Donald trump

It is the great good fortune of Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand to be united by a common language, and a misfortune of even greater magnitude that they share that language with the United States. America is a very different country to the four Commonwealth realms sometimes brigaded together under the ugly acronym ‘Canzuk’. It has a different constitution, a different culture and a very different history. Where for many years the four were partners (if hardly equal partners) in the common project of the Empire, the United States was, from its foundation, a determined and eventually successful enemy of the same.

Although Republicans and Democrats have few things in common, there’s one American universal: we don’t like when you mess with our money. After Donald Trump’s erratic tariff tantrums have sent markets lurching, who knows how much stocks will have spiked or tanked between the typing of this paragraph and it seeing print. Some 62 per cent of Americans own stock; unsurprisingly, I do, too. A believer in the joys of denial, I’ve refused to even peek at my portfolio since the President’s ‘Liberation Day’. I guess not worrying my pretty head about my finances constitutes liberation of a kind. While never a Trumpster, I found the initial weeks of the 47th presidency exhilarating.

A ‘black swan event’, as defined by the risk analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb in 2007, is a surprise occurrence that has a major impact on the global financial system and is rationalised after the fact as something that ought to have been expected all along. The 9/11 terror attacks are one example, the Covid pandemic another – shocks that rocked the world and made us wonder if freedom works. Since Wednesday last week, however, the gods of the marketplace have been wrestling with a new and more mind-boggling creature: the ‘orange swan’, a cataclysmic Donald Trump-induced happening that is at once entirely predictable and baffling, an event that is rationalised post hoc as a shock when in fact everybody saw it coming a long way off.