Stocks won’t fall as far as the economy, so when people start selling off everything not nailed down just for tomorrow’s food, the wealthy can swoop in and buy it all up for pennies on the dollar.
It’s the whole game plan, after all. Land, especially: generally speaking no-one is really making any more land all that fast, and when it comes down to your family starving or selling off your land for food, the land goes pretty f**king cheap and pretty damn fast.
By this method, the Parasite Class will end up owning all the land and everything in it, and the entire Working Class will become the modern version of tenement farmers or those living in company towns - slaves, essentially.
Yeah, land… you know US CRE is on the precipice of disaster, Chinese RE had some huge disasters. And the best opportunity for RE came and went in 2009. Meanwhile the top S&P500 stocks were not the top in 2009, even Apple had already released the iPhone back then. I understand you are making a colorful comment. But “real estate tycoon” isn’t the antagonist for many people.
That's if they're allowed to force the liquidity hose to stay open. An alternative future is one where everyone's bets get called in (as should happen during a downturn). The richest are far more underwater in an asset bubble pop environment than the rest of us are. Remember who bailed out who in 2008.
Force them to close their existing obligations. People will be able to keep their land (albeit worth phenomenally less).
The standard move is to hunker down for the next 4 years, keep buying low, and wait for Democrats to come back and fix things in their next term. The same cycle has repeated what, 5 times in the last 30 years?
These people are breaking things that cannot be fixed quite so easily. Things like the trust of other nations. Scientific research. There are a lot of things that will take a generation or more to repair, if ever.
To be fair, the sub-prime lending crisis had its roots firmly in Clinton-era repeal of Glass-Steagal, so it’s not all so easy.
No particular love for the Republican Party, but it’s a problem created by the Democrats, which they then patched with the inferior Frank-Dodd. Plenty of stupidity to go around, I would say.
Glass-Steagal was repealed by a GOP Congress. And the 2009 bailouts were Obama’s implementation of a plan devised by the Bush administration.
That said in economic and trade policy there’s not much difference between Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama. All support free movement of goods and labor. The only difference was in how big of a welfare state to have to mitigate the negative effects.
> the sub-prime lending crisis had its roots firmly in Clinton-era repeal of Glass-Steagal
Not really. You'd just have very highly correlated financial entities that would have collapsed the exact same way. AIG received the largest bailout and wasn't even a bank.
> they then patched with the inferior Frank-Dodd.
Dodd Frank is why the finance sector was stable despite all the volatility introduced by the pandemic and inflation. The culture of banking has significantly shifted to being more conservative now, and risk has moved to the buy-side of trading, which is easier to let go of. Trump partially rolled back regulations such that banks under $250 billion no longer had to had to conduct stress tests, and bank collapses occurred all the way up to that threshold.
Hopefully there's still a free and fair election in 4 years. That might be contingent on how well Democrats do in next year's election. We need Congress back.
The standard relationship with the US is gone, though. I've been moving everything out and it won't be coming back regardless of what happens in 4 years time.
Remember, this is the president that won largely because of people's dissatisfaction with inflation, and his promises to "fix" the economy.
Instead, he's decided to wage a pointless trade war that nobody asked for, and came out yesterday essentially saying he's totally okay with a recession coming out of it.
The only thing more absurd is the fact that some people didn't see this coming. He signalled everything that he's doing now during his campaign, over and over.
I will say I'm pretty happy with how badly TSLA is doing.
> The only thing more absurd is the fact that some people didn't see this coming. He signalled everything that he's doing now during his campaign, over and over.
Right, I think it's less that they "didn't see it coming" and more so a basic lack of understanding around how anything works and a complete trust in perceived wealth and authority.
The vast majority of people I know that fell into the camp of voting this into power follow a basic equational logic of "he is a (presumably) wealthy businessman he must know about how to manage money, therefore he can fix the economy" that's literally the entire depth to which they go. There's zero investigation into the validity of the premises, no question of the (ridiculous) assumption that governance must be exactly like running a business, no concern over the kind of business the person has background in... etc.
I'm sure there are exceptions to this, but I'd also be confident conjecturing that, for a huge number of people, this basic, shallow, completely flawed argument is precisely why they made the choice that they made. That and a pervasive inability to recall what things were like a mere four or so years prior.
I'm in an area of the country in which he won easily in the polls. Whenever I hear the "run the country like a business" line, I always ask "What's the product? And who is the customer?". I haven't received an actual answer yet.
The core base is also given a flawed understanding of how anything around them works. America has been enduring under a self inflicted information and disinformation war for decades now.
