Justin Wolfers

I know I wrote a study years ago looking at the stock market effect of the invasion of Iraq.

We found that if the diff the stocks were valued 15% lower, if the us invaded Iraq relative to if it didn't.

So if you thought something like that, if you thought Greenland were Iraq, there's lots of reasons to think it's not right.

You would expect stocks to fall on the order of 10 to 20%.

Today they fell on the order of one to 2%.

So my interpretation is they've built in a one in 10 chance.

The guy is serious.

In some sense, markets are really useful here that are a wake-up call.

It's not about the probability he follows through.

It's about the consequences if he follows through, which is they're screaming, this is terrible.

But they're not screaming, screaming.

If you remember Liberation Day, they screamed, they howled.

Right.

We weren't quite used to the Trump two-step of two steps forward and an immediate back down.

If we're in a world in which he never followed through on anything, of course, markets would react to nothing.

Right.

The problem is that the president actually does sometimes do things.

You could ask the Venezuelans about that.

And the problem is we couldn't tell before the fact if he was serious about Venezuela, and then we learned after the fact he was.

And I would like to think he's not serious about Greenland, but I don't want to wake up tomorrow and all of a sudden discover he was.