A Quick Primer on the Trump TACO Trade and the Economic Danger It Presents Now
Photo by The White House
I and everyone else on the trade war beat have been documenting this phenomenon week-in and week-out since Trump’s liberation day tariff announcement, but now the markets have a well-publicized name for it. A Financial Times columnist coined the term the Trump Always Chickens Out (TACO) back on May 2nd, and Trump was recently asked about Wall Street adopting this trade over the past bullish month. He responded the way you would imagine, telling the reporter, “Don’t ever say what you said. That’s a nasty question.”
After another chaotic week where nobody knows anything about Trump’s tariffs, Trump posted a totally believable explanation about why he definitely caved in China’s best interests to be “MR. NICE GUY!” This totally happened and this most recent iteration of the TACO trade certainly wasn’t due to America’s emptying ports or the ongoing turmoil in the bond market, and the fake news media again is making MR. NICE GUY out to be the bad guy. It was a nasty question and you definitely can’t plot out Trump’s caves on the chart of the 30-year Treasury yield every time it approaches a certain magic number!