer debt has exploded, along with delinquencies.
No one is actually hiring, companies just post ghost jobs, fake openings, to look like they are rapidly growing when they aren't.
Many, many companies have been actually laying people off in the 10s of thousands.
The stock market is wildly overvalued and based on speculation, very far away from fundamentals, from reasonable pricing.
The bond yield curve has now inverted and univerted twice without yet a massive economic downturn.
In the history of basically all modern economics, last 200 years, any time the bond yield curve inverts, the economy crashes when it uninverts.
... I could go on.
You got it.
When people with a lot of investments, who are not otherwise facing some immediate cost... literally cash them out, and hold cash, as Buffet has done /is doing...
That means he is betting the losses from inflation will be less than the losses from those other investments tanking.
That means Buffet is roughly predicting something like a -2 or -3 % (or worse) Q1 25 GDP 'growth'... ie, general economic decline.