Markets are crashing today Monday 7th of April 2025. Following 2 days of stock markets collapse around the world, the fall seems to be steepening after Trump announced his protectionist tariff policy against the world.
Until Trump went into office for the second time we couldn’t understand that international relations and trade policies would collapse under a bullying behavior. The rude and discgraceful attack to the Ukrainian president, the unthinkable fact the the VP of USA would take the floor and address/attack the No1 of a country, was the beginning of the era of the BULLY! Also the rude and authoritarian Trump stopped the speech of the UK Prime Minister but telling him “that’s enough”. I’m not even elaborating on the Munich trip of the US No2 where he accused Europe for lack of transparency and free speech. The bully in the room accused the people of Europe for promoting censorship while his president chooses the journalists and the channels that will enter the White House for briefing and questions.
We would undermine the bully tactic if we didn’t mention that he threatened Panama and Greenland to be taken over even by military means and Canada to become the 51st state of the USA.
The US President published a table and a formula full of nonsense! By calculating the trade deficit of the USA with all countries and dividing it by total imports, he decided to name the outcome as tariffs imposed to the USA. Pure nonsense! In the free market global economies, countries and people buy goods because of their price or quality or both, also based on its uniqueness i.e champagne or Mercedes cars and Porche or the Greek olive oil and fetta cheese and the Cyprus cheese halloumi.
Now the whole world is feeling insecure and uncertain for the near future and which will affect all sectors of the economies, imports and exports. Even if some countries will not retaliate, still the USA will be negatively affected and therefore its trading partners will be affected also, even in the case the remain calm and ask for negotiations.
It seems that Trump is shooting holes in a boat at sea but unfortunately in this boat there are also the trading partners of the USA. It would be wise for him to pause the “shooting of the boat” since if the other countries retaliate by shooting also, the the boat it will sink for sure. I believe that the EU will react in a calm way asking for negotiations by pausing the enforcement of the tariffs on the 9th of April 2025. That will only happen if Trump is forced by the markets, otherwise he will continue the mad man show of who is the captain of the boat, even if its sinking, by bullying trading partners to succumb to his dictation. I used the last word with great thought and as carefully as possible.
