Trump's 'Liberation Day': US govt imposes tariffs to 'reset' global trade, 'MAGA', 'defeat' China - Will it work?

daddycat said:
It might be a good time to put on your seat belts. US Federal Reserve cut its rates by -0.50%, ending rate increases and starting rate decreases. This rollercoaster down at the end of increases and beginning of decreases has marked the beginning of many crashes.

Sept 18, 2024 -50 4.75% to 5.00%

March 3, 2020 -50 1.0% to 1.25% [covid crash]
Aug. 1, 2019 -25 2.0% to 2.25% [this was start of rollercoaster down though only -0.25% cut]

Sept. 18, 2007 -50 4.75% [housing crash]

Jan. 3, 2001 -50 6.00% [internet crash]
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It took a little longer than 6 months. Now the stock markets are below where they were on 9/18/2024 when Federal Reserve rate cut -0.50%, which was during Biden, not Trump. I sounded a crash warning then. Now has a pre-crash look, so the weekend and Monday could be ugly.
 
Serendipity said:
A likely reason behind Trump's tariffs: forcing the FED to lower the interest rates to reignite the US economic growth.

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No, it's the opposite. Interest rates go up with a good economy and go down with a bad economy, and the Fed merely follows the market interest rate. The Fed cut rates -0.50% under Biden in 9/2024 because the economy was already going down and the market interest rate was already going down.
 
iamthatis said:
Larry Fink help us all understand that depopulated countries are actually going to benefit from the 4th Industrial Revolution. Less people = fewer social problems when humans are replaced by machines. What a nice man.


Fink: ""If you forecast out the transformation we're going to see across all societies because of AI, robotics, sensor technology - the speed in which this change is going to occur - I could argue, in the developed countries the big winners are the countries that have shrinking populations. That's something that most people never talked about. You know, we always used to think that shrinking population is a cause of negative growth.

But in my conversations with the leadership of these large, developed countries that have xenophobic immigration policies, they don't allow anybody to come in - shrinking demographics - these countries will rapidly develop robotics and AI technology. And the promise - I didn't say it's going to happen - the promise of all that transforms productivity, which most of us think it will, we'll be able to elevate the standard of living of countries, the standard of living of individuals even with shrinking populations. And so the paradigm of negative population growth is going to be changing.

And the social problems that one will have in substituting humans for machines is going to be far easier in those countries that have declining populations."

I've been reading three books of a history series by Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire, and The Age of Extremes. It's a fascinating overview, and he packs in a lot of detail, covering the years from 1789 - 1991.

In its own way, the first industrial revolution also entailed many of the aspects promised by the Great Reset - the replacement of humans by machines, the destruction of old relationships and traditions, new social regulations and a new form of bureaucracy, civil institutions, and also institutionalized greed. One result (from what I've gathered) was a sort of depersonalization of the landed peasant, or a destruction of their core identity, who bore the brunt of all of this 'progress', torn from their local soil and sent off to work to death in the factories. Strangely enough, their misery allowed for the recognition of a new set of identities - class being a major one, but also nation, and struggles for fairness were waged on these bases. So the stage was set for the struggle between classes.

The WEF crowd obviously expect some form of revolt or resistance against the new conditions, another outcry of humans being replaced by machines. I suppose they've landed on depopulation as one way of preventing the new looming struggle between classes not going in their favour. In addition to a general poisoning of the population, and spellbinding them, they can see the benefit in reducing their numbers, too.
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Following up on machines replacing human labour... with Trump's tariffs, the plan is to re-shore American industry. Will this benefit the population, in particular his MAGA base? Lutnick, in line with Fink above, says robots will replace cheap labour and American workers will have the task of servicing the new robot class.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Thursday touted the use of robotics in his pitch for an American "manufacturing renaissance."

The big picture: While President Trump's tariffs are meant to boost American manufacturing and jobs, U.S. manufacturers will likely hurt from these tariffs, at least in the short run. Whether they lead to more jobs in the long term remains an open question.

