TACO King Makes a Fortune for Him and His
But what about the rest of us who don't have a seat at the TACO table?
The possibility anticipated in my last editorial as likely is the one that proved true. The stock market’s dive and rapid rebound was another TACO trade, made possible by the president reneging at Davos on the Greenland tariff threats he made because supposedly NATO gave him a deal he cannot refuse.
The details of the deal are as vague as Trump needs them to be in order to claim an excuse to wind backward from his tariff assault that immediately ripped so deeply into the financial world that the president had to send his Secretary of the Treasury out on post to proclaim to the world that everything was fine and markets should just calm down.
Trump didn’t get an actual deal, but he got an ambiguous “framework” for a deal:
TACO prevails: Stocks jump after Trump calls off Greenland tariffs
US stocks ripped higher late in Wednesday’s session as Trump walked back his latest tariff threats.
The president said he had reached a framework deal with NATO countries over Greenland.
The president soothed markets earlier after he said he wouldn’t use force to take over Greenland.
The most telling thing of all about the framework for a deal was that Trump said nothing about how it strengthened US security or Greenland security, which was the all-important urgency he originally claimed was at stake. What he boasted of as an accomplishment, instead, was that the framework secured mineral rights for the US. Once gain, these wars and threatened wars are all about the oil (and other minerals of equal value). It’s about the treasure beneath the surface.
“This solution, if consummated, will be a great one for the United States of America, and all NATO Nations. Based upon this understanding, I will not be imposing the Tariffs that were scheduled to go into effect on February 1st,” the president wrote.
Yet, the only great part he mentioned was US mineral rights/access of some kind. That seemed to be on the top of his mind.
Use of the big club worked, but it comes with a cost of relentless degradation of US status as an ally you can rely on or as a nation or can do business with or a financial system the world can bank on. So, Europe, for now went ahead with developing its retaliatory tariffs. Of course, the switch on Trump’s part happened so quickly, Europe may have still been in meetings and just didn’t know about about the president’s reversal as European leaders came to an agreement to work out retaliatory tariffs, including possibly their financial nuclear option of divesting from US Treasuries, which they have now started talking openly about.
Details on the agreement were thin, but investors didn’t hesitate to pile back into stocks, erasing much of Tuesday’s steep loss.
Details are very thin because the only thing that often matters with Trump’s deals is that they give him something to hang his hat on. In terms of really mattering, I know I find it hard to see ANY way in which the US I live in day today has become one bit better after a year of Trump. Just more everyday chaos. I’m not richer. I don’t feel the country is richer. I certainly don’t feel it is more peaceful or secure. I don’t feel my nation is greater. I don’t feel like I’m going to have much respect for being an American, not that I crave respect on that basis, but I might be inclined to wear a Canada pin when traveling. I don’t care greatly either about loss of respect from the New-World-Order nations but I can see NOTHING in what Trump has done that puts us in less of a new world order in exchange for the disrespect of other nations! All he is delivering is a NEW new world order, targeted all the more specifically to the benefit of elite billionaires, which is also a new order focused all around the mercurial Trump and whatever his rage drives him to do on any given Sunday. Trump is building a new world order around himself.
Jobs are not more plentiful. AI has been intentionally accelerated by Trump who boasts at a Ford factory about how robots, wirelessly connected to the big AI brains owned by billionaires, will take over jobs quickly as Trump pushes US government funds into AI development in baldfaced fascist style. He doesn’t even try to hide his fascist economics as he boasts about what a great leader Hitler was and does all he can to empower NeoNazis. (Calling Trump’s economy “fascist” is not me being pejorative; that is just what the mixture of major public funds with private investments has been called for decades.) The dollar has been falling all year under tariffs, as I predicted we’d see from all of this. Prices are higher because of tariffs, as predicted, while the president brazenly lies on a daily basis to claim prices are lower and to keep claiming that other nations are paying for the tariffs, even though almost all of us have figured out by now that neither of those claims is not remotely true. (I plan to dig into the details on those rising prices in my weekend Deeper Dive, unless something more compelling comes along.) The nation is far more agitated to where people are much more easily angered at each other. The sweep of a military police state throughout the country has spread rapidly with Trump finding ways to dodge courts and warrants as the courts resist his militarizing of America that demands citizens certify their citizenship up demand. We are involved in a widening spiral of regime-change wars around the world. US citizens now find less in common with each other from being Americans, not more, because the president is a divider, not someone like Reagan who could unite a good number people around his vision, even though he had his protestors to be sure; but he could work in a friendly manner across the aisles of congress to get things enacted as law, not as decrees. The government has turned into an unabashed crony system that has devalued the centralized national dollar. That iconic system is being supplanted by a highly unreliable crypto system owned largely by billionaires that is certainly not more stable than the old banking system that was owned by the world’s first billionaires. It’s hard to see how that new fractured financial system is going to prove more stable, while it’s easy to see how it will lead to the digital replacement of all money in the US while Palantir and other corporations are finding multiplicities of ways in which tech can help the government monitor and control your lives. That is not exactly settling as we accelerate our downhill slide away from totally anonymous cash, losing grass of that independence forever. Much of all of that was sliding in one direction prior to Trump, but Trump has greatly accelerated the slide in that wrong direction. Sure, that means the breakup of the system; but “burn it all down” has not ever resulted in a better nation down the road that I can recall from history. It is, instead, the very thing that conservatives on the far right warned was coming—a collapsed financial system and collapsed nation.
