Jim Cramer, the host of Mad Money—a popular TV show that comments on investment and speculation on Wall Street (he is the Louis Rukeyser of an age of finance that has broken all that once linked money with style or bourgeois aristocratic pretensions—in our Cramer moment, one must roll up their sleeves to make that mad money)—suggested on Friday that Trump might be deliberately crashing the markets with his call for tariffs on Chinese products.
In his view, a trade war with China (the second-largest economy in the world, and the economy that many believe pulled the world out of the Great Recession with a massive Keynesian program that has vastly expanded its built environment) makes no sense whatsoever. He also believes that the Chinese administration is far smarter than the one currently running the US. And so, what's the deal? Why has Trump turned on investors? Last year, he was all about praising the markets. This year, he seems hell-bent on destabilizing them. Cramer concludes that Trump must be shorting the markets. He, and those in the know, might be making huge gains on short positions. Trump is, after all, much more a businessman than a politician. And he has made it very clear that he is in government to make money. Why should he do otherwise when it comes to the stock market?
All films that concern the US stock market—from Oliver Stone's Wall Street, to Charles Ferguson's Inside Job, to Anthony Onah's The Price, to Jed Rothstein's The China Hustle (which opens on April 6 at the Northwest Film Forum)—have this one thing to say: The big bucks on the market are only made by beating the gun. (Here, I'm referring, of course, to this line by John Maynard Keynes: "The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelop our future. The actual, private object of the most skilled investment today is 'to beat the gun,' as the Americans so well express it...")
What Keynes didn't add, but very well understood, is that beating the gun almost always requires legal or illegal manipulation of the market's rules. With that in mind, let's turn to this recent report on Bloomberg: "Carl Icahn [former Trump advisor and famous activist advisor] sold about $30 million of shares in crane manufacturer Manitowoc Co. in the weeks before President Trump said he would impose new tariffs on U.S. steel imports." That's how you beat the gun.
