On what was described as Liberation Day this Wednesday, Donald Trump held up a large cardboard

sign in the White House Rose Garden with a list of countries along with his estimate of their

tariffs against America, which he said included currency manipulation, trade restrictions and other

distortions like value-added tax.

As he revealed his placard, the stock market began its decline, to what would soon be the

15th biggest gap down open for the S&P in its history.

Joe Wysenthal at Bloomberg described watching the speech as one of the most surreal events

in his life, saying that he has seen speeches

and press conferences that the market hated before like this, but they had all been given

in the middle of a market crisis, and the market plunged because the speaker was seen

to not be doing enough. He says that this was the first self-manufactured event like this that he had seen,

and what made it worse, he said, was that the administration knew how much damage they would

do, but went ahead with even more aggressive actions than anyone had expected. To be clear from

the start, this is not a political video. I've no interest in covering political

topics, but this is likely to be the biggest market event of the year. My goal is just to discuss

the ideas behind these tariffs and their economic impact. Both sides of the political

aisle in the United States had been moving in a protectionist direction in recent

years and Trump's moves are just more extreme than Biden's were, but neither were taking

a free market's approach.

During the Liberation Day event, Trump announced new reciprocal tariffs on almost all of America's

trading partners. He announced that there would be additional

tariffs of 34% on China, 27% on India, 24% on Japan, and 20% on the EU. All other countries

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