The treasury bond mess: is this the demise of the US as a safe haven? | Hacker News Reader

The treasury bond mess: is this the demise of the US as a safe haven?

theguardian.com

  > And he hinted at a novel approach to monetary policy, suggesting that “the ultimate intervention is our military”.

Yes, that was both funny and tragic. But it also demonstrates why smart people made him president: he is beyond perfect for redirecting attention. By burning the institutions down and by severing international relations, a certain class of people can finally disable the corrective and limiting mechanisms that keep them in check. Even if that means the whole country needs to be burned down. Zero sum in business, zero sum in church, zero sum in state governance.

"Give us money to pay for our military or else our military will intervene"

The military threats include burning down other countries.

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?

We know from crime that the only way to solve a crisis is to escalate, because that is what zero-sum dynamics basically forces one too. In that process, everything becomes a tool and there is barely anything that is off-limits.

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.

When a debt crisis occurs, there is only one good option and many bad ones. The good option is the debt holders realize they need to compromise and are willing to forgive part of the debt for proper governance. ie. forgive part of the debt as long as the US adheres to a strict budget which involves raising taxes and cutting services. And no more giving out tax breaks and tax holidays as if they were free.

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.

Such a deal is basically not possible. See the Argentina "pari passu" fiasco. Because US T-bills are everywhere. They are, to use a Claude-ism, load bearing for the world economy.

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.

Gold hit $4700 today. Hyperinflation looks like where we are headed.

Why blame the right? FDR changed the gold peg from $20/ounce to $35, thereby devaluing the dollar. That wasn't ongoing like a hyperinflation would be, but it's still the same effect. And nobody serious accuses FDR of being part of "the right".

The window is still pretty large. Raising taxes at low to moderate levels would be sufficient to close the gap and restore confidence in debt without slowing the economy.

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

Agreed, short term there is. But tax=theft narratives and other cultural beliefs are real obstacles.

  > 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.

True, but people won't believe you if you would tell them, or they will ignore it. Furthermore, the dems don't own the media, including the 'liberal media'. I expect blame games and victim-playing turned to the max on news stations after any change of guards. What doesn't help too is that every politician has to literally buy their seat, so sponsors have ultimately more power than the electorate.

Next he'll be bombing US states guilty of 'election fraud'.

I wouldnt call those people smart. They might be playing a game optimally in the short term, but they are ruining a long term system. And i dont mean centuries, but decades. They need the general population 20 years from now to have grown up in a safe and prosperous environment with good education accross the board and the country to have the global influence necessary to maintain all that. They're throwing all that away for more cornering more of a market for the next 5-10 years. Its kinda dumb

Those people aren't really "Americans" in any meaningful sense, even if they happen to hold US passports.

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

I don't disagree that they're locusts, but 'American' has been leaning heavily in the same direction as locusts for a long while. That's why they currently hold US Passports, the most fertile breeding ground.

From Network (1976):

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.

M-M'

They have that capacity right now, because of the same system the GP was talking about.

Break it and they will discover they stop being welcome in other countries. Probably even quicker than on their original one.

Unfortunately for the rest of us, their money will make them welcome pretty much anywhere.

At any given time, there are large numbers of influential people with no long term horizons, only a short one that is rapidly approaching. For these people, a good 5-10 more years may be all they really need. That’s why we need to invent life extension tech that gives elites more incentive to think long term, even if most regular people only live normal lifespans.

That’s why we need to tax billionaires into oblivion. The solution isn’t to make them immortal in the hopes that this somehow makes them benevolent, it’s to ensure nobody has that kind of power in the first place.

Military coups don’t often get led by generals or top brass. It’s usually colonels or mid ranked officers who lead coups.

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.

"Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' " - Steinbeck

"I supported this revolution, should I not get more than those who did nothing?!"

I think it was more the notion that those who don't have it that bad pushing for a revolution with the idea that their lives would be more comfortable, they will end up with more things or power.

I have often heard people talk about how Capitalism keeps the middle class in check by having a large number of people in poverty but it seems to me like a large number of middle class people feel that they are living in poverty.

1 in 6 households in the US are millionaires. And they're nearly a mutually exclusive group with the underemployed and educated. These are very large groups of ordinary people who are very much not running the ship right now.

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.

>Nope it’s the millionaires. It’s the underemployed educated elite.

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.

> The one thing the billionaires want to avoid is a unified public coming for their wealth and influence.

Personally I prefer to avoid "Reign of Terror" (1) or similar situations where a "unified public" wantonly destroys the ultra wealthy. That revolution was led by educated elites clerks, lawyers, etc and not by commoners. The peasants were pawns.

> 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.

Billionaires wealth may need curbing, in particular unlimited mergers. However in my estimation it's the millionaire class level actively destroying the economic foundations of the west, not just the USA.

