Are there any business winners in Trump 2?
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. “The golden age of America begins right now," intoned Donald Trump at the start of his inaugural address on January 20th. The business world bought the glittering talk, in anticipation of lower taxes, less red tape and buoyant American consumers.
Between election day in November and the swearing-in, the Russell 3000 index, which covers most of America’s public companies, rose by 5%. The resulting $2.4trn in new shareholder value was equivalent to the entire Indian stockmarket with two Mexican bourses thrown in. America was first.
No one came remotely close. A month into Mr Trump’s second term America was even firster. By February 19th the Russell 3000 had added another $1.4trn in market capitalisation, reaching a record $63trn.
Scott Bessent, a comfortingly buttoned-down hedge-fund billionaire, was in charge of the Treasury. Another financier, Howard Lutnick, was installed as commerce secretary. Elon Musk’s engineering genius would make the gummed-up bureaucracy run as efficiently as his Tesla assembly lines.
Could things get any sparklier? It turns out they couldn’t. In the past six weeks the sheen has come right off the Trump economy. Instead of tax cuts America is getting a hike in the form of sweeping tariffs against all the country’s biggest trading partners, the details of which Mr Trump will unveil on April 2nd.
Mr Musk’s efficiency drive is gutting the federal workforce willy-nilly. In February alone more than 62,000 government employees got the sack, according to a monthly tally by Challenger, a recruitment firm. Private-sector employers, among them household names like Meta and John Deere, announced 110,000 cuts, compared with 82,000 the year before.
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