April Fools - How Nobody knows Anything
On the eve of Trump's tariffs, I began thinking that this rising market surely indicated that insiders or much wiser people than me, knew what exactly Trump would announce after the markets closed...
‘Nobody knows anything’.
William Goldman, the Oscar-winning writer of screenplays for All the President’s Men, Marathon Man and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, coined this phrase when speaking of the Hollywood Industry. Writing in his 1983 memoir about his professional life in Hollywood, Adventures in the Screen Trade, he caustically observed: ‘Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess — and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.’ Despite being paid eye-watering amounts of money, Goldman slammed high-flying, suited executives for being unable to predict what an audience would react to, despite claiming otherwise.
By this year’s April Fool’s Day, after so many decades of trusting the words of people older, wealthier, better qualified and better looking than me, I had finally convinced myself that I could possibly be as clued-in as those high-flying suited executives who were being paid eye-watering amounts of money. I had made a decision regarding my modest pension plan and decided to liberate it out of the rate-race. One day later and it was almost time with my hand nervously poised above my laptop keyboard. The blinking cursor berated me for taking so long to decide: ‘Sell ?’ The sales window was closing in a few minutes at 3pm and the cursor damn well wanted to know if I was I going to sell or not. Hurry!
Why was I pausing? I had already decided that Donald Trump was about to usher in an new era of awfulness while fixated on his tariffs idea, to be announced in a few hours after the markets closed on ‘Liberation Day’ of April 2. He claimed that these ‘beautiful’ taxes on imports would protect American jobs and bring manufacturing back by making foreign goods more expensive. He claimed they would fix unfair trade deals, shrink the trade deficit and stop the U.S. from relying on rivals like China and the European Union. He claimed they were unfairly manipulating their own import taxes and currencies to favour themselves against the U.S. Then again, he had also claimed that the noise from wind turbines causes cancer.
I knew tariffs are taxes in disguise. Almost all U.S. media outlets have long reported that while such import taxes are sold as protectionism, they actually raise prices for consumers, spark trade wars and hurt the very workers they claim to defend by disrupting supply chains and driving up business costs. Even Fox News had played down Trump’s sweeping tariff proposal on his campaign trail last year, claiming he was just using the idea as a clever threat — not to be actually enforced — to bring bad actors to the negotiating table.
That said, politicians across the American political divide have long agreed with the underlying issue of Trump’s proposal, including Barack Obama’s defeated Republican opponent Mitt Romney, President Joe Biden and the last remaining American Socialist senator, Bernie Sanders. All have accused China of unfair trade practices, which is generally seen as keeping the yuan artificially low to make their exports cheaper, with other barriers that make it harder for U.S. companies to sell goods into the country. China denies deliberate manipulation, but it has a tightly controlled currency in a strict one-party communist state and a history of protecting domestic industries. So there’s that.
The EU has also being periodically accused by U.S. politicians and administration officials of implementing regulations and subsidies which discriminate against American imports, particularly in agriculture, cars and technology. But in many respects it’s an open secret, as many U.S. products don’t meet European quality standards — for example U.S. beef treated with growth hormones is banned from European Union countries. In general, the EU follows World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules more than China, even if from an American perspective, both have trade practices that the U.S. sees as unfair—but the nature, severity, and intent differ sharply between the two.
Peter Navarro, one of Trump's prominent trade advisors and loyal hold-over from his first administration, has been instrumental in shaping his tariff policies. Navarro authored Death by China (generously described as a non-fiction book) and almost certainly created a very fictional economist named ‘Ron Vara’ to support his economic arguments. This character was used to bolster claims about the dangers of trade with China, further influencing Trump's stance on tariffs.
So, knowing all this, I must sell…. Trump’s announcement was going to surely tank the stock markets? Wasn’t that the reason he waited until after they closed on April 2 to make his announcement? Yet, the Dow Jones, S&P 500 and FTSE 100 were slowly climbing higher as we edged towards 4pm. Talking heads on the main business channel CNBC were rationalising this apparent paradox by seeing the markets as just wanting clarity and predictability going forward. Fox News were lauding Trump as the ultimate businessman negotiator who was playing three-dimensional chess with everyone. While doubting the president’s ability to predict one move ahead in Checkers, I began thinking that this rising market surely indicated that insiders or much wiser people than me, knew what exactly Trump would announce after the markets closed. They must know what was coming and were happy with it. So I never pressed the button. The decision window closed and I waited to be proved right.
I was wrong. The market is dumb and ‘nobody knows anything’.
Claiming that his bold ‘Liberation Day’ move would solve trade imbalances and revitalise American manufacturing, with chest puffed and standing in the White House Rose Garden at 4pm on April 2, President Donald Trump imposed an unprecedented 10% universal tariff on all imports and additional ‘reciprocal’ tariffs targeting 57 countries, based on their ‘unfair’ trade practices. The announcement sent shockwaves through global markets, triggering the most severe stock market crash since the Covid pandemic (also under Trump’s administration). Everyone, everywhere, was in shock even as Trump’s surrogates were attempting to hail his actions as a necessary step toward economic independence. Claims swirled that his administration used A.I. to calculate the sweeping list of reciprocal tariffs, not made less likely by the fact his tariffs included remote territories like Heard Island and McDonald Islands — occupied largely by penguins.
After a week of predictions of global economic ruin by a roll-out of the top U.S. business leaders, renowned economists, Federal reserve officials and high-flying, suited executives being paid eye-watering amounts of money, Donald Trump gave in. He paused his tariff implementation on most countries except China, which he claimed deserved even higher tariffs for responding so aggressively to his original proposal. The U.S. President claimed his reversal was due to 175 countries being in contact to negotiate solutions while ‘People were jumping a little bit out of line. They were getting yippy.’ The stock markets soared after the announcement with Wall Street seeing the benchmark S&P 500 up by 9.5% in its biggest single-day increase since 2008, while the Dow Jones industrial average jumped 7.9%.
I can finally look at my pension plan again and even started thinking of what to do next.
But then again, nobody knows anything.
Originally published in the Western People, 15 April 2025