The Uncertainty is The Point

Mild success can be explained by skills and labor.

Wild success is attributable to variance.

—Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

It happened Friday night. The Trump administration announced exemptions for tech companies from their latest barrage of tariffs. They were going to exempt smartphones, computer chips, computers, flat-screen televisions, solar panels and equipment, and pretty much every other electronic.

For a moment, it looked like his administration was offering some clarity on their strategy. They would push tariffs in name only to patronize their base while rendering them largely meaningless in any practical sense, indicating big tech was running things in the background. Honestly, that made sense. It looked as if the trade war was going to be a giant nothingburger, a managed panic to produce a few weeks of volatility that his donor class could dine out on for a while—nothing more.

Then Trump reversed course again, walking back the exemptions he’d offered barely 48 hours earlier and promising tariffs in new forms on semiconductor chips. As he spouted on social media, electronics and other crucial goods exempt from tariffs “are subject to the existing 20 percent fentanyl tariffs, and they are just moving to a different tariff bucket.”

Does he even know what he’s saying anymore?

At this point, everyone is waiting to hear his final decision on what he’s going to do with tariffs on chips that go into all of our electronics.

Even then, will that be the end? Nobody knows. This week has reminded me of an important book about all this uncertainty.

Looks like it’s time to reread it.