It's CEOs like the ill fated Brian Thompson worth only tens of millions who made those millions by driving exaggerated profits and share price at UnitedHealth. It's Jim McNerney former CEO at Boeing who drove up share prices by gutting engineering that made himself a centi-millionaire.

Meanwhile SpaceX and Tesla made Musk a trillionaire, but you don't need a Tesla. Similarly for Bezos or Zuckerberg's products.

However food, healthcare, education, etc are all continuously increasing their profit margin's at the expense of everyone else and their companies/brands. For example Dorito's market share plummeted recently after they kept driving up prices to over $7 / bag.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror

The low-end millionaires run interference for the billionaires.

Regardless of who's actually at fault, if the low-end millionaires were to publicly and materially side with the remaining middle class, working class, poor, and indigent, their combined influence would be irresistable - which is basically what you said, I'll admit. But my point is that the millionaires are the last holdouts. Everyone else is ready to party.

If every American with a sub-8-figure net worth held back their property payments for 6 months, they could collectively have anything they asked for. Anything.

> If every American with a sub-8-figure net worth held back their property payments for 6 months, they could collectively have anything they asked for. Anything.

That'd not affect the federal government. It would however hurt schools & teachers, garbage men, police, etc as property taxes largely go to city and county governments which run those services.

It would cause an instant liquidity crisis that would lock up credit and securities markets. The federal government would be forced to backstop large market participants as years of suppressed price discovery was unleashed, decimating balance sheets worldwide. This would result in a fundamental rebalancing of apparent value, which those withholding payments would have a primary hand in influencing.

Only billionaires can afford to pay to have their entire reality replaced with fantasy.

Nitpick: At a certain level of millions, below a billion, this is also true, however. But it makes for a longer / worse soundbite.

Extreme wealth decouples people from the game, especially in the modern world. You think the richest of the rich will suffer when it's time for the US to pay the piper? Of course they won't. It's all a game to them. Of course they're not going to lead a coup. They already run things, why would they need to?

Yup.

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.

Ironically, the only way out of a volatility spiral (inflationary, deflationary, doesn't matter) is radical application of private capital to public good. Whether you're dealing with an economy that has locked up because of falling asset prices, or an economy that's insolvent because no amount of inflation can outstrip rising interest rates, the answer is to commandeer capital from those most likely to survive its absence so that it can be used to stabilize and make sustainable real production.

"But incentives."

The aftermath of this is an authority (still deriving its power from the will of the people) that's shown that it will keep you housed and with food on the table, and still able to access education and creativity and community and healthcare, and all you have to do is keep working like you always have and give up your exceedingly remote chance of one day being an oligarch or living on Mars. The elite are terrified that we'll realize how good of a deal it is.

Went from 3 points up for 4 hours to 0 in the 5th.

It's always funny to me how threatened the sockpuppet brigaders are by small posts like this. They really can't stomach the idea getting even the littlest bit of traction.

Well, I'll say it again: capital redistribution is our way out of this. Our elite can stomach only owning one or two houses and businesses in exchange for saving the entire system from collapse.

Yup.

We wouldn't even be having this conversation had capital shared the surplus (profits) with labor.

There'd be no oxygen for Sanders, AOC, DSA style proposals (the very modest, proven, and just slightly left-of-center Nordic Model) had the corporatists simply honored The New Deal and Great Society social contracts.

Alas, the "free enterprise" types want the whole pie.

Marxism doesn’t work out well.

Heavy taxes on the rich is not Marxism.

Taxing them into oblivion is class warfare, seizing capital, whatever you want to call it.

They'd still be wealthy enough that they and their children would never do another day of work in their lives except by choice. They just wouldn't have wealth comparable to that of a small country.

And where would that money go? To the people? No.. power will always concentrate as it did in every socialist movement around the world.

Man, high taxes isn’t even socialism either.

Let me break down your first post again.

> That’s why we need to tax billionaires into oblivion. The solution isn’t to make them immortal in the hopes that this somehow makes them benevolent, it’s to ensure nobody has that kind of power in the first place.

1) blame the “bourgeois” for a problem the government created.

2) “tax the billionaires into oblivion” sounds a lot like seize their capital and destroy their class.

3) “it’s to ensure nobody has that kind of power in the first place.” Except for the government who obviously exercises the power to tax them into oblivion. In a socialist regime, no one shall oppose the power of the government.

1) Yes, because they exert far too much power over the government.

2) "Destroy their class" only in the sense that there wouldn't be billionaires. They'd have to make do with a paltry $999 million, the horror. I'm not proposing to kill rich people or put them in camps. I'm not even proposing the absolute horror of making them work for a living. I'm just proposing that there should be aggressive taxes that prevent their wealth from growing to the point that it gives them absurdly outsized power in our nominally democratic system.

