In which the pond gives snappy Tom a go for a late arvo meditation ...

 

The Economist knows that the best way to get anyone talking about the magazine comes by way of deploying a splashy cover...

The pond particularly enjoyed that bird going splat on that truck ...

Every day somehow Uncle "Cheesehead" Leon finds new ways to drive his truck into the ground ...and isn't he loved by the media for it.

This late arvo meditation was prompted by a guilt trip. 

Why does the pond always pander to the full, barking mad reptile loons, when there are occasional reptiles who try to fake being normal?

The pond dismissed snappy Tom Dusevic out of hand this morning, yet attention should be paid, and perhaps carrots should be planted in the garden, given the chances of the world economy being driven into the ground.

The reptiles gave Tom a terrific opening splash ...

The scribbled notes, perhaps a tad hard to read unless you click on the image, suggested Tom was in the grip of a heresy alien to other reptiles ...

Election 2025: Radical Anthony Albanese schools ‘dumb’ Donald Trump in Economics 101, A day after dabbling with dismal science fictions on productivity, wages and inflation, the Prime Minister has sensibly gone back to basics.
Anthony Albanese on the campaign trail in Victoria with Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Trade Minister Don Farrell. Picture: Jason Edwards / NewsWire
This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

Well, we're here Tom, take us there ...

Anthony Albanese, son of St Mary’s Cathedral College and the University of Sydney’s radical political economy cell, has schooled the putative author of The Art of the Deal in classical economics.
A day after dabbling with dismal science fictions on productivity, wages and inflation, the Prime Minister has sensibly gone back to first principles and the neat graphs he once drew with coloured pens on supply and demand for first-year assignments.

He declared there was “no basis in logic” in an unfriendly move that will punish us but the American people more, after Donald Trump hit Australia with a 10 per cent tariff on Thursday morning (Australian time), a relatively light smack all things considered,
In this, the Prime Minister was echoing economic basics and enlightened Labor heroes, as well as the editors of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, who straight off the bat called out Trump’s move as “the dumbest trade war in history”.

The pond quailed when the reptiles imported an AV distratcion, with the simple explanation, Jack Quail explains.

The pond has no idea why they cut Jack off at half-mast. 

Where's the reptile pride in their team, with Jack diligently explaining how gassing the country was almost ready, much better and tidier than nuking it?

The pond was relieved to be spared Jack's explanation of why Norfolk Islanders were wicked and deviant, and have been since Fletcher Xian days, and went back to snappy Tom ...

As the son of a New York property mogul, Trump famously went to the Wharton business school at the University of Pennsylvania, founded in 1740.
Although The Donald graduated in 1968, his economic brain is clearly stuck in the 18th century, during the dying days of mercantilism, the discredited theory that a country got rich by one-sided trade, pumping up its exports and shutting out imports.
It was the dominant school of thought in the fledgling discipline before two momentous events in 1776: American Independence and the publication of Adam Smith’s game-changing An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations, which never goes out of style.
Only a couple of weeks ago, Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey drew on the classical economist’s master work to talk about the best ways to revive economic growth and hope in the UK and beyond.
“One of Smith’s important insights can be described by his observation that if a foreign country can supply us with a commodity more cheaply than we can make it, better buy it off them, with some part of the produce of our own industry employed in a way in which we have some advantage,” Bailey told a British university audience.
“That advantage which Smith pointed to would arise from one of his other insights, the benefits of specialisation and division of labour.
“In this way, Smith set out the view that greater openness through trade will increase competition, productivity and growth.”
Along with developments in technology, free trade has been the secret sauce to the prosperity of nations for two centuries.
Albanese said on Thursday he understood in year 7 that border taxes hurt the country that imposed them more than the country that copped them.
By my reckoning, that was in 1976, a few years after the local subsidiary of British Leyland stopped making the gas guzzling lemon P76.

All well and good, and at this point the reptiles repeated yet again their list of the tariffs, which left out all the fun stuff, and so doesn't need repeating here.

Couldn't they do what others do to attract clicks and eyeballs? A meme here, a meme there...

If the Moosh and others can get into it, why can't the reptiles? Why are they always so solemn, so po-faced,  or even inclined to get teary?

Australia’s protected car factories had struggled for decades to deliver quality and reliability.
“Didn’t have to go to uni and get an economics degree to get that,” the Prime Minister said of the economic harm from tariffs.
“But there appears to be a debate about that.
“It produces higher costs for the country that’s imposing the tariffs, which is why we’re not responding by lifting up our tariffs and by therefore having an inflationary impact.
“So it’s important that Australians get that as well.”
Despite clear evidence of the economic damage, it took a long time for Australia to learn about the self-defeating nature of industry protection; about how it kept our precious capital and labour in dying industries, costing consumers more for cars, fridges, shoes and clothing; and how protected sectors are never able to get off the taxpayers’ drip until they fail.
The US President’s Liberation Day tariff onslaught offends traditional and modern economic thought, as well as America’s loyal and free-trading friends.
It’s a sad, stupid and hurtful move. Maybe that’s the point.

Poor Tom, not so snappy today ... and John Durie arrived late in the day to join him, expressing a deep unhappiness ...