What he's saying: Lutnick made the case in several TV interviews this week that tariffs will bring jobs and factories back to the U.S., saying they'll utilize robotics to make American workers "more efficient."
  • Speaking on CNBC, he said that with the use of robotics, factories are "going to see the greatest surge in training for what we call trade craft — teaching people how to be robotics, mechanics, engineers and electricians for high tech factories."
  • On CNN, Lutnick said, "We use robotics here. It's cheaper than cheap labor overseas." He added, "The renaissance will be the greatest factories in the world, high-tech people. What are the jobs Americans are going to have? We are going to have mechanics who fix robotics."
  • On Fox News' Hannity on Wednesday, Lutnick touted that "a high school-educated workforce is going to get trained to do robot mechanic," adding that it'll bring the "coolest" and "highest-paying jobs" to the U.S.
Between the lines: If the jobs are for repairing and maintaining robots to do the factory work, blue collar jobs likely won't be as plentiful.

Flashback: Former President Biden had also floated the use of robotics in his clean energy push, including for solar panel installation and wind turbines.
  • But the interest in automation paired with a vow to create millions of jobs as part of the clean energy boom proved to be a difficult undertaking — and one that could take years to come to fruition.
Our thought bubble, via Axios' Emily Peck: American manufacturing is already quite advanced and has increased in productivity overall.
  • That means fewer workers are needed. So while the industry has grown over the past decade, there hasn't been a proportionate increase in jobs.
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So along with Rubio's use of AI to search for 'antisemitism' in America, AI used in strike targeting in the genocide in Gaza, and a whole host of manifestations, yet another technocratic ideal is being pushed - robots to replace human workers. It's already been around the world since the industrial revolution, and I wonder if we may see an explosion of robotics onto the scene in the USA. Maybe not soon, but that's the plan. That might mean that eventually a whole lot of workers will not be needed. So what about those workers to be replace by robots? At the extreme end of the scale, here is what one technocrat envisions:

A Humane Alternative to Genocide?​

Following Trump’s inauguration, The New York Times published an adversarial interview with aforementioned political theorist of the neoreactionary movement (NRx) Curtis Yarvin.

Outlining Yarvin’s contention that the US should be run as a corporate monarchy (gov-corp) under the leadership of an all-powerful CEO (Trump), Times‘ writer and interviewer David Marchese formulated his arguments on the suspected racist aspects of Yarvin’s ideology.

The pair debated nothing of notable interest. The piece allowed Yarvin to forward some of his ideas to a wider public — but without disclosing any of their appalling implications. Meanwhile, the Times‘ Marchese posited a practically irrelevant counterargument.

The legacy media is not going to point out those appalling implications. But this is what Yarvin, the leader of the NRx admired by Peter Thiel and other neoreactionary oligarchs, had proposed in 2008 under his pen name, Mencius Moldburg:

"Our goal, in short, is a humane alternative to genocide. That is: the ideal solution achieves the same result as mass murder (the removal of undesirable elements from society), but without any of the moral stigma. The best humane alternative to genocide I can think of is not to liquidate the wards [people]—either metaphorically or literally—but to virtualize them. A virtualized human is in permanent solitary confinement, waxed like a bee larva into a cell which is sealed except for emergencies. This would drive him insane, except that the cell contains an immersive virtual-reality interface which allows him to experience a rich, fulfilling life in a completely imaginary world."

The suspected racist streak in Yarvin does matter when we consider the implications of his gov-corp philosophy. But to imagine that identity politics provides any kind of intellectual basis to tackle the NRx dooms all such opposition to failure. If the objective is to resist accelerationist neoreaction, then harping on about the divisions between the progressive left and the right-wing — or “alt-right” — serves no useful purpose. Such arguments don’t even come close to comprehending what the Dark Enlightenment is. They only deflect the public from paying vital attention to real threats.