3) Yes, but this is, again, not socialism. The idea that the government gets power no private citizen can have is fairly basic and runs across ideologies aside from the more extreme sorts of libertarianism or anarchism.

Absolutely not. The only thing saving us from these people and their senility is the knowledge that they will eventually die.

(Obama is so far the only US president born after 1946)

This is why we need term limits everywhere. People are living longer. Without term limits on every position democracy won't survive.

There are pros & cons to term limits, but I think an age limit would be an easy win. It gets you most of the same benefits with a lot less resistance. Anyone who will be over 65 when entering a position should be ineligible to be elected or appointed to that position. Judges with lifetime appointments should be forced to retire on their 65th birthday. It's a clean, easy to understand & enforce rule, and provides plenty of time for people to make a succession plan before their brains turn to mush.

72 ?

We need election reform but I'm against term or age limits.

Encourage younger voters and politicians. Remove the current age limits as we're obviously not using them. Make state positions something a young person can live on, right now they have to keep their job and hope the boss is ok with them campaigning for months to just do a short legislative session.

Change campaign laws, Citizens United has shoved so much money into the system, we campaign for months, reducing the effectiveness of elected incumbents and winnowing out the candidates who can't fund raise the entire time.

Uncap the House, they passed legislation in the 1920's to limit their number to 435. Meanwhile they are now granted staff based on the population of their state. We now have more legislative staff than we would have Representatives if we kept to the original 30,000:1 that George Washington did the first presidential veto to keep.

The prevailing mentality seems to be that if we don’t win in the next three quarters it will be such a catastrophe that there won’t be a future at all.

I don't think we can say this one is a distraction - historically the US dollar has involved the "secret" deal [0] where the US was trading military protection in the Middle East for having a major energy supplier only accept dollars. Probably some other similar shenanigans going on that aren't public too.

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

… and yet America voted for him a second time. I just don’t get why

Project 2025 ain't gonna implement itself.

Even now when things have gone so far off the rails, the average American knows basically nothing about what's going on. There's a ton of information but no reliable way to split it from misinformation, so people just glom on to whatever aligns with their worldview. Our future feels pretty hopeless to me.

Nothing is happening because you aren't doing anything and are even spreading hopelessness! Imagine someone at work or on a team who acted that way. It's psyops for the opposition. It is the behavior of losers (sorry).

The main obstacle for the opposition is itself.

There is no meaningful "opposition" at the national level. There's not even a pretense of it. The same Democratic Party that failed to hold Reagan and Bush responsible for Iran-Contra, that failed to hold Bush responsible for torture and domestic spying, that failed to hold Trump responsible for a coup and stealing secrets, that did nothing with the Epstein files, is not going to "oppose" anything. They'll slap on a fresh coat of paint, say calming things to the investors, and keep right on with business as usual.

I think the Democrats tried to hold Trump responsible for the coup attempt. They just botched the timing. They delayed the court cases until late 2023/early 2024, maybe for political reasons, to tar Trump with it closer to the 2024 election. That backfired spectacularly, as Trump was able to manufacture enough delay to drag the cases out to late 2024, where they were held to not cause election interference. And then, after that, he had immunity while in office.

Republicans hold all 3 levers of Gov’t.

The midterms are the first chance to get it back. Voting maters

but until then. Democracy has handed them all the power

Well I don't know _what_ to do! I think if people knew the truth it would help but anti-intellectualism has taken hold and backlash effects are real, and talking heads have spent decades poisoning the well. If we can't agree that Trump is a disaster and we need to protect the constitution from him and the SC then how are we going to accomplish anything? Genuinely don't know what I can do that would matter.

Steps:

1) Stop spreading powerlessness

2) Stop worrying about your own feeling of powerlessness

3) Get to work

Everyone facing a real challenge feels powerless and despair at times. 90% of the difference between success and failure is what you do next.

The biggest issue (having seen it first hand), is anyone trying to directly address the actual issues gets attacked by their ‘own side’, often in a lot of ways that are hard to address and everyone will deny are actually happening.

A lot of ‘if I can’t/won’t solve this problem, fuck you if you try to solve this problem’ going on, especially on the left.

Possibly the most famous poem ever begins,

  If you can keep your head when all about you   
      Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   
  If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
      But make allowance for their doubting too; ...

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46473/if---

That's your big plan? Lol. Stop fucking lecturing me if you don't have any ideas. Sick of this kind of shit.

People need to come up with their own ideas or there's nothing anyone can do for them. They need to get in a different mode than powerlessness, victimhood ('I'm powerless so I am justified in being irresponsible'), and waiting for an answer, and attacking people who are moving forward.

Only then is a discussion of ideas, etc. useful. At work, facing a challenge, someone is no good on a team if they take a position of powerlessness and 'come up with ideas for me'.

