The crazy thing is I know otherwise intelligent people who voted for Trump, but make arguments in his defense that 75% sound like the most jaded #resistlib never trumper take, until he gets to the end.
Almost word for word this week was like-
Trump is a conman, you can't believe half of what he says. Trump doesn't deliver half of what he promises. He isn't very smart, just cares about his own image and ego. He is addicted to doing substanceless deals and creating crises he can do these nothing deals to resolve. So DOGE isn't real, he isn't gonna cut spending, he's gonna continue growing deficit, he won't drain the swamp or build a wall or repeal Obamacare.
And the closer is "And given all that there's no way Trump crashes the economy".
I just do not get this cult. It's an addiction to "owning the libs" at all costs.
The markets, while often right after a while, can be a bit slow. I remember the weeks in February/March 2020. The writing about the upcoming global pandemic was on the wall, yet I had enough time to calmly sell all my stocks during the week before everything came crashing down.
Same slowness with the reaction to Deepseek recently.
The odd part is that Congress, at any time, can revoke these tariffs but are choosing not to do so because they need them for the tax cuts the GOP will legislate later this year.
The only sad thing during this whole ordeal is how ineffectual democratic politicians are... especially when they personally dealt with minority parties stopping them quite easily for the last 15 years. You'd think they'd learn some lessons but their failure to seize the moment is the only consistency they have.
The democrats blew it by believing Americans were educated. Now they have ZERO POWER. They don't control the executive branch, they don't control the legislative branch, and they don't control the judicial branch. I'm not sure WTF you expect Democrats to do now. It's not like Americans don't have access to a plethora of history books informing them exactly how this will play out. Too bad they don't read.
The Democrats blew it by being unresponsive to their voters' material demands and instead doubling down on hollow NGO speak. They preferred to run issue-free "vibes" campaigns.
The same business-industrial class captures them as the Republicans. Neither party is genuinely going to organize around class or material needs.
The real threat to America or Americans isn't a single man. It's the superstructure that enabled him.
In other words: "Wer hat uns verraten? The Democratic Party."
But they weren't unresponsive to the actual needs of their voters. Biden was one of the most successful presidents in US history, but in this Republican-led post-factual world facts don't matter. The blame for that rests solely on US citizens. They've allowed themselves to be lulled into the fantasy that the party will continue on and on regardless of reality. Well, the party is over.
Gaza was not a need of the vast majority of their voters, whatever a handful of college kids who are utterly incapable of understanding basic international politics think of themselves.
Neither is Bernie’s idiotic version of Medicare for all, in spite of it being a fun bumper sticker.
Y’all have gotta give up the TikTok bullshit and read some books.
Voters don't respond to long-term policy wins or economic data.
They respond to the perception of their material conditions, and the rise in inflation of the last few years has resulted in regime change all over the world.
Liberals are only just now beginning to realize this, but it remains to be seen if they'll learn at a scale that matters.
I was a Biden voter, but he was a weak and deeply disappointing president who exercised awful judgment on multiple occasions: running for re-election at his advanced age, not sacking Lloyd Austin for either the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal or going on cancer leave without telling anyone, not taking the lead on ending the COVID emergency (Colorado's Jared Polis was ahead of the White House on that), having so little control over White House interns that they released open letters against official Biden Israel policy, failing to take inflation seriously, etc.
Republicans are awful, but Democrats don't seem to want to do any better than "at least we're not them." It shouldn't be any surprise that Trump has (had?) real appeal over feckless national Democrats.
> Biden was one of the most successful presidents in US history
Biden? If that man was actually the one leading the country over the last 2+ years, I’ll eat your hat. All that is coming out now from multiple sources in the administration seem to indicate he hasn’t been capable of making many decisions for quite a while now.
Can you give a few of the specific "multiple sources" you mention?
I see posters on HN trot this out, but I'm yet to see any evidence of this. Can you point to a couple of reliable news sources reporting on this so I can read more for myself?
There are two books that literally have dropped in the last 2 weeks and the authors have been doing a lot of media about them. One is called “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House” another is called “Uncharted: How Trump beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History”. Both of these books quote anecdotes from Biden admin insiders and dem politicians about the challenges they saw and experienced.
DNC fundraiser Lindi Li has been all over the podcasts and news (back in November a lot) talking about the challenges she saw.
I’m not sure what you consider “reliable news sources” but I have seen this topic and these authors, and Lindi Li on network, cable, and new media news sources across the spectrum.
It's always interesting when you see a new meme emerging from the rightwing information wormhole into the open internet. This week's must be "NGO" used as some type of slur.
Anyway, the economy was rocking under Biden, we had the largest investments in manufacturing in decades (the advanced kind, not mud production), record low unemployment, stonks going up, etc.
Inflation is pretty much the only issue that mattered, which was a global phenomenon that America navigated better than anyone else, and there's almost nothing to say about it. Well, you can lie and say that you'll reduce prices on day one, despite having no mechanism to do so, which I suppose is the real takeaway: Dems should blatantly lie more.
They totally did. Sorry but no one but rightwing information wormhole seen NGO as something nefarious in principle. It is just laundering far right bullshit again.
So anyone critical of the Gates Foundation for distorting public health priorities through his NGO slush-funds is participating in "far right bullshit" again?
It has zero to do with material demands. Those lost the elections. What won them was conservatives stroking fears about trans, women and such. Talking about material demands is just repeating past mistakes.
Actual economical or other results have nothing to do with anything. It was not about that. Democrats thinking them being objectively better for economy might do something is what looses the elections.
The only reason those evergreen moral panics worked is the radio silence from the Biden and Harris campaigns on what concrete things they would do differently if given the chance at another term.
Instead, voters were told they were better off than ever, and there was some astroturfed panic about "Project 2025."
> they need them for the tax cuts the GOP will legislate later this year.
They're also playing games where new time-limited tax cuts are counted as "costs" for their planned lifetime, but now, later, they're claiming renewing the same cuts costs nothing because they're already there. [0]
This is like a man with a mid-life crisis renting a fancy sports car saying "just one month is quite affordable", except next month he extends the lease, saying "this is fine, it's already in the budget so it doesn't cost us extra."
That matters because they're using this fake math to try to trigger special rules which let them pass budgets with fewer votes.
> The odd part is that Congress, at any time, can revoke these tariffs
Side note: Originally the law (IEEAP, 1977) [1] allowed Congress to revoke them with 50% of each house. But few years later the Supreme Court ruled that mechanism unconstitutional. This means it now requires a veto-proof supermajority of >66.6% in each house.
So yeah, with enough votes this could be done in a very short time-frame... but "enough" is such a big number that it requires most of the GOP to decide it doesn't want to destroy America after all.
I recall that the GOP once introduced a bill requiring congressional approval for any changes to tariffs. I believe it was proposed sometime around 2015—or perhaps even earlier, around 2005. I’m not entirely sure of the exact date. What I do remember is that Democrats strongly opposed the bill at the time, as they were generally supportive of tariffs during that period.
