Predictably, U.S. stock markets took to the news of Trumpian tariffs with a dive toward disaster. True, some companies will — at least in the beginning stages — suffer fairly deeply from higher tariffs on countires such as China, upon which they rely for manufacuturing to be done for virtually pennies on the dollar. Apple, a trillion-dollar purveyor of iPhones and Macs, took a big hit as its products almost entirely emanate from the PRC.
Trump, learning from his first term in office when he hit China with added tariffs, made it almost impossible this time for companies, including Apple, to go bargain manufacturing shopping in Asia. Last time some comppanies simply shifted production to Vietnam (another People’s Republic), but that won’t work this time as the new tariff on Vietnam, set at 46 percent, virtually mirrors China’s.
Meanwhile, doomsayers abound and dominate virtually every news outlet, many pointing to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, claiming that that piece of legislation prolonged the Great Depression, if not creating it in the first place. However, Smoot-Hawley didn’t become law until nine months after the stock market crash of October 29, 1929, dubbed Black Tuesday, so it wasn’t the central cause,
The 1929 Wall Street dive took its cue from a rise in interest rates, which both the Bank of England and the U.S. Federal Reserve saw fit to set in place to counter too much exuberance, not only in the financial markets but also in life itself. Remember this all began occurred the height of “The Roaring 20s.”
Following Black Tuesday, global banks, including the Fed, continued their high-rate fixation even in the face of economic fallout. It didn’t help that President Herbert Hoover, who went on a spending spree to jumpstart things, also raised taxes in 1932 to pay for his largesse. He wasn’t long for office after that, a lesson George Herbert Walker Bush never learned.
To this day, many mistakenly credit President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aka FDR, will “solving” the Great Depression. Wrong. It took Adolph Hitler and his war ambitions to get the American economy humming again to counter his aggression. Since then, Democrats and RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) have been fixated on endless wars as a means to economic salavation, to say nothing of being a means to enrich themselves and their cronies.
Now, as for my initial question about the Ghost of Herbert Hoover stalking 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, only an old fart like me could recognize my reference to a 1950s television show called “The Shadow.” At the beginning of each episode of that show, a voice would ask, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” And the voice would answer, “Only The Shadow Knows,” The Shadow being a human with deep insight into the mysteries of our very being.
I will deal with the “evil” that stalks America in a subsequent post, but it is neither Trump nor his tariffs (or Elon Musk). For know, let me say that this contemporary evil lurks in the hearts of the journalists and commentators — even those with fancy degrees and titles after their names — who dominate what is now referred to as “the news.”