Over the weekend, Donald Trump’s calming up for a more generous approach to tariffs was reversed again, apparently returning to the Dragon 20% tariffs. The forthcoming announcement of the President’s Day Liberation Day for Universal Tariffs for everything that enters the United States from all of Trump’s 10% decline in the last month of the last month, just the last example of how the capricious tariffs of Trump run the US economy directly from the rock. Given the almost unanimous choir of business leaders and economists, one must wonder what Trump’s destructive rulings motivated. As Trump himself acknowledged this weekend at NBC, “I couldn’t be interested less if the prices of cars rise!”
The problem is not tariffs – the problem is Donald Trump, plain and simple. According to our results from the study by Yale Executive Director, 90% of CEOs actually support tariffs when using strategic and selectively. These business leaders support the use of selective tariffs to eliminate real commercial imbalances and restrict foreign discards in the United States, undermining US manufacturers in sectors such as steel.
But these decent goals often seem to be subordinate to Vendettas, governed by Trump’s personality, such as punishing the longtime Nemesis Justin Trudeau; And even more importantly, the idiosyncratic, capricious Trump rates did all this, but it is not impossible for companies to invest at all, making it difficult for Trump’s requested goal to return investments and jobs in the United States
There is already a confusing massif of 12,500 tariff categories in 200 trading partners. In the last two months, we have collected Trump’s tariff pronouncements and found no less than a rotating chapter 107 cases of paradoxical flip flops on tariff policy, often with a turn on the same day. This does not even take into account often contradictory guidelines from Trump MPs, which are subsequently canceled by Trump himself.
Business needs predictability and stability; No company can allow billions of capital costs to build new plants or hire new workers when trade policy is changing not day by day, not hour by hour, but in some cases, literally minute by minute. During our Yale CEO this month, the CEOs groaned and shuddered every time Eamon JAVers from CNBC read a new conversion of tariff policy, with seven flip flops during our three -hour event.
On March 11, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Yale’s Chief Executive Institute and President Jeffrey Sonnnfeld discussed Trump 2.0’s strategic capabilities and challenges.
Trump’s defenders claim that all this is part of his “art of the deal” – to break the counterparties in the face so strongly that they are demolished from balance and everything, but does not pray for a deal. But the reality is that Trump is intensifying in these deals, as companies simply reproduce existing and pre-planned Capex costs in Gauzy, title “New Investments” in the United States, such as the GLITZ veneer and the more Flowing Edges and the Electronic Factory Factory. Meanwhile, foreign leaders and companies offer discounts with a little real benefit to the United States as they compete to avoid tariffs by redirecting supplies chains through neutral countries, brazenly and openly refuting Trump while paying lip services to their whims. That is why 90% of the CEO of our CEO of Yale Caucus said Trump’s tariffs abandon the US in the United States
These executives, like all others, look at sufficient data, indicating the widespread chaos created by Trump’s tariff intrigues. Not only did tariff intrigue not only helped reduce about $ 7 trillion from the stock exchange after taking office – enough to finance the government for the whole year – but the costs are also felt in the real economy. It is far from returning production and jobs in the US, Trump kills US production, hurts US workers and raising the entire US economy with it. Inflation expectations jumped to 32-year-old maxima; Consumer confidence has been immersed by 25% in both Michigan University studies and Conference Council surveys, as consumer expenses have dropped most in five years; The confidence of the small business NFIB has immersed by 50%; The labor market is deteriorating as the number of new abbreviations has been fired in the last three months; Capital expenditures and investments are submerging; And GDP growth projections dropped by 1%, a rotating head turning economic wealth, as Trump’s initial euphoria for tax reduction and deregulation became Frankenstein’s monster for all tariffs all the time.
Of course, many business leaders wonder what motivates Trump’s destructive tariff intrigues. On the one hand, Trump is obsessed with at least 80 years; And he, long, reducing the balance of trade in the US, as if still managing the Trump organization, which tries to sell more than he buys each year. But the pure, avoiding, deliberate chaos of Trump’s tariff introduction and his desire to ignore significant reductions in the stock markets suggest that there may be other explanatory factors. Some CEOs have suggested that Trump may try to cause a recession at the beginning of his term to “clear the deck” well before the intermediate election-macar that implies a larger long-term strategic facility than it is usually connected to Trump. It is more likely that Trump may not have a plan and just do things on the go, with arbitrary megalomaniac impulses unlimited by yes.
In Trump’s intrigues, psychoanalysts can find a strong resemblance to what Sigmund Freud called the “death” pathology of entrepreneurs, or what psychiatrists call the self-destructive pulse to be aki to a child on the beach who builds a beautiful castle and kicks it.
Forty -two years ago, Abraham a castle, a scientist to manage the psychoanalyst at the Harvard Business School, announces that many times such entrepreneurial leaders as Trump and Musk are guided by the ultimately destructive megalomania, rooted in bad relations with a parent who has distinguished them, but is no longer about. Zaleznik said: “In their climb to the top, they have certain fantasies related to the creation of a new world. There is a demand for restitution – to rework the world, to rework their childhood, to adjust with a parent. They are very similarities.
Trump’s “Liberation Day” has become a nightmare for American business. The real liberation that the US economy needs is a more implicit, strategic approach to tariffs, released from the idiosyncratic whims of Trump.
Jeffrey Sonenfeld is a professor of Leicester’s crown in the practice of management and president and founder of the Yale Institute for CEO. Stephen Tian is the director of research at the Institute for Executive Management in Yale. Stephen Henricks is a senior research associate at the Institute of Executive Director of Yale and a former consultant at McKinsey & Co.
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