Now Trump is targeting the U.K. with tarriffs how should Sir Keir handle a response?

He finally left the golf course long enough to post on Social Media. He is doubling down on tariffs.

Experts are expecting a 1987 Black Monday like sell off tomorrow.

DOW Futures down 1500 points at the open tonight.

This is very, very bad news for tomorrow's stock market.

www.cnn.com/2025/04/06/business/stocks-futures-sunday-tariffs/index.html

I read the article. Understood most of it.

Trump has gone completely bonkers. I've begin to think he wants a crash.

He does want a crash. Because when it hits rock bottom, the uber rich will be able to afford to buy and make a fortune on the way back up.

Another child has died from measles. Total count is over 600 in the US, which is more then the last 5 years combined.

RFKjr went to the funeral of rhe child and finally admitted the best way to protect against this disease is vaccines.

Though his first suggestion was vitamin A, which put a few dozen kids into the hospital with liver problems.

Sorry, that was confusing. Over 600 cases of measles, 2 deaths.

fancythat
Have a look at one of Michael Wolff's books - he had unfettered access to Trump last time he was elected.

NS - thank you. I think I will get one.

imaround - he does want a crash.
I think he does too.

Interesting, imaround.: RFK jr does seem to change his mind a great deal, doesn't he?
So, now, is he pro vaccination? I understood that there has been some " redundancies" in medical research departments which suggested that vaccines save lives.
Also, didn't he add, helpfully, to the vitamin
A debate,that a death from measles was related to poor lifestyle choices regarding diet and exercise?

elegran
Donald Trump won 49.8% of the votes.
Kamala Harris 48.3% of them

It was a very low turnout - 59.9%. So logically 40.1% of known and registered eligible voters didn't vote.

Uk stock market "only" dropped 2.4% so far..

The talk on "Today" is very depressing. I'm trying to think what can be positive.

Is a world divided off from America the best we can expect?

PoliticsNerd

Was it Michael Wolff, NotSpaghetti? He was on TRIP and several others recently, talking about his time in the Whitehouse and his subsequent book.

Yes! Exactly - it was.

www.globalplayer.com/podcasts/42KuYR/

Episode 124.
Worth a listen.

Reading the papers this morning I'm getting the impression that Trump's entire tariff performance is to do with bringing governments around the world to a point of fear. Enough fear that they pull back on restrictions that stop the rich getting richer.

FT full of people suggesting less compliance and restriction, UK car market told it can take it's foot of the non-petrol pedal.

What is at risk are all the things that have developed over the last decade to make life safer and the environment better. What next? Workers rights? H&S?

NotSpaghetti

elegran
Donald Trump won 49.8% of the votes.
Kamala Harris 48.3% of them

It was a very low turnout - 59.9%. So logically 40.1% of known and registered eligible voters didn't vote.

So?
That’s elections for you isn’t it? I doubt that everyone in the UK voted for Keir Starmer.

Not that it matter a jot now, he’s the President like it or not.
I don’t like it!

NotSpaghetti

elegran
Donald Trump won 49.8% of the votes.
Kamala Harris 48.3% of them

It was a very low turnout - 59.9%. So logically 40.1% of known and registered eligible voters didn't vote.

Exactly what I said - of those who could have voted, less than a third actively wanted Trump to be their President. If that election were rerun today with the voters knowing all that they know now about what Trump would do as soon as he was in the White House, he would not have been elected POTUS. I suppose he has achieved somehing - he has awoken the sleeping giant of the Apathetic US Non-voter.

