Two very quick points looking at this from the perspective of bourgeois interests.
The first is the Liz Truss argument. I.e. What Trump has done is to short the market. The announcement leads to market turmoil and devaluation, and down in the dip the most short-termist sections of finance and commercial capital hoover up cheap assets which they can sell when stocks inevitably recover. Which depends on Trump rowing back on some tariffs, which seems likely given his erratic behaviour. Would some sections of capital be happy to see US capital as a whole take a hit for their profits? Absolutely. We saw some of their British counterparts do this two-and-a-half years ago during Truss's brief stint in Downing Street, so why not again? There are sections of American capital who are totally on board with libertarianism as a strategy for class politics. I.e. Blow up anything that amounts to a social or legal obligation on capital accumulation, even if it's against the interests of capital-in-general. Giving credence to this reading is the "idiotic" way the tariffs have been calculated, and to whom they've been applied - including uninhabited rocks in the middle of the ocean. The slap dash approach indicates a desire in engineering an outcome, not a serious policy orientation.
But supposing it is a turn away from global trade, what does the US stand to gain? It's worth remembering that capital is not unified, and there are competing perspectives within it regarding assumptions about the ways of the world, what policies are appropriate to it, and what strategies are best for advancing the interests of sections of business, and/or capital as a whole. For instance, Trump's slimy relationship to Vladimir Putin is entirely rational viewed in the context of this framework. I would suggest the tariffs are bound up with securing the oligarchical interest on the home front. While trade unionism is hardly in rude health across the sea, the street rebellions around Black Lives Matter and Palestinian Solidarity are read by hyper-class conscious oligarchs as trouble at t'mill; that something is shifting. The proxy for this is the elite's war on woke. They (rightly) discern that the take up of diversity and inclusion policies by big capital is a form of appeasement, of capital responding to the expectations and aspirations of labour rather than laying down the law. After all, how awful it is for business owners that workers resent their aptitudes and identities being used against them. It is a far sighted recognition that the becomings of immaterial labour presents a long-term threat to the stability of class relations. The development of so-called AI is one technique whose application is to head this off, but equally the reconstruction of the federal state as a decrepit do-nothing institution with no purpose beyond enforcing the power of the executive branch can also serve as capital's reply to this existential challenge, albeit one that is crude in its methods and brutal in its outcomes. Trump's new isolationism is a disengagement from US responsibilities and dependencies and is explicitly asserted in sovereigntist terms - Make America Great Again. But what the real consequence will be is not the much-promised economic renaissance, but the reconsolidation of the bourgeois power some class fractions feel is slipping away.
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The US ruling class obsession with China can’t be ignored. Trump is a blundering oaf, but there are smart people in his administration. We can expect to see a rerun of the Nixon era dollar devaluation efforts, picking off competitors one by one and forcing them to accept terms including dollar devaluation. While China is unlikely to take notice, the aim would be to undermine its economy with a more competitive US one.
The USA has spent the last 50 years (at least) opening up markets, strong-arming small and medium-sized countries around the world to drop protectionist measures, ending import bans and import taxes on luxury goods, and to allow capital to flow in and out freely. European elites have assumed that this was always going to be the direction of travel and that the USA would be consistent and take responsibility for any side-effects. At a stroke it has been shown that the USA can be very inconsistent. The rest of the world cannot just go with the flow and allow the USA to make decisions with international repercussions assuming that the USA has thought them through and will deal with the consequences. Some parts of the European elites appear to have realised that. Less so in the UK: Starmer's constant refrain that the USA is the UK's ally sounds very wooden when the USA has just shown itself to be highly unreliable. There's no going back, even if the Trump administration becomes a lame-duck one and all its measures are reversed: political elites on the rest of the world are going to have to think for themselves and not blindly follow the USA.
«Two very quick points looking at this from the perspective of bourgeois interests. The first is the Liz Truss argument. I.e. What Trump has done is to short the market. The announcement leads to market turmoil and devaluation, and down in the dip the most short-termist sections of finance and commercial capital hoover up cheap assets which they can sell when stocks inevitably recover. [...] For instance, Trump's slimy relationship to Vladimir Putin is entirely rational viewed in the context of this framework.»
My guess is that our blogger suffers from TDS frenzy and is simply hand-waving feverishly some made-up claims and the underlying logic seems to me the usual one: since it is an acknowledged fact Trump is 100% evil and an evil genius too it must logically follow that anything he does is evil and cleverly calculated for maximum evil. His actions cannot possibly have any other meaning! Also that 100% of what he does is evil proves that he is 100% evil, so it all figures. :-)
«But supposing it is a turn away from global trade, what does the US stand to gain? It's worth rememberingthat capital is not unified [...] I would suggest the tariffs are bound up with securing the oligarchical interest on the home front.»
But the interests of which faction of the oligarchy? That seems to be a good starting for the following argument:
* There is a long standing conflict in the USA between "one-nation tories" like Perot, Buchanan, Trump (and Roosevelt before them) and "woke globalist whigs" like Clinton, Romney, Gore, Bush, Biden.
* The "one-nation tories" have been historically allied with the domestic working class and that alliance is called "populism".
* The "woke globalist whigs" (also known as "centrists") are allied with the upper-middle property-owning rentier ("petty bourgeoisie") middle class and that is why reaganism/thatcherism is called "*neo*liberalism: it is not pure victorian liberalism, it includes the protection from the markets and competition of allied land-rentier interests; the joint interest of "globalist whigs" and rentier middle-class is lower wages and of course "globalist whigs" like higher asset prices too (but more for stocks than property).
* The "one-nation tories" want to use tariffs to effect a large redistribution from foreign workers (whether offshore workers or onshore immigrants), "globalist whigs", rentier middle class towards onshore citizen workers, onshore industries, the self-employed.
* The "one-nation tories" are so because they reckon that the USA empire has over-extended and to preserve it they need to consolidate and in particular contain China while the "woke globalist whigs" think that the USA empire is disposable and want to asset-strip is as fast as they can.
Indeed in case nobody noticed the "one-nation tories" ("populists") are not being opposed so much by the class-politics left as it is quite repressed in the USA but by the whole "woke globalist whig" Establishment ("centrist" journalists, "centrist" politicians, "centrist" academics, "centrist" pundits, "centrist" Economists, "centrist" institutions, ...) who are firmly against working-class interests and promote zealously finance and property interests.
Goods trade relative to each other. A Rolls Royce engine is always worth a certain number of tomatoes based upon relative productivity. That’s one of the reasons currency devaluations never worked.
"with floating exchange rate policy, the price level ceases to be the relative value between the now non-existent monetized reserves and all other prices." https://warrenmosler.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/1_11_25-Draft_-A-US-Centered-Analysis-of-the-Price-Level-Inflation-and-the-Neutral-Rate-of-Interest.pdf
The net result is that importers pay the exporters domestic cost of sale (in the currency) plus foreign-held net savings (in the currency) and exporters pay the foreign cost of imports (in the countercurrency), with anything left held as foreign denominated assets (in the countercurrency). The domestic cost of sale includes any domestic savings the exporters wish to hold or are forced to hold by regulation (as we see in Russia for example)
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