The people who run a company have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders. This means that it is quite literally their job, punishable by legal ramifications should they fail to an unacceptable degree, to protect their shareholders’ investment. This is largely framed around avoiding insider trading and blatantly illegal self-dealing while ensuring that you are making more money for the business, which is a convenient framework for a world driven by stock-based executive compensation, but a fiduciary duty goes both ways. Yes, the point of a company is to make money and if you are not doing that, you are not doing your fiduciary duty. But your fiduciary duty is also to ensure your company does not needlessly lose money, and this is where huge swaths of corporate America have set themselves up to utterly fail their shareholders, by their own admission. “Trump trade war confounds CEOs” and “American business leaders are turning on Trump — fast” are common enough headlines at this point as to make it a memeable trope like the old white guy in a Midwest diner who the New York Times is still interviewing.
Fun fact that much of elite corporate America has demonstrated a failure to understand this year: 2018 happened. Donald Trump enacted tariffs, and the S&P 500 finished down on the year. These are facts that America’s corporate titans seemed to have forgotten in their rush after the election to assume that dear leader will fix all their problems. The Wall Street Journal is out with another report today from your local country club’s leopard’s eating people’s faces party meeting, and it paints a picture of a lot of people coming to grips with a reality that has long been promised to them.
“At the end of last year, the attitude was, ‘Full on, this is going to be an exceptionally pro-growth agenda and it will be executed in a clear way.’ All of that has gone in reverse,” said Ed Al-Hussainy, global interest-rate strategist at Columbia Threadneedle Investments.
The supposed pro-growth Republican agenda that historically doesn’t come close to growing the economy like the Democratic agenda so abhorred by America’s corporate elite aside, what colossal dipshit thought it “would be executed in a clear way?” This is Pete Hegseth-level stupidity. Have you lived on this planet before? Do you know who Donald Trump is? The perpetual liar who went bankrupt six times running a rigged business? The president who oversaw the largest unemployment rate since the Great Depression? Corporate America has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are just as willing, if not more, to believe the lies Trump that has peddled to the rubes over his decades of peacocking for the media. Here’s more from WSJ’s coverage of this week’s leopard’s eating people’s faces party meeting:
“There’s an overriding sense of helplessness” among executives now, said Sean West, co-founder of the software firm Hence Technologies and the author of a new book on modern business risks. “CEOs are feeling stunned, and they’re not used to feeling like they don’t have good moves.”
How are CEOs stunned? Other than the 51st state stuff that genuinely came out of left field, what has happened so far that was not promised and did not happen before? Sure, the degree of his insane tariff policy, blatant fascism and general clusterfuckery this time around is more extreme, but this is the Trump agenda! He calls himself the “Tariff Man,” and says it’s “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” How are any of these supposed Very Serious people surprised? It is becoming quite clear this year that a big theme of the 2024 election was Americans across the entire socioeconomic spectrum seemingly forgetting that Donald Trump was the president before.
I realize that given corporate America’s current definition of fiduciary duty centered around ‘don’t insider trade too hard’ and ‘make sure line make boing’ means that tariff-based losses will not actually land any executives in legal trouble, but companies really may go out of business because of this childish belief of the economic elites in Trump’s ability to manage the economy in a way he never has and never said he will (I don’t care how many times America’s corporate titans point to Howard Lutnick’s lies in these stories that he’s already reversed course on by now, he’s not the president).
Trump’s new tariffs on Venezuela are functionally an additional 25 percent tariff on China, and he confirmed that the new baseline tax on the core engine of the global economy is now a staggering 45 percent the same day the stock market went bonkers (it finished down today and yesterday). Trump said all last year that he would hit all of our largest trading partners with a heavily restrictive tariff regime, and any corporate officer who oversaw a business directly affected by these tariffs and did not prepare for them has abandoned their fiduciary duty under any logical definition of the term, legalese be damned.
Current corporate law is such that if I brought this tariff-based case against a flat-footed company I was a shareholder of, I would get laughed out of court (not necessarily before 1980 though), but that doesn’t make their failure to protect their business from Trump any less pertinent. Besides, who cares about what a court of law has to say when you can’t sell your product at a 25 percent mark-up or worse. All because you didn’t believe the self-described “Tariff Man,” when he said he planned to destroy your business so he could set up a protection racket to further enrich himself. Everywhere you look these days, you either see America’s elites capitulating or being bamboozled by Trump. The meritocracy has proven itself a lie, we are governed by cowards and fools.
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