Never Mind About the Hedging Trump Thing
It’s been a whirlwind couple of weeks and hopefully you didn’t take seriously my joke about buying puts (to channel Bloomberg’s great Money Stuff columnist Matt Levine, none of this is financial advice) because on Wednesday, April 9, after having previously presented a long list of draconian tariff rates in comprehensive table during a formal Rose Garden ceremony, President Trump reversed course and announced a broad 90-day pause on some (but not all) tariffs that sent the stock market up 8%. In other words, we’re back to not hedging Trump (since who knows what actions will correlate with what outcomes going forward).
I will, however, take a victory lap for telling our CLO Taylor not to circulate any more memos on potential Trump administration trade policies. Because if I hadn’t done that and he had continued to stay up late into the night drafting, he would have died from overexertion by now and we’d be searching for a new lawyer-cum-barista.
I wrote previously about bad presidents, but I’m not here to advocate for or against this or that policy. After all, I think the American economy has shown that it can grow both because of and in spite of decisions made in Washington, D.C. What I would like to advocate for, however, is stability, certainty, and predictability. Because while people and businesses can adapt to pretty much any set of circumstances, no one can adapt to what they don’t know they don’t know.
And while, yes, I’m the guy who says certainty is expensive, I’d be willing to pay a pretty penny for a little bit more of it right about now (and I bet you would, too). Have a great weekend.
– Tim
