Trump's Tariffs Wipe Out over $6T on Wall Street in Epic Two-Day Rout • Hacker News Board

Re: Trump's Tariffs Wipe Out over $6T on Wall Street in Epic Two-Day Rout

#501

Post by walterbell » Sat, Apr 05, 2025, 4:22 AM UTC

cmurf wrote: post #436

f33d5173 wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has always been incredibly mercenary with their investment. If there was a way of squeezing more blood from the stone a previous president would have done it. You learned about economic policy yesterday. Now you think that picking tariffs by throwing darts can do better than seasoned economic expert trying to maximize benefit to the US. It's just laughable.

Supposedly they have a seasoned economic expert on staff, Stephen Miran. Is this guy a kook? It wouldn't surprise me, Trump had Laura Loomer at the White House and 1/2 an hour later three members of the National Secure Council had been fired. https://www.politico.com/newsletters/morning-money/2025/01/0... https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/us/politics/trump-nsc-fir... A central problem with this administration is it'…

> Supposedly they have a seasoned economic expert on staff, Stephen Miran. Is this guy a kook?

https://financialpost.com/news/stephen-miran-economist-trump...

> Currently a senior strategist at Hudson Bay Capital Management LP and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York City, Miran holds a PhD in economics from Harvard University and his dissertation advisor was Martin Feldstein, an eminent American economist who chaired the CEA during the Reagan administration.

> Miran.. points to Trump’s application of tariffs on China in 2018-2019, which he argues “passed with little discernible macroeconomic consequence.” He adds that during that time the U.S. dollar rose to offset the macroeconomic impact of the tariffs and resulted in significant revenue for the U.S. Treasury.. “The effective tariff rate on Chinese imports increased by 17.9 percentage points from the start of the trade war in 2018 to the maximum tariff rate in 2019,” the report said. “As the financial markets digested the news, the Chinese renminbi depreciated against the dollar over this period by 13.7 per cent, so that the after-tariff USD import price rose by 4.1 per cent.”

Re: Trump's Tariffs Wipe Out over $6T on Wall Street in Epic Two-Day Rout

#502

Post by budududuroiu » Sat, Apr 05, 2025, 4:23 AM UTC

billy99k wrote: post #478

tock wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America is the richest country in the world. That is the payback. Yet somehow the working class is screwed. People don't want to admit wealth distribution is the problem because that would make them "communists". It's an emotional response. I'm scared how far they take it.

"People don't want to admit wealth distribution is the problem because that would make them "communists"." If you are referring to taking wealth by force from people that earned it and giving to people that didn't earn it, yes it's 'communist'. There's nothing emotional about a methodology that has failed over and over again.

Well, we’ve been going through wealth redistribution towards the “elites”, and no one batted an eye.

China popped the real estate bubble, collapsing entire industry giants and making the “elites” swallow the financial downturn. Literally allowing the “poor” to refinance their homes on the back of the “rich”, because they believe housing isn’t for speculation, but for living in.

Tariffs without windfall profits tax will be further wealth redistribution, from the poor to the wealthy

Re: Trump's Tariffs Wipe Out over $6T on Wall Street in Epic Two-Day Rout

#503

Post by verteu » Sat, Apr 05, 2025, 4:26 AM UTC

kaycebasques wrote: post #346

A simple but profound idea that has stuck with me from the days when I religiously listened to The Macro Tourist's podcast: who's on the other side of the trade? In order for AAPL to drop 7% today, someone of course had to agree to sell their shares at a price that is 7% lower than yesterday's. But perhaps more interesting, someone else agreed to buy the shares at that price. Who's buying here and who's selling? Who'…

There was widespread institutional selling, and typically dip buyers are non-professional traders who underperform the market [1] [2]

At the end of the day, does it really matter who's the marginal buyer and who's the marginal seller?

