Justin Wolfers

to rise.

I think it was on the Friday.

It was all the way back to last Friday.

So it's been seven days, Friday or maybe Saturday.

It was Saturday when he said that he was going to impose the brand new tariffs on Greenland.

And so it took all of four days for him then to decide, well, actually, I'm not going to do anything with the tariffs.

So what he managed to do was cause a stock market sell-off as the world reacted to the possibility that

the next round of the trade war was starting.

And then he managed to cause markets to rise by just not doing that.

And if I sound a little exhausted now, I am.

And if your audience is feeling sick and tired of this carnival show, you ought to be.

Sometimes, though, I think we're going to learn the most if we press pause, stand back, and try and put everything that we just talked about in a deeper perspective.

I'm going to let you guide me on that, Ben.

Normally, the economy churns along and some good things are happening and some bad things are happening.

Some sectors are expanding, some are contracting, and that's what a normal economy looks like.

And sometimes we have recessions and that's usually because something bad and unexpected happens.

There's a financial crisis, there's a global pandemic, there's a war, there's big movements in global oil markets.

What's so annoying, frustrating, disappointing,

and different about this is this might be the first ever economic downturn caused by incompetence.

It's actually rare for a US, you know, often the role of economists when we talk about ongoing political dramas is to remind people that the White House doesn't control everything in their lives.