1 week Ago By Colby Cosh
Article content I find myself wondering if April 7 will be remembered clearly as one of the major defining moments in the Trump trade crisis of 2025, or if it will be a mere curiosity amid an intense period of political chaos to rival August 1914. As you’ve probably already heard, because we are all self-consciously part of the investor class now, the global stock market surged early in the morning because some people misunderstood a Fox News chyron, broadcast while one of President Donald Trump’s major courtiers was giving an interview, and social media was briefly flooded with fictitious hopes that the president might pause his pervasive, arbitrary program of new economic tariffs. There was a brief explosion in the markets, very welcome after two days of epochal gore, but the White House quickly shut down any rumours that the president intended to backtrack on tariffs, and even warned of further increases on tariffs against Chinese-made consumer products.
The bloodbath immediately resumed. Within hours, literally trillions of dollars in value had been created and destroyed in the equity markets: the movements, based on absolutely nothing but whispers, confusion and hope, dwarfed those seen after 9/11 or during the initial days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Some people will blame financial markets for being hypersensitive; others will blame that dang “social media” (media being social by nature since our ancestors were doing cave paintings, but I know we have come too far to fix this terminology).
The problem with “social media” is mostly that we haven’t fully developed the immune system of skepticism that we need to coexist with it, as we eventually did for earlier media. As for the financial markets, they’re doing what they’re supposed to: transmitting price signals with maximum speed. The extreme volatility jerking around your investments and pension entitlements is genuine! It’s out there in the world, and more specifically in the White House! Trillions of dollars in economic value really do depend on the mood and actions of one man, because the United States has plumb forgotten it has a parliamentary system of government! Perhaps I should embrace this as a sign that the world is being converted by means of the sword to classical-liberal doctrines of free trade, and that the Crisis of 2025 is mere prelude to an era in which artificial trade barriers are universally reviled and ridiculed.
In the meantime, what April 7 ought to highlight is that our world has somehow reverted to enlightened despotism everywhere one looks. The White House really is now just an early modern European royal court: your economic future is legitimately hostage, as some 18th-century Hessian farmer’s might have been, to a few privileged (and mostly unelected) personalities and their random offgassings. We are not experiencing a crisis of hypermodernity.
We are receiving forcible instruction in what the world looked and felt like in a time before liberalism. National Post.
