Steel Yourself for the Trump Slump
It’s getting harder to ignore the threat this president poses to the U.S. and world economies.
Everything is under control.
Photographer: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Stocks tanked last week amid signs of a worsening slowdown in Germany and China, and bond investors flashed the clearest signal yet that the U.S. is courting a self-inflicted recession. Hopefully these cries of alarm from financial markets will cause President Trump and his advisers to stop and think. If not, steel yourself for worse to come.
Slowing growth in Europe and China has various causes, but high on the list is trade — because Trump has made disrupting commerce his main instrument of economic policy. Right now, damage to the flow of goods and services is the least of it. Far more dangerous is the blow to confidence and investment. Firms and investors are starting to ask where the president’s willingness to wreck the global economic architecture might actually lead.