Now, interestingly, the GOP has shifted to being largely pro-tariff—except for a few staunch free-market conservatives like Rand Paul.
Being pro-rational-tariffs and being pro massive tariffs that are calculated as ration of export deficit and originally used to damage former allies are two different thigns.
As in, I could buy tariffs as a strategic decision to help build own industry in some are ... but these are just not that. These were originally used in conjunction with annexation threats, then with lies and are deployed with no regards to own citizens.
They aren't pro-tariff, and the dissent will grow. But the GOP is absolutely captured by the Trump cult. Any deviation from conformance with whatever nonsensical thing Trump says today is seen as disloyalty by the cult. Normal checks and balances are gone.
Mmmm, I'm not so sure about that anymore ... at least not for a while yet.
Trump has a lot of leeway to declare emergency rulings and to have those enforced in the short term. Such powers come with a short leash that require appeals to be addressed in a short time frame.
That mechanism was upended twenty four days ago when US Republicians effectively "stopped time" ..
Each day for the remainder of the first session of the 119th Congress shall not constitute a calendar day for purposes of section 202 of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1622) with respect to a joint resolution terminating a national emergency declared by the President on February 1, 2025.
"Each day [..] shall not constitute a calendar day"
This does not appear (on my admittedly brief search) to be something routine in US resolutions.
There's some further commentary here:
The Constitution gives to Congress, not the president, the power to impose tariffs. But the International Emergency Economic Powers Act allows the president to impose tariffs if he declares a national emergency under the National Emergencies Act, which Trump did on February 1. That same law allows Congress to end such a declaration of emergency, but if such a termination is introduced—as Democrats have recently done—it has to be taken up in a matter of days.
But this would force Republicans to go on record as either supporting or opposing the unpopular economic ideology Trump and Musk are imposing. So Republicans just passed a measure saying that for the rest of this congressional session, “each day…shall not constitute a calendar day” for the purposes of terminating Trump’s emergency declaration.
* The appeal has to be heard and voted on within X number of "Calendar days"
* "Calendar days" usually means "every day of the week, including weekends and holidays, as a 24-hour period from one midnight to the next."
* However this term has been "redefined in a context" such that it no longer means that ... (just with respect to the appeal against Trump's tariff powers)
with the result that the filed appeal will never be heard or voted on within the current session.
Programmers likely are familier with changing the meaning or type of things within a context .. it's a procedural version of that.
They were stopped because they were following the rules to enact change: legislation. Trump is just blatantly subverting the constitution, there's no vote they can block or fill buster. It's done. Over. Kaput.
I'm so tired of hearing that even when it's the Republican's fault, it's the Democrats to blame for not... What? Committing an assassination? They have zero power in the federal government. No house, no senate, no judicial, no executive. Nothing.
McConnell has brought the Senate to an absolute standstill during key democratic legislation like several dozen times. Why is he a more effective minority leader than Schumer? Worse, why is Schumer not using the same tactics McConnell did? He knows they're effective.
You are right tho, it is the fault of Republicans in Congress to let it come to this point.
All the more reason to expand the house in the future.
Please, show me the bill they signed for these tariffs. Please, show me the bill for DOGE. The dissolving of the DoE. The mass firing of federal employees.
Democrats cannot do anything because Trump has dissolved the power of the legislative branch and Republicans are capitulating. He is acting unconstitutionally as a king who declared unilateral edicts. The only they can do is sue in the courts afterwards, but they would still need standing, which politicians lack.
It has nothing to do with legislation- the tariff power lies with the legislature inherently under the Constitution. They can revoke the delegation to the executive at any time.
What about the fact of Democrats having ZERO POWER in the legislature did you not understand? The Republicans have taken over America lock, stock, and barrel. Legally, there's nothing that can be done to stop them until 2026. By then it won't matter. It already doesn't matter. America is already finished. It's over.
Buddy I promise you I live in a much redder state than you and I didn’t give up in the last 10 years and neither should you. That being said, I do plan on moving to a swing state by 2026 and voting. If you think two or three votes in the house is like the seventh seal, I don’t know what to tell you. You sound like my roommate in 2016 who busted in the door the night of the election saying that trans people they knew on forums had decided to kill themselves and I snapped at him they should at least wait until all the votes are counted and the electoral college was finished. I would rather take my cues from the two black men walking down the street in front of my house the next day with one of them saying to the other they’d survived 400 years of this and they’d survive Trump too.
Voters too, but the fact that the business community gave no serious pushback given what was at stake and anyone with Econ 101 exposure could clearly foresee grave consequences... This is their wheelhouse for crying out loud. Voters aren't always sophisticated but Wall Street should know better.
Feel free to school me on all the valid reasons they had. Just bear in mind that I have no love for the opposing party either, I just consider them the lesser of two evils.
I don't feel arrogant about this, I feel depressed and angry.
Agreed and its not just "prices will be higher".
You can pretty reasonably expect goods shortages as the entire global economy tries to re-adjust supply chains to more tariff friendly domiciles.
Of course everyone will be doing so at the same time, competing for the same finite factor capacity.
For example - If your Nike right now for example, you might be winding down Vietnam production volume and trying to spin up more volume in existing country footprints, while also trying to find new factories there as well. And then those suppliers will be looking for new suppliers for shoestrings and metal eyelets and 100 other things. And those suppliers will be searching for new suppliers of cotton, polyester, steel, cardboard, etc.
There is zero chance this happens without cost AND disruption! So things can get worse before they get worse!
I keep asking this of people making the argument of “when tariffs are felt…”?
Where do you think they will be felt and by who?
My guess is among Trump supporters, especially among those solid blue collar middle class vocal MAGA ones, most of these tariffs will not be felt in any really meaningful way. The tariffs that might affect the middle class (basically east Asia) will be the first ones that end up negotiating them away before American consumers feel them…because it’s in those countries best interest and they know it.
The biggest danger to Trump from these tariffs are from the GOP politicians and conservative retirees and nearing retirement age who will not be happy with the stock market if it doesn’t stabilize soon. The price increases don’t hurt them, it’s the impact on their portfolios.
Solid blue collar people will pay most of it in form of more expensive cloth, food, cars ... everything. The poorer you are, the more you will feel it. If you are rich, prices going up by 20% are nothing. If you are middle class, it is annoying. If you are poor, it is disaster.
Plus, truly rich are getting lower taxes. Tariffs are partially meant to offset those looses.
Tariffs will have negative impact if it’s on an everyday item. That group doesn't buy new luxury euro cars and wines every day. They buy domestic or Japanese and domestic beer and liquor. I’m convinced that east asia (Japan, Korea, Vietnam) will negotiate the tariffs down and that will bring Japanese/Korean vehicles and clothes prices down because China will need to lower prices to stay competitive to Vietnam and Korea and will just eat the tariff.