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese misses the point when he attempts to play down US President Donald Trump’s assault on multilateral trade and globalisation based on low levels of exports to the US.
The Trump’s tariff war is a delusional nonsense doomed to fail, albeit after short-term turmoil evident in world financial markets.
Australia as a small trade-based nation relies on multilateral rules and just as Covid derailed global supply chains Trump is aiming for nothing short of a revolution, up-ending global trade.
The US has arguably been the biggest beneficiary of globalisation and now Trump wants to destroy it.
The direct impact on Australian beef and lamb exports to the US is real but minor in the scheme of a complete re-routing of global trade flows to be sourced in the US.
Massive distortions on this scale will hurt broad sections of Australian industry away from the direct hits on bilateral trade.
That is, if the Trump agenda actually works long term, and the odds are stacked against it on basic economic fundamentals.
Artificial trade barriers are ultimately doomed to fail in the face of economic reality, starting with the fact the US economy like Australia is 70 per cent-plus service based.
The amount of jobs and production impacted by his trade sanctions then are a small fraction of US workers.
Forcing workers to take jobs in factories behind tariff walls raises costs and is doomed to fail.
The next scenario says this is all just a bargaining game which might be some fun but the evidence is the guy really wants a tariff wall just like he wanted as wall between the US and Mexico.
That is where his delusions get scary because the President actually believes this nonsense and as in many other ventures from foreign aid to health Australia faces the reality that under this administration its shared values with the US are disappearing.

Come on John, come on Tom, come on guys, wake up to what your kissing cousins at Faux Noise are celebrating, see what they're saying ... 

It's a golden age, tariffs made America great and will make America great again. Trust Hannity, trust Patrick J. Buchanan ...

Snap out of it Tom and John, enjoy getting your balls squeezed by the Don's men as they set the world's economic structures on fire ...

A coda, because snappy Tom's talk of Adam Smith reminded the pond of John Cassidy in The New Yorker, the pond took a look at Cassidy's piece The Truth About Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day”, The President’s one-man trade war was already hurting the economy. His expansive new tariffs will make things worse. (Archive link).

As it's easily reached, there's no point in repeating the whole thing. 

Instead, not in the spirit of our Henry seeking refuge in Gladstone and the Victorians, here's Cassidy wandering amongst the mercantilists and Adam Smith ...

Some accounts of Trump’s approach to trade, including mine, have identified William McKinley, the twenty-fifth President, as an inspiration. Other commenters have suggested that Hitler’s Germany, which pursued an economic policy of self-sufficiency, or autarky, may be Trump’s real role model. Wherever he got his love of tariffs and protectionism, the intellectual antecedents of his approach go back to English mercantilist thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who also viewed trade as a zero-sum enterprise in which one side wins and the other loses. “For we must alwaies take hede that we bie no more of strangers than we sell them; for so we sholde empoverishe our selves and enriche them,” an anonymous English author wrote in the fifteen-fifties. The aristocrat William Cecil, a senior adviser to Queen Elizabeth I, sounded even more Trumpian. “Nothing robbeth the realm of England, but when more merchandise is brought into the realm than is coming forth,” he averred.
At a time when trade was largely financed in gold and silver, the mercantilists thought of it in terms of accumulating wealth, or “treasure.” Trump thinks in terms of dollars rather than gold, but little rests on that distinction. In his remarks on Wednesday, he repeated his unfounded claim that Canada was subsidizing the United States to the tune of two hundred billion dollars a year. (Trade payments aren’t subsidies, and last year the U.S. deficit in trade on goods and services with Canada was well under a hundred billion dollars.)
After China joined the World Trade Organization, in 2001, and cheap Chinese goods flooded into the United States, it was amply demonstrated that open trade with countries that have much lower labor costs can devastate some communities and industries. For a long time, American economists understated these costs, relying on Adam Smith’s argument that trade is mutually beneficial because it allows each party to exploit its natural endowments and skill sets. (The famous example that Smith cited was Britain exporting cloth to Portugal and importing Portuguese wine.) In Washington these days, the economic debate has largely moved on to which departures from free trade can be justified. The Biden Administration, for example, quadrupled the tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles and provided generous grants for auto companies that invest in building E.V.s in the United States.

Turned out that there was just one fly in the ointment in the way of that EV strategy ...

Cassidy also included a more recent economist ...

Trump’s tariffs are much broader, and they will affect many of America’s historical allies. Inevitably, this has given rise to speculation about his ultimate goals. In a paper published immediately after last year’s election, Stephen Miran, a Harvard-trained economist who was then working for a hedge fund and is now chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, tied Trump’s tariff proposals to his America First foreign policy, suggesting they could be part of a grand strategy to reduce the U.S. trade deficit and simultaneously force America’s allies to share the burden of its defense umbrella and national debt.
As Miran described it, Trump’s tariffs would function primarily as bargaining chips, which he could use to browbeat other countries into accepting a devaluation of the dollar, which would make U.S. exports more competitive, and a refinancing of the U.S. national debt, in which foreign debt holders—of which there are many—would swap their Treasuries for a new type of security: a hundred-year bond that carries a very low-interest coupon, thus making it cheaper for the U.S. government to raise money.Why would foreigners accept such an unfavorable deal? Miran didn’t fully explain, but the inference is that they wouldn’t have any choice if they wanted to retain access to the U.S. market and military support. Miran termed this prospective rearrangement of the international trading system as a “Mar-a-Lago Accord”—a play on the Plaza Accord, of 1985, in which the U.S., Japan, Germany, France, and the U.K. agreed to a dollar devaluation on a voluntary basis. As Martin Wolf, of the Financial Times, pointed out, the Trump version, if it ever came to pass, could more accurately be described as a protection racket.

A protection racket? There's that Economist cover coming in handy again, celebrating The Don ...

If the pond had its druthers, it would rather a different visual metaphor. 

Cue a Luckovich for the closer ... with golf club and cart heralding the apocalypse ...