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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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

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

    I was right, Varoufakis is wrong.

    Again, Varoufakis idea is:

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

    and

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

    Summarized, he thinks that:

    US Bond prices will go up

    and/or

    US Bond yields will go down

    and

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

    What is actually happening is:

    US Bond prices are going down.

    US Bond yields are going up.

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

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

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

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

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

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



  • No problem!

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

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

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

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



  • I’ve very recently also seen this.

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

    So… why haven’t the books been withdrawn?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    You know, pretentious blowhards.

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

    He is an absolute hack fraud at this point.

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


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

    Cool, Brexit was still a disaster.

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

    Overtake is a gradual, predictable process.

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

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

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

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

    This is called a recession or depression.

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

    Net result is everyone is poorer.

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

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

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

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



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

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

    EDIT

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

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

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

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

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

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

    It is chaos. Not 12D chess.

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

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

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

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

    There is no silver lining to this.

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

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

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

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

    Even domestic US companies are going fucking nuts.

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

    Are you just stating your opinion?

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

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

    It will be a much larger disaster.

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

    What are you talking about?

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

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



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

    Alternate solution: Live in a studio apartment lol?

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

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

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

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

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


  • Varoufakis is wrong.

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

    What Trump is doing will result in a cheaper dollar.

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

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

    The USD has been the reserve currency because:

    Huge, growing, stable economy.

    Low debt to GDP ratio.

    Very, very willing to cooperate with international trade deals.

    Powerful military that can enforce its will as a hegemon.

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

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

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

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

    Trump has utterly destroyed all of that now.

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

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

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

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

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

    Beyond that, this plan won’t work.

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

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

    Please take a moment to appreciate how insane that is.

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

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

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

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

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

    They are already forming into blocs to resist this tactic.

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

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

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

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

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



  • That all sounds about right, yeah, a DisplayPort cable would work… but basically yeah, there aren’t many (any?) TVs that have DP … ports, and a long DP cable can be fairly pricey…

    A … relatively cheap wireless solution might work if you dropped the resolution down to 2K or 1080, but it sounds like you’re going for 4k?

    But Im just spitballing, sounds like you know your setup and have looked into this.



  • He is acting like there is basically perfectly inelastic demand for Americans to pay for imports and importers to pay the tariffs.

    Elasticity is basically how demand changes in accordance with price.

    Generally speaking, absolute necessities like food, water, housing… are less elastic than unneccesary luxuries.

    … But… basically nothing is perfectly in elastic.

    If anything was, the price could literally be either infinite, or totally free… and demand would not change.

    Obviously that is nonsense. Even if you die without food, demand will drop if a meal costs a billion dollars.

    Trump is acting like the US is so lucrative a market that… our volume of imports will be… the same… and … the importers just have infinite money to pay tariffs… and not do cost pass thru to consumers.

    Even though every economist since the 1700s will tell you tariffs result in less imports, and higher prices for consumers.

    He seems to genuinely think he is directly taxing other countries, when he is… just taxing American consumers and importers.

    Its like when Elon got mad at advertisers leaving twitter and he threatened to sue them for… not buying his ad service.

    These coddled corrupt criminal capitalists have gotten so used to just always getting their way… that they’ve broken fundamental underlying concepts of how the ‘free market’ works.

    Their worldviews are internally inconsistent and do not make sense, they hold fundamentally contradictory ideas simultaneously, and when people point this out, they flail and bitch and moan and insult like the petulant spoiled brats they are, because facing the contradiction, resolving the cognitive dissonance would cause ego death… which is the same as suicide for a megalomaniacal narcissist.

    For them, it is literally:

    I can’t be wrong.

    Ergo, everyone else is.



  • China’s growth is not a story of self-sufficiency.

    It is a story of doing state directed capitalism, making extensive use of international trade, much more productively, intentionally, and strategically competently than… basically any other economy in the history of the post ww2 world.

    They are not self-sufficient in the sense of autarky, a hermit kingdom like North Korea with 0 international trade.

    Vietnam basically 80s onward, is a similar economic story of a ‘Communist’ government/society/economy that did a good job of introducing elements of capitalistic economic systems into itself gradually, with great control, and much of its profits siphoned into further reforms and building up public services and infrastructure… lots of international trade in all that, though they have been significantly less restrictive of foreign direct investment than China has.

    … So is Japan, post ww2, minus the ‘Communist’ starting position, though with a good deal more foreign direct investment.

    A free market republican/libertarian who learned how large of a role the government of Japan played in directly molding the evolution of its industries and manipulating its markets, openly, would call it ‘communist’, because they think ‘communism is when the government does stuff’.

    In reality, its state directed capitalism, but in Japan, they call this capitalism, in Vietnam and China, they call this same thing communism.

    Their political systems and culture are all very different, but their economic organization and growth patterns actually have a lot in common.

    China does capitalism, its just that the state explicitly owns the largest corporations. But these corporations are still ultimately playing the same capitalism game as all other corps… they just have a lot more subsidies from and control by the state/Party officials.



  • 1: I agree that the remaining exclusives are still annoying, but it is quite a far cry from the 00s and early 10s, where … with some notable exceptions, basically only shovelware corpo IP slop was not console exclusive, and the norm was largely based on picking a console for a its game library as a huge factor, as almost everything super popular/good was exclusive.

    2: You… know you can set up some kind of streaming box or other wireless solution from your PC to your living room TV, right?

    I used to just carry my rig into the living room and hardwire connect it to my TV for certain occasions… now there are many ways to just do that wirelessly.

    I rocked a multi monitor set up that also included the TV in my room for a while as well, all hardwired, would just set up the TV as an optional 3rd monitor to put on movies and lounge on my bed.