Coffee will go up, but most food staples will not be all that volatile because Mexico got the out. Coffee is weird one though…because people will gladly pay 30% more for coffee on account of it being more an habit/addiction.
They buy cheap. A lot of what is cheap is from abroad. Also, cheap domestically produced goods use foreign materials or parts. If the steel price goes up, everything from the steel goes up too. The tariffs are supposed to offset tax breaks for rich people. In their current form, they are basically tax on consumers.
Mexico has old tariffs in place, they did not got an out. They do not have new tariffs put on them on top of previous tariffs. Even domestic foods can go up when fertilizers used to grow them are more expensive. Or when transportation is more expensive.
China did not just "eat the tariff". First, tariff is paid by domestic consumer, foreign company is not paying that. Second, China announced retaliatory tariffs.
Markets make rational calculations. I'm not sure how you could have rationally predicted this. For all I know he'll scrap it all on Monday. It's a bit random.
Hasn't there been too many "Surely they can't be that stupid/incompetent?", starting with "Hillary is surely going to win it"... and until yesterday everyone thought "Surely the regime in charge of the world's biggest economy isn't going to agree to the geriartic-in-a-full-diaper[1] wanting to implement his first-grader logic of how the world economy should work?".
This is, bar none, the stupidest self-own on a national level I've ever seen, and that includes Brexit. These idiotic moves just erased a few trillion dollars of national wealth without getting anything in return.
For the rest of my life, if anyone ever again unironically says we need a businessman for president, I will laugh in their face.
The scale's just tiny in comparison. Walmart's a huge company with about 2M global employees. That's nothing compared to the US-sized decisions a president has to make. And Walmart's CEO doesn't have to direct a military, too.
I would be willing to entertain that discussion, so long as it's not from anyone who thought our current president was a proper businessman in the first place.
Knowing nearly nothing about the stock market, I say some time has to pass before we truly know whether these current (and probably temporary) consequences will persist.
I mean, people sign the death sentences of companies that have gradual decline of their stock prices over the course of some mere two months... and then it rebounds, and then you check the one-year graphs and are wondering why were you worried.
So I don't know. Is it really so bad? Honest question. I am a layman.
I agree with your point to a certain degree. I think we should be willing to try bad/risky ideas occasionally if just to remind ourselves why they are bad. However:
1. It can take years to make something and seconds to break it. These changes are so drastic and damaging that we may permanently set our economy back decades, especially when if other countries no longer trust us.
2. It puts a lot of faith in politicians to admit mistakes. The disastrous trade policies of the 1930s were never gotten rid of until after they led to WWII.
It's like touching the stovetop after already having been burned, why would you do it? It's not like the tariffs promised were well thought out / structured to actually boost FDI and domestic manufacturing.
The current one-year graph is now in negative territory. And economists are saying there's a good chance we're headed for a global recession. The stagflation of the 70s is a real possibility, although employment news for March was good.
Right now countries around the world are re-organizing their trading patterns in ways that will have permanent effects. Even if Trump cancels the tariffs tomorrow, he would have to convince the rest of the world that he'll never do anything like this again -- and that actually he (and the US) are reliable trading partners. I just can't see how he'd do it if he wanted to, and I don't think he wants to.
COVID was basically an act of god that effected everyone and for whom no single actor could be blamed.
This is the thoughtless incineration of trust in a network of relationships, and that has to be earned back.
It's unclear how long that will take even if the GOP loses the next few presidential elections given how much US policy can change from one term to the next.
The world will be waiting to see if Trumpism ends with Trump or if it becomes something they have to account for possibly taking power every four years.
This has ramifications for any long-term investment into the US like factories and manufacturing. The risk has just shot up and will be much slower to come down.
it even goes beyond trump unfortunately. how can others be sure that we won't someone like him again or worse in 8 years from now. Our system does not have safeguards against lunatics like him I would not trust the US either if I were from some other country.
The Atlantic blew it, by continuing to equivocate around whether a "trade deficit" should be considered bad in the first place. Like all these Orwellian upside-down terms [0], it should really be called a trade surplus, as in we are getting more stuff from the other country than we're giving to them! Like duh, this is a no-brainer beneficial and enviable position. And Trump's goal is to end this, presumably to turn this country into an impoverished work camp ruled over by hollow charlatans like himself.
[0] eg "the deficit" should really be named the surplus as it's money representing the collected proceeds from our world wide demurrage currency that other countries still keep buying into because using it is just that advantageous.
That's what gets me. Trump has been telling us he was going to tank the stock market and increase unemployment -- it was practically his entire platform. Why are so many people acting surprised?
He also says he wants to bring back well-paid American jobs, and promises prosperity. The problem is that we've allowed a remarkable portion of the population to become so despondent and dismissive of con artistry that they're willing to write anything they don't like off as bluster and believe only the parts convenient to them at the moment. Simultaneously this group lacks the ability to perform the analysis necessary to make predictions about what parts he actually means.
A normalization of dishonesty and an unsatisfactory status quo, with only one person offering anything that sounds like change.
He, being a guy quite literally facing prison time if he didn't win, promised untold riches for all Americans if he won. An era of prosperity. That everything would be nothing but greatness from a newly respected super power.
I mean...anyone with any reason knew it was outrageous nonsense, of the worst sort of political puffery. Basically a cliche of the worst political nonsense.
He and his supplicants started the "okay, maybe things will be bad for a while" weeks after his inauguration when it was blatantly obvious that it was all ridiculous lies. His supplicants are now talking about how Americans should feel empowered going without goods and luxuries.
That's the thing about liars. It's like with DOGE starting by getting the cult all excited about the imaginary $5000 cheque they would all get from all those easy savings, but after a few months, when it is blatantly obvious that the deficit has gone up (and thus far there have been exactly 0 cases of fraud found), there'll be a different tune. Same thing about his team of cybercriminal misfits who claim they're going to super rewrite everything -- anyone who has worked in this field long enough have had to endure incompetent clowns like that, and six months in we'll hear a list of "why the code they inherited was the worst code in the world, and..."
Trump recently "reTruthed" a video that claimed he is intentionally tanking the stock market to drive down interest rates. Today he called on Jerome Powell to lower interest rates despite the fact that there is a massive looming inflation risk.
People were worried about Trump launching a coupe on the government. In the meantime, this is a coupe over the US economy - this is a blatant attempt to hand economic power from business investors to land investors. From industry to land wealth.
Trump is a capitalist trojan horse. He says it himself that he does not believe in competition. That the best/first brand should win and the others should lose. The most famous person should get the job over some nerd. He inherently does not believe in markets as a source of wealth.
Oh come on. Not really no. He is purely looking out for one person: himself.
Why would a large commercial real estate investor who's been losing money hand over fist since COVID want to massively lower interest rates and through stocks tanking gain incredible leverage versus companies that rent his properties? It is purely his own personal advantage.
Understood on his personal motives. But his enablers want in on the action too -- that's the whole point of their fealty.
