The Trump administration slapped global tariffs on trade partners and justified them by invoking forced labor. Trading partners responded by saying that's not a real reason. They're correct.
Forced labor exists. It's bad. It also has nothing to do with blanket tariffs on steel from Canada or wine from France unless you believe every product crossing every border was made by someone in chains. The administration doesn't believe this. The trade partners don't believe this. You don't believe this. But here we are, pretending it's a legitimate framework for economic policy instead of what it actually is: a thing someone said out loud to justify a thing they already wanted to do.
Most countries signaled they'll keep negotiating anyway. Smart move. When someone punches you in the face and says it's because you might have thought about punching them first, you don't storm off. You stay in the room and wait for them to get tired.
Retail traders will now spend six weeks trying to figure out which stocks benefit from moral outrage over forced labor and which stocks benefit from tariffs that have nothing to do with forced labor but are justified by forced labor. They will buy both. They will lose money on both. Then they'll post on Reddit about how the market is rigged because their shares of a French cheese company didn't moon after Trump cited Uyghur detention camps.
The chart doesn't care about your human rights talking points. It doesn't care about trade partner rebuttals. It moves because someone with more money than you decided it should move, and they decided that before this headline existed.
The tariffs stay until they don't, the justification was never the point, and your portfolio is still down because you bought options on geopolitical theater.
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
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