Live data from Hacker News

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

wsj.com

751–760 of 777 posts

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

#751
post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's exactly what a liability is! US currency is an IOU. The more of it out in the world the less value there is in America's domestic assets.

i generally cannot go to the US government with a dollar to withdraw its worth in gold. US debt is an IOU, but USD is just an object that i can barter with

Sure it's not exactly an IOU but it more or less entitles you to a certain bit of the American people's labor or assets. Billions / Trillions of dollars in USD overseas waiting to be traded in is not a good thing for people who aren't in a position of international rent seeking. The average American is harmed not helped by foreign trade.

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

#752
post #746

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

1) I never said ‘far left’. I just said left.

2) That’s just fantasy near as I can tell. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Party_(United_Sta...] has many, many references of folks calling themselves and their own party ‘left’ or ‘center-left’.

It’s very common. As is ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’.

3) I’ve never seen anyone on that side of the aisle calling themselves ‘right’, ‘conservative’, etc.

So who is just imagining things?

And the underlying problem is that - like is typical when dealing with effective narcissists - the reason this is the case is because of the reality distortion and manipulation being done by the guilty party.

They pre-poison the well, so in order to respond effectively the opposition has to be ‘the bad guy’, which exposes them to attack, because now the narcissist has ‘proof’ that the opposition is the actual bad guys. It’s evil genius really.

It’s why the only actually effective way to deal with narcissists is either 1) ignoring them (can’t do that and survive when the narcissist has power - which is why they tend to be power seeking), or 2) applied consequences, aka usually violence.

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

#753
post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real estate, bonds, foreign stocks, oil. There's a billion options out there. Or they can just sit and wait. Losing for a bit of inflation is better than losing 20-30% in a recession.

> Losing for a bit of inflation is better than losing 20-30% in a recession. Except you can't time it like that. Inflation eats your savings all the time , while recessions are short. I have a friend who's been saying "stocks are too risky" since about 2010. He prefers the predictable ~3% inflation...

1) We're not talking about retail investors here. 2) Institutional investors don't "time" things, they are the market movers.

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

#754

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ten times? More like two times: US population is around 340 000 000, 770 000 homeless. UK population is around 68 000 000, 354 000 homeless. (Possibly calculated more inclusively.) That's 0.23 % and 0.52 %. (Numbers from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Sta... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Kin... or more specifically from a govt department and a homelessness char…

Hey, so I was wrong in saying the UK has 10x the homelessness rate of the US. I used a stat from the video that "approximately one in fifty Londoners are now homeless." That's London, not the UK. Thanks for catching that -- I will update my post. But also, uh, you're wrong too! Your numerator for the UK figure is actually an estimate for homeless people in England, while your denominator includes the whole UK.

You probably don't want to get your stats from random youtube videos.

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

#756
post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'd like to eventually see the "import certificate" system that Buffett proposed in the 2003 article I linked above. It's a more free-market solution which does not pipe revenue through US government where a large chunk (or all) of it will disappear without ever reaching the exporters.

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

#757
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fa…

You think he, or the GOP would "benefit" from the stock market collapse? That contradicts all available evidence, at least for the short to medium term. I think the midterms are going to be an unprecedented bloodbath. Boomers won't allow their 401k's to decline even temporarily.

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

#758
post #350
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To lay out my own biases - I voted for Trump but do not consider myself a strong supporter (I saw it much more of a vote for who you dislike less sort of situation) - I don't understand and am not supportive of the approach on Tariffs - I am an active participate in what most here would consider right wing politics although I don't find myself aligning on every topic (e.g. I am supportive of the abortion laws in Cali…

Thanks for illuminating the mindset. One thing I want to say in support: The argument in favour of free trade is that it increases the pie, so that everyone can be better off (a Pareto improvement). However, given that trade does produce winners and losers, this argument is predicated on redistribution, namely (over)compensating the losers. That second part of the argument in favour of free trade is often convenientl…

I broadly agree that free trade increases the pie and is beneficial. I would still like to point out that I can think of two examples where the pie might actually decrease even while conceding in the vast majority of cases the pie does increase and that free trade is largely a good thing.

