The Secretary of Commerce at Lutnik has recently said this:
Donald Trump’s Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said Thursday that people should let the president run the world economy because they know what they’re doing.
One thing he knows is that his recent announcement has destroyed $2.5 trillion in stock market wealth in the US, let alone additional damage to non-trade and foreign companies. It is perhaps one of the biggest day destruction of wealth achieved by the biggest individual singles.
And here is the first articles of various US Constitution:
article. Yo.
Section 1.
All legislative powers recognized here shall be granted to the US Congress, consisting of the Senate and the House of Representatives.
Note that they say they have all the legislative powers, not “almost.” I am still looking for a part of the constitution where the president should “run the world economy.”
There was a time when Congress actually decided on US trade policies. The Institute for Policy Innovation recently created a list of 15 treaties passed in Congress that President Trump has violated in the past 24 hours. I won’t list them all, but here the first two and the last two give you a flavour:
On May 23, 1985, Congress was handed over to a free US-Israel deal. Donald Trump defeated it. On September 19, 1988, Congress was handed over to a free US-Canada deal. Donald Trump defeated it. . . . On October 12, 2011, Congress was handed over to a free US-Columbia deal. Donald Trump defeated it. And on January 16, 2020, Congress passed Donald Trump’s USMCA. This is a free deal between Mexico and Canada. Donald Trump just broke his own four-year-old trade deal.
It reminds us of the days when Congress had the power of wallets. The decisions on tax and government spending were made by the Congress, and the job of the administrative department was to register those laws. Today, Congressional expenditure permission is treated as a mere proposal, and the president can freely accept or reject it. The president can enact the biggest tax hike in history.
Intellectuals who run through history have repeatedly dreamed of being a benevolent dictator, and have dreamed of a leader who manages to survive the troublesome tasks that it reaches consensus, and dominates in a bold and decisive way. On some occasions, as I saw from reading Kuan Yew’s Singapore, it worked. But all Lee has a mature dozen, Castro and Putin. Crowd wisdom is not always right, but on average it’s not even wrong than single wisdom.
The recent tariffs adopted by the Trump administration would not have been enacted by Congress. We’ll see how they work. Bloomberg reports that the tariff announcement is hurting the US stock market far more than the foreign market.
US equity index futures fell more than 4% after Trump announced that the dollar measure had collapsed after the end of the market on Wednesday. However, the impact elsewhere was not extreme. The Stoxx Europe 600 fell 1.9%, while the euro rose 2.2% against the dollar, reaching its highest level since October. The broad gauge of Asian stocks fell by 1.7%.
How is the difference explained by special Thate, in particular, that argues that tariffs are an effective way to prevent the United States from being “used by foreigners”? Was this what they were expecting? Did they expect the dollar to depreciate in the news?
It is noteworthy that the subs of these trace treaties are clearly more than economic policy initiatives. It is no coincidence that Israel was the first country to achieve free training with the United States. It has close truism with Israel related to security issues in the Middle East. Trump’s abolition of this treaty is more than just economic policy, it is also foreign policy.
IPI also said this:
When will the President break the treatment that was legally passed by Congress?
President Trump relies on the International Emergency Economic Emergency Rights Act of 1977 (IEEEP), which gives the president the authority to act in the case of “an unusual and non-foreign threats.” Can anyone discuss with a straight face and a healthy mind?
A 10% tariff was placed on a hard island with zero humans and several penguin populations. However, there are some lovely mountains, but it reminds me of Mount Rainier.