I've had years to deal with this guy's antics and I'm still agog at how well he's created a literal cult. The only thing respectable about him is his acumen for playing the media and the peanut gallery.
I'm sorry, but how did Wall St "blow it"? Is the piece making the case that if this sell-off had started in January, then Trump wouldn't have magicked up these tariffs?
I hope people start taking Trump seriously now when he's talking about impeaching judges, critical media being illegal, running for a third term and taking over sovereign nations.
After months of talking about replacing income tax with tariffs, and his revered External Revenue Service replacing the IRS with trillions in tariff income per year, and just this morning saying that he'll never change his mind on this so manufacturers need to rush back (I guess Americans yearn for the $4 a day jobs making t-shirts or something), rapidly Trump and his sycophants are, in the face of market obliteration and literally everyone with a brain saying how dumb this all is, claiming it's a grand negotiating strategy. By mid-day various Trump supplicants like his sprog and Ackman were pretending there was a mad rush to negotiate the best terms first.
Vietnam, for instance, supposedly is on the phone "negotiating". But what is Vietnam going to negotiate? It has negligible trade barriers or tariffs -- we all realize the reciprocal thing is a ridiculous lie -- and an income per capita of like $2,500. Vietnam cannot fix the fact that they're cheap labour that quite literally benefits the US lifestyle.
In other words, after this profoundly stupid, catastrophically economically ignorant debacle, they're trying to back out yet again.
It is simply staggering how much of an idiocracy the US has become. In any normal government this clown would have people stopping him from this insanity. Instead he has slobbering bootlickers like Howard Lutnick trying to rationalize every bit of insanity.
And things will not return back to normal. Hundreds of billions of dollars of damage have already been done to the US, and this time they aren't going to fixed by another backtrack.
- High interest rates trying to combat inflation.
- AI, tech's latest, greatest thing is looking like a flop, at least from hype perspective.
- Tariffs.
It will go back up after a quarter or three I suspect, once everyone has adjusted and everything has stabilized. It always does. Good time to buy soon if you have the scratch.
This is delusional. The stock tanked literally the moment the board came out. Futures went -5% across the board. The actual minute China announced retaliation: boom.
Tariffs were the catalyst, but high interest rates certainly put downward pressure on markets, which was the intent, to cool inflation. Also the profitability underperformance of AI is very similar to all the .com companies who constantly lost money but had soaring stock prices. Companies like Microsoft and Google have poured billions into AI and it doesn't look like they are going to get a ROI any time soon.
One of the great oddities of this whole episode is watching people that have complained about unfettered free markets for years or decades suddenly become latter day Milton Friedman absolutists. Being of the libertarian side of things it has been deeply strange watching profoundly protectionist countries suddenly preaching the importance of the free trade they have been busy obstructing.
While the world swings from one authoritarian brand to another it does feel like a lonely place here for those of us that just want less intervention in everything.
There is nothing wrong with protectionist measures per se. These tariffs are just not set in reality. They demand the impossible, based on false premises. This won't happen. Therefore an economic recession will unfold.
No, boomers and NGO's who raided the coffers blew it and left us with $36 trillion in debt, along with $1.2 trillion on _just the interest payments_ - which is more than the US spends on Defense.
Now we can't build anything, and the other side is still holding out hope that eventually we'll be able to fix by just taxing more - despite the fact that Congress won't even vote to prevent themselves from insider trading...which means the middle class will continue to bear the downward pressure.
As far as I understand, however, there's not much of a path between the current tariff measures and reducing the US debt. Especially not with the tax cuts or if war with China is still in the books.
Yeah, this isn't due to the debt. Most infrastructure projects in the US are disasters (usually due to layers of outsourcing, tons of consultants, corruption, lack of competence) that cost multiple times their equivalents elsewhere in developed countries.
It's exactly like in healthcare - the US spends more to get less than similarly developed countries. The amounts available to spend aren't the issue here, the terrible use is.
You do realize this "debt" is denominated in the currency that the US itself controls, and can create and destroy at will, right? You cannot analyze this with the logic of household finances. The debt owed to bond holders is our and other countries continuing to buy into the American system. And the "debt" owed to other government agencies (including the Fed) is nothing more than a political martingale, to support the Republicans' kayfabe "fiscal responsibility" of the past forty years, where they sabotaged investments in our society so they could give away the wealth to banksters instead.
https://archive.ph/3GTsu
wild that we wouldn't be here if folks had taken the talking points seriously, but because they could be brushed aside as bombast, they came to pass.
It's the constant playbook of the trump explainer/apologists:
* He's just being bombastic
* It's just a negotiation tool
* Sure he's doing it but it's going to be a narrow policy
* Fine its broad but it's just temporary
* Yeah its broad and permanent but it won't be too harmful
* Actually it's a great idea and he's smart for doing it
Reminds me of the Narcissist's Prayer:
That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.
The crazy thing is I know otherwise intelligent people who voted for Trump, but make arguments in his defense that 75% sound like the most jaded #resistlib never trumper take, until he gets to the end.
Almost word for word this week was like- Trump is a conman, you can't believe half of what he says. Trump doesn't deliver half of what he promises. He isn't very smart, just cares about his own image and ego. He is addicted to doing substanceless deals and creating crises he can do these nothing deals to resolve. So DOGE isn't real, he isn't gonna cut spending, he's gonna continue growing deficit, he won't drain the swamp or build a wall or repeal Obamacare.
And the closer is "And given all that there's no way Trump crashes the economy".
I just do not get this cult. It's an addiction to "owning the libs" at all costs.
I think what explains it best is they're so allergic to admitting the outgroup is right that they would sooner burn the entire country to the ground.
It's not rational analysis or coherent reasoning. It's tribalism at its core.
The markets, while often right after a while, can be a bit slow. I remember the weeks in February/March 2020. The writing about the upcoming global pandemic was on the wall, yet I had enough time to calmly sell all my stocks during the week before everything came crashing down.
Same slowness with the reaction to Deepseek recently.
No, half of America’s voters blew it. The market is just expressing the consequences.
The odd part is that Congress, at any time, can revoke these tariffs but are choosing not to do so because they need them for the tax cuts the GOP will legislate later this year.
The only sad thing during this whole ordeal is how ineffectual democratic politicians are... especially when they personally dealt with minority parties stopping them quite easily for the last 15 years. You'd think they'd learn some lessons but their failure to seize the moment is the only consistency they have.
The democrats blew it by believing Americans were educated. Now they have ZERO POWER. They don't control the executive branch, they don't control the legislative branch, and they don't control the judicial branch. I'm not sure WTF you expect Democrats to do now. It's not like Americans don't have access to a plethora of history books informing them exactly how this will play out. Too bad they don't read.
The Democrats blew it by being unresponsive to their voters' material demands and instead doubling down on hollow NGO speak. They preferred to run issue-free "vibes" campaigns.
The same business-industrial class captures them as the Republicans. Neither party is genuinely going to organize around class or material needs.
