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I have a slight request, unless someone in the forum objects.
I'm not a Mod, so I can't do the change myself.
Could we slightly modify the title of the thread to "Today in tRump"?
I object. It looks fucking juvenile and it looks like I did it. Sorry. Can we change it back please.Quote:
Originally Posted by TitoFan
The guy who wrote this is the chief financial correspondent for the most right wing newspaper in Britain. He's a proper reactionary and would fit happily in the right wing contingent of the pre-Trump GOP. To give you an example, in the nineties he was based in Washington for the same paper and in his spare time wrote a book on how the Clintons had Vince Foster murdered. When he ditches ideology he's pretty accurate as a pundit and that's going over decades now, he's one of the handful of people I actually read. This seems to me like a likely path for where we're headed:
If you think it’s alarming now, just wait for Trump to wreck the bond market
The White House’s push for for expanded presidential power threatens US economic stability
Donald Trump is systematically purging every US government institution, a pattern familiar to anybody who has studied the caudillo regimes of Latin America, or the playbook of today’s Putin-Orbán-Erdoğan prototypes.
It is a racing certainty that he will soon do the same to the Federal Reserve, forcing the central bank to cut interest rates into the teeth of rising inflation, with epic consequences for the world’s dollarised financial system and for €39 trillion (£33 trillion) of offshore dollar debt contracts and swaps.
Late last week he fired the head of the National Security Agency and its top officials at the behest of Laura Loomer, a fringe conspiracy theorist, who whispered into Trump’s ear that they were disloyal to the Maga movement.
He has already fired the heads of the FBI’s intelligence division, its counterterrorism division and criminal investigations division, as well as the heads of the Washington and New York offices.
He has fired the top brass of the US military, starting with a preemptive strike on the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. An earlier chairman – General Mark Milley – refused to ratify Trump’s attempted coup d’etat on Jan 6 2021.
“We don’t take an oath to a king, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We take an oath to the constitution,” said Milley in his parting shot.
But Trump also fired the three judge advocates general, who are legally independent by Congressional statute and have the authority to decide which military orders should be disobeyed – such as Trump’s order to “just shoot” American protesters, on American soil, during the Black Lives Matter saga.
That obstacle will not recur. Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary, said the three judges had been sacked to stop them posing any “roadblocks to orders given by the commander-in-chief”.
You can go through the list, agency by agency, extending to the universities and private law firms, and even to the muzzled editorials of some of America’s once great newspapers: the purge is Bolshevik in ambition.
Does anybody in their right mind think that Trump will spare the Fed’s Jerome Powell as the two men gear up for an almighty clash over US monetary policy? “CUT INTEREST RATES, JEROME, AND STOP PLAYING POLITICS!” bellowed Trump in capital letters on Truth Social on Friday.
The Fed will indeed cut rates this year but not until it is able to see through the confusing blizzard of tariffs and the ricochet retaliation of an angry world.
Powell told Congress that the tariff shock is much bigger than expected and may set off “persistent” inflation rather than just a one-off jump in the price level. He came close to damning Trumponomics as a recipe for low-growth stagflation. That is a red flag to a bull.
The current debate over whether or not Trump has the legal power to fire Powell entirely misunderstands the character of the Maga revolution. America’s rule of law is for guidance only these days.
You could say it was ever thus. Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court after it blocked the New Deal. He failed, and unleashed tax investigations to settle scores, as did Richard Nixon. But Trump is an order of magnitude more outrageous.
Powell will not go without a fight. “I will never, ever, ever leave this job voluntarily until my term ends under any circumstances,” he said during Trump 1.0.
Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, said the administration could sideline Powell by appointing a “shadow” Fed chairman, who could steer the markets by issuing forward guidance. But this does not overcome resistance from the Fed board and the hawkish regional presidents.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/...eg?imwidth=350
A secretive team of Trump loyalists drew up a 10-page report before the election proposing more radical measures. These include forcing the Fed to “align policy with administration goals” or even to make the president an “acting” member of the Fed board.
Trump could purge members of the seven-strong Fed board one by one until they get the message. The law states that the president can terminate the 14-year term of a Fed governor “for cause”, usually meaning malfeasance or neglect.
