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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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  • So, its now around a day or two later.

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/apr/09/dramatic-sell-off-of-us-government-bonds-as-tariff-war-panic-deepens

    I was right, Varoufakis is wrong.

    Again, Varoufakis idea is:

    Central to this new global order would be a cheaper dollar that remains the world’s reserve currency — this would lower US long-term borrowing rates even more. Can Trump have his cake (a hegemonic dollar and low-yielding US Treasuries) and eat it (a depreciated dollar)?

    and

    Consequently, the euro, the yen and the renminbi will soften relative to the dollar. This will cancel out the price hikes of goods imported into the US, and leave the prices American consumers pay unaffected. The tariffed countries will be in effect paying for Trump’s tariffs.

    Summarized, he thinks that:

    US Bond prices will go up

    and/or

    US Bond yields will go down

    and

    The USD will appreciate compared to the Yen, Euro, Renminbi, that is to say, a dollar will be worth more yen, euro, ren.

    What is actually happening is:

    US Bond prices are going down.

    US Bond yields are going up.

    https://www.google.com/finance/quote/USD-JPY?window=1M

    https://www.google.com/finance/quote/USD-EUR?window=1M

    USD is depreciating, not appreciating, compared to yen and euro.

    The USD/CNY is exchange rate is set at a fixed rate by China, and they haven’t moved it yet.

    So uh, no Mr. Varoufakis, Trump cannot have his cake and eat it too, infact he shit in the cake and then threw the mixture all around the room, now he gets nothing that he wanted.

    Trump has destroyed the Bretton Woods USD hegemony, but in a way that is utterly catastrophic for the US, not some extremely clever 12D chess move.


  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.ziptoNews@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    3 months ago

    All these fucking idiots spent at least 4 years scouring the globe to find the world’s best shit sandwich chefs, to source premium, wagyu quality bullshit from the finest international suppliers…

    And now they don’t enjoy eating the sandwich.

    Gulp it down fuckos, yum yum yum, you wanted this.

    I’ll also throw Aiden Ross into this group. Actual sub room temp IQ idiot zoomer streamer, MAGA cultist/propigandist, who rose to fame by quite literally sniffing Andrew Tate’s farts …

    (I am not joking, he did a video with Tate where at one point Tate gets up from his chair and leaves the shot, Aiden sneakily gets up and huffs the seat of the chair)

    … yeah this dumb fuck had a stream in the last 24 hrs where he said he has taken an 8 figure loss on presumably his stocks and crypto from this Trump crash.

    That is at least 10 million dollars, bare minimum.


  • For what its worth, CyberPunk 2077 is … an alt history that diverges from our own … at some point in the 1960s I think?

    Like… the Soviet Union still exists. In 2077.

    Point being: The ‘Japanese megacorps taking over much of the American economy’ fear of our own 1980s is very, very much a big part of the lore/universe.

    Pondsmith published the first version of the lore in 1988 as the TTRPG ‘Cyberpunk’, originally set in 2013, and this kept getting added to and expanded with subsequent editions.

    Arasaka is… well hopefully without spoiling too much, Arasaka corp is basically run by a Japanese fighter pilot ace who pretty much swore eternal vengeance on America after Japan got nuked and lost the war, and his idea of how to do this includes figuring out how to become immortal, so that he can continue to run a megacorp that ultimately usurps American sovereignty and turns the country into his neo-corpo-feudal subjects.

    You can get almost all of that by playing through the Corpo intro character path and actually watching the informative slideshow thing in the elevator and on walls/screens in the … megalobby, so hopefully thats not too spoilery.

    Also in Die Hard it is Nakatomi Plaza iirc, Nakatomi being the name of the fictional Japanese corp.

    Anyway woo random trivia.


  • I regularly encounter, and have for the last at least 5 years have encountered, many, many people, who use the term … whatever stupid number of D Chess move phrase… to genuienly, earnestly describe something they think actually is an extremely intelligent strategy.

    … Especially when it comes to large scale economic/political/business strategy.

    Yes, a lot of people also use the term sarcastically as well.

