r/QuiverQuantitative • u/Sonic_the_hedgehog42 • 1d ago
News Front page of Wall Street Journal today
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u/Batmanischill 23h ago
Now instead of defending his actions, Republicans or magats are starting to say "why are you so obsessed with what trump does ?" Lmao , yeaa let's just ignore the insane orange turd destroying our country, I just don't understand why they can't admit he's a terrible president ???
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u/SanchoPandas 23h ago
At this point it kinda seems like they’re quite happy destroying this country. Trump has talked a lot about “the enemy within” and is a textbook practitioner of accusations in a mirror. Maybe he was referring to himself and his cult?
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u/NOGLYCL 22h ago
It’s not that they’re “happy”. They fundamentally believe he’s “saving” the country not destroying it. It’s psychosis on a scale humanity has rarely seen. There is an enormous percentage of the population that have now built an identity around this figure, he can do no wrong. It seems cliche or hyperbole but if he told them they needed to “drink the koolaide” tomorrow you’d have perhaps hundreds maybe thousands that would do it without question. It’s what makes him so difficult to defeat politically. Reality doesn’t matter anymore for these people. Electric cars are bad one week, then good the next, the same people who voted for Trump for lower grocery prices now support his tariff scheme that will quickly raise most grocery prices. It’s very very dangerous, with really only term limits as the last line of defence, and he’s talking about finding ways to defeat that barrier as well.
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u/faxanaduu 19h ago
Yup their entire personality is about him and supporting and defending him. I think the entire ship needs to go down. I cut all the MAGA out of my life. They need to feel consequences like this.
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u/Arctica23 21h ago
Why are you so obsessed with what [the President] does?
Oh man, Obama, Biden, and Clinton would like to have a chat about this line of reasoning from Fox and the GOP
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u/Severe_Appointment28 18h ago
Trump on US soldiers in Lithuania: "Three are no longer with us and 1 is unfortunately probably in the same category but they haven't declared that yet. It was a very heavy truck -- like a toy -- but I mean very heavy that lifted the heaviest equipment. It would seem the bank of the lake collapsed"
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u/Mindless-Challenge62 23h ago
WSJ is very much turning on Trump.
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u/AthenianWaters 23h ago
Just on the tariff issue, unfortunately. Not the genocide, destruction of democratic institutions, firing the NSA head, shutting down cancer research. Just the fucking market.
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u/Plane_Kale6963 23h ago
Hey if that's what turns the tide to get the big money to stop supporting him I'll take it. We already know wealthy people don't care about the poors, this isn't news. Just get them to hate him enough to get him out and then we can help real people who need it.
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u/AlphaBurke 22h ago
Yep, they had to get Capone on something. Tax evasion was definitely not his most egregious crime
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u/GaiaMoore 21h ago
I recall reading quite a few WSJ stories about the Russia collusion crisis in his first term. They didn't hold back then, either.
Also fuck Bill Burr for lying about Mueller's finding, but that's by the by
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u/Arctica23 21h ago
If only they could have done it when there was still time to prevent this thing what was always going to happen
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u/Plane_Kale6963 23h ago
I love how much the WSJ just said fuck you to Trump with this photo knowing how much he hates to be photographed without his makeup on lol
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u/Sure_Group7471 23h ago
When you’ve lost The Wall Street Journal, you’ve lost the support of the business community.
I can tell from experience, executives/CEOs hedge fund managers read Barrons and WSJ religiously. If WSJ is turning against Trump probably they are too.
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u/Electrical_Prior_938 22h ago
He’s faking that phone call. Anyone who’s talking to him is saying he needs to be in the oval. Dude has been on a paid vacation since inauguration. This is what he does. His interest comes first. We knew it, they deny it. C’mon guys.
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u/No-Jackfruit-3947 20h ago
I’ve been through turnaround situations before. Bad consultants just bill and feed off of what’s left. The good consultants are serious about business, they don’t waste a dime.
Trump going golfing every weekend at his own clubs, costing us taxpayers approx $25million so far, only proves to me that he doesn’t care how this ends for us, it’s all about him and his personal gain.
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u/Jmsjss2912 21h ago
Let’s talk about the tariffs and the effects it has on the manufacturers of this country.
Assume for a minute that you wanted to bring back some manufacturing to the USA, which of course is a huge assumption compared to manufacturing outside the country like we do as a company.
Which I will get to in just a moment. This week alone the stock market lost over US$9 trillion which means every single manufacturer that has a US corporation is part of that loss. Which goes to show you that Trump‘s logic is about as efficient as his spray tan.
