Terence Corcoran: Trump-fuelled trade fiascos are failing to swamp the markets. Why?

financialpost.com:

President Donald Trump is a bombastic blowhard, a high-profile manifestation of what the late United States philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt once described as a bullshitter, someone who is “not constrained by any consideration of what may or may not be true. In making his assertion, he is indifferent to whether what he says is true or false. His goal is not to report facts. It is, rather, to shape the beliefs and attitudes of his listeners in a certain way.” Frankfurt — whose 2005 book On Bullshit was a bestseller — passed away in 2023, but there is no reason to doubt he would repeat his 2016 assessment of Trump if he were writing today.

At least for the next year, or maybe longer, the world will be rolling forward under Trump’s influence, although where the world economy is going nobody knows. Certainly there is no consensus. While media, political and economic discussion is filled with negative angst over the destructive impact of tariff wars on national and international economic performance — job losses, rising prices, investment crises, trade blockages — the investment markets are booming.

This almost global investment boom raises a question: Are we in a bull market or driving into what Frankfurt might call a bullshit market?

For people who don’t spend time tracking the ups and downs of global stock markets, below is a graph that reflects the near-global trend toward record-setting market prices. While the Trump trade wars are supposedly threatening Canadian jobs and investment, the leading Canadian stock index — the S&P/TSX Composite — this week hit a record high 25,600, a 35 per cent gain from just two years ago.

In the United States, the S&P 500 index crossed the 6,000 mark two weeks ago and hasn’t stopped, even