Article by James M. Lindsay, December 18, 2024 3:14 pm (EST)
A Landslide Election or Not? from The Water's Edge and Diamonstein-Spielvogel Project on the Future of Democracy
The 2024 Election by the Numbers
Early election coverage described Trump’s victory as a landslide. But whether you go by the Electoral College vote or the popular vote, it was anything but. The 312 Electoral College votes that Trump won are just six more than Joe Biden won in 2020, twenty less than Barack Obama won in 2012, and fifty-three less than Obama won in 2008. Trump’s Electoral College performance pales in comparison to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s landslide victory in 1936 (523 electoral votes), Lyndon Johnson’s in 1964 (486), Richard Nixon’s in 1972 (520), or Ronald Reagan’s in 1984 (525). In terms of the popular vote, more people voted for someone not named Trump for president than voted for Trump in 2024, and his margin of victory over Harris was 1.5 percentage points. That is the fifth smallest margin of victory in the thirty-two presidential races held since 1900.

The 2024 election was the tenth presidential election in a row in which the margin of victory in the popular vote was in the single digits. That is a record. The longest prior streak began in 1876, when seven consecutive elections were decided by single digits. The last person to win the presidency by a double-digit margin was Ronald Reagan in 1984. He won by eighteen percentage points. The last time someone won the presidency by more than five percentage points was Barack Obama in 2008. He won by seven percentage points. The bottom line is that whatever one makes of the mandate that Trump did or did not win last month, the United States remains deeply divided politically .
www.cfr.org/article/2024-election-numbers

Yes it does of course Elegran as it is here too.Starmer didn’t win ‘big’ with voter numbers and if the election here was rerun right now there’d be a different outcome I bet.
It is what it is, that’s elections.

BBC - it’s a bit long but worth the effort.

President Donald Trump has built another wall, and he thinks everyone else is going to pay for it. But his decision to impose sweeping tariffs of at least 10% on almost every product that enters the US is essentially a wall designed to keep work and jobs within it, rather than immigrants out.
The height of this wall needs to be put in historical context. It takes the US back a century in terms of protectionism. It catapults the US way above the G7 and G20 nations into levels of customs revenue, associated with Senegal, Mongolia and Kyrgyzstan.
What occurred this week was not just the US starting a global trade war, or sparking a rout in stock markets. It was the world's hyper power firmly turning its back on the globalisation process it had championed, and from which it handsomely profited in recent decades.
And in so doing, using the equation that underpinned his grand tariff reveal on the Rose Garden's lawns, the White House also turned its back on some fundamentals of both conventional economics and diplomacy.
Trump talked a lot about 1913 in his announcement. This was a turning point when the US both created federal income tax and significantly lowered its tariffs.
Before this point, from its inception, the US government was funded mainly by tariffs, and was unapologetically protectionist, based on the strategy of its first Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton.
The basic lesson the White House has taken from this is that high tariffs made America, made it "great" the first time, and also meant that there was no need for a federal income tax.
On this side of the Atlantic, underpinning globalisation and free trade are the theories of 19th-Century British economist David Ricardo. In particular, the 1817 Theory of Comparative Advantage.
There are equations, but the basics are pretty easy to understand: Individual countries are good at making different things, based on their own natural resources and the ingenuity of their populations.
Broadly speaking, the whole world, and the countries within it, are better off, if everyone specialises in what they are best at, and then trades freely.

