"It's a bit different today. Trump needs a Treasury secretary who can sell Wall Street on tax cuts, reduced regulation, and protectionism, but this time it's protectionism on a colossal scale, with tariffs of 10 to 20 percent slapped onto every import plus a 60 percent tariff on all Chinese goods and a tariff of 25 percent to 100 percent on all goods from Mexico, which is an even bigger trading partner than China.
These tariffs would, it is widely agreed, tank the economy and usher in a bear market"and that's before factoring in the worker shortage from Trump's planned mass expulsion of undocumented aliens.
Any Treasury nominee who understands the misery that Trump's tariffs would create will resist them, and any Treasury nominee who doesn't understand, or (more likely) pretends not to, will scare the living daylights out of Wall Street."
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Wall Street is the only part of the American Establishment that Trump respects. As Bloomberg's "Carmen Reinicke and Esha Dey wrote earlier this week, "the stock market is a way [Trump] keeps score." It's pretty much the only way.
If you wonder why Trump didn't talk about the stock market during the campaign, the reason is that the S&P 500 rose faster under President Joe Biden than at any time since 1945, except for the dotcom boom of the late 1990s, when it rose even faster (under another Democratic president).
Unlike other economic statistics, stock indexes are really hard to lie about, because your audience can see what's happening in their portfolios.
(Then why did Trump voters think the economy was in trouble? Because nearly 40 percent of the population owns no stock, and among those who do all but the richest own very little.)"