    … Which is why I asked you to clarify what you mean.

    You then replied with further explanation.

    You could have just said you were joking at that point, but you did not.

    … Now that I have taken your explanation at face value, now you just say you are joking.

    Thanks for wasting my time with a schrodingers shit post.



  • I mean… I may be wrong about this, but I think its just a gigantic pile of cash.

    Its a revenue budget surplus, not like a … state version of a soverign wealth fund.

    Can’t be legally ‘invested’ in anything. It’s just locked in as giant pile of cash, with no interest rate, no ability to invest it in one thing or another. Only either do nothing, or spend it on government costs.

    You are basically saying ‘spend all the money now, because prices will be much higher later’.

    But uh… if they just… you know…didn’t wipe out a progressive income tax source of funds… that is you know, ongoing, a flow, not a static total…

    The state would yes, still have to cope with rising general costs… but this would be augmented by that flow of rising amounts of tax revenue.

    If your scenario is agnostic massive inflation, that the dollar goes down in value generally, then it would be much better to keep the flow going, as that will be balanced on both the spending and revenue side by whatever the inflation is.

    The inflation would increase both state budget costs and state budget revenues from taxes, as both incomes and sales prices would rise, thus so would income and sales tax revenue.

    And then in that scenario, yes, still use the static pool of reserve cash to shore up irregularities in that flow, maybe to help subsizide at a state level some of the rising consumer price burden, or maybe sure, spend it all at once to try to build some kind of massive infrastructure project that generally supports economic activity, or start giving it out as small business grants, or start a state backed entity to provide some kind of locally sourceable vital staple consumer good.

    But you can do all that without massively destabilzing your state budget flows by cutting out the income tax revenues.

    It is not a 5D move to stop inhaling a third of the oxygen you normally breathe before you use your reserve of calories from eating breakfast to fuel you to go run a mile.

    You could… just use those deposited breakfast calories to run a mile… and keep breathing normally the whole time. That’ll probably result in a better mile time.


  • No problem!

    But uh… I dunno exactly what your masters in the medical field is, but the medical field is also absolutely chalk full of people with sometimes real, legit degrees and sometimes absolute bullshit ones like chiropracty and naturopathy…

    Who routinely publish pop-medical books oriented toward the general public, using their official credentials for clout, often promoting dubious or utterly false and dangerous misinformation.

    Yout field is not immune… though yes, there generally is a better unified official condemnation… but only after a certain person has reached a certain level of popularity/infamy, and the seeds of nonsense have already been sewn.

    Then the official condemnation is seen as censoring heroic truth warriors and the conspiracy theories abound.



  • I’ve very recently also seen this.

    Basically uh, yeah, that tracks, that seems completely inline with the rest of how completely ridiculous this all is.

    So… why haven’t the books been withdrawn?

    Because academia, academics, … they regulate and peer review Journals. Published papers. Textbooks used in classes.

    Not books designed for popular consumption, pop-econ, pop-psych, pop-whatever.

    Why hasn’t he been rejected by the Econ community?

    Ironically, because of the nature of the incentive structure of the field of Econ.

    Way, waaay too much overlap with politics and business, so its basically split into psuedo religious ideological camps, who often realize they can make way more money or have may more power by working for a hedge fund or being some kind of propogandist.

    So… in that sense… the academic Econ community rarely is even capable of coming out as a unified body of academics and rejecting someone. There are too many different ideological camps, they’re all arguing with each other all the time.

    There is no broad consenus view as there is with say all climate scientists saying climate change is real, all biologists and archaeologists and geologists saying evolution is real and the earth is 4.5b years old.

    But with Navvaro… he apparently hasn’t done much or any really groundbreaking research, spent about two or three decades teaching, and during that time he realized he could make way more money selling pop-econ books to people who want to be able to argue about Econ to support their ideology without actually learning Econ.

    You know, pretentious blowhards.

    Anyway he also went to jail for Contempt of Congress for lying to the Jan 6th committee.

    He is an absolute hack fraud at this point.

    So there, me with a BSc. in Econ, I’m calling him out rofl.





