{"id":524312,"date":"2026-03-09T10:03:09","date_gmt":"2026-03-09T10:03:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/524312\/"},"modified":"2026-03-09T10:03:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-09T10:03:09","slug":"risk-is-business-poison-and-trump-is-risky-winnipeg-free-press","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/524312\/","title":{"rendered":"Risk is business poison, and Trump is risky \u2013 Winnipeg Free Press"},"content":{"rendered":"

With every passing day, it seems more and more like the president of the United States doesn\u2019t understand the business costs of risk and instability.<\/p>\n

And not only the U.S. is going to feel the results of that blind spot.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true that people do make money in unstable times \u2014 especially, as seems to be happening in the United States, if you know about significant government changes in advance, and tailor your stock purchases and sell-offs accordingly.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"President
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n

President Donald Trump waves after arriving on Marine One on the South Lawn of White House, Sunday, March 1, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo\/JMark Schiefelbein)<\/p>\n

Much money has been made by anonymous traders (you could legitimately suspect inside traders) who have magically decided to dump stocks just before U.S. President Donald Trump has made sweeping or unexpected tariff decisions, as it has been made on oil plays by speculators who seem to know when military actions are about to take place.<\/p>\n

But on the whole, businesses don\u2019t invest during times of turmoil unless they can see clean, clear opportunities. Instead, they plan and retrench: they hold their cash reserves close, tighten up the amounts they spend on their workforces, back out of low-performing operations.<\/p>\n

Fast food chains are a bellwether: so far this year, Papa John\u2019s pizza has announced the closure of 300 North America locations by 2027, Wendy\u2019s is in the midst of a wind-down of underperforming locations that could top 350 restaurants, and Starbucks is trimming 124 storefronts and dropping 900 corporate staff as part of a US$1 billion restructuring.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s just not good business to roll the risk dice and hope they will come up your way.<\/p>\n

Think about it this way: there are major companies that have promised to reshore manufacturing in the United States \u2014 the Trump government boasts of billions of dollars of commitments.<\/p>\n

But if you\u2019re a company president watching tariffs first get applied by Trump, then get removed by the U.S. Supreme Court, then get reapplied by Trump under an even more abstract interpretation of some piece of rarely-used dusty U.S. legislation, chances are you\u2019re going to dog-walk any actual construction of a new American plant for as long as you can \u2014 at least until the dust has finally settled.<\/p>\n

\n\t\tWinnipeg Free Press | Newsletter\n\t<\/p>\n

\t\t\tThe Wrap<\/p>\n

Weekday Evenings<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s must-read stories and a roundup of the day\u2019s headlines, delivered every evening.<\/p>\n

\t\t\tSign up for The Wrap<\/a><\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\"Sign<\/p>\n

The tightening-up is limiting expansion, and with it, jobs.<\/p>\n

And a huge amount of the fallout of uncertainty is getting backstopped by the American taxpayer, and anyone willing to loan money to the U.S. government. Something close to US$200 billion in tariffs currently have to be refunded, and the U.S. government has to pay interest of, this year, six per cent on improperly collected tariffs as it works out who to repay, and how. The war in Iran is, by some accounts, costing an estimated US$1 billion per day, and a huge volume of high-cost armaments are being used and will have to be replaced.<\/p>\n

Not only that, but there are the costs of the fallout of an international conflict: President Trump\u2019s promise to use U.S. armed forces to protect tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz, his promise to use government intervention to make sure higher gas prices don\u2019t hit Americans, and his promise to provide backstop currently-unavailable insurance for tanker traffic \u201cat reasonable rates\u201d through an American government agency all put the U.S. government on the hook with new fiscal risk.<\/p>\n

Then, there are the global effects and warning signs: uncertainty over the U.S. war with Iran is driving up oil prices, causing fears of shortages, and also causing downstream producers \u2014 like South Korea\u2019s Yeochun NCC Co. \u2014 to announce that they are moving petrochemical production to minimum levels. Yeochun is one of the top petrochemical raw material producers in the world, and its production winddown will clearly have significant downstream effects.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s just another result of uncertainty. And while it will affect the world, it\u2019s made in America.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With every passing day, it seems more and more like the president of the United States doesn\u2019t understand…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":524313,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194296],"tags":[49,48,22073],"class_list":["post-524312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-winnipeg","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-winnipeg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=524312"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524312\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/524313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=524312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=524312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=524312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}