Tariffs...

When Donald Trump first started pushing some of our trading partners for better deals, I initially thought it was an interesting possible "deal-making" stance (since at the end of the day, Trump is a deal maker). But long term, tariffs are a very bad idea. It's quite likely that the Great Depression was not caused by the stock market crash. While that didn't help, it was probably made much worse by the Smoot-Hawley tariffs.

So we have China with the 90-day quiet period. From their perspective, it's not bad since we'll have a new split congress in place so it isn't clear that it will give us any better deal. It could make things worse. And now we have Trump making threats against GM - a large global company - about American jobs. Mark Perry at AEI sums it up well:

http://www.aei.org/publication/notable-and-quotable-gm-is-right-to-close-us-sedan-factories/

Net net, there's a good reason the stock market is down 1200 points in the last 2 days. If anything will generate a recession, curtailing the opportunity for global trade is a very good start.

Hmmm... well, now it's 12/24 and maybe I've been a bit too negative. Let's see what happens in the next few weeks.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-24/china-cuts-tariffs-on-more-than-700-goods-amid-open-trade-drive