Alas, I digress to the many deeply negative changes in the US that are hounding my brain, so I’ll narrow back down to the details of just Wednesday’s TACO trade:
“Walk softly and carry a big stick, and you get that TACO reaction and the market can finally unclench,” he said. “It’s an exhausting process and this is the exact news that investors were hoping to get some sort of resolution on.”
Given how Trump has unabashedly profiteered off the presidency at every turn, I have to wonder if he doesn’t deliberately say things that he knows will crash the market so that he can say things the next day that will make the market soar in relief that he didn’t do what he said he would so so that all his cronies who buy membership to the presidency at Mar-a-Lago can cash in on the TACO trade (in line behind the president, of course, who always gets the only double scoop of ice cream on his Mar-a-Lago cake). So, the average marketeer gets exhausted from all the presidential disruption of markets, but each person in the in crowd knows just how to time the president’s move to make another billion in just one day.
The market had already been somewhat soothed earlier in the day when Trump said during his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that he wouldn’t use force to take control of Greenland.
He even has a world stage for making his market-changing pronouncements.
Supposedly, he got a framework for a deal what will make America a safer place to live in. I don’t know how because I was never the least bit concerned in the first place about Russia taking over Greenland with all of NATO ready to destroy any nation that tried. I guess it is just that Trump successfully used the threat of his powerful military to press former friends in Greenland and Europe into some sort of better mineral deals than what we might have gotten, had he not strong-armed them.
Other trends in the “Sell America” trade also began to reverse, a sign that investors were gaining more confidence in US assets after a bruising session on Tuesday. The 10-year US Treasury yield dropped four basis points. The US Dollar Index also firmed slightly to 98.82.
But only “gaining” the confidence he caused them to lose.
You have to put “TACO” as a caveat to any market move that is based on Trump tariff threats these days because Trump prides himself on being unpredictable as the art of the deal, though nothing is more predictable now than the fact that he will most likely reverse himself in a day or two in order to capture the huge bounces he can make in market’s around the world with the help of his global podium. This one was timed perfectly for the biggest stage of all—the WEF.
If Trump knows how to play the markets he’s making and is not concerned about the optics of doing so nor the legality, since he is immune to prosecution from anything related to official acts as a president, then he is making bank like no prior time in his life; and I have no doubt he is capable of doing all of that and IS doing all of that because he has repeatedly shown us that he has no reservations about any of that. He will no doubt soon be accelerating past Elon Musk as the richest man in the world, hitting that mark long before impeachment has another chance to fail as his party protects their own no matter what.
“President Trump’s statement that he won’t use military force to control Greenland is sparking a relief rally on Wall Street on the heels of yesterday’s sell-off,” José Torres, a senior economist at Interaction Brokers, wrote in a note earlier in the day. “Like a swimmer awaiting the sound of the gun before stroking to the other side in hopes of winning the race, traders piled into shares and Treasuries once the US leader delivered a more conciliatory tone than expected,” he added.
Except that it could be easily expected, which is why I noted its likelihood in my last editorial. It has become a predictable pattern.
Can anyone believe the president was either too dumb or too bashful to get the jump on that trade in order to profit more than anyone? With total immunity and no chance of a third term to worry about, why would he hesitate? It is far harder to believe he did not profit immensely off of the TACO trade than to believe he did, since making money off of great deals is supposed to be the area of Trump’s boasted genius. I don’t see how he could miss the opportunities he is creating. This is, after all, the guy who openly sold access to a Mar-a-Lago dinner for $100,000,000 investments in his crypto $Trump, far excelling Biden’s selling of presidential access, and Biden would have also been very secretive about it. Trump does it brazenly in the open because of his clarified immunity.
Of course, those big investments aren’t doing all that well for investors, but what does Trump care so long as he banked a personal fortune before $Trump started going down? The investors will make more to the tune of billions off their close presidential access to the big deals that combine public and private funds than the $100M investment cost them:
Hopefully, for Donald $Trump, he captured his profits at the top of that cliff-dive, ski slope. I’d hate to call that a failed enterprise, but if crypto is to be the new replacement for the dollar that Trump is doing his best to cripple with tariffs, then that is the scariest financial graph you ever saw for the rest of us Americans because the president’s own crypto wouldn’t even pay this month’s rent if you traded twenty-thousand dollars for it back when it was issued last year.