See the comment sibling to your own.

What are you doing?

I've said it in a different thread, but I think we need to be more open to the ways that people can effect change. Maybe it's a new approach to politics, maybe it's something else. But the constant obsession about "we need to elect people to Congress and the White House to fix things for us" is crowding out whatever other potential solutions might be out there. We won't know until we try and stop thinking of the problem as only having one correct answer.

People will need to do both to win, and especially not shy away from crushing the other side in elections.

I think the Dems are satisfied with losing, and just tell each other they're powerless so they don't feel too bad.

> I just don’t get why

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.

> and yet America voted for him a second time.

Well, a lot of them didn't vote for him. Roughly a third of eligible voters stayed home (actually the largest group) while Trump and Harris each got a bit under a third, with Trump narrowly ahead.

But yeah, I guess its still baffling about 31% voted for him.

Biden's debate performance, and the aftermath, are the well-recognized reasoning.

Yeah but Harris embarrassed him so badly he backed out of the third debate.

I’m reminded of the recent study claiming that British imperial activities had a negligible impact on the quality of life for non-elites, but was enormously enriching for the elites. Tough to take entirely seriously due to no perfect control sample, but it’s at least provocative to me to consider this: all this pain and suffering for what? The worst person you can imagine being able to piss in a gold toilet and grope women (and men) of a questionable age with coerced consent?

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 think it is past time to admit that a lot of the roots of our current issues, both culturally and economically, can be traced back to the Regan era. Culture wars have always been a thing, but 'the moral majority' throwing out reason for emotion and economic policy glorifying the short term gain of the rich because it will 'eventually' benefit the poor got a real boost under Regan and then Bush. The results of that, unlike the promised economics, have been trickling down ever sense.

The winners of WWII basked in their own glory for far too long, constantly looking back at a grand victory instead of looking forward to ensure a grand future.

The march of technology papered over a lot of cracks, but the cracks keep on growing.

Yep, they were the vanguard of "fuck you I need to get mine at all costs."

> 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.

Yes, but not the poor.

> The distribution of wealth kept pace with the advances of efficiency.

For the middle class. Short-term.

> 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.

Ding! There's the truth, finally said out loud: The Reagan years were great for white, upper- to middle-class, hetero, Judeo-Christian men. If they didn't have AIDS. Or mental health needs.

Well, it’s less for them to be able to do the groping, and a lot more about them not being sent to jail for all the groping they’ve already been caught doing.

He’s known since the first term (and he’s not the only one!) that if he loses he’s going to jail - or worse.

Why do you think he’s so dead set on staying?

Smart people helped him be the candidate.

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.

I was in college in the run-up to Trump's election. I knew a lot of left-leaning people who were very tired of the neo-liberal status quo, and who were willing to put their time and money into making Obama's promised but undelivered change into something real. And then along came Donald Trump, and, "OMG look how awful he is! Vote Blue No Matter Who!"

It's a sucker's game, and the voters on both sides of the spectrum get taken again and again and again. "Sure, Our Politicians are Bad, but the Other Side's Politicians are Much Worse!" Voting for the lesser evil for decades is just taking the scenic route to Hell as a country.

Meanwhile, no matter who's in charge, there's always just enough votes in Congress for military spending and corporate bailouts, but never enough votes for any sort of significant populist economics or meaningful regulation that might push back against the billionaire/big corporation stranglehold on the country and government. (President Obama, with a working Democratic majority, delivered... a national health care plan designed by the right-libertarian Cato Institute and pioneered at the state level by his Republican opponent Mitt Romney.)

> And then along came Donald Trump, and, "OMG look how awful he is! Vote Blue No Matter Who!"

And that would have been the correct choice. Because he's not just the worst person to be president, he was very clearly, even in 2015, among a small handful of the worst people with any kind of following to ever run for the job (maybe not as bad as David Duke, at least as bad as Lyndon LaRouche).

It's really simple: if there are two candidates with a chance of running for the job and only one of them is very evidently a malignant narcissist, you pick the other one. Regardless of their policies!

Trump was easily identifiable as erratic, self-centred and profoundly dangerous and that has been borne out.

(You'll get no argument from me that Mitt Romney got a raw deal both from timing and from the old school of political rough-and-tumble, especially seeing as he's often to the left of Gavin Newsom)

> People who didn't mind that he is a racist, xenophobic, anti-semitic, bigoted philandering malignant narcissist grifter made him president.

It's not that they "didn't mind", but many probably were happy that he was those things:

> If you’re a racist, you found your guy. If you’re a misogynist, you found your guy. If money is your only religion, you found your guy. If your heart is armored shut, you found your guy. If you mock the disabled, you found your guy. If intelligence makes you insecure, you found your guy. If you’re a sexual predator, you found your guy. If you trade in humiliation and conspiracy and filth, you found your guy.

