I saw some news about a “Wall Street Buying Spree” over the weekend. One article from November 7, by Kevin T. Dugan in New York Magazine, began like this:
The Wall Street buying spree has begun. At 9:30am, when markets opened in New York, brokers were scrambling to fill orders as fast as possible. The Dow Jones Industrial Average shot up 1,300 points, putting it on track for one of its best days ever. Trump Media & Technology Group was up 25 percent to a new all-time high, even though it had released disastrous earnings the night before…
The “market” mentioned here is the “stock market”. Which has its headquarters on Wall Street, I believe?
New York Magazine likes to report on things happening in New York, in the same way the Pagosa Daily Post likes to report on things that may (or may not) have happened in Pagosa Springs.
So if a buying spree is happening in New York, we can typically read about it in a magazine published in New York. If we’re lucky, the information is also found in a humor column, on a local website.
The buying spree I’m most interested in, however, is closer to home.
In particular: bananas.
I don’t know if the wealthy investors on Wall Street eat bananas. Maybe they eat caviar? But both caviar and bananas are currently at risk.
Our newly-elected president, Donald Trump, has promised to cut our taxes… and fill in the big financial shortfall with “tariffs”.
As I understand “tariffs”, a foreign company that wants to sell their products in the U.S. will have to add 10% or more to the price of their products to pay for “tariffs”, with the extra dollars being submitted to the federal government. We, the customers, end up paying the extra 10%.
Or maybe 60% extra in the case of Chinese products.
Traditionally, the job of tariffs is to protect a nation’s fledgling industries from unfairly-priced foreign competition. Like, you might put a tariff on steel, to protect the domestic steel industry, until it can figure out how to compete with the foreign competition.
The outcome is, all steel products will cost more, so long as the tariffs are in place. If you’re the steel industry, you can relax, because you’re protected.
What you don’t want to do is put a tariff on everything. That would be crazy. It would be just an income tax by another name.
But Donald Trump has promised us that he plans to put a tariff on everything imported from everywhere.
Last time Trump was president, he jacked up the federal debt at a faster rate than any President since the Great Depression. With the hlep of a Republican Congress, he cut taxes without filling in the big financial hole. (I learned about some of this here in the Daily Post, for which I will be eternally grateful, even though I was depressed for a few days.)
Stocks on the stock market do not come from a foreign country, as far as I know. So presumably, Wall Street can buy all the stocks they want without paying for new “tariffs”.
But bananas come from foreign countries. Just like caviar.
I’ve never bought caviar. I’m not even sure what it is, exactly. Some kind of black fish eggs?
But bananas, I buy a lot of. It’s about the cheapest fruit available, mostly because it comes from foreign countries and because, unlike money, it grows on trees. Currently, there’s no tariff on bananas, because the federal government didn’t feel the need to protect a fledgling American banana industry.
But Trump seems to be saying, he’s going put tariff on everything, so we can pay lower taxes… by paying more, for bananas.
This is a painful future for me to consider.
I pay my taxes once a year, around April 15. But I buy bananas several times a week.
Going on a buying spree for bananas would be a really bad idea. Unlike caviar, bananas don’t keep forever. Maybe a week, if you’re lucky. And even then, they are likely to be bruised and mushy.
But like caviar, tariffs can last a long time. Practically forever.