It’s been a month since “Liberation Day,” the day that President Donald J. Trump announced that we would emerge from the oppression of foreign manufacturing. For years, the President declared, we’ve been “ripped off” by the Chinese and others who have moved American jobs to their shores, producing the goods and products that you and I consume daily.
Liberation Day is a Grand Strategy, a “great big idea,” as President George HW Bush once said, an all-encompassing reordering of the existing world of commerce. But for most of us, what exactly are the implications of Liberation Day and the myriad of tariffs that will be used to implement it?
Wall Street has become a pretzel attempting to decipher what Liberation Day means. Stock Market volatility has been like nothing we’ve ever seen, down on the announcement of each import tax, up on any tariff relief.
The chief measure of market volatility, the VIX Index, which measures the volatility of the broadly based Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, reached an astronomical 60 just a week after Liberation Day was announced, one of its highest levels ever.