Some amount of swing voters may have done so because of inflation - but a large number of voters didn’t show up.
There was also ample evidence that he was going to engage in trade wars. In November, I was already checking with friends in finance and banking what the amount of stress the global financial system could endure.
This is very much like the 2008 crisis, in that low information consumers are being misled by corporations with massive teams, marketing and financial power.
Its an uncompetitive market of ideas, being foisted on viewers and information consumers.
You're not wrong. And yet he's polling well. And as long as people poll surface level questions like "do you like that he's cutting things?" he gets general support.
Drill into specific topics item by item and it's a bleaker picture however. But that's how these things always go, like the ACA for instance.
This analysis is lacking. People didn't vote for Trump because they analyzed his proposed economic policies and decided they would improve their situation. Almost nobody votes like that. There's general financial anxiety in the US, and he promised to fix it. What methods he proposed using are almost irrelevant, it's the rhetoric around them that sways voters.
The narrative is now one of temporary hardship to excise the supposed rot of the system that is the root cause of the aforementioned anxiety. Pointing out that inflation is bad has no persuasive power over someone bought in on that narrative.
The only way to sway general support away from this self-destructive administration is to offer another path towards alleviating the problems that voters face in their lives. The time when you could run on promises of competent administration alone has passed.
It's not enough to have a plan, as a sibling commenter pointed out. Looks more like straight-up irrational team-based tribalism to me. That and ordinary ignorance. How else do you explain a Republican candidate campaigning on raising taxes and winning?
You are ignoring how trump focused far more on hurting people they don't like(immigrants , trans people and minorities) than on any actual economic policy. He and the Republicans fomented a hate wave and he rode it right back into the White House. So damn shameful for this country
Harris also promised to fix it, and had an actual plan for addressing housing, education, medical costs, and prices in general, but we are all now pretending like none of that was a part of her campaign.
Anyways, it's telling that everyone who was anxious over $3.50/dozen eggs in November is deathly silent over what's been happening in the past few weeks. All of a sudden, all of those people are now in the 'we have to be patient and get through the pain, there's definitely a payoff at the end' boat.
(Milk's $11/gallon at my grocery, by the way. Unless I buy 5 gallons at a time.)
> The narrative is now one of temporary hardship to excise the supposed rot of the system that is the root cause of the aforementioned anxiety.
OK.
> The only way to sway general support away from this self-destructive administration is to offer another path towards alleviating the problems that voters face in their lives. The time when you could run on promises of competent administration alone has passed.
Disagree. Another three years of this and "temporary hardship" will be exposed as wishful thinking. People will want actual competence.
Of course That is how they vote. But their analysis isn't on the impact of tarriffs nor the economic strength of trade.
It's on egg prices and job market vibes and other everyday sorts of stuff. He promised he'd fix those. And it seems the center seokg voters are facing a lot of regret on that right now.
My guess is that his supporters are so entrenched in their position that they won't care. Trump channelled their anger at how broken the American Dream has become, and they're probably OK getting personally singed if it means the whole thing burns down.
However, it will likely be a rude awakening on the other side for them, especially if they find that some of their entitlements were cut (just as they come to need them most), and meanwhile yet again the rich and powerful not only are fine but the gap continues to widen at an even faster rate.
Even then, I doubt his supporters will turn on him.
Remember, even Hitler had support from the average Germans after the end of the war (at least before the holocaust and other atrocities came to light to them). I'm not saying Trump is Hitler, just showing how you can lose everything and still not accept that your cherished leader wasn't such a smart or great guy...
> they find that some of their entitlements were cut (just as they come to need them most), and meanwhile yet again the rich and powerful not only are fine but the gap continues to widen at an even faster rate
I’m honestly not seeing a way out of this for the die-hard MAGAs other than letting them age out. The problem is less that idiot 20% and more the Obama-Trump crossover voters. They’re the ones we should fight to win back.
Be careful taking people seriously when they claim to have voted a given way for a given reason; especially a specific reason. They’re usually false claims.
One of the weirdest views of Democrats is thinking that because the market has dropped 2% then individual voters are out there with their head in their hands thinking the world has ended.
If you go back a few years and the government (largely the Fed) was destroying the economy, you never saw this type of comment. It seems to be that Democrats specifically cannot think of politics in any terms other than personal, or (indeed) of government function as anything other than a thing that bestows personal benefit. There is no discussion of content, it is just pure personal vitriol constantly.
You see the same thing with left-wing voters in other countries too. Unsurprisingly, this has led to a situation where government spending is massive, most of that spending is handouts, and actual government function has collapsed. Milton Friedman wins again.
