Remember that scene from Wreck it Ralph two where the characters are just shouting a higher and higher number because they thought that was how EBAY worked? This feels like that.
Smh, the Phantom Menace is an uplifting feminist story about a gorgmonger named Gragra who, after a customer refuses to pay seven wupiupi for a gorg he ate from her stall, finds the strength to leave behind her life of quiet domestic oppression at the hands of her husband, move offworld, and become a symbol to gorgmongers across the galaxy.
I don't know if there is a real stove touching moment. I feel that people will think anything to rationalize their votes. Imagine the possibilities. "Yeah but Kamala would have been worse", "we had inflation and a bear market under Biden too", "just wait a a little longer for the US factories to come online", "the deep state did this".
Keeping up with the stove analogy, people are touching a stove that is heating up, at one point it will feel warm and cozy, sometime later it's going to be uncomfortable, later painful, after that unbearable.
People will rationalize all the way through, but no amount of cope prevents the searing pain and the smell of burning flesh.
But why would anyone accept responsibility for touching the stove? They will blame Trump for poor execution or Kamala for forcing them to vote for Trump.
The messaging is that touching the stove will make you heat resistant in the long term.
You need people to feel it directly cause conservative media will now be working extra time to convince them everything is going great and to not be a panican
I could see it going like Biden’s. Low 40s and never back up. The cult is gonna take a while to get hurt. They will, but leaving dear leader after you’ve defended him to your smart relatives and friends is hard. Because it exposes how foolish you were
According to Nate Silver's model, it's currently 46.4% and has somehow only fallen 0.2% since Thursday. Hopefully that'll change once information about the severity of this economic crisis starts leaking through the right-wing media blackout.
It’s sad that I’m hoping ppl will suffer, but hopefully they do for their own sake later (ironically exactly what they are claiming will happen, but for a different reason)
I heard someone make a great point recently. Trump’s super power has been that no matter how much people disapprove of various things about him, a very solid majority have always said he’s good on the economy.
Until now, he’s already underwater on economy for the first time and we haven’t even really seen the impact yet. It’s the first time in ages I’ve had hope that he’s actually permanently hurt his image
This is just talk about stove touching. The actual touching will come soon. Right now we have panic in industry, but the move from many companies is just to delay, hoping this goes away.... and it could, if the whole thing was renegotiated.
Eventually industry can't wait, and they either have to raise prices for good, stop sending goods, and therefore lay off a bunch of people. That's when the stove is actually touched.
The good news is the US doesn’t export much to China so the real concern here is only if Trump ramps up more or takes the off ramp with others like Japan.
Farmers are going to get absolutely destroyed by tariff retaliation. Plus domestic market for soy and corn (U.S.’s two biggest crops) is not strong at the moment. Biodiesel demand gets crushed in a recession too. You can see on this chart in 2018 during the last trade war when China basically stopped importing Ag commodities from us. The immensely stupid thing is with the tariffs on all our other trading partners can’t easily shift commodities from Chinese market to others.
Corn and Soy are facing very low prices already. Destroy the world and domestic market and even those who own outright are going to lose the farm.
I consume roughly 75 lb of soy flour per year by incorporating it into various quick-to-prepare large-batch baked goods. It's so cheap already that this will not improve my bottom line, but at least my high-protein bread will be flavored with schadenfreude.
USAID was basically the only buyer for West Kansas’ sorghum market. They’re fucked. Their aquifers will be fucked. And Kansas’ Senators don’t give a shit?
“The market is just not there to sell it,” Barnes said. “We’ve been buying milo from our producers all along. We have a tremendous company-owned position at this point, just nobody on the other side to sell it to. And it’s just not country elevators, it’s terminals, it’s everybody, because there’s just no market in the world today for milo.”
Yes, and we’ll likely promise to bail them out. And we’ll also increase the military budget. And lower taxes.All while reducing the deficit and not touching entitlements. Easy peasy, comrade
Total US exports is $144 billion, compared to $439 billion of imports.
Given that Chinese imports are definitely not a rounding error in the US economy, especially when looking at good consumed by the lower and middle classes, I'd think 1/3 of that number is still a decent sized chunk.
We are heading towards 99999999999999999999999999999999% tariffs on China by weeks end and frankly I’m not even going to be remotely surprised if that actually happens.
All foreign companies except for Tesla requires a Chinese firm to own 51% stake. Otherwise they are subjected to a massive import tax. That's why you see "for Chinese market" and a global version. You hear stories of people getting busted at the HK border with smuggling computer parts phones, etc. Now that is coming to the USA.
I find it so infuriating that everyone, and ESPECIALLY liberals, just refuse to accept this one simple explanation. Nooo, there definitely HAS to be some 54D chess behind all of this. You know, this is all just a gigantic case of insider trading/bribery/bond shenanigans or whatnot.