(1) The comparative advantage of a country is that they do not have strict environmental standards and becomes the low cost leader in a "dirty" industry.

(2) An individual in the rich country loses their job to an individual in the poor country who produces exactly the same level of output at lower cost and the individual in the rich country ends up having to subside on government benefits

For both of these examples, shareholders profit financially from the outsourcing (and so I would argue it is likely happen) even as the world in example 1 or the rich country in example 2 loses out.

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

#759
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To lay out my own biases - I voted for Trump but do not consider myself a strong supporter (I saw it much more of a vote for who you dislike less sort of situation) - I don't understand and am not supportive of the approach on Tariffs - I am an active participate in what most here would consider right wing politics although I don't find myself aligning on every topic (e.g. I am supportive of the abortion laws in Cali…

To improve rust belt manufacturing, you would target competitors of industries in that area, not the whole global economy. We imposed a 32% tariff on Taiwan. Simultaneously, we are making it more expensive to manufacture here in the states. We have 1/4 China's pop - why would we try to compete on raw output by ourselves, instead of strengthening ties w/ the world? For many countries, there is nothing to negotiate sin…

I'll continue playing devils advocate here.

> To improve rust belt manufacturing, you would target competitors of industries in that area, not the whole global economy.

If you accept as a premise that the goal is to prevent offshoring our manufacturing base THEN you may also want to develop new industry and not just protect industries in that area. Moreover the goal is presumably not restricted to just that area it is an example of a specific region which was hard hit.

> We imposed a 32% tariff on Taiwan. Simultaneously, we are making it more expensive to manufacture here in the states. We have 1/4 China's pop - why would we try to compete on raw output by ourselves, instead of strengthening ties w/ the world?

I don't immediately see how each of these statements relate to each other. I'll just reply to "We have 1/4 China's pop - why would we try to compete on raw output by ourselves" by stating that we may want to compete with China on manufacturing output because of national security implications.

> For many countries, there is nothing to negotiate since we already have free trade agreements with them. We may import a lot of goods, but we export a lot of services, like many developed nations do.

The Tariff calculations have a differential rate for each country so it appears to have taken into account to some degree that we need more negotiation with certain relationships. I won't state that this was necessarily done well...

> With regard to raising revenue, think of the tradeoffs. If demand is elastic (given our trade deficit, it has to be!), this will be a tax on many, many American businesses and consumers. Its just moving the taxes from income tax to a consumption tax. That's a worse deal for poorer/middle-class Americans.

A consumption tax is a worse deal for poorer/middle-class Americans. I agree with you. It may be the case that this functions as a consumption tax on foreign labor which could increase the negotiating power of poorer/middle-class Americans.

---

I really do not mean to defend the specific actions of the sudden global Tariffs. I am attempting to explain how I believe some on the right may see things in case people find this interesting. The furthest I will go is to state that I think the fears about a new great depression may be somewhat overblown.

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

#760
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To lay out my own biases - I voted for Trump but do not consider myself a strong supporter (I saw it much more of a vote for who you dislike less sort of situation) - I don't understand and am not supportive of the approach on Tariffs - I am an active participate in what most here would consider right wing politics although I don't find myself aligning on every topic (e.g. I am supportive of the abortion laws in Cali…

> To lay out my own biases > - I voted for Trump What will it take for you to regret doing so?

It's hard to say exactly as the possibilities are endless and as I said originally I am not exactly proud of my vote to begin with. Some things that come to mind:

- Clear outperformance (in my judgment) by Canada / Europe as compared to the US (this would indicate policy failure on the part of the US to me) - Large scale war of some sort beyond the level of carnage we are witnessing in Ukraine

Post reply on HN