At the Mercy of a Feral President
What it’s like to sell a house in an economy on the verge of a self-induced financial crisis
I mentioned last week that I’d been at work on a post about some personal news and ended up setting it aside when the president’s “Liberation Day” tariffs announcement sent the stock market into a tailspin. Rather than return to that apolitical essay, I’ve decided to reframe it into a hybrid post blending the personal, political, and economic.
The news is that, while teaching two classes this semester and writing two posts a week for this newsletter, I’ve also been hard at work with my wife on selling our house and buying a new one in Center City, Philadelphia. That’s right, after 19 years of living and raising two kids in the very pleasant Mainline suburbs just west of the city, we’ve decided to mark the onset of the empty-nesting chapter of our lives by becoming urbanites for the first time since we lived (and loved living) in Berlin, Germany as graduate students for a little more than a year in the late 1990s.
We took our time in making the decision, slowly looking, on and off, for about 18 months. We found a townhome we liked last November and bid on it, but we weren’t willing to pay what the sellers were asking and so we lost the place. After that, we kept looking and then finally found a place that checked every box and felt like home to us. We bid right away and managed to get it. We’re thrilled, but also exhausted, since we also need to sell our current house, and getting it ready for sale after all these years has been a major project, taking up nearly every waking moment of every weekend over the past 6 weeks. But we’re finally there, with several open houses coming up very soon.
You’d expect us to be going through a mixture of anxiety and relief, and those feelings are certainly there. But throughout the experience, and with special intensity over the past week or so, there has also been a keen sense of dread sometimes verging on outright panic. That’s because it just so happens that our move has coincided precisely with Donald Trump’s wildly erratic imposition of the highest tariffs in a century on pretty much the entire world—an act that has not only prompted a collapse in equities but also a very dangerous spike in bond yields, including the yield on what is supposed to be the safest of all safe harbors in the financial system: U.S. Treasuries.
From Monday morning until early afternoon Wednesday, when President Psycho jacked tariffs on China up to the absurd level of 125 percent and simultaneously dropped the rest of world to 10 percent for a “90 day PAUSE” (as he put it in an Truth Social post), I was seriously entertaining the possibility that the global economy could be teetering on the verge of a repeat of 2008, 2020, or something even more catastrophic, albeit with two crucial differences. The first is that this time the crisis could explode at the precise moment I’m trying to buy one house and sell another. The second is that this time the crisis would be caused entirely by the actions of the president of the United States.
Free Fallin’
I would describe the feeling of living through the first half of this week as being locked in a tiny cage with a dangerous, feral animal.
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