• 2 Posts
  • 10 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: April 24th, 2024
  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.ziptopolitics @lemmy.world•'Your question is so stupid' Trump snaps when asked how much economic pain he'd tolerateEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    So, its now around a day or two later.

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/apr/09/dramatic-sell-off-of-us-government-bonds-as-tariff-war-panic-deepens

    I was right, Varoufakis is wrong.

    Again, Varoufakis idea is:

    Central to this new global order would be a cheaper dollar that remains the world’s reserve currency — this would lower US long-term borrowing rates even more. Can Trump have his cake (a hegemonic dollar and low-yielding US Treasuries) and eat it (a depreciated dollar)?

    and

    Consequently, the euro, the yen and the renminbi will soften relative to the dollar. This will cancel out the price hikes of goods imported into the US, and leave the prices American consumers pay unaffected. The tariffed countries will be in effect paying for Trump’s tariffs.

    Summarized, he thinks that:

    US Bond prices will go up

    and/or

    US Bond yields will go down

    and

    The USD will appreciate compared to the Yen, Euro, Renminbi, that is to say, a dollar will be worth more yen, euro, ren.

    What is actually happening is:

    US Bond prices are going down.

    US Bond yields are going up.

    https://www.google.com/finance/quote/USD-JPY?window=1M

    https://www.google.com/finance/quote/USD-EUR?window=1M

    USD is depreciating, not appreciating, compared to yen and euro.

    The USD/CNY is exchange rate is set at a fixed rate by China, and they haven’t moved it yet.

    So uh, no Mr. Varoufakis, Trump cannot have his cake and eat it too, infact he shit in the cake and then threw the mixture all around the room, now he gets nothing that he wanted.

    Trump has destroyed the Bretton Woods USD hegemony, but in a way that is utterly catastrophic for the US, not some extremely clever 12D chess move.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.ziptopolitics @lemmy.world•'Your question is so stupid' Trump snaps when asked how much economic pain he'd tolerateEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    I’ve very recently also seen this.

    Basically uh, yeah, that tracks, that seems completely inline with the rest of how completely ridiculous this all is.

    So… why haven’t the books been withdrawn?

    Because academia, academics, … they regulate and peer review Journals. Published papers. Textbooks used in classes.

    Not books designed for popular consumption, pop-econ, pop-psych, pop-whatever.

    Why hasn’t he been rejected by the Econ community?

    Ironically, because of the nature of the incentive structure of the field of Econ.

    Way, waaay too much overlap with politics and business, so its basically split into psuedo religious ideological camps, who often realize they can make way more money or have may more power by working for a hedge fund or being some kind of propogandist.

    So… in that sense… the academic Econ community rarely is even capable of coming out as a unified body of academics and rejecting someone. There are too many different ideological camps, they’re all arguing with each other all the time.

    There is no broad consenus view as there is with say all climate scientists saying climate change is real, all biologists and archaeologists and geologists saying evolution is real and the earth is 4.5b years old.

    But with Navvaro… he apparently hasn’t done much or any really groundbreaking research, spent about two or three decades teaching, and during that time he realized he could make way more money selling pop-econ books to people who want to be able to argue about Econ to support their ideology without actually learning Econ.

    You know, pretentious blowhards.

    Anyway he also went to jail for Contempt of Congress for lying to the Jan 6th committee.

    He is an absolute hack fraud at this point.

    So there, me with a BSc. in Econ, I’m calling him out rofl.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.ziptopolitics @lemmy.world•'Your question is so stupid' Trump snaps when asked how much economic pain he'd tolerateEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    This article has been posted by me several times. You are only the second person who notices.

    Probably because I am one of the few people on lemmy that actually has a degree in Economics.

    EDIT

    jammed the rest in spoiler tags for the thread's sake

    Granted, just a BSc, but I got it during and after the 07 08 financial crash in the US, and remember arguing with my PhD professors that uh actually, the fact that Iceland just literally jailed all their bankers and did not bail them out… and then their economy just suffered a moderate down turn, instead of a complete collapse, meant that their whole reasoning behind ‘we have to bail out the banks and do QE, there is no other way’ … well here is a case study that disproves your model.

    The US cannot have it all. I think Varoufakis just doesn’t want to be the one who delivers the message. He must have known better.

    I get that he is attempting to explain what he thinks the real plan is, and he’s done a decent job of theory crafting…

    But he is wrong. There is no hidden well thought out plan.

    The people in the Trump admin are unqualified, uncoordinated morons. They are only there because they are loyal to Trump.

