Artists and the tariffs
Like you, I’m sure, I’m a pretty sophisticated macroeconomic thinker.
For example, here is approximately what I thought about the tariffs:
First thought: “This guy is such a clown.”
Second thought: “Wait! Is it possible that this is, like, actually really good? Like, is he such an idiot that he’s going to tank everything for everyone and totally self-destruct and finally lose the blind obedience of his followers and eventually get his ass KICKED? Let’s gooooooo!”
Third thought: “Wait… if everything in the world tanks, that’s… really bad, right?”
Then everything in the world did, in fact, tank. And now my feelings of schadenfreude have soured into fear that this will plunge the world into large-scale and long-lasting damage.
And who actually suffers in that event? Ding ding ding! Correct! It’s not the high-net-worth individual whose net worth of millions and millions gets cut in half to just plain old millions. A massive recession would land, as ever, on the backs of the poor, on working people, on blue collars.
Because the president of the United States watches a lot of television and is afraid of going down in history as the next Herbert Hoover1, it seems to me that there is a real possibility that he walks it all back and tries to sell it as just a negotiating tactic.
In the meantime, what are normal people to do?
Don’t get distracted from the fact that, economic “policy” aside, LEGAL RESIDENTS OF THE UNITED STATES WHO HAVE DONE NOTHING WRONG ARE BEING DISAPPEARED OFF THE STREETS AND SENT TO THE DAMN GULAG.
Please keep making those five calls.
But if you want to understand the tariffs better from just a normie economics POV, Krugman is a good place to start.
With regard to the money side of Money for Artists, jeez louise fam, there’s not much you can do right now besides stay steady. Obviously and by definition, artists and blue collars are unlikely to have millions of dollars set aside, whether in the stock market or under the mattress. In the unlikely event that you have a bunch of cash sitting around, I would advise continuing to invest it as normal while also keeping cash on hand for emergencies. If you are lucky enough to have a bunch of money already invested, and you are watching the stock market drunkenly stagger and feeling freaked out, recall that the market has been historically overvalued in recent years, and was probably due for a “correction” anyway. For our part, rather than investing in the market as a whole, we’re going to keep looking for non-sleazy companies that seem to us durable and with a good chance of succeeding in the end. But the blunt hard reality is that anyone who is right now on the verge of retirement or has recently retired is in a scary place.2 You have to remember that, while the short term is anxiety-making, money and saving and retirement are a long game. Even people in their 60s and 70s have time for their savings to turn around.
Courage!
Luck!
Cheer!
Even aside from the Depression, Hoover was terrible on every count, but to his credit, he never seems to have ordered people to be illegally disappeared — there are worse people to go down in history as, in other words.
At least, anyone who is retiring with something. Those who live in precarity and simply work until they can’t work any longer have always lived with financial fear and distress, and this moment only deepens it.