461–470 of 857 posts
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Fair, but since we can't look into the future that's an obvious thing. Every maximum is always a maximum 'so far'.
It's more of a Simpsons reference haha, sorry. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfpPArfDTGw
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How is the US promoting right wing nationalist policies in the EU? Why would anyone listen?
Just one example: Elon Musk (at that time part of US government) tried to directly influence German elections by prominently featuring AfD (German right-wing extremists).
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This is not a one sided thing. The US has been allowed to do a lot of things under the NATO umbrella that it benefited from (such as: selling a vast quantity of arms). Soft power is a thing and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization came into being to deal with exactly the kind of situation that we are viewing today. To see the US bow out, and in fact threatening allies is duplicitous at best.
The Euros also underfunded their defense obligations and received huge amounts of US investment in facilities, enabling them to upfund social programs, socialized healthcare and most egregiously 8 - 12 week vacations which are completely unheard of in the US.
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How is the US promoting right wing nationalist policies in the EU? Why would anyone listen?
Just one example: Elon Musk (at that time part of US government) tried to directly influence German elections by prominently featuring AfD (German right-wing extremists).
It's symbolism. But it's important symbolism. Far more notable, I think, is Macron saying this morning that Europe needs more investment from China. Canada signing a deal with China to allow their cars to be sold in the country. It's all a sliding slope until it reaches a breaking point and falls off like a cliff. EDIT: to quote the Canadian PN earlier today: “American hegemony in particular helped provide public goo…
So much American exceptionalism is just the Dollar exceptionalism. Without the G7 piling up dollars, there is no American exceptionalism.
At some point the US will lose the Dollar, and it will turn out that US productivity is just like everyone else's.
Regularly claimed to be the worlds largest stock market investor.
"The fund is the largest single owner in the world’s stock markets, owning almost 1.5 percent of all shares in the world’s listed companies."
https://www.nbim.no/en/about-us/norges-bank-investment-manag...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...
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This is precisely it. People in the US have been living with the insanity of Trump for so long that they have become numb to it, and don't realize just how crazy and out of bounds every day is now. We continue on, because we have to, but it's hard to reevaluate everything every single day because it's so crazy. Europe and the rest of the world are making completely rational decisions in response to the utter self-des…
What we witness seems to be a lack of control due to a vicious feedback loop that eliminates dissenters and reasonable, moderate people from positions of power. The longer it stays active, the worse it becomes. In other authoritarian systems this is not so noticeable because their leaders act more rationally to begin with, although they tend to lose their grip on reality in the long run, too.
A lot of pundits that were center-left in past years fall into this trap, and normalize extremely right-wing positions these days because of it. They are stuck in an media and information environment of politics and, lacking many core values to guide them, they navigate to the middle of the media that they consume, assuming that the truth will be there in the middle just like it was in the past.
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> Danish pension fund AkademikerPension said on Tuesday it would sell off its holding of U.S. Treasuries, worth some $100 million, > AkademikerPension has in total 164 billion Danish crowns ($25.74 billion) So they are moving about 0.4% of their investment. Not pure symbolism, but $100 million is really nothing when we're talking about US treasuries. In the past decade, China has reduced their holding by about $600B.
Think of it as a bowshot. There are many more such 10 to 100 billion funds and they can move at the drop of a hat if they have to.
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> It's symbolism. It's not. This is where the financial rubber meets the road, actions have consequences, and the rest of the world is looking at the US as increasingly unlikely to pay above inflation on its debts. The people managing the pension funds (if they are acting in good faith) really want to generate yield, and really want to preserve capital for the Danish people. They don't want to symbolically do those t…
The markets certainly don't think it's symbolism.
Why would anyone believe that this is the last time a president will use Tariff threats in the next 12 months? it was reasonable to negotiate last year based on the observation that trade imbalances had been a growing issue for the American people. Using trade as a lever for territorial concessions is almost certainly a hard red line.