But Trump has just abused his tariff powers on an heroic scale by invoking fictitious “emergencies”. He could no doubt stretch the meaning of “for cause” to anything he wants. The Supreme Court has the last say, but Trump-appointed justices have already shown a strong leaning towards an imperial presidency.
In any case, there are other methods to bring the Fed to heel.
Maga vigilantes are intimidating American judges by having pizzas delivered to their homes – a mob tactic to say “we know where you live”. So we can assume that recalcitrant members of the Federal Open Market Committee will face this sort of treatment.
The major US banks are raising their inflation forecasts to 4pc or higher this year. This inflation will hit before the last three price shocks – Covid, the Putin commodity spike and Biden’s overspending – have faded from immediate memory. It is exactly how inflation psychology becomes embedded.
A variant happened in the 1970s. Nixon bullied the Fed into expansionary policies, with some choice language on “the myth of the autonomous Fed” that later surfaced in the Oval Office tapes.
Loose money stoked inflation, so Nixon ordered a freeze on prices and wages in 1971, declaring war on “gougers”. It was very popular. Illiterate policies often are.
If Trump succeeds in extracting rate cuts from the Fed and tax cuts from Congress, the same problem is going to arise. So my assumption is that he will blame the symptoms and will resort to price controls.
The elephantine difference is that US federal debt was 34pc of GDP in 1971. Today it is 122pc on the Fed measure, and galloping upwards. The fiscal deficit is over 6pc as far as the eye can see.
The US does not have the domestic savings to fund this debt appetite. The savings rate has collapsed to 0.6pc of national income. It was 12pc in the 1960s.
Foreign investors have been plugging the gap. This soaks up a large part of the world’s savings – the underlying cause of America’s trade deficit.
If you think the stock market gyrations of the last few days are terrifying, just wait until Trump destroys the credibility of the Fed and of US treasury debt, the anchor of the global system.
He could order a captive Fed to relaunch quantitative easing and buy the bonds, but to do that when inflation is running hot would be seen by the whole world as naked fiscal dominance. It would set off a price spiral and a collapse of the currency – the sort of outcome seen over the decades in Latin America, or Erdoğan’s Turkey.
The end destination is a return to US capital controls to stop foreign funds and US investors from taking their money out of America. A man willing to impose 116pc tariffs – including pre-existing ones – on Chinese goods and shut down the biggest bilateral trade relationship in the world as if it were a TV reality show will stop at nothing.
So a bit of a debt problem. Never mind, efficient tax collection will at least keep revenues coming in. It's not like they're going to shutter the IRS tax division that monitors big business and the wealthy:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog...9-df7e05237d43
Also I'm going to take a wild guess here and say shutting down the crypto investigation unit of the DOJ will end badly:
https://fortune.com/crypto/2025/04/0...blanche-trump/
Firsr Trump started off shaking down law firms for tens of millions of dollars of pro bono work. Now they're going after individual lawyers for the crime of representing people they don't like.
https://www.mediaite.com/news/lawyer...ugh-his-phone/
America is halfway to Russia as far as the rule of law goes and the democratic system in just a couple of months. The tariffs and other policy moves are heading it towards South American banana republic economics. Maybe the best hope now is that the tariffs backfire so badly that Trump loses support and congress and the senate develop some backbone and rein him in.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kirkland LaingI object. It looks fucking juvenile and it looks like I did it. Sorry. Can we change it back please.Quote:
Originally Posted by TitoFan
Juvenile fits tRump just perfectly. ;)
Besides, there's a conga line of tRump haters on the forum. You'd be one of many suspects.
Where are all the TDS (Trump Derangement Sycophants) ?
This 5D Chess is brilliant. Look at how drained the swamp is. Dry as a bone spur.
Remind me who the snowflakes are again.
Attachment 6346
Quote:
Originally Posted by Beanz
As a Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican, I find it depressingly amusing that a U.S. government official would refer to Mexican as a "language." I know a lot of U.S. residents probably make the same mistake. But for a high-ranking government official to do it, is downright embarrassing. Then again, that's the type of uneducated, racist assholes that Trump likes to surround himself with.