After the election I know Canadian and colleagues from other countries thought of moving to US for an easier time building a business. Curious if anyone from the founder / small business crowd has had this feeling and either is still interested/happy with such a move? Or regretting it?
IIRC Culturally it was said by many that the US is much better that EU / Canada for building a business as US rewards ambition. While other countries it’s seen as not as positive of an attribute. Other countries did not let you easily build wealth or grow a business, while it was said US is culturally more welcoming to building wealth.
I’m curious how this will change in this administration.
To be fair, as a Canadian, I think starting a business anywhere else is better than in Canada, except maybe Germany? (Apologies to our dear Germans; my sense of humor isn’t the best.)
Why? I have started two small businesses in Canada with reasonable success (not enough to retire, but a nice payday each time), there was nothing particularly onerous either time.
The US makes startups easier due to easy access to capital from investors. OTOH, I'd be wary of starting a lifestyle business in the US due to the poor social safety net.
Red tape is also a concern, but it depends on what European country you're talking of, some are better than others, and red tape is awful in the US as well, depending on the state.
Those are basically the only considerations, everything else (like culture) is BS.
Be thankful you're not in New Zealand. Our current government claims to be business oriented, but they appear to desire to screw our economy. Partly because of trying to appeal to voters that are generally socialist here (a strong preference to hobble greedy business owners and often little sympathy for anyone who exports something to bring a USD into the country). Short sighted policy goals aiming to sell off anything to overseas "investors". When everything is for sale, we all lose. Eventually there will be fewer productive export businesses left to pay for our free healthcare, our retiree's superannuation or our other welfare benefits. Lose lose. Our socialist policies are good and humane, but they are hard to balance against economic growth.
We lack economic balance over here even though we have MMP voting. Swinging leftwards and less leftwards (NZ is mostly lefty) seems to be the only way we achieve a modicum of compromise over the years.
The US idolises successful business owners (even the notorious are validated).
NZ does have a couple of successful tech companies that list in Australia (e.g. Xero) or moved to the US (e.g. RocketLab). They often keep engineering in NZ because staff are skilled and cheap.
The American economy is a giant magnet right now -- after the inevitable crash I think that innovation would be a lot more distributed and that'll be a good thing.
Ruble exchange rate is propaganda. It was not possible to freely convert it for a long time. And black market rate was always very different from the official one.
Such a curious dance. About 5 years ago the headline was, "President Donald Trump has signed a law that will impose sanctions on any firm that helps Russia's state-owned gas company, Gazprom, finish [Nord Stream 2]." https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50875935 Of course, Trump isn't the only one to do an about-face. In 2019, Germany supported Nord Stream 2, but now opposes Russian gas imports.
Yeah, this has read to me as another double win for the Disaster Capitalist class. I'm sure we'll be seeing record profits for the s & p 500 by year's end no matter the outcome for the rest of us.
Readit News
It’s the whole game plan, after all. Land, especially: generally speaking no-one is really making any more land all that fast, and when it comes down to your family starving or selling off your land for food, the land goes pretty f**king cheap and pretty damn fast.
By this method, the Parasite Class will end up owning all the land and everything in it, and the entire Working Class will become the modern version of tenement farmers or those living in company towns - slaves, essentially.
Force them to close their existing obligations. People will be able to keep their land (albeit worth phenomenally less).
No particular love for the Republican Party, but it’s a problem created by the Democrats, which they then patched with the inferior Frank-Dodd. Plenty of stupidity to go around, I would say.
That said in economic and trade policy there’s not much difference between Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama. All support free movement of goods and labor. The only difference was in how big of a welfare state to have to mitigate the negative effects.
Not really. You'd just have very highly correlated financial entities that would have collapsed the exact same way. AIG received the largest bailout and wasn't even a bank.
> they then patched with the inferior Frank-Dodd.
Dodd Frank is why the finance sector was stable despite all the volatility introduced by the pandemic and inflation. The culture of banking has significantly shifted to being more conservative now, and risk has moved to the buy-side of trading, which is easier to let go of. Trump partially rolled back regulations such that banks under $250 billion no longer had to had to conduct stress tests, and bank collapses occurred all the way up to that threshold.
I'm not sure i want to stick money in a country that could implode every four years.
Instead, he's decided to wage a pointless trade war that nobody asked for, and came out yesterday essentially saying he's totally okay with a recession coming out of it.
The only thing more absurd is the fact that some people didn't see this coming. He signalled everything that he's doing now during his campaign, over and over.
I will say I'm pretty happy with how badly TSLA is doing.
