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

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

#741

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most wealthy people’s wealth is in investments. If the value of the investments goes down, there are fewer resources to “buy the dip.” It doesn’t hold water as a theory. Basically robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Yes, but investors move in and out of cash positions. Bershire Hathaway is currently sitting on $334 billion in cash. If you're an active investor, you'll have periods of both buying and selling - so you'll have cash, or you won't have cash. To assume 100% is allocated at all times is incorrect.

Hence my use of the word “most.”

Investors do hold some cash, but they generally prefer not to hold a lot of it because inflation reduces its value. $44B sounds like a lot of money, and it is, but it’s only around 8% of the $632B of assets they hold. (Not sure where you got your much bigger figure; mine is from their consolidated balance sheet reported in their 10-K report for Dec 31, 2024.)

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

#742
post #616

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What souls did Silicon Valley ever have, c'mon srsly

There used to be more of an image of making the world better - people were still talking about getting rich, of course, but there was a sense that they were going change the world more positively in the spirit of Steve Jobs’ bicycle for the mind quote, and it seemed like that got dropped in the 2010s when everything got so focused on adtech riches and, later, the cryptocurrency marketing push tried to finalize everyt…

"Making the world a better place" is an incredible marketing trick, almost good enough to fool the people working at the companies into feeling like they were doing more than selling electronics, and chronic anxiety.

The only way to convince someone the world needs to be made better is to either convince them it sucks or force it to suck. Ad tech just said the quiet part out loud.

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

#743

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What were America's political objectives in those wars? There are stated and unstated objectives. We don't really know if they were achieved or not. Maybe Iraq was a Haliburton enrichment play... That's still going on [0]! But you're not really right here. In both cases, American forces dismantled the initial enemy: the Taliban regime fell in 2001, and Saddam Hussein’s government collapsed in 2003. Combat superiority…

Extreme combat superiority does not mean you are fighting a combat where that achieves your objectives. The reason the Taliban did not have to reckon with the full potential of the US military is because the US unleashing it's full power on them would be stupid. Your power is actually limited by the boundaries of rationality. The US (and to a lesser degree Russia) could in theory vaporize every city in any country, a…

Right. You’ll notice I never mentioned WW2. I said this:

  > You, and I, and the entire world, have been living under a Pax Americana for the past 70-something years. As that world order fractures, you will see that no country without hard assets and military power, the Netherlands and Switzerland included, are as powerful as they may seem.
And that is true! The Korean War was more than 70 years ago.

Since then, US military-industrial capacity has absolutely ballooned. Our modern military is orders of magnitude more capable, armed, and well-equipped than the one which fought the Korean War.

I don’t get what point you’re trying to make. Your arguments are redundant and make no sense.

With regards to military engagements, I’m explicitly talking about non-nuclear engagements, and I’m pointing out that states without true military capability will not be “live players” in the new world order.

You can see this with Ukraine and Russia! Military mobilization and aid has boosted the Ukrainian military to the second largest in Europe. If they didn’t have that aid and that military power, you can be sure Kyiv would be Russified tomorrow.

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

#744
post #711

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Anyone who says the left is doing anything which requires power should not be taken seriously at all. The left is people like Richard Wolff, Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Žižek, Ralph Nader, Norman Finkelstein, Vandana Shiva, Chris Hedges, Michael Parenti, Cornel West. The left has almost no organized political power in the US. Except for a few city councils and a couple state houses, it's zero. When people use "…

‘The left’ held the presidency up until quite recently, among other things.

Really? There was bank nationalization? Industries were mass converted to worker cooperatives? Supreme Court got rotational term limits?

No. Instead deportations increased, incarceration went up, there were tax cuts and more deregulation...

Either you don't know what left means or you're imagining things.

The Democrats in practice and in policy, are a conservative party, in material terms of actual implemented politics and the Republicans are the right wing party.

They did things like protect against junk fees and go after phone scammers but pursuing financial criminals is hardly leftism just because the right wing doesn't do it. Bush and Reagan would have done that.

Reagan and Bush did a bunch of prosecutions during S&L...

It's a conservative party and a right wing party.

There is no center, there is no liberal, there is no left.

There was no right until Trump. There was Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan but they didn't go anywhere.

I can fully acknowledge this and not just look at things I don't like and say "bah! Right wing"

Once you can look at things that you don't like and not say "bah! Far left!" Then we can to have a meaningful conversation.