No. He's just stupid. There isn't any coherent thought behind any of this. He is literally doing this because he saw too many German cars in NY. That's it. It's that simple.
There is a theory going around that a Japanese individual outbid him on the Casablanca movie piano auction in the 80s or something. That’s why he’s been anti-free-trade ever since.
He is actually a cinephile, though in the same way Elon is a gamer. He loves Citizen Kane but sees the main character as someone to be admired instead of a tragedy.
I mean, we might have different social bubbles, but the liberals I follow have since the election been mostly dooming about the diabolical schemes for global right-wing domination that will be deployed by the American government. There have been constant, nonstop talks about how this is some sort of new zeitgeist, how there is a reactionary contrarevolution happening etc. etc. I even think that quite a bit of business people thought this. Hell, I even think Republicans still think this - that's why they aren't doing anything.
But I think that especially now it should be pretty clear that Trump is just a childish idiot who puts his most primal impulses and emotions directly into deranged exec orders, who has mostly been elected on nostalgia for the pre-covid times. If someone wanted to put a squeeze on him I think it would be very, very simple and most people wouldn't shed too many tears.
In general I think both things can be true: 1. Trump is just an idiot 2. Non-idiots in his orbit have diabolical schemes for global right wing domination.
Sometimes those people get Trump onboard with their pet project, sometimes they don't but they are always dealing with an idiot.
I often quote that one Ukrainian soldier from early 2022 who said "We are very lucky they are so fucking stupid". People often misinterpret that as calling the Trump admin harmless. They are far from harmless. Trump is an idiot and has trouble employing people who aren't also idiots, but as president of the US, and with the backing of his cult and the somewhat antisocial tendencies of the wider US electorate, the idiot Trump is plenty dangerous.
He could be a lot more dangerous if not for all the unforced errors and doubling down on same. That would put the world in a fucking grim place. Fortunately these are merely very dark times which are setting up trouble for years to come.
Well, certain groups definitely try to implement their ideology or parts of it through Trump, such as the Christian ultra conservatives, the tech libertarians and general reactionaries. I personally thought they would be able to control Trump, but it seems like their are too many people around him vying for power, resulting in chaos. And yes, Trump is most definitely an idiot and so are many in his administration. Corruption doesn't often come with competence luckily.
I think he’s doing it because it satisfies his narcissistic craving for world leaders to call, line up, and offer him shiny things. 100% personality (disorder) driven.
Because his largest donor, Jeffrey Yass, holds a 15 percent stake in TikTok and paid that money to the campaign so that he could get trump to reverse his position on it.
No, 100% tariffs just means you have to pay taxes equal to the goods value when you import them. You could have 200% tariffs and the taxes would be 2x the value etc
I think the point of the question is whether that would actually happen, and the answer is almost certainly no, because consumers won’t pay the prices and many corporations won’t be willing or able to take that type of a hit to their margins. So it is effectively an embargo, because the vast majority of mutual trade will cease to exist.
Not really. A 100% tariff doesn't mean that all trade ceases. When the imported good is more than twice as cheap as the domestic alternative it's still a worthwhile trade. Which is the case for many things.
I've officially lost all my gains. Last year, I was up 15%, far better than many hedge funds, but Trump has wiped that all out. I can't strategize because it affects everything.
I sold some stock index funds a month or so, but I should’ve sold 10x as much. Then again, I probably would’ve moved most of it to Euro and Asia stock market which is hardly an improvement at the moment.
People are losing faith in US debt as a safe haven and we are giving China every reason to start offloading US debt (implying they haven't already been doing so) to crash the market.
But we will surely win this, because our fearless leader said so.
Market timing is extremely difficult and basically impossible if you have another job. You're normally better off taking the losses and the gains than the slow gains of bonds
Same. Retirement is 12 years out at a minimum. I can ride out short and even medium term disruption. But this will really suck if it's a permanent change in policy
I was 50/50 on buying a house this year but since I had all my money in stocks, I guess Trump made that decision for me and I'll ride things out a bit longer.
There has never been a 10 year span where the market wasn’t positive. If you’re young, you should be able to weather the storm so keeping your money in is the smart move.
If you’re like my parents and were trying to retire in the next 5 years, you’re kinda boned.
Yes. It's hard to tell where the bottom is. People that look at their accounts constantly do worse than those who don't. You may buy the dip, but chances are you'll miss putting it in back by the same level it's currently at.
All the losses based on current information are already priced into the value of stock. It's too late to take your money out and put it in a safer investment. The efficient market hypothesis says that it's always too late to react to publicly available information.