Trump has retreated and backpedaling from destroying USA.
Captain Cluster Fuck has absolutely no idea what he's doing on these tariffs new increased taxes. Market is basically tanked and middle class are getting done from behind for the foreseeable future. What he did yesterday was clear market manipulation complete with direct tip off to his billionaire cronies to buy in low just hours prior to the "90 day pause" aka cave after a bi partisan group was forming to finally act like they have some balls to perform as a coequal branch of the US Government and do their MF jobs. The crazy thing about his dwindling hold out defenders is that they still form this as a democrat of republican situation. When your 401k is going to shit and small business/investor have zero clearly defined and cohesive indicators due to an erratic rudderless ship in POTUS they will stall hirings, big costs and future growth. There is no more convenance of party affiliation to cocoon in...this is now a sink or swim off the Titanic scenario. WE will all pay. The man can and will cause literal chaos to the economy on the mere impulse of a random tweet. There simply is no defense for taking a sledgehammer to allies we've ever had and setting a global economy ablaze. He truly has no idea.
The tariffs on China are now at 145%. That is basically a ban on goods coming from China. Do I hear 1000%?
Temporarily. The current situation is that tariffs in 90 days will noe be higher, more inflationary and more economically destructive than what was announced next Wednesday. MAGA world has gone from praising him for the tariffs to the new line of praising him for going after the real enemy, China. So he has to find a way of backing out of the huge new tariff he imposed on them. Ninety days from now he'll have forgotten the market meltdowns (it was the bond market that forced his hand) and will be spoling for a fight again like a giant toddler. The people around him who know what they're doing (Bessent) have to come up with some kind of way for him to drop the China tariffs too.Quote:
Originally Posted by Master
But that isn't the only crazy economic idea he has. In addition to being obsessed with tariffs for decades he's also obsessed with gefaulting on the national debt. Maybe defaulting on the eight hundred billion of US debt China owns is his next "retaliatory" action.
Basically this comes back to doing an Erdogan. I'll explain tomorrow when I have a minute.
https://x.com/jdpoc/status/1909894555677139111
https://x.com/SpencerHakimian/status...64861846077643
He has a bunch of ideas but they're all nuts. He wants to keep the dollar as reserve currency at the same time as weakening it to increase exports. He wants to bring back loads of manufacturing jobs to an economy with full employment but also stop immigration. He wants to make deals but he just ripped up the showpiece deal (somebody else) negotiated the last time he was prez (and it was basically just a minor revision to six percent of NAFTA). He wants massive foreign investment into America (which increases the trade deficit) but also wants to cut the deficit. And so on and so on. It's all just incoherent bullshit. He has a bunch of notions about what makes a countrt and a leader strong and doesn't understand that they're all in tension with each other because he's a fucking ignoramus and in his first term people politely pointed this stuff out to him but now all those people quit on him and he's surrounded by tenth rate yes men and here we are.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spicoli
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukr3Y3unFhg
First time around:
Of course the United States manufactured things, but the reality did not match the vision in Trump’s mind. The president clung to an outdated view of America – locomotives, factories with huge smokestacks, workers busy on assembly lines. [Gary] Cohn assembled every piece of economic data available to show that American workers did not aspire to work in assembly factories . . .
Mr. President, can I show this to you?” Cohn fanned out the pages of data in front of the president.
“See, the biggest leavers of jobs – people leaving voluntarily – was from manufacturing.”
“I don’t get it,” Trump said.
Cohn tried to explain: “I can sit in a nice office with air conditioning and a desk, or stand on my feet eight hours a day. Which one would you do for the same pay?”
Cohn added, “people don’t want to stand in front of a 2,000 degree blast furnace. People don’t want to go into coal mines and get black lung. For the same dollars or equal dollars, they’re going to choose something else.”
Trump wasn’t buying it.
Several times Cohn just asked the president, “why do you have these views?”
“I just do,” Trump replied. “I’ve had these views for 30 years.” “That doesn’t mean they’re right,” Cohn said. “I had the view for 15 years I could play professional football. It doesn’t mean I was right.”