Until then you are acting in bad faith

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

#745
post #674

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> Nor can we afford their protective tariffs against our goods. Virtually none of the US’s major trading partners have high tariffs. Per the World Bank: - EU: 1.39% total effective tariffs. - China: 2.3% - Canada: 2.35% - Mexico: 1.21% - Japan: 1.84% US (prior to Trump II): 1.47% US (next week): Estimated at over 20%.

That's the trouble with "barrier" tariffs and weighted tariff calculations. E.g. a lot of US agricultural products are subject to up to 50% tariff in the EU, so the US is simply unable to sell them there in significant quantity. What do you get as a result of a weighted tariff calculation? That's right, you get "low tariff". Japan is also interesting. It imposes insane tariffs (several hundred percent) on some US agr…

What is your alternative solution? Something like weighting the tariffs based on US production? What's the calculation using this method?

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

#746
post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

‘The left’ held the presidency up until quite recently, among other things.

Really? There was bank nationalization? Industries were mass converted to worker cooperatives? Supreme Court got rotational term limits? No. Instead deportations increased, incarceration went up, there were tax cuts and more deregulation... Either you don't know what left means or you're imagining things. The Democrats in practice and in policy, are a conservative party, in material terms of actual implemented politi…

Or we’re talking about the US, so what the US considers ‘left’ vs ‘right’ politically matters, not what some other arbitrary (generally european) criteria is. Or have you checked in with Africa and China too?

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

#747
post #622

Has anyone checked out Fox News recently? There is zero, and I mean zero coverage of the implications of the tariffs. W.T.F. At what point do you go “okay, we’re actually on par with North Korea”?

They removed their stock ticker that runs at the bottom of the screen for the first time in 30 years. They're a Trump propaganda machine.

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

#748

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I think less 4d chess and more Erlich Bachman school of negotiation. Bullying people in inferior bargaining positions has somehow worked thus far.

>Bullying people in inferior bargaining positions has somehow worked thus far. Has it? To who? Canada hasn't, and won't , negotiate a single thing. We increased border patrols for a made up problem and thus far it has entirely served to catch guns and drugs and illegals coming from the United States . The United States has lost tens to hundreds of billions of sales to Canada. They are never , ever coming back. Trump…

I mean over the course of his career.

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

#749
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that really what he’s doing? If so, then that’s some 5d chess right there.

It's 1D chess, really, and it isn't really Trump who came up with the idea. We're between a rock and a hard place. If we refinanced at 4.8%, the interest payment would go to $1.2T per year. If we refinance at a lower rate, it's lower. Note that we're not just refinancing either, we'll have to borrow about $1.8T, too, unless DOGE miraculously achieves its $1T/yr savings (doesn't look like it will, if the current trend…

I read Buffett's proposed solution. It's clever - it must be about as close as you can get to a market based solution. But as you say, it won't be implemented, if for no other reason that Trump wouldn't trust a solution he doesn't control and doesn't directly benefit from.

His introduction to his solution reads more like a prophecy. Other countries, including have also taken the trade deficit path. Mine is nowhere far as down that path as the USA, but still it makes me nervous. I saw no way out - until Trump. It looks very likely Trump will make Buffett's prophecy come true. The fallout should make all sorts of thinks possible - including solving the trade deficit issue.

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

#750
post #746

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? There was bank nationalization? Industries were mass converted to worker cooperatives? Supreme Court got rotational term limits? No. Instead deportations increased, incarceration went up, there were tax cuts and more deregulation... Either you don't know what left means or you're imagining things. The Democrats in practice and in policy, are a conservative party, in material terms of actual implemented politi…

Or we’re talking about the US, so what the US considers ‘left’ vs ‘right’ politically matters, not what some other arbitrary (generally european) criteria is. Or have you checked in with Africa and China too?

but it's not. it's dictated by the right. The democrats don't call themselves left. The liberals don't. The centrists don't call either of them "The left" - not even the soft republicans like liz cheney does. There is one group that calls all these people "The far left" ... just one.

It's the same one who believes in jewish space lasers, that there's secret tunnels under the getty, that hillary clinton is an actual child sacrificing witch, that there's a secret basement in a pizza parlor, that the holocaust was fake and simultaneously that 6 million wasn't enough.

Those people are not using reality and there's nothing we can talk about because they simply make things up based on fantasy and fiction

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