The real threat to America or Americans isn't a single man. It's the superstructure that enabled him.
In other words: "Wer hat uns verraten? The Democratic Party."
> The Democrats blew it by being unresponsive to their voters' material demands
The margin is so close that one can name any of a dozen reasons why they blew it and be totally correct.
The Democrats blew it by no cravenly violating norms like refusing to seat a supreme court justice because it was too close to an election.
But they weren't unresponsive to the actual needs of their voters. Biden was one of the most successful presidents in US history, but in this Republican-led post-factual world facts don't matter. The blame for that rests solely on US citizens. They've allowed themselves to be lulled into the fantasy that the party will continue on and on regardless of reality. Well, the party is over.
> But they weren't unresponsive to the actual needs of their voters.
Medicare for all? A cease-fire in Gaza and an end to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians?
Gaza was not a need of the vast majority of their voters, whatever a handful of college kids who are utterly incapable of understanding basic international politics think of themselves.
Neither is Bernie’s idiotic version of Medicare for all, in spite of it being a fun bumper sticker.
Y’all have gotta give up the TikTok bullshit and read some books.
Voters don't respond to long-term policy wins or economic data.
They respond to the perception of their material conditions, and the rise in inflation of the last few years has resulted in regime change all over the world.
Liberals are only just now beginning to realize this, but it remains to be seen if they'll learn at a scale that matters.
I was a Biden voter, but he was a weak and deeply disappointing president who exercised awful judgment on multiple occasions: running for re-election at his advanced age, not sacking Lloyd Austin for either the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal or going on cancer leave without telling anyone, not taking the lead on ending the COVID emergency (Colorado's Jared Polis was ahead of the White House on that), having so little control over White House interns that they released open letters against official Biden Israel policy, failing to take inflation seriously, etc.
Republicans are awful, but Democrats don't seem to want to do any better than "at least we're not them." It shouldn't be any surprise that Trump has (had?) real appeal over feckless national Democrats.
> Biden was one of the most successful presidents in US history
Biden? If that man was actually the one leading the country over the last 2+ years, I’ll eat your hat. All that is coming out now from multiple sources in the administration seem to indicate he hasn’t been capable of making many decisions for quite a while now.
Can you give a few of the specific "multiple sources" you mention?
I see posters on HN trot this out, but I'm yet to see any evidence of this. Can you point to a couple of reliable news sources reporting on this so I can read more for myself?
There are two books that literally have dropped in the last 2 weeks and the authors have been doing a lot of media about them. One is called “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House” another is called “Uncharted: How Trump beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History”. Both of these books quote anecdotes from Biden admin insiders and dem politicians about the challenges they saw and experienced.
DNC fundraiser Lindi Li has been all over the podcasts and news (back in November a lot) talking about the challenges she saw.
I’m not sure what you consider “reliable news sources” but I have seen this topic and these authors, and Lindi Li on network, cable, and new media news sources across the spectrum.
It's always interesting when you see a new meme emerging from the rightwing information wormhole into the open internet. This week's must be "NGO" used as some type of slur.
Anyway, the economy was rocking under Biden, we had the largest investments in manufacturing in decades (the advanced kind, not mud production), record low unemployment, stonks going up, etc.
Inflation is pretty much the only issue that mattered, which was a global phenomenon that America navigated better than anyone else, and there's almost nothing to say about it. Well, you can lie and say that you'll reduce prices on day one, despite having no mechanism to do so, which I suppose is the real takeaway: Dems should blatantly lie more.
The terms NGO-speak or PMC didn't come from some "rightwing information wormhole."
These are very real ideas and concepts that average people internally and instinctively revile: they are no longer people but "human resources."
Oooookay
?
Ok.
They totally did. Sorry but no one but rightwing information wormhole seen NGO as something nefarious in principle. It is just laundering far right bullshit again.
So anyone critical of the Gates Foundation for distorting public health priorities through his NGO slush-funds is participating in "far right bullshit" again?
This is demagoguery.
It has zero to do with material demands. Those lost the elections. What won them was conservatives stroking fears about trans, women and such. Talking about material demands is just repeating past mistakes.
Actual economical or other results have nothing to do with anything. It was not about that. Democrats thinking them being objectively better for economy might do something is what looses the elections.
The only reason those evergreen moral panics worked is the radio silence from the Biden and Harris campaigns on what concrete things they would do differently if given the chance at another term.
Instead, voters were told they were better off than ever, and there was some astroturfed panic about "Project 2025."
> Astroturfed Panic
Oh, please, if this isn't you just saying the quite part out loud.
They are enacting Project 2025. Significant portions are already done, for God's sake! Don't pretend like it's some Boogeyman made up thing!
"If Americans were educated and could read they would vote Democrat..."
EXACTLY the thinking that won Trump the election. Reduce legitimate concerns to the deplorable desires of the unwashed masses.
We need another "Why Trump won?" postmortem, as it seems people haven't learned yet.
We're still having to explain to adults that tariffs are, in fact, a consumer tax. We're not bringing crayons to the meeting for ourselves here.
> they need them for the tax cuts the GOP will legislate later this year.
They're also playing games where new time-limited tax cuts are counted as "costs" for their planned lifetime, but now, later, they're claiming renewing the same cuts costs nothing because they're already there. [0]
This is like a man with a mid-life crisis renting a fancy sports car saying "just one month is quite affordable", except next month he extends the lease, saying "this is fine, it's already in the budget so it doesn't cost us extra."
That matters because they're using this fake math to try to trigger special rules which let them pass budgets with fewer votes.
> The odd part is that Congress, at any time, can revoke these tariffs
Side note: Originally the law (IEEAP, 1977) [1] allowed Congress to revoke them with 50% of each house. But few years later the Supreme Court ruled that mechanism unconstitutional. This means it now requires a veto-proof supermajority of >66.6% in each house.
So yeah, with enough votes this could be done in a very short time-frame... but "enough" is such a big number that it requires most of the GOP to decide it doesn't want to destroy America after all.
[0] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/04/republicans-tax-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Emergency_Econom...
I thought they are a negotiating tactic for countries that have their own anti-us tariffs.
I recall that the GOP once introduced a bill requiring congressional approval for any changes to tariffs. I believe it was proposed sometime around 2015—or perhaps even earlier, around 2005. I’m not entirely sure of the exact date. What I do remember is that Democrats strongly opposed the bill at the time, as they were generally supportive of tariffs during that period.
Now, interestingly, the GOP has shifted to being largely pro-tariff—except for a few staunch free-market conservatives like Rand Paul.
Strange world …
Being pro-rational-tariffs and being pro massive tariffs that are calculated as ration of export deficit and originally used to damage former allies are two different thigns.
As in, I could buy tariffs as a strategic decision to help build own industry in some are ... but these are just not that. These were originally used in conjunction with annexation threats, then with lies and are deployed with no regards to own citizens.
