WASHINGTON, D.C. – If you checked your 401K balance today, you may have suffered a medical crisis as your account was possibly beat down harder than a Democrat running for office in rural Iowa. But, Secretary of State Marco Rubio held a press conference and explained that “people that play the stock market” will need to “adjust” as the Trump Administration “reset(s) the global order of trade” and introduces chaos into the economy, at least for the short term.
Today, Secretary of State Marco Rubio took questions from the press about plunging markets around the world, and he attempted to frame what is happening. In recent years, the U.S. stock market, such as the DOW Jones and S&P 500 and the NASDAQ, have raced north to record highs. Few complained as record high after record high was set under the last two administrations, and 401K balances made average joes strut around and act like the sky would never fall. At the same time, folks said the economy overall was awful and good jobs were hard to find and prices soared during and after the COVID pandemic. Perhaps Americans have been living on borrowed time – or just borrowing too much – and the chickens are coming home to roost. NIT reported recently, for example, that Americans’ credit card debt has reached a record $1.21 trillion. Meanwhile, student loan balances have come due, folks are behind on their mortgages, prices on groceries, cars and other goods have skyrocketed, and the Trump Administration is cutting government assistance and its own workforce with a vengeance.
Secretary Rubio, at a press conference at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, Belgium this afternoon, seemingly taking all these facts into consideration, laid out why President Donald Trump and his economic team have slapped the world with high tariffs, and brought the stock market to its knees:
PRESS CONFERENCE QUESTION AND ANSWER, APRIL 4, 2025:
SECRETARY RUBIO: All right, let’s do it. I don’t have a statement. Let’s just do it.
QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, thank you for taking questions. Diplomacy depends on predictability, reliability, trust. Markets are crashing around the world for the second day in a row. The consensus is that the President’s tariffs were much higher than expected, and based on economic formulas that people do not understand. What is your reaction, and what is the impact on Europeans? You want them to spend more on defense —
SECRETARY RUBIO: Yes.
QUESTION: — which they are agreeing to finally, but how can they do that when their economies are crashing, and they are now —
SECRETARY RUBIO: No, their – no, no, no, no, no – no, their economies are not crashing. The markets are —
QUESTION: But they are.
SECRETARY RUBIO: No, their economies are not crashing. Their markets are reacting to a dramatic change in the global order in terms of trade. And so, what happens is pretty straightforward. If you’re a company and you make a bunch of your products in China, and all of a sudden shareholders or people that play the stock market realize that it’s going to cost a lot more to produce in China, your stock is going to go down. But ultimately, the markets – as long as they know what the rules are going to be moving forward – and as long as that’s set and you can, you can sustain where you’re going to be, the markets will adjust. Businesses around the world, including in trade and global trade, they just need to know what the rules are. Once they know what the rules are, they will adjust to those rules.
So, I don’t think it’s fair to say economies are crashing. Markets are crashing because markets are based on the stock value of companies who today are embedded in modes of production that are bad for the United States. We have to be a country that – we’re the largest consumer market in the world, and yet the only thing we export is services, and we need to stop that. We need to get back to a time when we’re a country that can make things, and to do that we have to reset the global order of trade.
QUESTION: Yeah, but – sir, there’s a long (inaudible). And the other part of my question —
SECRETARY RUBIO: Well, the worst thing is to leave it the way it is forever. I mean, this is – just can’t continue. We can’t continue to be a country that doesn’t make things. We have to be able to make things to provide jobs for Americans. We – that’s it; it’s that simple. China is an example. I mean, it’s outrageous. I mean, they don’t consume anything. All they do is export and flood and distort markets, in addition to all the tariffs and barriers they put in place. So, the President rightly has concluded that the current status of global trade is bad for America and good for a bunch of other people, and he’s going to reset it. And he’s absolutely right to do it.