Here in Britain this remains a cornerstone of the junction between politics and economics. Most of the world still believes in comparative advantage. It is the intellectual core of globalisation.
But the US was never a full convert at the time. The underlying reluctance of the US never disappeared. And this week's manifestation of that was the imaginative equation created by the US Trade Representative to generate the numbers on Trump's big board.
The rationale behind 'reciprocal' tariffs
It is worth unpacking the rationale for these so-called "reciprocal" tariffs. The numbers bear little resemblance to the published tariff rates in those countries.
The White House said adjustments had been made to account for red tape and currency manipulation. A closer look at the, at-first, complicated looking equation revealed it was simply a measure of the size of that country's goods trade surplus with the US. They took the size of the trade deficit and divided it by the imports.
In the hour before the press conference a senior White House official explained it quite openly. "These tariffs are customised to each country, calculated by the Council of Economic Advisers… The model they use is based on the concept the trade deficit that we have is the sum of all the unfair trade practices, the sum of all cheating."
This is really important. According to the White House, the act of selling more goods to the US than the US sells to you, is by definition "cheating" and is deserving of a tariff that is calculated to correct that imbalance.
This is why the surreal stories about the US tariffing rarely visited islands only inhabited by penguins matter. It reveals the actual method.
The long-term aim, and the target of the policy, is to get the US $1.2 trillion trade deficit and the largest country deficits within that down to zero. The equation was simplistically designed to target those countries with surpluses, not those with recognisable quantifiable trade barriers. It targeted poor countries, emerging economies and tiny irrelevant islets based on that data.
While these two different factors overlap, they are not the same thing.
There are many reasons why some countries have surpluses, and some have deficits. There is no inherent reason why these numbers should be zero. Different countries are better at making different products, and have different natural and human resources. This is the very basis of trade.
The US appears no longer to believe in this. Indeed if the same argument was applied solely to trade in services, the US has a $280bn (£216bn) surplus in areas such as financial services and social media tech.
Yet services trade was excluded from all the White House calculations.

There is something bigger here. As the US Vice President JD Vance said in a speech last month, globalisation has failed in the eyes of this administration because the idea was that "rich countries would move further up the value chain, while the poor countries made the simpler things".
That has not panned out, especially in the case of China, so the US is moving decisively away from this world.
For the US, it is not David Ricardo who matters, it is David Autor, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) economist and the coiner of the term "China shock".
In 2001, as the world was distracted by the aftermath of 9/11, China joined the World Trade Organisation (WTO), having relatively free access to US markets, and so transforming the global economy.
Living standards, growth, profits and stock markets boomed in the US as China's workforce migrated from the rural fields to the coastal factories to produce exports more cheaply for US consumers. It was a classic example of the functioning of "comparative advantage". China generated trillions of dollars, much of which was reinvested in the US, in the form of its government bonds, helping keep interest rates down.
Everyone was a winner. Well, not quite. Essentially US consumers en masse got richer with cheaper goods, but the quid pro quo was a profound loss of manufacturing to East Asia.
Autor's calculation was that by 2011, this "China shock" saw the loss of one million US manufacturing jobs, and 2.4 million jobs overall. These hits were geographically concentrated in the Rust Belt and the south.
The trade shock impact on lost jobs and wages was remarkably persistent.
Autor further updated his analysis last year and found that while the Trump administration's first term dabble with tariff protection had little net economic impact, it did loosen Democrat support in affected areas, and boosted support for Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

fancythat

Uk stock market "only" dropped 2.4% so far..

The big drops are in Asian shares which shows how much they are dependant on the US market. However this instability is being fueled by speculators making money “short selling” the market will stabilize at some point.
There are many goods in stock in the US including many thousands imported cars any real effect, will be gradual, hopefully sensible tarrifs will be in place when stocks run out.

Oreo,
My response was to Elegran who stated:
I wasn't exactly the majority of the American people. It was less than two thirds of them.

I was pointing out that it was much less than two-thirds.

(I see that subsequently you have said one third Elegran so I think your earlier two thirds was probably a typo?)

I just thought I was being helpful. 🤷‍♀️

Yes, spaghetti it was a typo. Sorry I have done quite a few of those in the last few days. It should improve soon.

(I just checked this post - my fingers slipped sideways without me noticing, so I had typed "data" for "days")

Thank you Whitewavemark2; it was certainly worth the read and good to have it to return to. (I could do with a save button!).

This YouTube-channel may interest some. I watch this guy, or rather I have his channel on, when I am doing other things. It's usually very light and he "reacts" (that's a youtube thing) to everything UK and Europe. I have not really ever thought of him re politics. So, he is reacting to an insight into how Trump's tariffs may affect America.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYnhvFznkWM

Sorry. How the may affect Europe.