They aren't pro-tariff, and the dissent will grow. But the GOP is absolutely captured by the Trump cult. Any deviation from conformance with whatever nonsensical thing Trump says today is seen as disloyalty by the cult. Normal checks and balances are gone.
Mmmm, I'm not so sure about that anymore ... at least not for a while yet.
Trump has a lot of leeway to declare emergency rulings and to have those enforced in the short term. Such powers come with a short leash that require appeals to be addressed in a short time frame.
That mechanism was upended twenty four days ago when US Republicians effectively "stopped time" ..
~ https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-resolutio..."Each day [..] shall not constitute a calendar day"
This does not appear (on my admittedly brief search) to be something routine in US resolutions.
There's some further commentary here:
~ https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-12-2025I honestly don't understand this "stopped time" tactic? Reading the sources seems more confusing.
Can someone explain like I'm a college freshman?
It's an odd piece of procedural technicality.
* Trump declared emergency Tariff powers.
* An appeal was made to stop this.
* The appeal has to be heard and voted on within X number of "Calendar days"
* "Calendar days" usually means "every day of the week, including weekends and holidays, as a 24-hour period from one midnight to the next."
* However this term has been "redefined in a context" such that it no longer means that ... (just with respect to the appeal against Trump's tariff powers)
with the result that the filed appeal will never be heard or voted on within the current session.
Programmers likely are familier with changing the meaning or type of things within a context .. it's a procedural version of that.
They were stopped because they were following the rules to enact change: legislation. Trump is just blatantly subverting the constitution, there's no vote they can block or fill buster. It's done. Over. Kaput.
I'm so tired of hearing that even when it's the Republican's fault, it's the Democrats to blame for not... What? Committing an assassination? They have zero power in the federal government. No house, no senate, no judicial, no executive. Nothing.
McConnell has brought the Senate to an absolute standstill during key democratic legislation like several dozen times. Why is he a more effective minority leader than Schumer? Worse, why is Schumer not using the same tactics McConnell did? He knows they're effective.
You are right tho, it is the fault of Republicans in Congress to let it come to this point.
All the more reason to expand the house in the future.
Because.
There.
Was.
No.
Vote.
Please, show me the bill they signed for these tariffs. Please, show me the bill for DOGE. The dissolving of the DoE. The mass firing of federal employees.
Democrats cannot do anything because Trump has dissolved the power of the legislative branch and Republicans are capitulating. He is acting unconstitutionally as a king who declared unilateral edicts. The only they can do is sue in the courts afterwards, but they would still need standing, which politicians lack.
It has nothing to do with legislation- the tariff power lies with the legislature inherently under the Constitution. They can revoke the delegation to the executive at any time.
What about the fact of Democrats having ZERO POWER in the legislature did you not understand? The Republicans have taken over America lock, stock, and barrel. Legally, there's nothing that can be done to stop them until 2026. By then it won't matter. It already doesn't matter. America is already finished. It's over.
Buddy I promise you I live in a much redder state than you and I didn’t give up in the last 10 years and neither should you. That being said, I do plan on moving to a swing state by 2026 and voting. If you think two or three votes in the house is like the seventh seal, I don’t know what to tell you. You sound like my roommate in 2016 who busted in the door the night of the election saying that trans people they knew on forums had decided to kill themselves and I snapped at him they should at least wait until all the votes are counted and the electoral college was finished. I would rather take my cues from the two black men walking down the street in front of my house the next day with one of them saying to the other they’d survived 400 years of this and they’d survive Trump too.
Voters too, but the fact that the business community gave no serious pushback given what was at stake and anyone with Econ 101 exposure could clearly foresee grave consequences... This is their wheelhouse for crying out loud. Voters aren't always sophisticated but Wall Street should know better.
Actually, about 31% of the voters blew it. There were ~245M eligible voters and ~77M cast the deciding vote.
My faith in American "democracy" has faded significantly.
edit: fix the vote count.
That would make it well over half of eligible voters who blew it. Those who chose incorrectly as well as those who chose no vote at all.
I wonder if you can appreciate just how arrogant that sounds. Even if you disagree, people generally have reasons they act the way they do.
Feel free to school me on all the valid reasons they had. Just bear in mind that I have no love for the opposing party either, I just consider them the lesser of two evils.
I don't feel arrogant about this, I feel depressed and angry.
I’m sorry, are you saying that a decision is correct because it is popular?
If they didn't vote, they are, by definition, not "voters".
I prefaced it with eligible which sets the context for the outcome, i.e., what kind of "mandate" is implied by the outcome.
Two things.
1. The tariffs have not yet been felt. This is all projection. Once people feel the tariffs things are going to get much worse.
2. China has already retaliated. EU will announce retaliatory tariffs next week. Trump is likely to take it as a challenge and double down.
Agreed and its not just "prices will be higher". You can pretty reasonably expect goods shortages as the entire global economy tries to re-adjust supply chains to more tariff friendly domiciles.
Of course everyone will be doing so at the same time, competing for the same finite factor capacity.
For example - If your Nike right now for example, you might be winding down Vietnam production volume and trying to spin up more volume in existing country footprints, while also trying to find new factories there as well. And then those suppliers will be looking for new suppliers for shoestrings and metal eyelets and 100 other things. And those suppliers will be searching for new suppliers of cotton, polyester, steel, cardboard, etc.
There is zero chance this happens without cost AND disruption! So things can get worse before they get worse!
I keep asking this of people making the argument of “when tariffs are felt…”?
Where do you think they will be felt and by who?
My guess is among Trump supporters, especially among those solid blue collar middle class vocal MAGA ones, most of these tariffs will not be felt in any really meaningful way. The tariffs that might affect the middle class (basically east Asia) will be the first ones that end up negotiating them away before American consumers feel them…because it’s in those countries best interest and they know it.
The biggest danger to Trump from these tariffs are from the GOP politicians and conservative retirees and nearing retirement age who will not be happy with the stock market if it doesn’t stabilize soon. The price increases don’t hurt them, it’s the impact on their portfolios.
They’ll be felt by everyone buying goods in the US as prices increase, it’s not a trick question.
So all goods. Care to explain how it will affect all goods including domestic goods?
Solid blue collar people will pay most of it in form of more expensive cloth, food, cars ... everything. The poorer you are, the more you will feel it. If you are rich, prices going up by 20% are nothing. If you are middle class, it is annoying. If you are poor, it is disaster.
Plus, truly rich are getting lower taxes. Tariffs are partially meant to offset those looses.
Tariffs will have negative impact if it’s on an everyday item. That group doesn't buy new luxury euro cars and wines every day. They buy domestic or Japanese and domestic beer and liquor. I’m convinced that east asia (Japan, Korea, Vietnam) will negotiate the tariffs down and that will bring Japanese/Korean vehicles and clothes prices down because China will need to lower prices to stay competitive to Vietnam and Korea and will just eat the tariff.