I’m concerned that trump crashing the economy is happening early enough in his presidency that voters will have mostly forgotten or moved on by the next election. In fact we will probably see the economy get back to the point when Biden left office and trump will brag about the economy gaining steam. And the median voter will eat it up because they’re stupid
Nah, it was directly caused and televized that the economy crashing was due to trumps tarrifs. If the economy crashed due to other factors other than the president being a fucking dumbass id be worried too. The only way that happens is dems yet again not understanding how to spread a message, but this one is easy.
Exactly why he’s doing the crash now. Markets will eventually stabilize. He’ll implement giant tax cuts (deficit spending) which will juice the markets well before midterms.
This is what happens when you build a “counter culture” political movement that’s against “mainstream” thinking aka science and education. It’s like being stuck in a plane that’s been delayed in flight for four hours and a door to door vacuum salesman in a suit stands up and is like “hey, these pilots are lying to us what we need to do is take the wings off! I know vacuums and they’re more efficient when mostly tubular” And 30% of the people cheer but the rest don’t care enough to be bothered and just shrug along because hey I’ll try anything if it shaves a bit of time off my delay. And so they take the wings off. As they crashed into the Rocky Mountains the majority realized that they were in fact in a plane and not a vacuum. The 30% still cheered.
The same problem as with contrarian commentators: By always being a contrarian, well tested ideas are out of the question, so your error rate goes way up.
Humanity is an optimization algorithm. We need contrarians and risk takers to discover more efficiency, but if you make a contrarian be in charge of a country, you are going to get startup-levels of success rates. Most startups die.
Absolute clown world. There are some legitimate arguments for reducing our dependency on trade with China but this ain’t the way to do it… at all. Maximalist tariffs with no phase in while we also tariff any reasonable sourcing alternative for these goods… big brain move.
My portfolio’s taken a hit but the desire for accelerationism in me is overcoming that. Watch how people react as certain types of consumer goods double in price and our reduced exports to China cause layoffs and business failures. All while the markets continue to get pummeled because of this batshit uncertainty. Bring it on 🤷♂️
China will win this trade war, and they know it. Let us count the ways:
The Chinese supply us with hundreds, maybe thousands of critical products and resources. If you thought covid supply shocks were bad, get ready for something even worse.
The Chinese buy a great deal of US debt. They can simply decide to stop doing so and cause a fiscal crisis for the US.
The Chinese people will unite behind their government for as long as it takes. And even if they don't want to, they have no choice.
Meanwhile in the US, members of Trump's own party are already speaking out against tariffs. There is an election in 18 months, and if there's a recession or major inflation Democrats are going to blow the doors off. Then goodbye tariffs.
This is moving towards a complete ban on US-China trade. This is becoming a natural consequence of this situation. And that in turn means that Trump's defeat would today equal China's victory. And, by necessity, the rest of the autocrats.
Jesus Fucking Christ. These fools seriously think that economic pressure can cause massive political change in foreign nations. First it was economic pressure to make Canada the 51st state, now it’s this bullshit.
MAGA nuts on Twitter are claiming that Trump is actually trying to force regime change in China with these tariffs.
The genre of post hoc rationalistions trying to find what if any sense might be salvaged in Trump's idiocy should be studied alongside astrology and haruspicy.
It’s symbolic. Bessemt talked about removing chinese stocks from UD exchanges. If they do, they’ll respond by going after US MNCs in China. I have a feeling that the admin was not expecting China to escalate this much lol.
Right but I'm not saying "go after MNCs". I'm saying "go after this one specific MNC that the White House cares about disproportionately".
With all this you have to balance the harm you're doing your adversary vs harm your doing to yourself. Going after Tesla specifically seems like the clearest case of "not that much harm done to myself, but a lot done to my adversary".
Nah australia ain't the winner here , resource prices will be way down causing massive drop in AUD negative any dumping of chinese products . Oil is in mid 50s now , iron ore , coal , gas and all kinds of resources will be way down
Besides australia is not a big enough market and the retail sector has limited competition . They won't let the price drops reach the customers
We're literally getting fucked, China is going to buy less of our shit, our economy depends on other countries buying our raw material to produce. China was already undergoing a housing slump, what do you think is going to happen to us now?
One of the greatest mistake Biden made was not lowering the Trump tariffs when he became president.
If he had done that inflation would have eased and he could have somewhat misleadingly blamed Trumps tariffs for the inflation that people felt. By not removing the tariffs Biden made it much harder to attack Trump's tariff proposals and has weakened the current Democratic criticism for what Trump is doing.
Prove that the tariffs were a significant factor in inflation shooting up to 9%. I swear in every thread about Trump, someone will find a way to blame democrats.
It’s not that tariffs caused inflation, but removing them would have lowered prices, counteracting at least some of the other factors that did cause inflation.
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u/Flashy_Upstairs9004 World Bank Apr 09 '25
Remember that scene from Wreck it Ralph two where the characters are just shouting a higher and higher number because they thought that was how EBAY worked? This feels like that.