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Wall Street stocks tumble as investors fret over US economic slowdown

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Re: Wall Street stocks tumble as investors fret over US economic slowdown

#181

Post by iAMkenough »

gadders wrote: post #154
mempko wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's simple incompetence. The whole lot are economically illiterate. Musk is out there talking about the US going bankrupt. Trump is saying other countries will pay for the tariffs. It's mind numbing. This is why you can't have business people running a country. A country is not like a business or a household.

Canada imposed tariffs on China last year [1]. Is that incompetence as well? [1] https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/news/2024/08/can...

Canada imposed targeted tarrifs on certain Chinese products, increasing their cost for Candadian consumers to level the playing field. China didn't pay Canada a dime.

The United States on the other hand is planning a blanket tariff with certain carveouts, and the current administration seems to believe it will be foreign countries paying the United States as a result. When in reality, it will be American consumers and business owners paying 100% of the tariff costs. That is incompetence.

Re: Wall Street stocks tumble as investors fret over US economic slowdown

#182

Post by adamc »

sanktanglia wrote: post #118
idle_zealot wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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

Yep. MAGA is a hate movement.

Re: Wall Street stocks tumble as investors fret over US economic slowdown

#183

Post by iamtheworstdev »

rayiner wrote: post #101
iamtheworstdev wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's intentional. Anyone thinking otherwise hasn't been listening to Treasury Sec Bissent talk these last two months. The goal to lower prices is to "increase supply and lower demand," and yes that's a direct quote. You don't lower demand by asking people to stop buying things. You lower demand by reducing people's ability to buy things.

That’s not some secret plan, that’s how policymakers historically address inflation: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/7/13/23188455/inflat... > Higher interest rates generally reduce inflation by reducing spending, which in turn slows the economy and can lead to mass unemployment. > One of the people who denounced Volcker’s moves was then-Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd, who declared after Volcker announced…

> Higher interest rates generally reduce inflation by reducing spending, which in turn slows the economy and can lead to mass unemployment.

But higher interest rates aren't what the Whitehouse wants.

Re: Wall Street stocks tumble as investors fret over US economic slowdown

#184

Post by Aunche »

atypeoferror wrote: post #160
paxys wrote: post #49

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?

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.

> 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.

Re: Wall Street stocks tumble as investors fret over US economic slowdown

#185

Post by H1Supreme »

voidhorse wrote: post #40
Trasmatta wrote: post #3

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 h…

> 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 in…

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.

Re: Wall Street stocks tumble as investors fret over US economic slowdown

#186

Post by deepGem »

rayiner wrote: post #165
gadders wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean in theory you could maybe argue that free trade economically makes the the country as a whole better off, but it could still be worse off strategically (EG by not being able to produce weapons or the necessary components to defend itself). It's also pretty clear that any economic benefits that there were, didn't benefit all of society equally,

I strongly suspect that free trade is good for the economy as a whole in the short to medium term, though has a negative effect on distribution (disproportionately benefitting those whose jobs can’t be easily outsourced). But in the long term it may destroy a country’s competitiveness by vitiating any comparative advantage.

I've thought long and hard about free trade. Ultimately, people want cheap products and free trade optimizes for price that's it. It's like this single objective function that disregards all other functions.

So the competitive advantage for any country now boils down to the entire nation optimizing for cost. A country like China can do this, because the cost optimization for USA = lifting someone out of poverty in China. They are at the rock bottom of cost already.

Now that China has learned to optimize for cost, they will continue down that path - AI, robotics whatever tool they can amass to drive down cost, they will.

Meanwhile, other nations arbitrage about quality of life, politics, hatred of the rich so on and so forth and let the cost optimization slide. Ideally if every country optimized for cost, free trade would work like magic. Sadly, China is the only country doing that and rest of the world is now beholden to them, losing their once cherished competitive advantage.

Now China which once was derided for cheap quality has learned to build quality at scale and for cheap. Literally no one can compete with them on price:quality ratio. 3-4 decades of cost optimizations have paid off immensely for them.

Re: Wall Street stocks tumble as investors fret over US economic slowdown

#187

Post by betaby »

rayiner wrote: post #170
betaby wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tim Cook has focused on increasing profits by building a hyper-optimized Chinese supply chain. That doesn’t help American workers Agree, and that's kind of obvious. > we may have dramatically changed the direction the cell phone industry went in the country Not sure. Even less sure how instantaneous and very tariffs can help with that. Also it's not clear how that less of the financealisation.

This comment struck me as interesting re: financialization. https://x.com/ces921/status/1886037535283143162

It reads to me as 'unknown unknown' not as a plausible strategy.

Re: Wall Street stocks tumble as investors fret over US economic slowdown

#188

Post by seanicus »

bparsons wrote: post #44

This is all looking like a strategy to intentionally depress asset valuations so that they can be acquired at fire sale prices.

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.

Re: Wall Street stocks tumble as investors fret over US economic slowdown

#189

Post by h2zizzle »

rekabis wrote: post #99

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…

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).

Re: Wall Street stocks tumble as investors fret over US economic slowdown

#190

Post by rayiner »

iamtheworstdev wrote: post #183
rayiner wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not some secret plan, that’s how policymakers historically address inflation: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/7/13/23188455/inflat... > Higher interest rates generally reduce inflation by reducing spending, which in turn slows the economy and can lead to mass unemployment. > One of the people who denounced Volcker’s moves was then-Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd, who declared after Volcker announced…

> Higher interest rates generally reduce inflation by reducing spending, which in turn slows the economy and can lead to mass unemployment. But higher interest rates aren't what the Whitehouse wants.

The article is about interest rates, but the relevant point here is that higher interest rates are a way of slowing the economy, which reduces demand, which in turn reduces inflation.

The White House wants to reduce prices without raising interest rates. So you need some other way of slowing down the economy. There’s lots of ways to do that, such as laying off federal workers.

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