Coffee will go up, but most food staples will not be all that volatile because Mexico got the out. Coffee is weird one though…because people will gladly pay 30% more for coffee on account of it being more an habit/addiction.
They buy cheap. A lot of what is cheap is from abroad. Also, cheap domestically produced goods use foreign materials or parts. If the steel price goes up, everything from the steel goes up too. The tariffs are supposed to offset tax breaks for rich people. In their current form, they are basically tax on consumers.
Mexico has old tariffs in place, they did not got an out. They do not have new tariffs put on them on top of previous tariffs. Even domestic foods can go up when fertilizers used to grow them are more expensive. Or when transportation is more expensive.
China did not just "eat the tariff". First, tariff is paid by domestic consumer, foreign company is not paying that. Second, China announced retaliatory tariffs.
Trump is doing exactly the craziest versions of the stuff he promised to do, without guardrails and 'adults in the room' of his first admin.
Maybe its for the best so people are finally rid of this madness.
Note that the Shiller ratio is still at 31.3.
Stocks are still historically expensive, and have much room to decline further.
Seeking peace of mind? Proceed to Bogleheads.org and read.
Ever since the election, there's been a lot of talk about markets as good prediction engines, why did everyone seem to miss this one?
Markets make rational calculations. I'm not sure how you could have rationally predicted this. For all I know he'll scrap it all on Monday. It's a bit random.
Hasn't there been too many "Surely they can't be that stupid/incompetent?", starting with "Hillary is surely going to win it"... and until yesterday everyone thought "Surely the regime in charge of the world's biggest economy isn't going to agree to the geriartic-in-a-full-diaper[1] wanting to implement his first-grader logic of how the world economy should work?".
[1] "I’ve heard from a reliable source, that Trump smells of soiled diapers, Axe Body Spray and hotdog burps.": https://www.indy100.com/politics/trump/trump-smell-kinzinger...
Because he is backed by a bunch of billionaires and everyone is trying to figure out why they are shooting themselves in the foot.
This is, bar none, the stupidest self-own on a national level I've ever seen, and that includes Brexit. These idiotic moves just erased a few trillion dollars of national wealth without getting anything in return.
For the rest of my life, if anyone ever again unironically says we need a businessman for president, I will laugh in their face.
In fairness, not all businessmen have multiple bankruptcies, two impeachements, and 34 felony convictions.
Very true, and somehow completely overlooked by the sizable chunk of the population who mystifyingly still believed he was good at it. I'm at a loss.
Trump is a poor person's idea of what a rich person is.
Being able to run an enterprise well (and there's plenty of evidence to the contrary) is no guarantee of being able to direct an entire economy.
The scale's just tiny in comparison. Walmart's a huge company with about 2M global employees. That's nothing compared to the US-sized decisions a president has to make. And Walmart's CEO doesn't have to direct a military, too.
A proper businessman might be good. But a sleazy "You want to buy a watch?" kind of "businessman" like the one we have now?
I would be willing to entertain that discussion, so long as it's not from anyone who thought our current president was a proper businessman in the first place.
Wall Street or at least hedge funds love this kind of volatility
Knowing nearly nothing about the stock market, I say some time has to pass before we truly know whether these current (and probably temporary) consequences will persist.
I mean, people sign the death sentences of companies that have gradual decline of their stock prices over the course of some mere two months... and then it rebounds, and then you check the one-year graphs and are wondering why were you worried.
So I don't know. Is it really so bad? Honest question. I am a layman.
I agree with your point to a certain degree. I think we should be willing to try bad/risky ideas occasionally if just to remind ourselves why they are bad. However:
1. It can take years to make something and seconds to break it. These changes are so drastic and damaging that we may permanently set our economy back decades, especially when if other countries no longer trust us.
2. It puts a lot of faith in politicians to admit mistakes. The disastrous trade policies of the 1930s were never gotten rid of until after they led to WWII.
It's like touching the stovetop after already having been burned, why would you do it? It's not like the tariffs promised were well thought out / structured to actually boost FDI and domestic manufacturing.
The current one-year graph is now in negative territory. And economists are saying there's a good chance we're headed for a global recession. The stagflation of the 70s is a real possibility, although employment news for March was good.
Right now countries around the world are re-organizing their trading patterns in ways that will have permanent effects. Even if Trump cancels the tariffs tomorrow, he would have to convince the rest of the world that he'll never do anything like this again -- and that actually he (and the US) are reliable trading partners. I just can't see how he'd do it if he wanted to, and I don't think he wants to.
> Right now countries around the world are re-organizing their trading patterns in ways that will have permanent effects.
I would say that during COVID it was much, MUCH more serious. And yet here we are, back in years long bull market.
COVID was basically an act of god that effected everyone and for whom no single actor could be blamed.
This is the thoughtless incineration of trust in a network of relationships, and that has to be earned back.
It's unclear how long that will take even if the GOP loses the next few presidential elections given how much US policy can change from one term to the next.
The world will be waiting to see if Trumpism ends with Trump or if it becomes something they have to account for possibly taking power every four years.
This has ramifications for any long-term investment into the US like factories and manufacturing. The risk has just shot up and will be much slower to come down.
Just took some trillions to be printed across the world to be ingested by financial markets to get into it. No biggie.
I think in the pandemic everyone knew it would end at some point, just not when.
With Trump… he's already talking about a third term, despite the constitution.
it even goes beyond trump unfortunately. how can others be sure that we won't someone like him again or worse in 8 years from now. Our system does not have safeguards against lunatics like him I would not trust the US either if I were from some other country.
That makes sense on the outset, thank you.
Any details on that re-organization of trading patterns?
We don't know because it's literally day 2, but e.g.,: https://www.axios.com/2025/04/03/trump-tariffs-canada-europe...
The Atlantic blew it, by continuing to equivocate around whether a "trade deficit" should be considered bad in the first place. Like all these Orwellian upside-down terms [0], it should really be called a trade surplus, as in we are getting more stuff from the other country than we're giving to them! Like duh, this is a no-brainer beneficial and enviable position. And Trump's goal is to end this, presumably to turn this country into an impoverished work camp ruled over by hollow charlatans like himself.
[0] eg "the deficit" should really be named the surplus as it's money representing the collected proceeds from our world wide demurrage currency that other countries still keep buying into because using it is just that advantageous.
This is what Trump & Elon wanted all along. They even said it outright duh.
That's what gets me. Trump has been telling us he was going to tank the stock market and increase unemployment -- it was practically his entire platform. Why are so many people acting surprised?
He also says he wants to bring back well-paid American jobs, and promises prosperity. The problem is that we've allowed a remarkable portion of the population to become so despondent and dismissive of con artistry that they're willing to write anything they don't like off as bluster and believe only the parts convenient to them at the moment. Simultaneously this group lacks the ability to perform the analysis necessary to make predictions about what parts he actually means.
A normalization of dishonesty and an unsatisfactory status quo, with only one person offering anything that sounds like change.
Can you provide a link?
This isn't accurate.
