With the amount of squirming and outright panic in the news media, markets, and on social media, you'd think we were 50 years into a 100-year bout of famine, plague, depression, and pestilence.

Let's all just gather our heads for a second.

At a very basic psychological level, people are opposed to change. It doesn't matter whether it's changing their cable provider or taking a detour in traffic. Extrapolating from this, people are really opposed to bigger, more consequential change.

Extrapolating from this, in the world of finance, I have consistently argued that market participants have been falsely conditioned by our monetary and fiscal policy in this country to always expect comfort and never expect interruptions from the market moving higher, or the quality of life status quo that we believe we are entitled to here in the United States to suffer.

This concept was the basis for my article explaining why I thought the next market crash would "break the brains" of market participants.

Now let's zoom out and think about what President Trump is trying to accomplish with his tariff agenda. He is essentially saying that the status quo in the United States isn't working and large changes need to be implemented—changes that will shock the global economy—to remedy the issue.

"Who is the status quo not working for?" some of you will ask me from your Porsche, driving down PCH, or from your desk overseeing your millions in the market.

If I had to venture a guess, I'd say it's not working for people in towns like this:

Or people whose grandparents used to work at places like this: