> And he hinted at a novel approach to monetary policy, suggesting that “the ultimate intervention is our military”.
Once they're done with the US they'll just move onto the next country, same as they moved onto the US once the British empire was done.
They're just locusts
You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West.
There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU... WILL... ATONE!
Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.
What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.
We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that... perfect world... in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.
(Obama is so far the only US president born after 1946)
Repeated radical cashectomies, until wealth inequity is decidedly pro-democracy.
Alas, from the little I've read about both reform (new legislation) and revolution (new constitution), the wealthy elite squirm thru, never truly losing their power advantage. (Probably because any new agenda still needs to be capitalized.)
eg The Nordic model worked pretty well for a while. But weren't durable enough. Allowing the Wormtongues to undermine it all, one millimeter at a time. Opening the door for another cycle of revanchism.
Similarly the concern over billionaires are overplayed. They’ve got too much skin in the current game to destroy the current game.
Nope it’s the millionaires. It’s the underemployed educated elite. Those are folks who will destroy a country for their own marginal gain.
Nitpick: At a certain level of millions, below a billion, this is also true, however. But it makes for a longer / worse soundbite.
There's a billionaire in the White House who's hosting billionaire guests on the regular, there was a line of billionaires behind him at the inauguration, and a temporary trillionaire living in the White House for a while and shredding every agency that had power to regulate him.
Wrong. The billionaires want the public focused on the low-end millionaires, who largely have no more control over policy than the poorest pensioner or laborer, while the billionaire-class and their willing enablers destroy the society and environment to their own benefit.
It's just a different spin on the ages-old strategy of dividing the non-ruling-class and pitting them against each other. The one thing the billionaires want to avoid is a unified public coming for their wealth and influence.
From 1945 to Reagan may have been one of the most extraordinary times for the “middle class” of any nation in the history of the world. The distribution of wealth kept pace with the advances of efficiency. What a privilege it must be to have been an adult in a non-discriminated class during that period, and the honeymoon phase that kept steam until the Great Recession.
I imagine the US's poor showing against Iran and the implied inability to coerce medium powers is a factor in the decision making of the serious buyers of US treasuries. It has never been entirely clear how much value the US military's ability to control global trade really backed the dollar; but Trump's style is to hit people with every possible threat and reason to do what he wants in case it helps.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrocurrency#1970_to_2000
People who didn't mind that he is a racist, xenophobic, anti-semitic, bigoted philandering malignant narcissist grifter made him president.
Intelligent lawyers degraded themselves to make it happen again.
I do think trying to backdate the idea that intelligent people are behind Trump's rise because supposedly intelligent people are now on the Trump train for their own expedient reasons ignores that the beginning of the Trump movement was grounded in his explicitly bigoted and racist proclamations.
It's not like he came down the escalator with any pitch to intelligent people. Appeals to hatred, bigotry, conspiracy theories and racism were a key plank of how he drove his candidacy from the very beginning. Enough Americans chose this revolting human being as their avatar to make it happen. Twice.
Nobody was conned by intelligent people: they went along with the racist carnival huckster.
The main obstacle for the opposition is itself.
That behavior is the cause. The question must be answered, and if you haven't answered it after 8 (since 2016) or 26 (since 2000) or more years, you aren't trying.
How does the Republican party do these things without losing votes? The likely causes seem obvious to me, but the real problem is that people who oppose them need to believe again that they can do anything, that they are responsible, that they won't be stopped, and stop accepting helplessness.
Now, people accept the "no angel" defense for Iran and Venezuela. Just like a cop is allowed to execute someone in the street if they have a criminal record. But now we have to work out how serious the threats against Western countries are, or whether they're just routine Trump bullshit for social media. Is there a real prospect of the use of force against Canada, or Canadian nationals in the US? Is there a limit to the trade sanctions? If the US can sanction individual ICC members, can't they exert pressure on Carney by debanking him too?
Putting aside the possible change of guards with the other party getting into power, the USA are long-term heading to a serious crisis. The dems were able to reduce deficits in the past (a bit surprisingly because that contradicts the narrative), but I think their space for maneuvering is getting increasingly small. There is a serious possibility that notwithstanding efforts to save the ship the long term trend cannot be reversed because so many critical processes had been set in motion, about which control has been lost.
What happens after a decade? You can do the math. A disgruntled electorate want final solutions to an increasingly heavier crisis. It takes real states(wo)men to re-architect the USA in favor of the public. Also, if you ever open 'social' media or regular media even, you could experience first-hand how hard it has become to reach the public. The vested interests are not willing to give up their power.
All the other options are infinitely worse. The problem is that such a deal is political suicide. MAGA will run on repealing the deal like they ran on dismantling Obama care. They are the party of financial self immolation.
There is no "adults outside the room" who can intervene to fix the situation. Either Americans sort things out among themselves, or they will end up with the traditional Latin American solution to a debt crisis: hyperinflation. Which some of the right have been salivating about ever since FDR.
The problem is that every time democrats make progress republicans pass massive tax cuts. Four successive republican administrations have passed massive tax cuts. Trump alone is responsible for 30% of all debt.
The problem is that voters punish anyone who raise taxes. The first bush lost reelection because he broke his “read my lips no new taxes promise” when he was actually trying to behave responsibly.
> The window is still pretty large. Raising taxes at low to moderate levels would be sufficient
> The problem is that every time democrats make progress republicans pass massive tax cuts. Four successive republican administrations have passed massive tax cuts. Trump alone is responsible for 30% of all debt.
And I gotta be honest, the carrot danglers don't seem to have a prosperous and thriving democracy in mind as one of their goals lol
Democrats Change in Deficit
--------- -----------------
Joe Biden -6.1% GDP
Barack Obama -6.4% GDP
Bill Clinton -5.0% GDP
Jimmy Carter -0.2% GDP
Republicans Change in Deficit
----------- -----------------
Donald Trump +8.6% GDP
George W. Bush +11.0% GDP
George H. W. Bush +1.1% GDP
Ronald Reagan +0.2% GDP
Gerald Ford +2.3% GDP
Richard Nixon +0.7% GDP
Dwight Eisenhower -1.1% GDPObama was on tracy to reduce the deficit and likely would have had the financial crisis not required stimulus.
Biden was using debt to invest in infrastructure and things like power generation that would yield returns unlike tax cuts that just exacerbate wealth concentration and inflation by asset appreciation due to capital chasing the same assets.
It’s not symmetrical one party is driving this and the irony is that they are the “fiscally responsible” party.
No amount of discipline is possible for democrats if every time they balance the budget republicans use the savings to cut taxes further.
Borrowing hundreds of billions, but yes, inflationary is the idea.
https://archive.ph/2026.08.24-074023/https://www.ft.com/cont...
Until that is fixed, the US will end up as a banana republic with lots of nukes.
> rates on mortgage loans and other long-term lending across the economy – are walloping his popularity, helping freeze the housing market
Looking like 2007 again ? The GOP loves flirting with creating a massive depression.
What was inflation like before Regan?
If you do that it can be a good idea. It's a way to accelerate investment. It can also be a good idea to modulate your deficit in a cycle counter to the economy so that it acts as a stabilizer.
The US has been failing on all these. The deficits are too large and are high both in good and bad times. Eventually that breaks things.
But if other countries tried to maintain the levels of US deficit / debt, they were given far less lenience from investors, in pressure / yields. This was because US was seen as, on the whole, fiscally responsible, very productive, and safer from shocks - to the point that when the US mortgage crisis exploded, the safe haven for assets was… the US.
As these assumptions are challenged, the US is waking up to what the European old economies experienced following 2008. Increasingly yields, increasing costs of borrowing etc.
