You know how conspiracy theorists believe there’s a secret cabal controlling the world economy? Turns out they may be kind of right – only the conspiracy’s stupider than they ever imagined.
As American television journalist Rachel Maddow revealed in her weekly MSNBC segment on Saturday, the White House’s economic guru during the Trump era, Peter Navarro, kept quoting a “trade expert” named Ron Vara in his books and arguments. But here’s the catch: Ron Vara does not exist. He’s not an economist. He’s not a person either. He is just an anagram of “Navarro”.
And this Ron Vara, whose “expert” advice Navarro quoted in his book which formed the basis of the Trump tariffs, may be behind the global economic downturn that has pummeled markets across the globe.
In India, Indian equity markets tanked to a 10-month low wiping out investor wealth of over Rs 20 lakh crore within seconds. Meanwhile, in the US, the Dow jittered like it had read the headlines, the VIX howled like a banshee, and investors clutched their portfolios like rosaries.
The indicators of a market bloodbath
Delving deeper, Maddow pointed to specific instances where the Dow Jones Industrial Average experienced abrupt declines. “The Dow dropped more than 2,000 points today. Not a typo…yesterday and today are the first time ever that the Dow has dropped 1,500 points or more on two consecutive days,” she said. She pointed to two metrics to understand the scale of what has happened, “whether or not you watch the markets, whether or not you have any money in the markets or retirement account”.
“The first one is the circuit breakers. You know about this. The markets have circuit breakers that kick in when things go off a cliff. That’s a mixed metaphor, but I think you know what I mean. They call them trading curbs, and they’re these shut offs that kick in automatically and basically stop the market. They stop people from trading for 15 minutes when things have gone unbelievably wrong,” she said, pointing to the S&P drop over the last two days.
She then pointed to the sharp spikes in the VIX index – a barometer for market uncertainty. “It’s the volatility index. It goes up when things are terrible…the first huge peak that’s 2008. That was the global financial disaster of 2008, the worst financial catastrophe since the great depression…the next big peak is March 2020. That’s the equally huge global disaster, right when the Covid pandemic overran the world, killed millions of people and basically shut off economic activity like there had been a power outage…but now look, new peak that’s now…not caused by the biggest financial catastrophe since the great depression or a global pandemic that’s killing millions of people. That one caused simply by Donald Trump being president again with his great ideas.”
The American journalist pointed out how the media reflected on the crisis. “I mean, here’s the Wall Street Journal front page right now. US stocks plunged deeper, capping worst week since 2020 which again was the pandemic. Trump’s tariffs set off a two day sell-off as recessionary fears mount. More than $6 trillion erased from market. This has been the lead analysis piece on CNBC.com all day. Trump’s tariffs are biggest policy mistake in 95 years. This is the lead editorial today at the Financial Times…if it endures, Donald Trump’s decision on April 2, 2025, to enact sweeping tariffs on US trade partners will go down as one of the greatest acts of self-harm in American economic history.”
“Larry Summers, former treasury secretary, says, quote, this is to economics what creationism is to biology, what astrology is to astronomy.”
She said “it’s even harder to get your head around simultaneously” to the fact that Trump can do damage of this magnitude with “such a teeny, tiny, teeny, teeny tiny amount of thought”. “You think it would take like a grand plan and some big brains to figure out how to destroy the economy of the richest nation on earth. But that’s not how it’s working out…Do you remember where Trump got the tariff thing from in the first place? Do you remember like when and why and how he started talking about tariffs in the first place? it was in his first campaign for president.”
How Jared found a book, an adviser, and a fake expert
The journalist recalled that Trump “didn’t really have any formal economic advisers”, so he told his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to find him an economic adviser.
“Trump reportedly gave Jared some vague ideas of what his thoughts were on economic issues. You know, something something. Make me look tough, China bad. Something, something. Jared then decided to find his father-in-law, a financial adviser for his presidential campaign, by going on the Amazon.com website and starting to browse books. Not like reading the books because you can’t do that on the Amazon website. He was just looking at the covers, looking at the titles, and he found a book title that he thought was so cool. The title was Death By China…that apparently was it. Quote from Vanity Fair.”
This book was coauthored by Navarro, a well-known “trade deficit hawk who agreed to join the team as an economic adviser”. “Where did Peter Navarro get his idea that tariffs would be a good policy for America?…well, he did have backup from a real expert who he cited in at least a half dozen of his books, including the one that Jared found on Amazon that fateful day. In all of his books, Peter Navarro has cited an economics expert to justify his views, and the economics expert he cites is somebody named Ron Vara…when Trump won the presidency and entered the White House, this Ron Vara started circulating a memo around Washington in support of Trump using tariffs and trade policy. According to the New York Times, the memo had been, quote, sent from an email address purportedly belonging to Ron Vara…the problem is, Ron Vara doesn’t exist.”
The journalist said that Navarro “invented Ron Vara as his expert source, so he could quote this expert source over and over and over again in his crackpot books. Who is Ron Vara? Ron Vara is an anagram of Navarro…my name anagrams to Macho Waddler, but I don’t see myself trying to talk you into doing what Macho Waddler wants, right?”
“But that really is how the Trump administration crafted its tariff policy. That’s where Trump came up with the tariff idea, circulating a fake memo from a fake person with a fake email address in order to make it look like this was a serious issue being debated by real experts. That is, the intellectual basis on which Donald Trump today wiped $6 trillion of wealth out of existence and crashed America’s markets and brought America and the world to the brink of a self-inflicted, on purpose, global great depression, along the lines of what we had in 2008 and what the pandemic inflicted upon us in 2020. This time, the global disaster is Donald Trump’s big brain.”
In times of misinformation, you need news you can trust. We’ve got you covered. Subscribe to Newslaundry and power our work.
Newslaundry is a reader-supported, ad-free, independent news outlet based out of New Delhi. Support their journalism, here.