Do we learn anything about the value of Apple Inc by learning that the marginal buyer was an HFT hoping to offload inventory in 500ns, a mid-frequency shop who will hedge delta at end-of-day, or a value investor who will hold for a lifetime?

I claim any such information would be rapidly priced in by flow-analysis algos, and thus reflected in the closing price.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/markets/retail-bought-stocks-largest...

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/retail-investors-buy-dip-tru...

Re: Trump's Tariffs Wipe Out over $6T on Wall Street in Epic Two-Day Rout

#504

Post by WrongAssumption » Sat, Apr 05, 2025, 4:30 AM UTC

bediger4000 wrote: post #258

nwatson wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the bully gets too ambitious the large number of bullied gang together for revenge, or at least effective countermeasures. The world will route around USA, find they can manage ok without it. The USA will be iced out, lose its reserve currency status, nobody will buy its military technology, making the USA unable to recoup large outlays for ambitious military projects, and the USA will lose its military dominanc…

The USA may get the metric system out of this. The only reason the USA can hang on to its ridiculous "imperial" units has been its economically dominant position.

Imperial units are British, and the United States doesn’t use the imperial system.

Re: Trump's Tariffs Wipe Out over $6T on Wall Street in Epic Two-Day Rout

#505

Post by nitwit005 » Sat, Apr 05, 2025, 4:30 AM UTC

JeremyNT wrote: post #359

lenerdenator wrote: post #4

I was looking at used cars on Carmax about two or three weeks ago. I looked again today. They're another $1-2k. This is the shareholder/political class trying to eat their cake and have it too. Pay people a stagnant wage for 40 years while taking most of the surplus value and dedicating it to equities, then pretend to do something about it, but in a way that passes the buck to the people who have been making a stagna…

It amazes me the contortions some people go through to maintain the belief that this administration is competent. Occam's razor suggests that they just have no idea what they're doing.

I'm fairly convinced it's easier feel like there is some plan, even if a bad or sinister one, than things being in a state of genuine chaos.

You occasionally see the people jumping between different ideas as to what the underlying plan is, once events no longer support their initial idea.

Re: Trump's Tariffs Wipe Out over $6T on Wall Street in Epic Two-Day Rout

#506

Post by mindslight » Sat, Apr 05, 2025, 4:32 AM UTC

sebmellen wrote: post #366

cycomanic wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was bringing this up with a guy yesterday who was genuinely supporting the policies and somebody chimed in that they were not worried at all, because everyone wants to trade with the big boy in town. Trust is not important if they are afraid of you (I'm paraphrasing). Quite a different perspective, but it is consistent with an observation I made about a lot of US comments, people are quite happy for their country/g…

Devil’s advocate: If you (the US) massively subsidize the world order through your financial markets, military defense, and foreign aid, it’s only fair that you get to take advantage of your position. Historically, the US has done this at the expense of its working class. Now there is a populist feeling that we are owed a long due “payback” for our generosity. The Bernie/AOC left believe the payback is owed by our el…

> freeloaders that have benefited from our technology, military defense, and foreign aid while simultaneously being net exporters to the US.

I'm not trying to jump on you for having captured it, but the problem is that this is wholly nonsensical - the repayment for benefiting from our technology and military defense IS the net exporting to the US (via holding our currency). That "logic" is still based on having one foot in the paradigm of the financial engineering puppetmasters where getting real physical goods is somehow a liability rather than a benefit!

For sure, this enviable position has had a corrosive effect on our economy. But the inability to deal with that has been wholly down to self-inflicted policy wounds of previous decades - chiefly led by the Republican party marketing a game of fake "fiscal responsibility" whereby the government is prevented from taking deliberate action to mitigate the displacement of industry and workers, while the increased (but now centralized) wealth from offshoring (and other technological/economic gains) was merely handed over to the banksters in the form of low-interest loans that went into driving up the asset bubble.

