More adventures in policymaking

It’s the middle of the night in New York, but I’ve having morning coffee here in Italy, so I thought I’d post something short about the latest crazy news. A second conversation with Nathan Tankus will be my main post today, going up after Nathan has had a chance to read the transcript.

So, two items.

First, I’ve read many “news analyses” discussing what they say is the deep thinking behind Donald Trump’s tariff policy. Now, thanks to the Wall Street Journal, we have a scoop on how Trump, having announced a radically destructive tariff plan on April 2, replaced it with an equally radical but completely different plan on April 9:

When I read the headline I assumed that Bessent and Lutnick had pushed for a total revision of Trump’s trade policy while Navarro was out of town for a few days. But no. They rushed in to see Trump while Navarro was having a meeting elsewhere in the White House.

Hoo boy. Next you’ll be telling me that the infamous letter to Harvard, demanding that the school basically destroy itself lest it be destroyed, was sent by mistake. Oh, wait.

Second, yesterday morning I posted about Trump and the Fed, and compared Trump to Turkey’s Erdogan:

Like Erdogan, he has embraced crank economic doctrines to justify his policies, in Trump’s case the ludicrous claim that tariffs won’t raise consumer prices. Does anyone doubt that when inflation rises, he’ll dismiss it as “fake news”?

Just a few hours later: