Energy Prospectus

https://x.com/FreyjaTarte/status/1908281098141892883

Very interesting. Countries that have been charging asymmetrical tariffs have had booming economies, but if we mirror their tariffs, we will bring on a recession. Curious. Hanson also does a good job of debunking the Smoot Hawley Tariff Act of 1930.

Cliff, seriously? This guy believes everything president Trump spewed out on his imaginary tariffs. Like Europe is applying 39% tariffs on the US while it is in real life 3%! 250% Canadian dairy tariffs already debunked a 100 times.

Trumps calculation was deficit/imports. Nothing to do with tariffs.

agree 100% with Harry
Victor Davis Hanson is reciting the Cliff Notes over-simplistic "Idiots Guide" - Fox News version from Hannity and the White House on the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act.

let's recap the Fox News-Hannity-Trump GOP - White House - Hanson- Tucker Carlson versions:

The stock market crash happened in Oct 1929.
Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act was signed by Hoover in June 1930.
hence we are told ... the Smoot-Hawley tariffs did not cause the Great Depression, because of that 9 month lag-time.

They leave out the timeline details as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act made its way through the House and Senate in 1929 prior to the stock market crash in October, and the very negative effects on the markets as it moved closer to passage and signed into law by Herbert Hoover in June 1930, against the advice of his economic advisors.

Much like today, in 1929-1930 the market rallied and fell with every rumor and palace intrigue detail that came out of the Congress as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act was dissected, revised, and bent to the will of different lobbies and Congressional power brokers. Hoover made protectionist campaign promises and felt he had to sign it. Sound familiar?

read the details here and arrive at your own conclusions, don't drink the Kool-aid from certain media sources that we are painfully familiar with

there are many, many other history sources on this difficult time in our history

https://www.cato.org/blog/smoot-hawley-tariff-great-depression

as a wise man once said
History teaches
but there are no pupils

Bottomline, Trump's goals are:
1. Reduce the size of the U.S. Federal Government that has out-of-control spending and full of corruption.
2. Re-industrialize the U.S. to create good paying jobs for middle class Americans.
This is why I voted for Trump and the fact that Kamala was the most un-qualified person to ever run for the office.

Maybe reciprocal tariffs are not the answer to our national debt that increases by $1 Tillion each 100 days, but some significant changes must be made before the U.S. is bankrupt. What happens if America decides that it cannot fund a military that protects the entire world? Without the U.S. military to protect them, what happens to Europe and Asia except for China?

My Guess is that half of the countries on the tariff list that Trump showed last week, will agree to lower their tariffs on the U.S. by the end of this quarter. In turn, Trump will lower or end the tariffs on those countries.

Also, the illegal immigration problem created by whoever Biden's Puppet Master was is a major problem for America. If countries in Europe will accept couple hundred thousand of these illegals, maybe Trump will lower the tariffs.

Each country has the option to quit selling stuff to America. We can live without it, but their economies can't survive with access to the U.S. market.

I trust we can all agree on one thing: economic policy is complex and nuanced - everybody seems to have an opinion about why the market seems to be falling like a rock.

A great example is the debate around the cause of the Great Depression. Several great points in this thread from Harry and Mike. I did read Mike's link to the entry at cato.org about the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs, it had interesting points. But consider monetary policy (Ben Bernanke focused on this as the cause). See this article which discusses Bernanke's views in his book "Essays on the Great Depression", also at cato.org:
https://www.cato.org/commentary/essays-great-depression-reviewed-anna-schwartz
The author of this article (Anna J. Schwartz, National Bureau of Economic Research), describes three different views from economists on the cause of the depression:

Since the 1930s, economists have pursued at least three different directions in research. At first, “overproduction” of some industrial output or a decline in a real sector of the economy (residential housing construction, business fixed investment, or real consumption expenditures) was emphasized as the source of the Depression. Since the 1960s, the emphasis has shifted to monetary shocks as the source of the downturn. Finally, beginning in the 1980s, a select group of proponents of real business cycles have favored technology shocks as the source of downturns in general.

Research in the first direction has been largely superseded by the shift to the monetary shocks approach of the second direction, which Bernanke embraces. He rejects the technology shocks approach of the third direction, discussed in an essay in the final part of the book that examines the evidence for a sample of U.S. manufacturing industries from 1923 to 1939.

In fact, since we're already here, searching only on cato.org for "Causes of the Great Depression" returns 2,969 results.

Maybe there's another, more straight-forward cause for the current market turmoil: the market has been priced to perfection, all-time highs in the S&P 500 were reached two months ago, and traders were looking for a reason to sell.

Attached is a chart showing the S&P 500 PE Ratio, from December 1927 - March 2025 (source: https://www.macrotrends.net/2577/sp-500-pe-ratio-price-to-earnings-chart). For the last few months the PE Ratio has been hovering between 28-29, and has dropped to 24.1 as of April 1.

For comparison, other recent highs were:

• 122.4 - March 2009 "Great Recession"

• 46.5 - March 2001 "Dot-com mania blowoff"

• 38.2 - December 2020 "Covid vaccines available"

Sometimes, we may just be looking in the wrong place for the answer.