Re: Trump's Tariffs Wipe Out over $6T on Wall Street in Epic Two-Day Rout

#507

Post by VirusNewbie » Sat, Apr 05, 2025, 4:33 AM UTC

giraffe_lady wrote: post #263

VirusNewbie wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you claiming that the 'shareholder class' would rather depress the economy and wipe out trillions in shareholder value...over inflating the economy and lowering interest rates?

Not "the shareholder class" but the actual super wealthy, those few thousand individuals at the top. A way I have recently seen this put is that if you have a billion dollars another billion doesn't do that much for you in real terms. But if you're a billionaire who likes to sexually harass your child's nanny, you would much prefer she be desperate and precarious rather than economically secure or with a lot of other…

Ok, I buy the premise that maybe the top 1000 people are super evil mr. burns type folks. I even buy the fact that they would be giving up absolute wealth for greater relative wealth.

But you know the easiest way to do that. Inflation. Expanding the money supply. Increasing the value of their assets at the expense of the working class. not tanking the value of the companies they own!

Re: Trump's Tariffs Wipe Out over $6T on Wall Street in Epic Two-Day Rout

#508

Post by parodysbird » Sat, Apr 05, 2025, 4:34 AM UTC

sebmellen wrote: post #438

Centigonal wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the explanation! Most of what you wrote makes sense to me. In particular, I think the concept that going hard -> soft economic assets is easier than the reverse is really interesting. I'll have to think on that more. Things that still give me pause: 1. I don't understand why hard economic assets like manufacturing are more heavily impacted by this phenomenon. Wouldn't exporting a $50,000 car and a $50,000…

1. The further you are up the chain of abstraction, the less “valuable” the export is as a form of power. Think of this as a spectrum between hard and soft assets — if you decline to sell advanced computing software to your rival, you may harm their ability to optimize crop yields, or whatever. But if you decline to sell them steel, or oil, you may decimate their energy supply and bring their economy to a halt. So, g…

The Dutch and Swiss are very powerful, relative to their size. You can say fantasy things like "if they were invaded tomorrow", but that's not reality.

The US has atomic weapons, but has lost almost every war it has started since having nukes. Having weapons doesn't mean you will be faced with contexts to actually use them. "Genome-targeted bioweapons" is just made up nonsense. Just making up "if" statements of fantastical capabilities that do not have grounding in reality is just that: fantasy. Living in fantasy land is how the richest nation the world has ever seen could lose a war to teenagers in Afghanistan.

Re: Trump's Tariffs Wipe Out over $6T on Wall Street in Epic Two-Day Rout

#509

Post by refurb » Sat, Apr 05, 2025, 4:35 AM UTC

lreeves wrote: post #10

You know the craziest thing about watching this as an outsider in Canada is that we as a nation are losing one reliable trading partner (and obviously losing an ally but that's another conversation). Germany - losing a trade partner. Japan? And so on. But the US has lost 180 reliable trading partners. You're already seeing in the first week burgeoning trade alliances between nations who wouldn't have cooperated befor…

The US represents a huge proportion of global demand.

These countries can establish as many new trade agreements as they want, but they aren’t going to replace the US market.

And to claim that the US has lost allies is ridiculous. Countries have done far worse and remained allies.

Let’s not overplay the impact here. Free trade is a relatively new thing. We’re just going back to the world the way it was a few decades ago.

Re: Trump's Tariffs Wipe Out over $6T on Wall Street in Epic Two-Day Rout

#510

Post by disqard » Sat, Apr 05, 2025, 4:36 AM UTC

windex wrote: post #490

Iam amazed at the epic levels of ruin one man can bring upon a country and how a whole country of people can elect someone so utterly out of depth. This level of idiocy wouldnt be tolerated in companies if done by an intern.

But what if a significant fraction of the employees believed in some message being spread that intern?

Whether the intern is an inveterate grifter, and/or happens to be personally sponsored by a powerful mob boss, does not matter for the employees latching onto that message.

In that context too, I have a feeling these flaws would be tolerated/overlooked.