He, being a guy quite literally facing prison time if he didn't win, promised untold riches for all Americans if he won. An era of prosperity. That everything would be nothing but greatness from a newly respected super power.
I mean...anyone with any reason knew it was outrageous nonsense, of the worst sort of political puffery. Basically a cliche of the worst political nonsense.
He and his supplicants started the "okay, maybe things will be bad for a while" weeks after his inauguration when it was blatantly obvious that it was all ridiculous lies. His supplicants are now talking about how Americans should feel empowered going without goods and luxuries.
That's the thing about liars. It's like with DOGE starting by getting the cult all excited about the imaginary $5000 cheque they would all get from all those easy savings, but after a few months, when it is blatantly obvious that the deficit has gone up (and thus far there have been exactly 0 cases of fraud found), there'll be a different tune. Same thing about his team of cybercriminal misfits who claim they're going to super rewrite everything -- anyone who has worked in this field long enough have had to endure incompetent clowns like that, and six months in we'll hear a list of "why the code they inherited was the worst code in the world, and..."
Trump recently "reTruthed" a video that claimed he is intentionally tanking the stock market to drive down interest rates. Today he called on Jerome Powell to lower interest rates despite the fact that there is a massive looming inflation risk.
Who in their right mind would care this much? Real estate investors: https://x.com/GrantCardone/status/1907993458687549892
People were worried about Trump launching a coupe on the government. In the meantime, this is a coupe over the US economy - this is a blatant attempt to hand economic power from business investors to land investors. From industry to land wealth.
Trump is a capitalist trojan horse. He says it himself that he does not believe in competition. That the best/first brand should win and the others should lose. The most famous person should get the job over some nerd. He inherently does not believe in markets as a source of wealth.
Crash the market and let the oligarchs buy up distressed assets...
Oh come on. Not really no. He is purely looking out for one person: himself.
Why would a large commercial real estate investor who's been losing money hand over fist since COVID want to massively lower interest rates and through stocks tanking gain incredible leverage versus companies that rent his properties? It is purely his own personal advantage.
As per usual.
Understood on his personal motives. But his enablers want in on the action too -- that's the whole point of their fealty.
I've had years to deal with this guy's antics and I'm still agog at how well he's created a literal cult. The only thing respectable about him is his acumen for playing the media and the peanut gallery.
I'm sorry, but how did Wall St "blow it"? Is the piece making the case that if this sell-off had started in January, then Trump wouldn't have magicked up these tariffs?
I took it to mean if WS had stridently objected and lobbied against it. I didn't hear any unified opposition.
I hope people start taking Trump seriously now when he's talking about impeaching judges, critical media being illegal, running for a third term and taking over sovereign nations.
After months of talking about replacing income tax with tariffs, and his revered External Revenue Service replacing the IRS with trillions in tariff income per year, and just this morning saying that he'll never change his mind on this so manufacturers need to rush back (I guess Americans yearn for the $4 a day jobs making t-shirts or something), rapidly Trump and his sycophants are, in the face of market obliteration and literally everyone with a brain saying how dumb this all is, claiming it's a grand negotiating strategy. By mid-day various Trump supplicants like his sprog and Ackman were pretending there was a mad rush to negotiate the best terms first.
Vietnam, for instance, supposedly is on the phone "negotiating". But what is Vietnam going to negotiate? It has negligible trade barriers or tariffs -- we all realize the reciprocal thing is a ridiculous lie -- and an income per capita of like $2,500. Vietnam cannot fix the fact that they're cheap labour that quite literally benefits the US lifestyle.
In other words, after this profoundly stupid, catastrophically economically ignorant debacle, they're trying to back out yet again.
It is simply staggering how much of an idiocracy the US has become. In any normal government this clown would have people stopping him from this insanity. Instead he has slobbering bootlickers like Howard Lutnick trying to rationalize every bit of insanity.
And things will not return back to normal. Hundreds of billions of dollars of damage have already been done to the US, and this time they aren't going to fixed by another backtrack.
[flagged]
It's a multitude of things.
It will go back up after a quarter or three I suspect, once everyone has adjusted and everything has stabilized. It always does. Good time to buy soon if you have the scratch.1 and 2 have been constant for months now. In fact, rates have already started going down after inflation did.
So no, it's mostly the tariffs.
The market was/is hyper inflated like 2001. It usually takes several things to finally force a correction.
This is delusional. The stock tanked literally the moment the board came out. Futures went -5% across the board. The actual minute China announced retaliation: boom.
Tariffs were the catalyst, but high interest rates certainly put downward pressure on markets, which was the intent, to cool inflation. Also the profitability underperformance of AI is very similar to all the .com companies who constantly lost money but had soaring stock prices. Companies like Microsoft and Google have poured billions into AI and it doesn't look like they are going to get a ROI any time soon.
One of the great oddities of this whole episode is watching people that have complained about unfettered free markets for years or decades suddenly become latter day Milton Friedman absolutists. Being of the libertarian side of things it has been deeply strange watching profoundly protectionist countries suddenly preaching the importance of the free trade they have been busy obstructing.
While the world swings from one authoritarian brand to another it does feel like a lonely place here for those of us that just want less intervention in everything.
There is nothing wrong with protectionist measures per se. These tariffs are just not set in reality. They demand the impossible, based on false premises. This won't happen. Therefore an economic recession will unfold.
No, boomers and NGO's who raided the coffers blew it and left us with $36 trillion in debt, along with $1.2 trillion on _just the interest payments_ - which is more than the US spends on Defense.
Now we can't build anything, and the other side is still holding out hope that eventually we'll be able to fix by just taxing more - despite the fact that Congress won't even vote to prevent themselves from insider trading...which means the middle class will continue to bear the downward pressure.
There's definitely a lot of that.
As far as I understand, however, there's not much of a path between the current tariff measures and reducing the US debt. Especially not with the tax cuts or if war with China is still in the books.
> No, boomers and NGO's who raided the coffers blew it and left us with $36 trillion in debt
Serious question - when did you start paying attention to NGOs?
The debt goes up during republican governments much more then during democrat ones. If you cared about debt, you would voted democrats.
Which NGOs?
> Now we can't build anything
Yeah, this isn't due to the debt. Most infrastructure projects in the US are disasters (usually due to layers of outsourcing, tons of consultants, corruption, lack of competence) that cost multiple times their equivalents elsewhere in developed countries.
It's exactly like in healthcare - the US spends more to get less than similarly developed countries. The amounts available to spend aren't the issue here, the terrible use is.
You do realize this "debt" is denominated in the currency that the US itself controls, and can create and destroy at will, right? You cannot analyze this with the logic of household finances. The debt owed to bond holders is our and other countries continuing to buy into the American system. And the "debt" owed to other government agencies (including the Fed) is nothing more than a political martingale, to support the Republicans' kayfabe "fiscal responsibility" of the past forty years, where they sabotaged investments in our society so they could give away the wealth to banksters instead.