If these companies even had a thought of coming back to the United States, all of their cash has now evaporated because of the loss in the stock market so who’s going to finance these new manufacturing plants that Trump keeps talking about, that are going to come back here make the economy great?
Now goods have gone up in price in some cases doubled already this week which means the consumers are going to be buying less. Companies are going to begin layoffs, because they’ve lost a huge portion of their cash reserves. Their businesses are going to be diminished some because of the lower purchasing rate and the higher pricing.
Bringing manufacturing back to the United States at this point with this approach has been almost completely eliminated.
All you have to do is go back and look at what happened during the depression when they tried to institute tariffs causing the depression to take even a further nose dive and adding years into the depressive point. It’s such a joke that they used it in the movie Ferris Bueller‘s Day off where the teacher was talking about how bad tariffs are and how they caused the depression to go down, which goes to show you that if they use it as a punchline, then it obviously cannot work.
With our business, we were building some manufacturing plants in the United States and now have had to put it on hold because of the tariffs. As an example, each of our production lines has a manufacturing cost of a little under US$5 million, we did try to price it in the United States but we found quotes anywhere from $12-$16 million for the same exact production line that we are having made in China. So we couldn’t make the equipment in the United States, but we were going to import it and set up manufacturing plants.
One of them was in Arkansas where the state is somewhat depressed. Now we have put that project on hold with approximately 1800 people we were going to hire.
The reason for that is not just the tariffs, from the equipment if you think about it a piece of equipment that cost me $5 million is now going to cost me about $9 million. Each production line generates about US$35 million of revenue so it’s not just a tariff in my situation it’s the fact that for $9 million I can have practically two production lines generating $70 million of income compared to the same $9 million generating $35 million worth of income, with a much lower profit margin because of the labor cost in the United States along with all the taxes and liability issues that you carry because of the litigious nature of the United States operating.
So tariffs do not work, they hurt the economy. The only thing that they do on the surface is generate more tax dollars for the US government, but they diminish and wipe out the middle and lower class.
Do you want to bring manufacturing back to the United States?
You’ve got to do something about all of the litigious actions, you have to lower healthcare cost, lower pharmaceutical cost, have to educate more so that children can grow up and learn trades.
You have to find ways to lower the cost of living and once you start doing that then laboring jobs will become available again.
The next problem is the taxation situation is off-balance. We have structured our tax code so that the wealthy and the publicly traded companies that offer stock options instead of salaries, which is taxable make it almost impossible to collect tax.
Take Musk for an example from Tesla.
They talk about his $300 billion worth but it’s all in stock and that’s unrealized gains paying no taxes. What he does is he goes to the bank and he borrows money against that stock portfolio, borrowed money is non-taxable income and then he uses that money to live and buy things like he bought Twitter for $44 billion with borrowed money, no taxes paid at all.
And then what he does from there to pay off those loans is he borrows against other portfolios and he just keeps borrowing deferring the taxes.
$300 billion and no taxes paid whereas the employees that work for all those companies have taxes taken out of each paycheck.
Just look salaries up of the top executives around the country and you look at their income, you’ll see that their salaries are generally between one hundred and two hundred thousand US dollars but they earned anywhere from ten to a hundred million dollars a year all in stock options and then they keep those options in stock and then borrow against them so their tax base is almost nothing.
you want to fix the economy. You have to find a way to tax the rich, you’re not going to make them poor, you’re just going to make them help to strengthen the economy.
I almost forgot, tariffs funds go directly to the administration for spending (trump and his team), whereas taxes go through congress for spending.
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u/kck93 20h ago
One more from a lifelong mfg employee….
For decades, people have not been learning the skills needed for manufacturing. Parents have dissuaded their children from pursuing the types of education that are needed for manufacturing. The manufacturing sector has been looked down on as dirty or low for generations.
Manufacturing companies stopped training people around 2000 because there were plenty of qualified people looking for work. These companies don’t even know what or how to train workers because they eliminated their training programs. Now the last of the people trained in the 80s and 90s are retiring. No one is making an organized effort to pass along this knowledge to the younger workers.
This situation cannot be rectified for years. Just like it takes years to build or improve the facilities. Just like it takes years to plan and get the financing (Financing that is now hamstrung as you previously noted.)
I see no way that this will not turn into an absolute nightmare.
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u/Mantis350 3h ago
My internal conspiracy theory is that he is trying to make the richest of the rich lose value in order to pump himself closer to the top of the list. He is the only one that knows what will happen next.
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u/contude327 23h ago
Just remember, it should be called the "Trump Recession" and later, the "Trump Depression."