  • Britain always had bad news about the EU in the newspapers. Their population was never fully committed so it was possible to create a majority against the membership.

    Cool, Brexit was still a disaster.

    Likewise US companies will regularly discuss what they will do when China is going to overtake them. That moment has come. I don’t believe in the coincidence that the US is doing its biggest blunder at the most crucial time of their history.

    Overtake is a gradual, predictable process.

    Suddenly putting roughly 30% tariffs on the entire world in a very sudden and chaotic matter is not even in the same galaxy as US corporations making business plans based on predictable market trends.

    We are making a blunder because we became decadent, entitled, and privileged, and aggreived and then fell under the allure of an incompetent fascist, who, again, is a fucking moron at policy.

    Of course, the strategy can be that half the workers are fired, but with the expectation that they are hired by somebody else.

    … What? If everyone is firing, no one is hiring.

    This is called a recession or depression.

    Lose your higher paying job and maybe replace it with a shitty part time job.

    Net result is everyone is poorer.

    … If you wanted to kickstart making new manufacturing jobs in the US, well you’d need actual money to build the factories.

    If the entire economy crashes, no one, no companies, have money to invest in new capital expenditures. Foreign investment won’t come because exporting out of the US will be a shitty prospect due to retaliatory tariffs, and the general lack of a skilled manufacturing labor force in the US.

    There would have had to have been some kind of accompanying domestic fiscal policy to throw government money, subsidies, tax breaks, whatever to kickstart domestic manufacturing… before you throw the tariffs on.

    But Trump is an idiot and is ideollgically opposed to the government spending money on seemingly anything other than bitcoin and explosively liquifying brown people in ‘shithole’ countries (his words).



  • This article has been posted by me several times. You are only the second person who notices.

    Probably because I am one of the few people on lemmy that actually has a degree in Economics.

    EDIT

    jammed the rest in spoiler tags for the thread's sake

    Granted, just a BSc, but I got it during and after the 07 08 financial crash in the US, and remember arguing with my PhD professors that uh actually, the fact that Iceland just literally jailed all their bankers and did not bail them out… and then their economy just suffered a moderate down turn, instead of a complete collapse, meant that their whole reasoning behind ‘we have to bail out the banks and do QE, there is no other way’ … well here is a case study that disproves your model.

    The US cannot have it all. I think Varoufakis just doesn’t want to be the one who delivers the message. He must have known better.

    I get that he is attempting to explain what he thinks the real plan is, and he’s done a decent job of theory crafting…

    But he is wrong. There is no hidden well thought out plan.

    The people in the Trump admin are unqualified, uncoordinated morons. They are only there because they are loyal to Trump.

    It is chaos. Not 12D chess.

    Varoufakis, and you, are sane-washing the Trump regime. You both cannot comprehend something this tumultuous would occur without some reasoning behind it.

    There is none, at least none that is coherent and makes any sense.

    These people are dangerous megalomaniacal idiots who failed upward because of nepotism and corruption.

    They are idiots, as are the Americans who voted them in.

    There is no silver lining to this.

    America is now as corrupt and broken and oligsrchichal as Russia, if not more.

    I don’t fully agree with your outlook. The companies are not massively objecting.

    Please give me some examples of any companies based outside of the US who are doing anything other than cowering in fear and issuing statements that amount to ‘We believe in Donald Trump’s plan, we love Trump, please don’t hurt us, please give us a tariff carve out, we’ll bribe you.’

    I genuinely have no idea what you’re talking about.

    Even domestic US companies are going fucking nuts.

    I think the concept has already been discussed by key people, in the US and internationally. Like Japan is prepared to build a nuclear bomb and Britain was prepared for Brexit, the big companies are prepared for decoupling from China.

    Are you just stating your opinion?

    Britain was not prepared for Brexit, and it was a disaster.

    The US is currently trying to do… WorldExit, just fuck over our capacity to trade not just with the EU, but the entire fucking world.

    It will be a much larger disaster.

    What big US companies have plans to just somehow not use any imports from China?

    What are you talking about?

