Wall Street wants sympathy because the music stopped. For years, they danced on a floor built from zero rates, fake growth, and free money. Now the lights are on, the floor’s buckling, and they’re blaming tariffs for the collapse. Tariffs didn’t create this mess. They just lit the match.
The real structure was already rotting. We’ve spent the better part of 15 years pumping air into the largest asset bubble in history. Housing, equities, crypto, commercial real estate, private equity — you name it — all swollen far beyond fundamentals. Every dip was bought with borrowed money. Every downturn patched with stimulus. Wall Street didn’t care. As long as the game kept going, they played. Now they’re screaming because the game might be over.
Investors who bragged about “cheap debt” are now staring at 5 percent interest and discovering their cash flow was a hallucination. Homebuyers thought they were geniuses flipping homes in a zero-rate world. Today, they’re stuck with $900K mortgages on $700K homes, with no buyers in sight.
This bubble wasn’t accidental. It was engineered. The Fed juiced markets with one hand while Congress spent like drunken aristocrats with the other. Neither side of the aisle cared because asset inflation made everyone feel rich. The rich got richer. The middle borrowed to catch up. And the poor? Forgotten.
Wall Street never really believed in free markets. They believed in safety nets — for themselves. When Main Street goes broke, it’s called bad luck. When hedge funds blow up, they get invited to the White House. Now they want bailouts, rate cuts, a reversal of reality. Not because it helps America. Because it helps them.
Tariffs may cause pain, but they’re not what blew this thing up. The explosion was inevitable. Too much leverage, too little productivity, too many lies wrapped in ETFs and sold as innovation. Wall Street doesn’t want to talk about that. They’d rather pin it on a policy spat than admit the real economy was never healthy.
So the whining begins. They’ll blame Trump. They’ll blame Powell. They’ll blame anyone but themselves. But deep down, they know. The bubble popped. There’s no magic fix this time. Just gravity.