Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance

It has been one whole day since President Trump implemented his tariff agenda.

With the amount of squirming and outright panic in the news media, markets, and on social media, you’d think we were 50 years into a 100-year bout of famine, plague, depression, and pestilence.

Let’s all just gather our heads for a second.

At a very basic psychological level, people are opposed to change. It doesn’t matter whether it’s changing their cable provider or taking a detour in traffic.

Extrapolating from this, people are really opposed to bigger, more consequential change.

Extrapolating from this, in the world of finance, I have consistently argued that market participants have been falsely conditioned by our monetary and fiscal policy in this country to always expect comfort and never expect interruptions from the market moving higher, or the quality of life status quo that we believe we are entitled to here in the United States to suffer.

This concept was the basis for my article explaining why I thought the next market crash would “break the brains” of market participants.

Now let’s zoom out and think about what President Trump is trying to accomplish with his tariff agenda. He is essentially saying that the status quo in the United States isn’t working and large changes need to be implemented—changes that will shock the global economy—to remedy the issue.

“Who is the status quo not working for?” some of you will ask me from your Porsche, driving down PCH, or from your desk overseeing your millions in the market.

If I had to venture a guess, I’d say it’s not working for people in towns like this:

And the status quo definitely isn’t working for the bottom 50% of Americans here, represented by the yellow section that is so small you have to zoom in to see it:

Billionaires (other than Trump, it seems) have a difficult time answering questions like “What happens when we run out of middle American towns to gut?” and “How has your quality of life been negatively impacted by monetary policy over the last 20 years?”

The reason they can’t answer these questions is because they don’t have any idea. Monetary policy helps them accrue more wealth and power, and they don’t live in middle America. But if you take a trip to a place like Flint, Michigan, or Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the answers to these questions become a lot clearer.

Abandoned Bethlehem Steel plant

The direction the country was heading in monetarily and fiscally was simply unsustainable. Deficits too big. Debt skyrocketing against GDP. Wealth gap accelerating. Drug and alcohol addiction ravaging cities.

We were walking a path that decimated the lives and the purchasing power of the people who need it most and took American jobs away from people who needed them the most.

Worse off, it made the United States dependent on adversaries like China to simply go about our day-to-day. When global supply chains were cut off during COVID, it was obvious that our quality of life was 100% dependent on imported goods—everything from consumer electronics to clothing to the ingredients used in pharmaceuticals.

Recalibrating the country away from being dependent on adversarial nations is not a simple and inconsequential thing to do. On the contrary, it’s about as consequential of a decision as we can possibly make, alongside of trying to get our fiscal house as a nation in order.

Consequential means change. Change means discomfort. Discomfort requires courage. On a positive note, to me, it seems like the first time our government has taken more than a 10-day outlook on the future of our nation.

Time and time again, I have complained on this blog that monetary and fiscal policy in this country are run like an infant in a candy store. We do whatever we want, spend whatever we want, throw a tantrum when we don’t get what we want, barely think about the decisions we make, and sacrifice and mortgage anything not nailed down to ensure that our quality of life as it exists today can continue for just one more day (speaking of which, have we audited Fort Knox yet?).

The nearsightedness of our policymaking in this country has been breathtaking. Trump’s tariff agenda scratches to a halt the record of complacency that’s...(READ THIS FULL ARTICLE 100% FREE HERE).