Right, I think it's less that they "didn't see it coming" and more so a basic lack of understanding around how anything works and a complete trust in perceived wealth and authority.
The vast majority of people I know that fell into the camp of voting this into power follow a basic equational logic of "he is a (presumably) wealthy businessman he must know about how to manage money, therefore he can fix the economy" that's literally the entire depth to which they go. There's zero investigation into the validity of the premises, no question of the (ridiculous) assumption that governance must be exactly like running a business, no concern over the kind of business the person has background in... etc.
I'm sure there are exceptions to this, but I'd also be confident conjecturing that, for a huge number of people, this basic, shallow, completely flawed argument is precisely why they made the choice that they made. That and a pervasive inability to recall what things were like a mere four or so years prior.
Some amount of swing voters may have done so because of inflation - but a large number of voters didn’t show up.
There was also ample evidence that he was going to engage in trade wars. In November, I was already checking with friends in finance and banking what the amount of stress the global financial system could endure.
This is very much like the 2008 crisis, in that low information consumers are being misled by corporations with massive teams, marketing and financial power.
Its an uncompetitive market of ideas, being foisted on viewers and information consumers.
Drill into specific topics item by item and it's a bleaker picture however. But that's how these things always go, like the ACA for instance.
The narrative is now one of temporary hardship to excise the supposed rot of the system that is the root cause of the aforementioned anxiety. Pointing out that inflation is bad has no persuasive power over someone bought in on that narrative.
The only way to sway general support away from this self-destructive administration is to offer another path towards alleviating the problems that voters face in their lives. The time when you could run on promises of competent administration alone has passed.
Anyways, it's telling that everyone who was anxious over $3.50/dozen eggs in November is deathly silent over what's been happening in the past few weeks. All of a sudden, all of those people are now in the 'we have to be patient and get through the pain, there's definitely a payoff at the end' boat.
(Milk's $11/gallon at my grocery, by the way. Unless I buy 5 gallons at a time.)
OK.
> The only way to sway general support away from this self-destructive administration is to offer another path towards alleviating the problems that voters face in their lives. The time when you could run on promises of competent administration alone has passed.
Disagree. Another three years of this and "temporary hardship" will be exposed as wishful thinking. People will want actual competence.
It's on egg prices and job market vibes and other everyday sorts of stuff. He promised he'd fix those. And it seems the center seokg voters are facing a lot of regret on that right now.
Now, the big question is if the meme is gone, or just turned sour. Either way, I'm not seeing people going back to TSLA with Elon's antics.
However, it will likely be a rude awakening on the other side for them, especially if they find that some of their entitlements were cut (just as they come to need them most), and meanwhile yet again the rich and powerful not only are fine but the gap continues to widen at an even faster rate.
Even then, I doubt his supporters will turn on him.
Remember, even Hitler had support from the average Germans after the end of the war (at least before the holocaust and other atrocities came to light to them). I'm not saying Trump is Hitler, just showing how you can lose everything and still not accept that your cherished leader wasn't such a smart or great guy...
I’m honestly not seeing a way out of this for the die-hard MAGAs other than letting them age out. The problem is less that idiot 20% and more the Obama-Trump crossover voters. They’re the ones we should fight to win back.
If you go back a few years and the government (largely the Fed) was destroying the economy, you never saw this type of comment. It seems to be that Democrats specifically cannot think of politics in any terms other than personal, or (indeed) of government function as anything other than a thing that bestows personal benefit. There is no discussion of content, it is just pure personal vitriol constantly.
You see the same thing with left-wing voters in other countries too. Unsurprisingly, this has led to a situation where government spending is massive, most of that spending is handouts, and actual government function has collapsed. Milton Friedman wins again.
IIRC Culturally it was said by many that the US is much better that EU / Canada for building a business as US rewards ambition. While other countries it’s seen as not as positive of an attribute. Other countries did not let you easily build wealth or grow a business, while it was said US is culturally more welcoming to building wealth.
I’m curious how this will change in this administration.
Red tape is also a concern, but it depends on what European country you're talking of, some are better than others, and red tape is awful in the US as well, depending on the state.
Those are basically the only considerations, everything else (like culture) is BS.
We lack economic balance over here even though we have MMP voting. Swinging leftwards and less leftwards (NZ is mostly lefty) seems to be the only way we achieve a modicum of compromise over the years.
The US idolises successful business owners (even the notorious are validated).
NZ does have a couple of successful tech companies that list in Australia (e.g. Xero) or moved to the US (e.g. RocketLab). They often keep engineering in NZ because staff are skilled and cheap.
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At this point the Oval Office may as well be redecorated in Soviet red
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