Video Update - Tariffs, the Big Beautiful Bill, and 17+% Gains on Several Stocks

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This is going to be a noisy week. No question about it. I’s tariff week. The extensions expire on Wednesday, and the Trump administration has said it will send letters to all these countries, letting them know what their new tariffs are. He is not being shy. He has already fired away: 25% tariffs to Japan, 25% tariffs to Korea. I read the letters he sent announcing these to the leaders of these countries. They are insulting. There is no other way to put it. We are going to have a week of this.

The "90 deals in 90 days" talk was just Howard Lutnick making stuff up for soundbites. We have a fairly solid agreement with the United Kingdom. We have agreements with China and Korea. China and Vietnam agreed not to blow each other's countries up, but the one with Vietnam is upsetting China. There are just a lot of balls in the air.

I have said this continuously: politically and economically, tariffs are stupid. There is no other way to put it. They do not work. They are not going to achieve the president's goals here. If this is a mistake politically, the remaking of the global world order probably is not going to go in our favor. Maybe I am upsetting people who are big fans of the president. Sorry. I dislike them all, so I do not criticize any one more than the other, but this is not a great idea. What is happening across Africa, Latin America, and even Europe is they are turning away from the United States and looking to China and other Eastern nations as trade partners. That is not good for us.

Having said that, the doom and gloom that this is going to be the end of it all for the economy is probably not realistic. Remember the bell curve. All the really bad stuff on the left-hand side, all the good stuff on the right-hand side. This is not going to be the end of the world. It is not going to be the greatest thing that ever happened in the last 249 years of our national existence. It is going to be in the middle. There is going to be stagflation. We have said it all along: 1% to 1.5% hit to GDP, 1.5% to 2% bump in inflation. None of that is great, but it is manageable and it is not anything that this economy cannot handle. It is going to be a slow patch.

As I said, I am massively not a fan of tariffs. They are going to cause disruption in the markets. What we have to hope for is the disruption is enough that we get some buying opportunities out of it.

The Big, Beautiful Law

Lots of noise also about the big, beautiful law, and I have heard everything on this one. I have talked to people who were wondering if they should get a bunker and pile up all their copies of Rachel Carson and Karl Marx and all the environmentalists and just everybody else that they could possibly find and move to a liberal enclave somewhere in the mountains where nobody could get to them. Then on the other side, I have heard from people who said that this is going to be a massive economic renaissance.

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