This Carbon Based Life

By David Glenn Cox

Just for fun, imagine you are a death row inmate. As your execution approaches the phone rings. It’s the Governor with good news! They aren’t going to execute you…today. But in ninety days it’s all over. Rejoice! Good News! I’m still under a death sentence, just not carried out today! Oh rejoice! It’s just a death sentence!

But the Gods are gracious, and their beneficence shouldn’t be spurned lightly. The story goes that it took all the top CEO’s and financial experts to wrestle down the King. Explaining to the wall and the King, he was pushing the economy off a cliff towards doomsday. The bond market was starting to go. Last chance to pull back on the reigns before Disaster town.

So about 1:30 the King relented and “paused” his nuclear Tariff program for 90 days. Leaving in place a 10% tariff as a sop to the King illustrating, to all he was still correct in everything all along. Immediately, the markets convulsed the way a body clenches and strains in an electric chair when the voltage first hits. It was a good thing, but it was not a good thing. It was a spasm. The market isn’t supposed to gyrate wildly like a half-drunk stripper. Down 1,500 points for day or two and then up nearly 3,000 points on the King’s return to sanity.

But as a spasm, I tell you as your friend it won’t last. Sell and sell now. Come back and finish reading this after you’ve sold. Too few is given a second chance to escape the noose. I say this because most everyone is probably thinking the same thing. I’m not a savant, but that’s what I would do. Get out while the getting is still good! Are we still under a death sentence? Is the King still Mad? Will the King continue to screw up the world in the next 90 days? Can we expect things to settle down? Sell brothers and sisters, sell! And rejoice in your good fortune.

In its infinite wisdom Wall Street has declared a penalty. Roughly half of the wealth lost will stay lost in the King’s hijinks. Trillions of dollars in wealth around the world quickly incinerated. And now, almost half of the wealth is recouped, but just for a minute. Will the next bounce be this high or will it be smaller? Nothing in this situation has changed really. This is a stock market rejoicing in not getting killed…today! Tomorrow is an entirely different story.

All of the billions of dollars in commercial projects cancelled during the King’s spate of madness inspired Wall Street crash, are still cancelled. It’s like trying to catch a falling Jenga tower and put it back up in midair. The major problem is the uncertainty and irascibility of the King. The King goes to crazy town an up ends the world economy. Then the King gives a half-hearted apology and shoves a waste of a Treasury Secretary out on the lawn to explain it all. Call me cynical, but I don’t think the King was really being totally sincere.

I don’t believe the King has really learned his lesson about playing with fire. This event will only make him more stubborn in the future. The King is not done, not by a long shot. Even if the King did nothing more, the damage is already done. It is the uncertainty of the behavior of the mad King driving markets down. By the King reversing himself. He has inadvertently added to the uncertainty. What he does today he might undo tomorrow. What he ties with his left hand he unties with the right. There is no reliable forecast available. Except for the madness of the King and that means, Sell! Sell now! Sell all! Sell quickly!

It was just the other day Pete Hegseth told me our real enemy was China! That they were all giddy with excitement over to the Pentagon planning this new war with China. The King begins with a Trade War. Everyone is excused…except China. “I’ll see your tariff and raise mine to 125%!” But there is a line where negotiation becomes lecturing and brow beating until negotiation becomes antagonistic. “I’m going to show you how tough I can be, and I don’t care if it upends the whole world! I’ll make the tariffs 5000% see if I care! No skin off of my nose!

Their scheme was as simplistic as it is diabolical. The King wishes to replace the current progressive tax system with a regressive one. A tax system where the poor pay and the rich skate. It seems unlikely the King would abandon the plan and the Republicans life’s work so easily. Wall Street was all on board! All hail the new King! Wait a minute! You can’t do that! Stop! What are you doing? Get back! Get back I say! Back!

“Fire Bad!” And just like that, Frankenstein’s monster broke loose to murder and pillage in countryside. As the Treasury Secretary maintains, “He has some good qualities!” The Sesame Street word of the day is PANIC. Can you say panic boys and girls? Fire on the mountain, run boys run!

Is there panic? Is the King still on his throne? Will the King behave and do right from now on? Or are we doomed to an endless series of fits of madness? Is Pete Navarro dumber than a bag bricks? Is Elon Musk a corn-fed asshole? Are the two mutually exclusive? Can’t they both be true? Maybe the King is dumber than a bag of bricks. He hired Navarro, didn’t he? He listened to Elon, didn’t he? Will the King do right from now on?

NO! Definitely not! Sell! Sell immediately! Do not pass go, Sell! Sell like it’s the end of the world! Because according to the experts if the King persist in this madness, it is.

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
― Lewis Carroll