> If you’ve never done a single hour of emotional inventory, you found your guy. If you cheat, stiff contractors, bankrupt your obligations, and call it savvy, you found your guy. If you lie as easily as you breathe, you found your guy. If cruelty feels like strength, you found your guy. If white grievance is your comfort food, you found your guy. If your ego is a black hole no title can fill, you found your guy. If warmongering fuels your ego, you found your guy, If empathy feels like weakness and dominance feels like oxygen, you found your guy.

> If he’d only carried one or two of these pathologies, he might have been dismissed as just another loud, damaged man. But he carried a buffet of them. That was the appeal. Millions could locate themselves somewhere in the wreckage. They didn’t have to agree with all of it. They just had to recognize a piece of themselves in it.

> It was never really about him. It was about the validation. The absolution. The permission. He didn’t invent the resentment; he amplified it. He didn’t create the cruelty; he normalized it. He gave millions the intoxicating relief of hearing their ugliest impulses echoed back at rally volume.

[…]

* Michael Jochum, Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition

> But he carried a buffet of them

You could argue that the buffet was so large that combined with confirmation bias people often didn't see or believe the statements at the other side of the buffet. Allowing the convincing of opposite groups to both offer support.

This is very different from "traditional" politics where often one group is supported and the other fought.

> It's not that they "didn't mind", but many probably were happy that he was those things.

I think many of them were determined not to vote for a Clinton, or a woman, or that particular female Clinton, and they casually brushed off the very evident problems with his character to vote for him.

There are also moderate, supposedly principled Republicans who you would think would vote for a hawkish conservative Democrat over a revolting malignant narcissist philandering racist bigot and crook, but no.

So no, I think "didn't mind" is the right phrasing for the people with selective morality who pushed him over the edge to elected. They are negligent, immoral people who don't really have a problem with any bigotry not directed at them. They didn't pay it any attention. Not their problem, don't mind it.

All the evidence is "didn't mind" won it for him again, right? He wasn't going to come for the law-obiding immigrants, just the bad ones, etc. etc.

Exactly. He and his accomplices don't give a flying fuck whether the whole country goes down in flames, because they already have fuck-you money, and they're only getting richer. That's why arguing about how incompetent, demented, or whatever he is misses the point completely. And the "incompetence" of his underlings doing the work of destruction is a feature, not a bug in this scheme. The chaos they sow is the perfect cover to do what they want unhindered while everyone else is distracted. It would be beautiful if it weren't so unfathomably evil.

Which institutions has Trump burned down?

The federal government? Ever heard of DOGE??

I'm not a psychopath but how are we supposed to fix the deficit without something like DOGE that can cut programs.

Most spending is legislated and can’t be cut without congressional approval.

Responsible budget from congress.

Social Security / Medicare need to reduce benefits and increase taxation. Let's start with the easy one; social security taxes. Make every dollar of income be taxed for social security. If you make over $150k (pick a number, I don't care where it is), then 100% of your social security is taxed as income. Or maybe tax it a little more.

Cut the federal government. (mini-doge, for lack of a better term). Stop the growth in the budget of each department. Pull back 10%; done sanely by assessing what the department is doing, what it is required to do, and what it doesn't need to do.

Cut the military. Do we need both a land based and sea based nuclear deterrent? Get rid of 1 of them. Cut active duty strength 10%. Stop ridiculous projects like "B-52 Re-engine and Radar update". (So, I am going to put money into my 1950 ford, when I can buy a 2026 model (B21) at a reasonable price... this is absurd)

Raise taxes. Not a lot, but raise them. Bring in more revenue. You don't have to eat the rich, just reach a little deeper into their pockets. (also, I don't care how you define rich. Pick a number)

Do all of these in a moderate amount, and you will be OK. The yearly deficit will shrink, and some of the outstanding bonds will be paid. It doesn't have to be fixed in a year; a 20 year plan, executed, is fine.

> I'm not a psychopath but how are we supposed to fix the deficit without something like DOGE that can cut programs.

Reverse the taxes of Trump and Bush to start. Then perhaps reverse the tax cuts of Reagan.

A major plank of the GOP's game plan has long been cutting taxes and then complain about too much spending:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast

Another plank has been voter suppression:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDMAP

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

You can fix a deficit by reducing spending or increasing income.

Things like not cutting taxes when or letting tax cuts expire would help.

Ending programs can help, but not when it's done in unconstitutional ways that result in court expense, the program being reinstated, and backpay for no work. I'm sure some programs have fraud and waste, too; but the fiscally optimal amount of fraud and waste is not usually 0%.

Related: government shutdowns are also a big waste of money. You can blame those on whoever you like, but having them regularly is not fiscally responsible.

