POLICY ON THE HOOF
US policy instability under Trump is a real threat to world peace. It makes the ANC’S policy somersaults look tame
Say what you will about the ANC, the party of Jacob Zuma and Nelson Mandela won’t catch you by surprise on policy matters. The ANC always telegraphs its intentions way, way ahead of time.
Take the National Health Insurance (NHI) scheme, for example. The ANC adopted that resolution way back in 2007. Twelve years later a bill has been forwarded to parliament. At this rate the comrades will get NHI in … 2044. The current panic about NHI is really that some among us chose not to listen when the ANC said it would implement the programme.
Take the policy that’s exercising the minds of my friends in financial services at the moment: prescribed assets. It’s been on the ANC agenda since 2009!
Policy uncertainty? Bah, humbug. With the SA ruling party it’s more a case of “when are you going to get on with it?”
Which brings me to my point: isn’t it a good thing that US President Donald Trump is not the leader of a developing country? The international ratings agencies would have downgraded his country to triple junk status 20 times over by now.
It amazes me when we talk about policy uncertainty in places like SA and yet don’t mention that the country that is seen as the gold standard on matters of stability — the US — is possibly the most unstable and uncertain place in the world right now.
Honestly, no-one knows what Trump is going to say in the next hour and what it means for policy. He is like a bull in a china shop. Trade with China? He may rewrite policy and tradition with just a tweet, depending on what he is watching on Fox News. Peace in the Middle East? He might just put his big foot in it and scupper
whatever positive efforts are being made by those steeped in the politics of the region. There is no preparing the market when it comes to policy in the Trump administration. It’s all done on the hoof.
Take last Friday. Stocks fell sharply on Wall Street after Trump responded to China’s threat of new tariffs on American imports with an angry volley of tweets, The New York Times said. It was the market’s fourth straight weekly loss. Stocks had found their footing and had begun to move higher that morning until, “around 11am, Mr Trump took to Twitter”.
The newspaper continued: “‘We don’t need China and, frankly, would be far better off without them,’ he wrote in one message. In another post, Mr Trump said that American companies were ‘hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China,’ adding that he would respond to China’s tariff threat later in the day.”
“Hereby ordered?” What does that actually mean — an American president can summarily order businesses to do what he wants? Impulsiveness and thoughtlessness seem to be part of, or, indeed, essential, for the leadership mix. There is no policy, no strategy. Just utterances aimed at, it seems, enhancing the popularity of Number One.
It’s not that it’s new. Trump has always been this way. Journalist
James Fallows, who followed Trump before the 2016 US election, wrote last week in The Atlantic: “That background [Fallows’ previous reporting on the president] has equipped me to view Trump’s performance in office as consistently shocking but rarely surprising. He lied on the campaign trail, and he lies in office. He insulted women, minorities, ‘the other’ as a candidate, and he does it as a president. He led ‘lock her up!’ cheers at the Republican National Convention and he smiles at ‘send them back!’ cheers now. He did not know how the ‘nuclear triad’ worked then, and he does not know how tariffs work now. He flared at perceived personal slights when they came from senator John Mccain, and he does so when they come from the prime minister of Denmark. He is who he was.”
The problem is, however, that this is the man with his hands on the nuclear codes. This is a man whose utterances move global markets. This is a man whose words can set off wars in places one never even knew existed.
US policy instability is a threat, a real threat, to world peace. It makes ANC policy somersaults look tame in comparison.
We talk about policy uncertainty in SA yet the US is possibly the most uncertain place of all