That’s what I want as a national currency—something so speculative that you can bank your paycheck in it and have a 50/50 chance you’ll lose your home down the road when the money isn’t there. Speculation with your extra money as a way to make money is one thing, but speculative vehicles should never take the place of actual money because the last thing you want for paying your bills is money that bounces all over the place in value, making your personal financial planning a highly eventful rollercoaster of daily speculation. You need a stable money you can always bank on for your operating funds to go along with whatever you are doing in speculative gambles, or you put yourself in a highly insecure position. That kind of speculation may be great when it works, but it could be devastating when it doesn’t if you don’t have something far more stable as a foundation under it for paying the bills.
Something tells me that bouncing markets all over the place with truly world-changing announcements of military threats is not ultimately good for a stable financial world either and that doing the same thing with tariff threats is also not stable for the financial world as it is driving more and more nations and investors away from the dollar as the former ultimate safe-haven of boring investments.
“As we know from recent history, Trump uses these tariffs as a blunt instrument and a negotiating lever to pull to get his way on the world stage,” Matthew Ryan, the head of market strategy at Ebury, wrote in a note on Wednesday….
And he timed this one to line up perfectly with the biggest, most audacious world stage of all. However, blunt instruments and instability come with their own prices to pay, but those costs may be more chronic in forming than acute, even if his announcements have immediate acute effects. It is the longer-lasting chronic damage from each acute attack—the cumulative effect—that may be impossible to recover from later. Being mercurial and unreliable has not typically been a good trait in the world of finance or business; but it is the ride we are all on now.
Chatter about TACO — which sparked a record-breaking rally in stocks after Trump walked back some of his Liberation Day tariffs last April — began to pick up on Tuesday as markets digested Trump’s latest Greenland threats.
I seem to recall writing almost those exact words:
Today’s kind of move, when it was short-lived, happened so often last year that market analysts started calling moves like this (when the market settled down the next day upon further digestion) the TACO trade—stock traders betting that “Trump Always Chickens Out.” In the TACO trade, traders bought stocks the morning after prices plunged due to Trump’s tariff announcements then sold them after prices rose back up when the tariffs were delayed or reduced a day or a week later. (See “SELL AMERICA! It looked like a stock, bond and dollar fire sale today!”)
So, there it is: the TACO trade fully played out once again.
The USA is the president’s toy.
Analysts on JPMorgan’s international markets intelligence desk said they were reading Trump’s latest tariff announcements “from an ‘Art of the Deal’” perspective.
Exactly. Reading it like like a tarot card. Major political/financial moves for the US are all about deals … for Trump. Is the US better because of the deals? Are the tariffs helping you? If you’ve learned to make the TACO trades and are comfortable working in a highly capricious, personalized stock market, then you might be making bank; but you are probably numbered among the few, as many don’t have that kind of “extra” money to put at that risk. They are having a hard enough time keeping up with the rent under the rising prices that the tariffs impose. (Don’t forget that recent study that revealed 96% of US tariffs are paid for by Americans.)
“Trump creates noise and throws in a maximal stance designed to trigger negotiation and create leverage/urgency.”
It’s a tactic—not for your benefit, but for the TACO traders, including Trump. If I’m wrong, you can enlighten me in the comments below about the ways in which YOUR ACTUAL experience of America has significantly AND TANGIBLY improved because of Trump over the course of his first year in office now that that is completed. (Substack, not me, limits comments to paying subscribers. I would like to see a broader response but cannot override that in “paid” posts, even though I give most of the content away in my paid posts—something that may have to change.)
I’m looking for ACTUAL improvements, not theoretical—the latter kind being such things as immigration is down, even though YOU have not felt any specifiable benefit from it, such as an actual boost in pay that you can attribute to that. My guess is that your big improvement will be that your gold and silver are way up because he’s crashed all confidence in the dollar.
That, of course, is in reality the CATASTROPHE you were banking against when you bought gold and silver in the first place, so hardly an improvement for the US; you just reached the days when your long-planned insurance policy is paying off by becoming essential for continued survival. That would be like saying crashing your car is a good thing because you got the different car you wanted when you crashed your old car because the insurance paid off. Crashing your way to new successes is a rather dubious way and probably unsustainable way to improve your life, though I’m glad for all who bought the insurance now that we are entering the times you bought it for.
Just be a little careful about thinking crashes are good for you, even if your silver and gold did what the insurance was meant to do. Besides the crash getting you that replacement vehicle with lower miles that you wanted out of the insurance, crashes might also get you a broken wrist and a concussion. The USA is a big thing to go crashing around in as a presidential pathway to success, and I think Trump is likely doing a lot better by it than you are … unless you are one of the rare ones. In the end, a sinking tide likely lowers all boats. You may be better off in some ways because of your sliver, and I’m glad for those who bought the insurance, but living off insurance claims has its downsides from the injuries that likely are collateral to such claims. It is unlikely you’ll be better off overall by living in a collapsed nation as your habitat. And Trump as God’s wrecking ball for America seems to be a likely prediction I made long ago that keeps bashing its way into our realities.
But, maybe I’ve got it all wrong, so lay your comments on me for your sake and the benefit of others:
