These bans also seem kind of weird after the TikTok ban. They were supposed to find a US buyer or leave the US market. They’ve done neither and are still live.
At the same time, its a nice way to look tough on China while actually doing nothing about China...
1. Money
2. Adoration
3. Revenge
4. Preservation
The link that went round about the analogies between QAnon and LARP also seems relevant here. If someone lives in and believes their own hype for long enough, have they created their own little bubble of reality?
It's like watching someone try to perform a coup with a foam sword and a Nerf gun. On the other hand, a lot of bank robberies are done with fake guns; so the question is, how much does the plausibility of realness matter? All a bit Baudrillard for my taste.
Reality TV is a bit different in that it is intentionally deceptive.
The President seldom if ever performs for himself on big decisions. There are so many lobbies and power interests moving their hands here and there, according to the tides of power.
It's just convenient for the masses to believe the President to be some kind of idiot (despite the fact that he is the President and they are random people which couldn't get that position if their lives dependent on it - or even much easier ones to get).
Trump is just uncouth and uncultured, with no filter. On some ways it's a disgrace. On others, it's a breath of honesty - between JFKs mafia types (and general non-worthiness, he was just made President by his family's money), Nixon's tapes, Reagans disastrous economics and policies, Bush's cowboyism, Bill Clinton's scandals, sex obsession and Epstein field trips, and Obama's backtracking on promises, warmongering, and empty rhetoric) most politicians are equally crass if not more, they just know how to not show it or show it in moderation.
Since Trump doesn't come from a politics background, he hasn't internalized this automatic filtering, instead he has been brought up on sales and media businesses, so he automatically takes the role of salesman and entertainer.
The Trade War with China thing was a long time coming for the interests of certain parts of the American establishment, and will be continued by Trumps successors. It wasn't some idiot's one-off.
And in those cases, unless you're clearly on top of the other side, there are lots of false bragging and BS symbolic moves that don't amount to much, so expect more of the "Tik Tok" style gestures in the years to come.
My 2 euro-cents.
Trumps "trade war" was a storm in a tea cup at best. It was great cover for business as usual imho. I hope whoever takes it on actually fights it. He's sort of wrecked future efforts by alienating almost every other nation Ns doing nothing imho, so I understand by Biden doesn't want to "continue" it.
We'll see I guess.
It's all in the Starr report.
That was character evidence in a sexual harassment lawsuit from a different woman (Paula Jones) who claims that he tried to pressure her into non-consensual sex.
Clinton was sanctioned for perjury due to lying about that relationship in court, appealed the ruling, then later dropped the appeal and surrendered his law license voluntarily.
So there were elements of perjury and non-consensual sex here and your summary is incomplete.
People remember Clinton as being better than he was because they think he was railroaded over the BJ.
Whether or not HIPAA is a bad thing is very much a matter of opinion. That's the one thing that's keeping medical info from being whored out like all our other metadata these days.
The last uncontroversially good president we've had was born in the 19th century.
Far more damaging was NAFTA and letting China into the World Trade Association.
That probably meant the WTO.
Still, "letting"? As if it's the role of the 4% of the world to dictate whether the 18% of the world would enter a supposedly neutral global trade organization?
Imagine how easy would be to make money through stock options if you had the power to affect any stock to go up or down. Only ethics would stand in your way and if you think ethics are for loses, nothing is stopping you from doing that.
If you want reduce your risk further, you could simply get paid by your friends from Mar-a-Lago (by purchasing expensive rooms in your hotel) by letting them know your announcement ahead of time and let them do the investment. That will also reduce connections to yourself.
"It makes no tactical sense"
This is a pretty good summary of much of the last four years.
Perfect example of cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Also, it's important to realize that t-bonds and USDs are basically the same thing. A T-bond is, for all intents and purposes, high-denomination dollar bill that can be exchanged for low-denomination bills on an open market.
They don't want dollars doesn't matter who prints them.
Thank you.
$1tn is a lot of money to any country, even one as large as China.
Defaulting on our debt would be a huge fucking deal for us as well, but if the stakes were high enough others would understand that we couldn't pay someone money while at war.
It sounds like a lot of money, but the US War in Iraq tallied over a trillion, with Afghanistan matching that amount.
The CARES Act is estimated to have cost $2 trillion.
Countries are not going to go to war over such a petty amount of money. The costs of such a war would be 100x that amount, easily.
"If you owe the bank a 5 million NOK and cannot pay then you have a problem.
If however you owe the bank 500 million NOK and cannot pay then the bank has a problem."
If China dumps those bonds tomorrow the US dollar would collapse instantly. China would feel some pain of course, but their internal economy is not directly tied to international markets so they can handle it way better.
Now China would be stuck selling assets (t-bonds) at a loss, and in return, they get another asset (USD) which now has a suppressed value. And since low USD makes American goods relatively cheaper, it will hurt the Chinese production economy and help the American one.
Also, China could have difficulty deploying those USDs if the US Government imposes sanctions or other prohibitions on purchasing or capital inflow to the US.
Further proving to anyone else holding bonds how worthless dollars are.
