The moron premium
By 
The recent experience of the United Kingdom constituted good advice the American electorate refused to take. First Brexit:
Britain has watched President Trump’s tariffs with a mix of shock, fascination and queasy recognition. The country, after all, embarked on a similar experiment in economic isolationism when it voted to leave the European Union in 2016. Nearly nine years after the Brexit referendum, it is still reckoning with the costs.
The lessons of that experience are suddenly relevant again as Mr. Trump uses a similar playbook to erect walls around the United States. Critics once described Brexit as the greatest act of economic self-harm by a Western country in the post-World War II era. It may now be getting a run for its money across the Atlantic.
Even Mr. Trump’s abrupt reversal last week of some of his tariffs, in the face of a bond-market revolt, recalled Britain, where Liz Truss, a short-lived prime minister, was forced to retreat from radical tax cuts that frightened the markets. Her misbegotten experiment was the culmination of a cycle of extreme policies set off by Britain’s decision to forsake the world’s largest trading bloc.
“In a way, some of the worst legacies of Brexit are still ahead,” said Mark Malloch Brown, a British diplomat who served as deputy secretary-general of the United Nations. Britain, he said, now faces a hard choice between rebuilding trade ties with Europe or preserving them with Mr. Trump’s America.
Like Brexit, Trump’s tariffs are a twisted politics of nostalgia, creating real harms but not actually doing anything to recreate an (often imagined) past that can’t ne reconstructed. Only congressional Republicans are actually going to go through with Trussism, which will make it much worse.
And the damage is going to have ongoing effects even after Trump:
Since Truss’s resignation, the U.K. has suffered permanently higher bond yields and higher debt-servicing costs than its European peers. At the same time, interest rates on household mortgages have remained painfully high—a phenomenon dubbed the “moron premium” by her detractors.
Inflicting pain on U.S. investors may be part of the president’s plan, to show China that in pursuit of economic decoupling, America is prepared to suffer. But once you break a complex system, stuff tends to happen that you didn’t intend.
As I write, the dollar is falling and—despite the 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs—the yield on a 30-year Treasury bond is close to 5 percent. That means the cost of borrowing for the U.S. government is now double what it was five years ago, because investors are demanding higher returns for holding the safest debt in the world. If both of these circumstances persist next week, and begin to affect Americans’ income, the moron premium may cross the Atlantic.
I know it’s uncouth to say it but “randomly wreck things out of boredom and/or random grievances” is in fact politics for morons.