Trump’s economic gamble: Genius or hustler?

My parents had, within them, the Irish DNA of a fear of poverty, passed on through the generations, brought about by the famines in the 1800s in which hundreds of thousands died or emigrated.

They were very careful with what money they had and had an inherent distrust of the wealthy.

As my mother would say – can a rich man be honest and can an honest man be rich?

They believed in the simple ways: Work hard and save your money by putting it in a bank. No gambling – other than the odd “flutter” on the “gee gees”… and certainly no playing the stock market.

Stockbrokers, whether my mother actually encountered any of them or not, were regarded as “smarmy” and not to be trusted.

Nevertheless, my father did own 300 shares of the then Rhodesian Breweries. Nothing else. He never sold them and I think that they neither went up nor down.

Against that background, I remember being terrified by the grainy black-and-white films of the Great Depression which hit the US in 1929 with the Wall Street Crash and then rippled out across the world.

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Starving kids and adults with their pathetic belongings on carts are an abiding image. There was a little consolation, though, in the fact that many of the pin-striped stockbrokers chucked themselves off skyscrapers when penury approached them.

A few shivers went down my spine again this week as Donald Trump and his coterie of billionaire backers played “chicken” with the global markets.

In the process, they made billions, but the ordinary suckers, like you and me, took a pounding as our pensions plummeted.

Nobody keeps their money in a bank any more. It’s all being “managed” by the clevers – who are probably not much higher in the sleaze rankings than stockbrokers – and the casino which is the stock exchange played with abandon.

It is looking as though Trump, far from being a lying buffoon, knew exactly what he was doing in slapping the whole world with tariffs, calculated on some gobbledegook formula.

He knew the markets would panic and there would be a sell-off… because, supposedly, this roulette wheel turns because of “sentiment” and companies hate uncertainty exactly like Trump chucked into the mix.

A similar thing happened when Covid hit and markets collapsed. That was when we became acquainted with the term “dead cat bounce” – which Wikipedia defines as “a small, brief recovery in the price of a declining asset”.

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It is derived from the idea that “even a dead cat will bounce if it falls from a great height”.

Covid set my meagre pension savings back by about two years, I reckon.

Following the Trump-engineered crash, the bounce back, which happened on Wednesday, was anything but that of a dead cat.

While I watched BBC News that evening, I saw, from their inserted “ticker”, the Dow Jones index rise by 1% in just over five minutes.

Then I saw a tweet, with accompanying visual proof that, 90 minutes before Trump backtracked on the tariffs, there had been massive “buy” orders in New York.

Those people had probably sold high – perhaps knowing Trump was about to crash the markets – and then bought low, just as the bourse headed skyward. Millions – or even billions – in profits for them.

Which begs the question: Is Trump a global economic genius, or just a hustler prepared to bring untold suffering to many just so that the few – his mates – get even fatter?

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