1 week Ago
U.S. President Donald Trump attends a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, on April 10.
Nathan Howard/Reuters Wall Street titans breathed life into the second presidency of Donald Trump by funding his re-election campaign. Now that Mr. Trump is back in the White House, however, America’s most-venerated gods of finance have lost control of their political creation.
That billionaire investors were temporarily placated this week by the President’s pivot on his global tariff plan only underscores their waning influence with him and his administration. Sure, Mr. Trump’s 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs for all countries, except for China, sparked a sharp rebound in U.
S. financial markets on Wednesday. But by Thursday, equities were deeply in the red once again.
It seems that after the initial high wore off, the hangover set in. Investors finally realized that Mr. Trump’s reprieve was just a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.
It obviously didn’t work. Whipsawing financial markets have left ordinary people bracing for a recession in the world’s largest economy. Still, some on Wall Street seem determined to show deference to Mr.
Trump by rationalizing his latest trade antics. Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman – who earlier this week characterized Mr. Trump’s plan for country-specific tariffs as “ economic nuclear war ” – on Thursday credited the President’s strategy as “highly favourable.
” Mr. Ackman also bristled at criticism of his adulation of Mr. Trump.
“There is nothing sycophantic about giving praise to our president for outcomes that he has achieved that are good for America,” he wrote in a post on X. Nope, nothing at all. After all, it was just days ago that Mr.
Trump expressed indifference about the trillions of dollars in stock-market value that evaporated as a result of his global tariff plan. Perhaps, Mr. Trump assumed that Mr.
Ackman was just joshing when he warned: “ The global economy is being taken down because of bad math .” Maybe when one is blinded by wealth, it is easy to forget that Mr. Trump was initially unmoved by Mr.
Ackman’s pleas or those of other Wall Street giants. Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, wrote in his annual letter to shareholders this week that “the recent tariffs will likely increase inflation and are causing many to consider a greater probability of a recession.” It was yet another about-face for Mr.
Dimon. Although he was previously critical of tariffs during Mr. Trump’s first term in office, Mr.
Dimon appeared to shift his position this past January when he called the President’s tariff plan an important “economic weapon” and suggested that people just needed to “get over it,” according to a report by The New York Times . Billionaire Larry Fink, who is CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, told a New York business audience earlier this week that the U.S.
economy was “weakening as we speak.” He also warned that most CEOs that he confers with “would say we are probably in a recession right now.” Mr.
Trump, though, seemed to delight in psyching out the business community. “The only special interest guiding President Trump’s decision-making ..
. is the best interest of the American people,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai told the New York Times this week . Wait what? It would be a delicious turn of events if Mr.
Trump considered the billionaire class a special interest group now that he’s back in the Oval Office. Trump 2.0 is certainly a creature of Wall Street.
But the power dynamics have shifted in the President’s favour. He feels beholden to no one. No wonder Wall Street titans are falling all over themselves to get back in Mr.
Trump’s good graces. With their fortunes now at risk, they are trying to bend his ear before his tariff policies push the U.S.
economy into an official recession. The rest of us mere mortals, meanwhile, are marvelling at how these captains of finance were caught flat-footed by his trade agenda in the first place. Say what you will about Mr.
Trump, but he is doing exactly what he said he was going to do. His backers on Wall Street should have believed him..
