America This Week Monday Night Livestream by Matt Taibbi

A recording from Matt Taibbi's live video

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Walter Kirn books. 

8:35. I covered Wall Street for 10 years and I didn't know about the disparity you know of the auto tariffs between Europe and the United States there's a lot of idiosyncratic knowledge that we need to understand before we can make a decision about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing but everybody instantaneously jumped on this idea that oh my God the stock market is going down and we are headed towards catastrophe and it did indeed look that way for a while today and then Mark it shot back up . . .

9:09.  . . . over a rumor that Trump had decided to pause the tariffs for 90 days, and, if I'm correct, the market went up like a thousand points in moments, proving, I think, that individual investors or even regular investors weren't behind the sound mixing board, but massive computer programs.  And you thought if we just did this structural thing that is going to bring down the world economy and a pause of 90 days suddenly reverses the whole market, then what are we really looking at was some kind of mass psychological event rather than some deep descent into trade war and nationalistic isolationism and so on they they made the stock market and it's performance of a proxy for Donald Trump's effectiveness and now they are wed to that formula: should it go up, should it end up? I guess he saved the world if he was going to destroy the world when it went down, it was the most panicky embrace of a short-term rhetorical advantage that I've ever seen in return for a long-term unmasking of your values.

11:00. Having covered 2008 and the collapse of the stock market, yes, it was very bad for Wall Street, but it massively impacted ordinary people . . .

11:12.  What massively impacted ordinary people was that they were leveraged to the hilt on their houses . . . 

11:19.  No, but they got killed three times: they got killed on their houses, they got killed because their retirement funds were heavily invested in mortgage-backed securities, and it got killed because of their taxes.  They had to pay taxes to bail out the people who did the crime, right? If the stock market crashes, it's because it will likely be because of a huge galaxy of underlying structural weaknesses in the market that are partly the fault of this Administration, partly the fault of other Administration, everything from our job gigantic national debt to the overvaluing of securities to, frankly, the tariff program, which is if they hadn't done it we probably wouldn't have seen this correction.  That doesn't mean that it's a bad idea, but that's . . .

12:22.  Well the tariff program, let's remember it's not the Ten Commandments, okay.  It wasn't graven in stone and brought down to the people from Sinai.  It was a negotiating tactic that applies bilaterally to individual countries and has different effects in different realms.  You know, maybe you, maybe deleterious to supply chains in certain industries, too, but can go away or be rebalanced next week.  In other words, Trump did something that I think I haven't witnessed for a long time.  He found the on-and-off switch in American politics.  We saw the switch go on and off and we saw the switch go on and off in one day.  He announced what is essentially an industrial policy, if you think of it long term, because the goal at least is being articulated as the reshoring of manufacturing and all sorts of other jobs that have gone to other countries.  But then we saw it blank off, and now he holds complete keys to the kingdom as far as I can see.