Justin Wolfers

And this is actually, I think there's one profound sense, there's many senses in which these are uncharted waters.

But one very profound sense is I don't think we've ever been in a situation like this where

The word of the president about what his intentions are is so uninformative about the future.

Right.

George W. Bush, when he said, let's go ahead, you kind of knew that's what he meant.

And when he said, let's pull back, you kind of knew what he meant.

And here, I think we're all just guessing.

Yeah, so I think it's been a question very much on a lot of people's minds.

So if your simple model was the president will do what he wants until he hears markets don't like it, when he hears markets don't like it, then he'll undo it.

And if markets can think one step further, then they'll see the president does what he wants.

It's not very good.

They think he'll undo it.

Given that they think he'll undo it, they don't need to move.

Right.

What's the equilibrium of this game?

It could be that markets don't move very much and the president becomes hypersensitive to markets.

Who knows?

This feedback loop is profoundly broken and it would be a lot easier if it was genuinely mechanistic, but it's not.

Maybe, you know, all of this comes back to what,

How do you rewrite the rules of the game when you have an unpredictable president?