Saying China "dumping" t-bonds is bad for America is like saying that a person "dumping" CDs is bad for a bank. The seller is the one getting hosed on the deal, because they are forced to sell at a discount (otherwise, it wouldn't constitute dumping). The bank / treasury already knows they need to pay back the money at some point.
Also, a trillion dollars in t-bonds isn't that much. The Fed has purchased hundreds of billion on several occasions without much fanfare. A trillion bucks won't do much more than trigger some NYTimes articles on the subject.
Dumping bonds is not just an economic decision, but also a trust decision. You hold bonds because you trust the US. Dumping bonds means you no longer trust the US ability to pay back those bonds with dollars worth anything; that you lost hope of ever getting repaid.
And of course you lose your nominal amounts of dollars, who's arguing that? You still dump them because you are taking your loses today instead taking more tomorrow.
They are cash and cash-equivalents. Meaning, the same.
Many large business transactions are done using t-bonds. The amount of dollars in the economy is surprisingly small, thus, at some price point, it becomes necessarily to pay in t-bonds.
> Many large business transactions are done using t-bonds. The amount of dollars in the economy is surprisingly small, thus, at some price point, it becomes necessarily to pay in t-bonds.
Then they are not the same. You admit they are not the same, then deny they are not the same. If they were the same they would be called the same, and would be the same.
They can be equivalent and they are used similarly, just as a house can be used as "cash-equivalent" under certain circumstances. But they are different instruments that allow different (and some similar) uses.
For example, on the whole China trade war. The US’s net imports from China are higher than they have been since the mid 2000s. Chinas economic strength relative to the US is higher than its ever been. Instead of the US being trading and strengthening relationships with Pacific nations until Trump ripped the TPP its now China that has those trading relationships. The EU is reducing interactions with the US and just signed a deal with China, something that may have been unthinkable for them even ( years ago. The US is absolutely non existent in Africa while China continues to build relationships ans trade links there. Thanks to the US trade war China has drastically increased trade with Brazil (to procure soybeans instead of from the US) while US relationships with South America continue to weaken.
Trump has presided over worsening relationships with literally every other continent barring Antarctica, and as a direct consequence of his actions China has greatly improved relationships in all those continents.
I am not passing a value judgement on China or US trade relationships but from a developed nation like USA I would expect a broad policy first using which we can reliably predict how a successful Chinese company be treated in USA. That helps consumers, business partners VCs and so on.
https://reason.com/2020/11/08/peter-navarros-no-good-economi...
[0]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/11/tiktok-says-its-...
> Another portion of the book describes an instance with Mr Trump’s former chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, who “stole a letter off Trump’s desk” that the president intended to sign to formally withdraw the US from a trade agreement with South Korea.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
The president isn't the be all and end all power in the USA, as some people would like to think.
Also, if the GOP controlled both chambers of Congress, the odds that Joe Biden would be sworn in on the 21st would be very slim. There is your dictatorship. You might say that we would essentially become a parliamentary system, but I don't think that's what we were GOING for.
Uhm, you might be unaware, but Poland has gotten rid of communism and replaced the ruling communist party through both peaceful protests and democratic elections. I see these comments all the time ("all uprisings have to be violent") but that's just provably not true.
On the contrary. They stayed in power for many years in various forms. Read about the deal Solidarity struck with the commies in Magdalenka. No one left. They just changed their banners.
However the reason why it happened relatively seamlessly in Poland has to do with the fact that after the transition the post-communists still held onto a lot of power and the most impactful branches of the government, like the secret services. This was part of a deal in Magdalenka. Poland never opened their communist archives because that would compromise many active politicians. They didn't get rid of the cancer like they did in Chechoslovakia or the DDR.
A good evidence of that was the fact that my Polish grandfather who was lt colonel of secret service (going after the Solidarity freedom fighters) still enjoyed his 10x higher pension and privileges than his victims even 10+ years after Poland became a "free" country.
1. Communist party members never answered for their crimes, and were free to continue their political careers.
2. Compromised communist judges continued their service in courts, effectively granting communist scumbags immunity for their crimes. Crimes which included stealing huge amounts of money, which then were used for point 3:
3. The only two private TV networks, as well as biggest newspaper were owned/controlled by former communist intelligence officers. This was a great propaganda platform.
You see, that's a downside of peaceful revolutions: you never get a chance of permanently getting rid of your former rulers. Had generals Jaruzelski, Kiszczak and maybe two dozens other top ranking communist been executed in 1989 we might have avoided this mess.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/11/trump-admin-dela...
The narrative he and the right wing have been building over most of the last decade - that America at all levels of society is being infiltrated and captured by leftist extremists as a pretext to some kind of communist/globalist/NWO takeover (so vote for God, Guns and the GOP) - is exactly the doomsday trigger scenario that American militias have fantasized about and wargamed over, and QAnon and many Evangelicals believe Trump has been sent by God to cleanse America of occult pedophiles and atheistic liberalism.
Sinclair Lewis may or may not have said "When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross," in other words, by infiltrating American gun culture and conservative Christianity, because those are the forces that control the greatest potential for populist violence in the US. Trump may not have succeeded directly, but it remains to be seen who he's laid the foundations for in the future.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia...
This "both sides" bullshit needs to stop.
[0]https://news.google.com/search?q=trump+supporters+storm+capi...