By Michael M. McGreer
April 9, 2025
Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who backed Donald Trump for the Presidency, took to social media Sunday to ask the President to pause tariffs for 90 days.
Ackman likened Trump’s April 9 scheduled tariff launch to an economic nuclear war on every country in the world. Ackman argued that business investment will halt, consumers will close their wallets and pocketbooks, and we will severely damage our reputation with the rest of the world, which will take years and potentially decades to rehabilitate.
According to The Washington Post, Elon Musk, an investor in China’s market, held direct “private talks” with the President, hoping to convince him to scale back the measures.
Yesterday, Trump obeyed Ackman and put a 90-day pause into effect; he ignored Musk’s concerns and raised China’s tariffs to 125%.[i]
On Tuesday, in Las Vegas, DR. Stephen M. Miller, a University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) professor of economics, told Sky 3 News reporters that uncertainty drives everything while simultaneously warning of a potential tariff war with China and the possibility of stagflation, characterized by slow economic growth, relatively high unemployment, and rising prices.
[i] China is the world’s second-largest economy by nominal GDP and since 2016 has been the world’s largest economy when measured by purchasing power parity (PPP). Chinese companies invested 28.04 billion U.S. dollars into firms in the United States in 2023 when calculated on a historical-cost basis. That year, the total foreign direct investments in the U.S. were valued at approximately 5.39 trillion U.S. dollars.