Whether you're an economist or not, a financial professional or not, it's still your money that's being affected.
Like many people, I've avoided looking at my 401k these past few weeks. Well, I peeked, and it's all in the red.
There are so many interpretations of what's going on. It's either a genius move or the work of a madman. While we wait to figure it out, we have to live through the chaos and hope it works out for the best.
These were my thoughts amidst the tariff wars. Thoughts I kept to myself because our new political reality is that every other week we move on to a new problem.
I'd like to understand it better for myself so I can plan for my own future. I don't just want to think positively; instead, I want to analyze the current reality and see how I can still come out on top.
First, I'd like to compare tariffs as a tool in the midst of a crowded market of tools. Let's symbolically represent tariffs as Twitter. When Twitter came out, it was an odd addition to the book of social media. It only supported 140 characters per tweet, that includes spaces. That was completely ridiculous in the era of blogs, Facebook, and videos. In a world where you could express yourself freely, someone came in to limit that expression to 140 characters. That's a sentence or two, or just a single thought. Somehow, Twitter survived and thrived in that era.
Through these barebones limitations that forced you to be concise and straight to the point, creativity started emerging. People found a way.
People started posting links. These were too short, so URL shorteners came to life. Twitter didn't support images, so people found ways to share them. Even retweets didn't exist, and people came up with solutions. It forced Twitter to augment their platform with all these tools created by the community. Today, Twitter is a glorified blog engine, but if it had started this way, it would never have found the same success.
Now back to tariffs. They're creating the same restrictions that Twitter imposed on itself. They will force America to look internally and find solutions. Not because tariffs are a genius idea, but because that's the reality we're facing now.
And a reminder: Twitter is not the most successful social media platform. In fact, it is collapsing in on itself. I see tariffs the same way. As something that can only exist temporarily, or they will end up destroying the very things they're trying to create.