Sometimes just admitting you were wrong is half the battle. In a rare display of humility for the legacy media, financial journalist and author Andrew Ross Sorkin of CNBC and the New York Times appeared on Newsmax this week and admitted he and "most of Wall Street" were wrong about President Trump's Liberation Day tariffs. Sorkin was hardly alone last spring, when most mainstream economists (and the markets themselves) freaked out over Trump's announcement of tariffs on dozens of other countries, predicting recession, economic calamity, and everything in between. But in the six months since then, those predictions never came to fruition, with the economy still strong and the stock market setting a dozen new record highs as of this week.
Now, Sorkin is reflecting and why and how they misjudged it so badly. "Where I got it wrong, and I think Wall Street got it wrong, and a lot of people got it wrong, was when (Trump) first made his pronouncement about Liberation Day," he told Newsmax. "The tariff rates he was talking about were high, super high, and the bond market freaked out."
"And to the president's credit, he actually looked at what was happening with the bond market and said, 'You know what? I'm going to take some time. I'm going to try to figure this out. I'm going to negotiate country by country.' And he's been doing that."
Sorkin now credits Trump's more methodical approach with calming the markets and easing those initial concerns. "I think that we all---there was a sort of 'hair on fire' moment," he continued. "The good news is I think (Trump) has now tried to figure out how can he do this? He's still trying to figure it out with China, and there's still a couple of other countries he's trying to figure it out with."
Photo: AFP