    It is chaos. Not 12D chess.

    Varoufakis, and you, are sane-washing the Trump regime. You both cannot comprehend something this tumultuous would occur without some reasoning behind it.

    There is none, at least none that is coherent and makes any sense.

    These people are dangerous megalomaniacal idiots who failed upward because of nepotism and corruption.

    They are idiots, as are the Americans who voted them in.

    There is no silver lining to this.

    America is now as corrupt and broken and oligsrchichal as Russia, if not more.

    I don’t fully agree with your outlook. The companies are not massively objecting.

    Please give me some examples of any companies based outside of the US who are doing anything other than cowering in fear and issuing statements that amount to ‘We believe in Donald Trump’s plan, we love Trump, please don’t hurt us, please give us a tariff carve out, we’ll bribe you.’

    I genuinely have no idea what you’re talking about.

    Even domestic US companies are going fucking nuts.

    I think the concept has already been discussed by key people, in the US and internationally. Like Japan is prepared to build a nuclear bomb and Britain was prepared for Brexit, the big companies are prepared for decoupling from China.

    Are you just stating your opinion?

    Britain was not prepared for Brexit, and it was a disaster.

    The US is currently trying to do… WorldExit, just fuck over our capacity to trade not just with the EU, but the entire fucking world.

    It will be a much larger disaster.

    What big US companies have plans to just somehow not use any imports from China?

    What are you talking about?

    We do not have the capacity to source the needed materials internally, at comparable prices.

    The only plan there could be would be basically ‘fire half our workers, pare down operations to the bone, focus on core competencies, pray to baby jesus that somehow this nightmare all ends.’

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.ziptopolitics @lemmy.world•'Your question is so stupid' Trump snaps when asked how much economic pain he'd tolerateEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    Varoufakis is wrong.

    Central to this new global order (Trump’s plan) would be a cheaper dollar that remains the world’s reserve currency — this would lower US long-term borrowing rates even more.

    What Trump is doing will result in a cheaper dollar.

    It was also destroy the USD as the world’s reserve currency.

    wall of text further explanation so as not to clutter the thread

    The USD has been the reserve currency because:

    Huge, growing, stable economy.

    Low debt to GDP ratio.

    Very, very willing to cooperate with international trade deals.

    Powerful military that can enforce its will as a hegemon.

    Many deals with many oil producing countries who agree to only sell their exported oil via USD.

    … all of these except the last are as seen in statistical comparison to other countries. Its all about comparative advantages.

    Not sure if you haven’t noticed, but all of those are now rapidly crumbling, after a last 2 decades of slower, more incremental decline.

    But ultimately, all of those things could be smoothed over by a reasonable presentation of trustworthiness and reliability generally.

    Trump has utterly destroyed all of that now.

    …

    If Varoufakis were citing some kind of Project 2025 masterplan for this, I’d be more inclined to believe his read on the situation here is at least Trump’s plan.

    But even then, it still won’t work as he describes.

    Trump is acting with unimaginable hubris, his actions will destroy the USD as a world reserve currency, rapidly accelerate other countries looking for regional or possibly international alternatives, and as a result, less people will need to use dollars for trade, there will thus be less demand for US debt.

    Less demand means we have to offer higher yields, higher interest rates on our debt, as the us dollar weakening means the real price of debt goes down.

    Varoufakis may be correct in that this is what Trump will try to do, but I see no evidence that… the plan has actually been thought out that far by any actual administration or adjacent thinkers.

    Beyond that, this plan won’t work.

    We are acting like a rogue nation doing economkc terrorism to literally the whole world… other than basically Russia and Israel.

    China, Japan and South Korea have recently entered into a pact, an agreement, to coordinate their responses of retaliatory tariffs.

    Please take a moment to appreciate how insane that is.

    The past … since ww2, SK and JPN have firmly been in the US’s sphere of economic influence and military collaboration.

    They just fucking noped out of that the economic part of that and made a pact with China.

    Japan is now rapidly trying to militarize and there are even talks of starting their own nuclear program.

    Please, again, appreciate how fucking insane it is that the most anti nuclear weapons country on Earth is now maybe rethinking that.

    Most other world leaders are not stupid. They know Trump will try to do piecemeal, one on on negotiations.

    They are already forming into blocs to resist this tactic.

    There’s talk of Canada joining or at least much more seriously integrating with the EU.

    NATO is now basically defunct in all but paper only, the EU is finally ‘shouldering its burden of defense costs’, but uh, they’re working on an EU Army, that doesn’t involve the US, after Trump repeatedly threatens to acquire Greenland, and has totally betrayed Ukraine.