    We do not have the capacity to source the needed materials internally, at comparable prices.

    The only plan there could be would be basically ‘fire half our workers, pare down operations to the bone, focus on core competencies, pray to baby jesus that somehow this nightmare all ends.’



  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.ziptoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldNote: before tariffs
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    3 months ago

    Alternate solution: Live in a studio apartment lol?

    Yeah, you’re on top of this and know your shit.

    I just originally wanted to point out that there are generally workable solutions in case you had no idea… but yeah, you know your shit, and with games that need both super low latency on input registry and display output… yep, basicslly you still gotta go wired.

    … Maybe get swoll, or put your existing PC on some kind of wheeled base, set a cable management situation with the living room TV and your room monitors and controller for just… moving the PC around?

    Yeah I can’t think of much more than that -.-

    Ofc building a second machine is also a reasonable solution if that fits your preferences/budget situation.


  • Varoufakis is wrong.

    Central to this new global order (Trump’s plan) would be a cheaper dollar that remains the world’s reserve currency — this would lower US long-term borrowing rates even more.

    What Trump is doing will result in a cheaper dollar.

    It was also destroy the USD as the world’s reserve currency.

    wall of text further explanation so as not to clutter the thread

    The USD has been the reserve currency because:

    Huge, growing, stable economy.

    Low debt to GDP ratio.

    Very, very willing to cooperate with international trade deals.

    Powerful military that can enforce its will as a hegemon.

    Many deals with many oil producing countries who agree to only sell their exported oil via USD.

    … all of these except the last are as seen in statistical comparison to other countries. Its all about comparative advantages.

    Not sure if you haven’t noticed, but all of those are now rapidly crumbling, after a last 2 decades of slower, more incremental decline.

    But ultimately, all of those things could be smoothed over by a reasonable presentation of trustworthiness and reliability generally.

    Trump has utterly destroyed all of that now.

    If Varoufakis were citing some kind of Project 2025 masterplan for this, I’d be more inclined to believe his read on the situation here is at least Trump’s plan.

    But even then, it still won’t work as he describes.

    Trump is acting with unimaginable hubris, his actions will destroy the USD as a world reserve currency, rapidly accelerate other countries looking for regional or possibly international alternatives, and as a result, less people will need to use dollars for trade, there will thus be less demand for US debt.

    Less demand means we have to offer higher yields, higher interest rates on our debt, as the us dollar weakening means the real price of debt goes down.

    Varoufakis may be correct in that this is what Trump will try to do, but I see no evidence that… the plan has actually been thought out that far by any actual administration or adjacent thinkers.

    Beyond that, this plan won’t work.

    We are acting like a rogue nation doing economkc terrorism to literally the whole world… other than basically Russia and Israel.

    China, Japan and South Korea have recently entered into a pact, an agreement, to coordinate their responses of retaliatory tariffs.

    Please take a moment to appreciate how insane that is.

    The past … since ww2, SK and JPN have firmly been in the US’s sphere of economic influence and military collaboration.

    They just fucking noped out of that the economic part of that and made a pact with China.

    Japan is now rapidly trying to militarize and there are even talks of starting their own nuclear program.

    Please, again, appreciate how fucking insane it is that the most anti nuclear weapons country on Earth is now maybe rethinking that.

    Most other world leaders are not stupid. They know Trump will try to do piecemeal, one on on negotiations.

    They are already forming into blocs to resist this tactic.

    There’s talk of Canada joining or at least much more seriously integrating with the EU.

    NATO is now basically defunct in all but paper only, the EU is finally ‘shouldering its burden of defense costs’, but uh, they’re working on an EU Army, that doesn’t involve the US, after Trump repeatedly threatens to acquire Greenland, and has totally betrayed Ukraine.

    The EU is also rapidly pivoting away from being reliant on or using US software solutions.

    These actual adults in the room have actual plans to deal with the US, and they have been enacted astonishingly rapidly given how comprehensive they are.

    … The rest of the world does not need us anywhere near as much as Trump does, as much as Varoufakis estimates Trump thinks they do.