Where does all the wealth come from? I remeber, as a small boy, i learned Bill Gates was the richest man on earth with 8bn$. Today, Alon is ~120x that much. Where did all this came from?

"Money printer" is usually used negatively by right wingers to argue against debt driven social spending. The point missing in economics and politics is, that this money printer never stopped and it doesnt work for the many but for privileged elites. The superficial right wing response is just a reminder, whos in charge of their world view and fiscal policy.

The distortion of the public debate is reflected in your lopsided stance too, that you think you need DOGE to tackle the problem by cutting spending. There is another way.

Think about it this way, you have a money source, thus you should have a money sink, otherwise it migho get out of hand [1]. What could such a sink be? (i know you know it too.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization

EDIT: I want to hint at modern monetary theory, very "controversial".

Well, how much did DOGE cut? If you're dependent on something like DOGE, it's hopeless, because as a method of cutting the federal budget, DOGE didn't work.

Scientific funding is in crisis.

Let's ignore the fact that congress and not the president that allocates funding, and the fact that "scientific funding" is not a recognized obligation or even right of any branch of the US government, and therefore hardly qualifies as an institution, and the fact that "scientific funding" included things like spending $14,000,000 to have monkeys play a "Price Is Right"-inspired video game[1].

Can you share exactly how much less was spent on "scientific funding" by the US government in 2025, and how exactly that amounts to Trump burning down the institutions?

[1]: https://www.independent.org/article/2025/12/30/2025-festivus...

you're the one using the line "burning down institutions". they are not burning down, but they are on fire, and we are already feeling very significant effects from this. The Trump admin is illegally witholding allocated funds.

Take the EPA for another example. There have been so many layoffs, so many departments that just don't answer the phone any more because they don't have any staff. Over 20% of the EPA staff was laid off. A lot of this is in research departments. The downstream effect will be felt for decades even if you aren't feeling it now.

> you're the one using the line "burning down institutions

No. I'm not. The post I responded to literally said: "By burning the institutions down", which is why I asked "Which institutions has Trump burned down?"

> Take the EPA for another example

EPA is not an institution, it's a regulatory body which is part of the executive branch of the US government.

Also very odd that you did not actually address my question: how much less was spent on "scientific funding" by the US government in 2025?

CFPB

orange man bad sure but pretending military intervention isn’t an established part of monetary policy is disingenuous

Almost everything this administration does is inflationary. You cannot have tariffs, oil crisis, tax cuts, high debt spending without long-term investors getting worried that they won't meaningfully get their money back in 10 or 20 years from now.

How much of it is "the current administration" and how much is simply the continuation of a much longer trend? The US has been at war with this or that country in the Middle East for as long as I'm alive and I'm almost 40. Same with tax cuts, high spending and so on. It's easy to blame everything on Trump (or Reagan), but it seems to be a much broader issue with the whole system

Yes, this has been going on a long time. However, I think there is quite a bit of data about who is in charge or the White House and Congress when taxes go down/up or the deficit goes down/up, etc. It doesn't take more than one online search to see a very distinct pattern.

    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% GDP

Thank you. Could you please point me to the source?

Source: https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/information-resources/budget/...

I found this under the same domain: https://www.whitehouse.gov/lab-leak-true-origins-of-covid-19..., weird.

Let's count our blessings that the ongoing campaign to fill whitehouse.gov with Republican partisan hackery doesn't extend to the boring accounting parts. Yet.

And yet every single Fox talking head says the opposite, resulting in half the country thinking it's Democrats responsible for the deficit. Propaganda is magic.

Thank you for this. I am so tired of false equivalence. Democrats passed Obamacare, the chips act, the infrastructure bill and countless other large impactful pieces of legislation that people take for granted. And did that while reducing the deficits. Republicans killed investment in solar energy ceding the industry to China, same with EVs. We would be better positioned with abundant electricity with AI needing vast amounts, but we’ve put them in charge yet again at a critical moment. Biden had a coherent policy that would have been predictable. Trump randomly banned fable but not gpt5.6 which caused most the world to decide that reliance on American AI is extremely risky…good job.

Clinton balanced the budget. There was a surplus. Go read Articles from the 90s there was fear that we would pay down the debt too fast and it would harm the economy.

Obama 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.

Biden also had to respond to the deflationary risk of the Covid pandemic.

Printing hundreds of billions of dollars is also inflationary. Governments change but the impact of all this takes a very long time to flow through the economy.

Except American was in a structural slump similar to but not quite as bad as japans lost decade which meant that interest rates were stuck as near 0% percent. The inflation caused by Covid actually broke that cycle and American was on a much better path. Go look at articles from the last year of bidens term in the economist and financial times. The US had achieved a soft landing by bringing inflation down to within fed targets while avoiding a recession. We were the envy of the world. Income inequality was reducing, real wages were increasing for the first time in generations and productivity vs wages were converging.