If you’re reliably printing good GDP growth, higher level of debt may be good as it gives you more leverage, and drives more growth in turn. But leverage is a multiplier and it isn’t free, so if the engine sputters, you might find yourself falling out of the car at a greater speed…
The Fed seems already constrained by the administration to not raise rates. Yields went up anyway. US primary deficit is huge and so debt to GDP is accelerating from different angles - interest, increased spending, increased yield demand based off uncontrolled inflation expectations etc.
In fact I suspect that the mega-pivot to AI is an attempt to solve the problem by massively inflating GDP, so that the debt doesn’t matter - ie radically grow the economy. It remains to be seen if it pays off and solves US’s problems.
At the end of the day, the US cannot escape from the forces that drowned Greece - inflation, investor confidence, debt spiral. It’s totally avoidable, but the US seems determined to race full speed ahead at it. Let’s see if Trump can play chicken with economics.
Money is a created thing, a creature of the state. We maintain certain fictions about it (like “tax to spend”, allowing the market to set bond yields most of the time and keeping track of the outstanding bonds as “government debt”) because people are scared that Governments wouldn’t be controlled enough to manage money creation if they overtly used the powers they have to issue currency… But effectively they still kind of do it…
And while it’s not perfect it’s actually far more stable than attempts at fixed exchange rates and pegging currency to commodities like gold (which always fails eventually, because it doesn’t stand to reason that the amount of gold or any other commodity in a country would correspond to how much money the economy needs. You can set the exchange rate but it always drifts, so those periods tended to swing between big deflation and then inflation, with panics, recessions, and financial crises every few years)
Yields are high because the inflation is also running high and it doesn't like it will come down anytime soon so the central bank interest rates will also be kept at a higher level.
Long term bonds can be replaced with short term bonds which are constantly rolled over. The bond yields are pricing in the future interest rates, nothing more.
They were only coupled in the first place because treasuries were seen as the safest of havens. That means everything else had to pay more interest than them. So is that no longer the case?
The last Fed meeting saw high inflation and decided not to adjust interest rates, with the stated reasoning that the market will fix it by itself. This could be how the market fixes it by itself.
Vs the 30 year bond yield: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DGS30
That’s the news. The fed is desperately trying to get interest rates lower, but the free market isn’t buying it. The treasury is also pulling out some very desperate moves to control this, like selling euro for JPY without even telling the EU, we will see how it works out.
> Long term bonds can be replaced with short term bonds which are constantly rolled over
> The bond yields are pricing in the future interest rates
Agree, but there's also the expectation of future debt. A bigger debt means a bigger issuance of bonds, so the new supply-demand equilibrium moves the rates higher as it's the only way to convince investors to allocate more to bonds.
Technically, yes, but if you create demand for long term bonds and create supply for short term ones, you'll flatten the yield curve and pay long term yields for short term durations.
The governments and central banks across the world have no other choice. Corporations and big money have robbed our world of capital and are now changing the game to pull up the ladder behind them
everyone was so relieved when he was finally flown away for the last time by Marine One, he couldn't do any more damage
well this is round two, just keep voting for this kinda of garbage corruption
pray for a full impeachment because otherwise two more years is going to leave a burning dumpster fire of a country (but Vance maybe even worse)
his drapes! his golden statues! his ballroom! his ARC! his helipad! his flagpoles!
his image on passports, gold coins, $250 bill, park passes! 100 foot banners of his image on federal buildings!
renaming warships and airports after him while still in office
ONE BILLION DOLLARS in taxpayer funded renovations for all his nonsense in DC
ANOTHER BILLION DOLLARS stolen from nuclear missile maintenance for his QatarForceOne
$6 Million per day in pardons and other grift
$2 Million every weekend for his golf outings
go on, tell me any other administration from any party was ever this insanely corrupt
now imagine what else he is doing to the country, selling federal land, got the CIA mucking around in Greenland and who knows where else
and he's definitely doing Cuba after November