“By placing massive and disproportionate tariffs on our friends and our enemies alike and thereby launching a global economic war against the whole world at once, we are in the process of destroying confidence in our country as a trading partner, as a place to do business, and as a market to invest capital,” Ackman wrote.
He argued that Trump should consider calling a “90-day time out” that would allow him to negotiate and solve “asymmetric tariff deals, and induce trillions of dollars of new investment in our country.”
If that doesn’t happen and instead the U.S. launches “economic nuclear war on every country in the world, business investment will grind to a halt, consumers will close their wallets and pocket books, and we will severely damage our reputation with the rest of the world that will take years and potentially decades to rehabilitate,” Ackman wrote.
“What CEO and what board of directors will be comfortable making large, long-term, economic commitments in our country in the middle of an economic nuclear war? I don’t know of one who will do so.”
Ackman predicted that if markets crash, “new investment stops, consumers stop spending money, and businesses have no choice but to curtail investment and fire workers.”
The private equivalents are already there when it comes to a lot of those government programs; they’re called loans. Or, in the case of non-profits and academia, there are grants that the private sector will hand out, but they come with private sector strings attached (the petro-chemical industry loves to fund climate “science” research).
In biomedical research basically everything is government funded. Even the research being done by private companies is government funded. The few private grants that do exist are either one billionaire’s pet project or just government funding from different sources being repackaged.
Private industry in the biomedical industry isn’t real. The whole thing is a facade held up by middlemen. It’s designed to make it look like private industry is capable of doing things but if you actually look below the surface that’s entirely made up, and like 99% of the money can be traced back to the government.