Now we’re back to chaos and inflation and wage stagnation.

Yep. Biden handled this gracefully. And i can confirm internarional envy.

The part gggGP doesnt seem to grasp is, the fiscal hawks seeking to cut taxes and regulations etc. are strong and old lobbies around both parties and thats why you can see a trend. Some elected officials are just less susceptible than others and trump is a giant jackpot for the parasites, but so was reagan back in the days.

Most definitely. Trump just added a little bit of gunpowder to a fire that was already burning pretty self sustainably. Just a little turbo boost to get to the dark future a bit quicker.

If the fire wasn't already burning, Trump wouldn't have been able to bring such a number of cronies together - just look at the tech bros, they already had everything, but they still chose to lick the boot because they want moar!

foreign policy has always been a mess, and the US has always been a bully

but in terms of the deficit, the difference between Trump and other admins (Bush aside) is stark: just take a look at the table in one of the other comments (which I won't repeat here)

Trump is surrounded by people whom appear subservient under the sort of shallow gaze that Trump can muster if he tries hard enough, but in reality Trump is of course a tool, yes a pretty clumsy one who keeps trying to remind you who is the president here, but he is just following carrots dangled by very smart people with the means to keep Trump feeling the endorphins that Trump believes he is entitled to for winning in 2024.

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

There's a version of smart that they may be, but it's not a version of smart that is generally a parent of children they care about.

The future they're creating, no matter how much money they have and pass on, is going to be worse for their children and grandchildren. That's not smart, that's incredibly selfish and, regarding biological legacy, self-defeating.

* delusional.

One of the few english words, i have no native equivalent in practical use. Nobody sees themself as the vilain. We all have internal narratives, painting us as the heros of the story.

I feel like there is an unsolved problem in human organizations, that corrupts them over time from within, no matter if public or private institution. Trump is just a unique flashy clown that you may get with failing checks and balanced but im afraid, no matter the damage done, the delusional cogs with bloated selfesteem behind him are infinite as a selected breed, as a product/outcome of the institutions they emerged from.

All that has to happen to fix this is taxes. The ultra rich tax's need to be raised to a level the US had before Reagan. Instead the people running the US want the poor and middle-class to pay for everything and enrich the rich even more.

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.

2007 was very different. There was an entire industry propped up by artificially manufactured speculative demand. This was a real industry that produced loads of jobs,drove downstream industries and had significant involvement from a huge portion of the population.

Thank you for describing AI.

I was waiting for an "... oh, wait" at the end.

> All that has to happen to fix this is taxes. The ultra rich tax's need to be raised to a level the US had before Reagan.

What was inflation like before Regan?

Inflation was really solved when Volker raised the interest rates. Nixon, Ford, Carter all struggled with rising prices.

Strange enough, I was alive back then and clearly remember my grandmother applauding Nixon's attempt to 'freeze prices'. Did not work.

The numbers published by the government may not reflect how it is felt in the populace. I think the current inflation is 'worse' than the 1970's. One thing is that wages were getting bumped all the time to compensate; not something we see today.

Strong agree. Raise taxes for everyone (except those at the bottom, please). Draw the line wherever you want, we can argue about where, but it has to be drawn.

> Inflation was really solved when Volker raised the interest rates.

That was my point

> Strong agree. Raise taxes for everyone (except those at the bottom, please).

Again, what does this have to do with inflation? I'm not even questioning the (de)merits of the current tax rates, but pointing out that the tax rates before Regan were in no way correlated to low inflation.

I agree. The two are different things. My comments were sidetracked from the discussion.

Once again, I'm begging you, with tears in my eyes to learn the difference between statutory and effective tax rates. Do I disagree that there were headline rates of 70%? No. Did anyone pay those rates on any meaningful amount of their income? Also no.

Again I beg you to wipe the tears from your eyes and look at the data. Wealth inequality was significantly lower from 1940 to 1980, the gap between CEO and worker pays was orders of magnitude lower.

Taxe rates demonstrably reduced wealthy estates over time

We are now at levels of disparity greater than the guilded age. Consumers are about to run out of credit at which point there will be a Great Depression level contraction.

No, your parent is correct.

In addition to the pragmatic point about how nobody actually paid those rates, there is an ideological mismatch as well:

Those very high marginal tax rates were not enacted to address inequality or any of the typical social goals that we think of when we advocate for higher marginal tax rates. Rather, they were imposed to combat war profiteering during the WW2 period:

"The crisis of World War II led Congress to pass four excess profits statutes between 1940 and 1943. The 1940 rates ranged from 25 to 50 percent and the 1941 ones from 35 to 60 percent. In 1942, a flat rate of 90 percent was adopted, with a postwar refund of 10 percent; in 1943 the rate was increased to 95 percent, with a 10 percent refund."[1]

Can you argue for a very high marginal tax rate as a means of wealth distribution and furthering progressive policy ? Yes, of course you can.