    The EU is also rapidly pivoting away from being reliant on or using US software solutions.

    These actual adults in the room have actual plans to deal with the US, and they have been enacted astonishingly rapidly given how comprehensive they are.

    … The rest of the world does not need us anywhere near as much as Trump does, as much as Varoufakis estimates Trump thinks they do.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.ziptopolitics @lemmy.world•'Your question is so stupid' Trump snaps when asked how much economic pain he'd tolerateEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    He is acting like there is basically perfectly inelastic demand for Americans to pay for imports and importers to pay the tariffs.

    Elasticity is basically how demand changes in accordance with price.

    Generally speaking, absolute necessities like food, water, housing… are less elastic than unneccesary luxuries.

    … But… basically nothing is perfectly in elastic.

    If anything was, the price could literally be either infinite, or totally free… and demand would not change.

    Obviously that is nonsense. Even if you die without food, demand will drop if a meal costs a billion dollars.

    Trump is acting like the US is so lucrative a market that… our volume of imports will be… the same… and … the importers just have infinite money to pay tariffs… and not do cost pass thru to consumers.

    Even though every economist since the 1700s will tell you tariffs result in less imports, and higher prices for consumers.

    He seems to genuinely think he is directly taxing other countries, when he is… just taxing American consumers and importers.

    Its like when Elon got mad at advertisers leaving twitter and he threatened to sue them for… not buying his ad service.

    These coddled corrupt criminal capitalists have gotten so used to just always getting their way… that they’ve broken fundamental underlying concepts of how the ‘free market’ works.

    Their worldviews are internally inconsistent and do not make sense, they hold fundamentally contradictory ideas simultaneously, and when people point this out, they flail and bitch and moan and insult like the petulant spoiled brats they are, because facing the contradiction, resolving the cognitive dissonance would cause ego death… which is the same as suicide for a megalomaniacal narcissist.

    For them, it is literally:

    I can’t be wrong.

    Ergo, everyone else is.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.ziptosolarpunk memes@slrpnk.net•when i think about "running government like a business"English
    1·
    4 months ago

    Yeah just also piping in to say its real. I used to have the whole collection of these as a book, this was in it.

    Watterson was astoundingly good at capturing a whole lot of social dynamics in a single comic, presented in a way literal children could understand.

    I remember reading this as an elementary schooler and looking up words I didn’t know, from the comic, in the dictionary, to actually learn them and fully understand the comic.

    Had to go ‘online’ to figure out ‘caveat emptor’, haha.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zipOPtoYe Power Trippin' Bastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com•Toxic Positivity is MANDATORYEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    The original post was a 5 panel comic, as stated, with two people in a relationship talking to each other like 5 year olds, hat ended on one of the characters saying ‘what have we come to?’ so … maybe its the comic author’s story, in some sense, but it wasn’t like a lemmy user just directly posting their own picture with an attached personal story about why it was meaningful.

    But I wasn’t mocking anything.

    I have known people that have been in relationships like that, I’ve known they’ve both come from shitty family situations beforehand, I’ve had each person in the relationship either ask me for advice or at least complain or commiserate with me about how their relationship devolves from the cutesy stage into the codependent stage, and then collapses into mutual resentment, massive drama and despair.

    I’ve known many different couples and individuals where their relationships have played out like that.

    My comments were not meant to be mocking, as I said in the other, subsequent post that is captured in the modlog pics, that I am entirely serious, that you can interpret my initial read of the comic as a PSA style warning for how to look out for relationship dynamic red flags.

    I really don’t see how this can be interpreted as mockery, or being intentionally edgy for the sake of edginess, as PugJesus seems to think it was.

    I am completely serious, intending to inform, not mock, not insult.

    I get now that the community is literally intended to be a hugbox, but I don’t think that giving psychologically based relationship advice is abusive…

    Would be neat if there was actually a rule that stated ‘this is a hugbox, be nice, don’t be negative.’

    Being cold and realistic isn’t positice and cheerful… but it also isn’t abusive.

    Had the post actually been a person’s personal story, obviously yes, it would have been needlessly cruel to just jump right into a completely deadpan analysis like that.

    But it wasn’t. It was a comic.

    Did… anyone actually go to hyperlink of the post I put into this post?

    https://lemm.ee/post/56734338

    I mean, I could be wrong, but I don’t think Bubs, the only moderator and main person who posts in this community, and mainly posts Sarah Andersen quick comics… is Sarah Andersen.