Have we ever had one ? Not really.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_profits_tax#United_Stat...

Just because people didn’t pay the top rate doesn’t mean they didn’t pay substantially higher percentages than today.

The vaguepost by Bessent in today’s Financial Times looked pretty weak: https://www.ft.com/content/cb865200-1a06-40be-86a3-10ee2bb05...

He sounds like an extortionist. I particularly liked the reference to "America's tolerance."

https://archive.ph/2026.08.24-074023/https://www.ft.com/cont...

They’re just lining up the Xth once in a lifetime crisis for millennials…

remember the utter destruction of the economy by the Bush administration?

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

This is round three. Half the electorate saw round two and said, “more of that, please.” That’s why we’re fucked, not because of the particular idiot they chose.

Half of America thinks the only way to solve Republican-caused disasters is to elect more Republicans

It's very easy to look up what the govt spends money on. All of these things are rounding errors that make good rage bait. The biggest, and some of the fastest growing, outlays are medicare and social security - money transfers from everyone else to the richest demographic in human history. In case of medicare, also mostly unproductive money transfers. I think these are deeply immoral, but I guess helping grandma doesn't make for good rage bait so it's easy for both parties to get distracted by tiny line items that, fiscally, do not matter - be it DEI, ballrooms or whatever.

The bottom line is that the country cannot spend more than it makes in tax income indefinitely and anyone who says otherwise is delusional. Unfortunately, I think the reckoning for all this debt will come sooner than many people expect.

You can deficit spend indefinitely as long as your deficit percentage is below your economic growth percentage. That keeps the total debt as percentage of the economy stable and the amount of tax you need to service the debt a stable percentage of your total tax.

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.

Infinite growth is impossible, therefore the deficit has to be paid down some day.

Infinite growth is possible as long as your economy trades things that are not physically constrained. Art can grow in value over time without hitting any constraints. And even if your economy doesn't grow in real terms, to service debt all you need is for the economy to grow in nominal terms, to have inflation. And even if your economy stagnates completely and has zero inflation you just need to bring your deficit to zero to maintain the debt level. Every year you can just pay the interest on the debt from taxes and your debt as percentage of the economy stays stable without ever paying down the debt.

The reckoning will be put on Democrats. It's quite hard to do this while the Republicans hold all the power, but as soon as it flips the media will care again.

That’s not true, because it would have to mean that money is created by the private sector (or just magically springs into existence somewhere) and that taxing it is the only way for the Government to get it.

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)

Most money is created by the private sector. Thats was fractional reserve banking is, creating money.

That's half correct (and yes I did leave that bit out as a simplification to the argument), banks do create money, but not in the mechanism called "fractional reserve banking" which is only found in textbooks because it would actually violate accounting rules (it's true that banks only hold a fraction of their assets as central bank reserves but the mechanism referred to as "fractional reserve banking" and related "money multiplier theory" can't work because the bank can't make a loan out of a deposit because it would require two entries on the same side of the balance sheet).

But it is true that when a bank creates a loan (which to them is an asset, but to the borrower is a liability - debt) it creates a matching deposit (a liability to them) which does increase the money supply. The amount of central bank reserves is not hugely relevant to the process, that's more of a liquidity management thing. The main limitation is actually capital adequacy regulations.

But all of that aside, a Government doesn't need banks to create money so they can tax it, it permits banks to do it by granting them a banking license.

Trump will go down in history as causing the most damage to the US, economically, politically, in terms of foreign standing, and possibly even militarily, of any president. Nixon is starting to look like a saint.

TLDR: yes.

A garbage article. Yields went down after the housing bubble in 2007 because the central bank interest rates were lowered, not because the investors decided to flock to a safe asset.

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.

Treasury interest rates just decoupled from bond yields. That's the news.

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.

Late update: by "treasury interest rates" of course I mean the Fed interest rates. By definition, the "Treasury interest rate" is the yield on a treasury bond.

Check out the federal funds rate over the last 5 years: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/fedfunds

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.

30 year old bond yield being 1-2% above the short term yield is nothing unusual

Their point is directional. Fed is lowering rates but yields are rising.

  > Long term bonds can be replaced with short term bonds which are constantly rolled over

Bessent tried that, didn't work to calm down the bond yields. Unless you meant the USA is not interested in longer term bonds, which is obviously untrue, because Bessent is intervening.

  > The bond yields are pricing in the future interest rates

For investors, the price is the risk they want to get compensation for. The investors are increasingly worried about the credibility of the USA. Sure, the USA can print dollars, but Banana Economics Class teaches you that trying to inflate oneself out of debt with reckless printing will have some adversarial effects. You can't fool smart money that easily.

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