The Dark Enlightenment is not racist. It is anti-human race. Its advocates do not care what colour gov-corp’s customers are. They seek, rather, to transform all of humanity, to bring an end to what it is to be a sovereign human being.
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Jeffrey Sachs wrote a piece on the tariffs themselves. His piece has me thinking that this is a big lie being sold to the American public - the whole 'we are the biggest victims in the world, everyone is ripping us off' narrative. It's being used to justify a new level of technocratic advance into the American body politic and the eventual ruin/humane genocide of workers. And all the while telling Americans/MAGA it's good for them.


U.S. President Donald Trump is trashing the world trade system over a basic economic fallacy. He wrongly claims that America’s trade deficit is caused by the rest of the world ripping off the U.S., repeatedly stating things such as, “Over the decades, they ripped us off like no country has never been ripped off in history…”

Trump aims to close the trade deficit by imposing tariffs, thereby impeding imports and restoring trade balance (or inducing other countries to end their rip-offs of America). Yet Trump’s tariffs will not close the trade deficit but will instead impoverish Americans and harm the rest of the world.

A country’s trade deficit (or more precisely, its current account deficit) does not indicate unfair trade practices by the surplus countries. It indicates something completely different. A current account deficit signifies that the deficit country is spending more than it is producing. Equivalently, it is saving less than it is investing.

America’s trade deficit is a measure of the profligacy of America’s corporate ruling class, more specifically the result of chronically large budget deficits resulting from tax cuts for the rich combined with trillions of dollars wasted on useless wars. The deficits are not the perfidy of Canada, Mexico, and other countries that sell more to the U.S. than the U.S. sells to them.

To close the trade deficit, the U.S. should close the budget deficit. Putting on tariffs will raise prices (such as for automobiles) but not close the trade or budget deficit, especially since Trump plans to offset tariff revenues with vastly larger tax cuts for his rich donors. Moreover, as Trump raises tariffs, the U.S. will face counter-tariffs that will directly impede U.S. exports. The result will be lose-lose for the U.S. and the rest of the world.

Let’s look at the numbers. In 2024, the U.S. exported $4.8 trillion in goods and services, and imported $5.9 trillion of goods and services, leading to a current account deficit of $1.1 trillion. That $1.1 trillion deficit is the difference between America’s total spending in 2024 ($30.1 trillion) and America’s national income ($29.0 trillion). America spends more than it earns and borrows the difference from the rest of the world.

Trump blames the rest of the world for America’s deficit, but that’s absurd. It is America that is spending more than it earns. Consider this. If you are an employee, you run a current account surplus with your employer and a deficit with the companies from which you buy goods and services. If you spend exactly what you earn, you are in current account balance. Suppose that you go on a shopping binge, spending more than your earnings by running up credit-card debt. You will now be running a current account deficit. Are the shops ripping you off, or is your profligacy driving you into debt?

Tariffs will not close the trade deficit so long as the fiscal irresponsibility of the corporate raiders and tax evaders that dominate Washington continues. Suppose, for example, that Trump’s tariffs slash the imports of automobiles and other goods from abroad. Americans will then buy U.S.-produced cars and other merchandise that would have been exported. Imports will fall, but so too will exports. Moreover, new tariffs imposed by other countries in response to Trump’s tariffs will reinforce the decline in U.S. exports. The U.S. trade imbalance will remain.

While the tariffs will not eliminate the trade deficit, they will force Americans to buy high-priced U.S.-produced goods that could have obtained at lower cost from foreign producers. The tariffs will squander what economists call the gains from trade: the ability to buy goods based on the comparative advantage of domestic and foreign producers.

The tariffs will raise prices for automobiles and wages of automotive workers, but those wage hikes will be paid by lower living standards of Americans across the economy, not by a boost of national income. The real way to support American workers is through federal measures opposite to those favored by Trump, including universal health coverage, support for unionization, and budget support for modern infrastructure, including green energy, all financed with higher, not lower, taxes on the wealthiest Americans and corporate sector.

The federal government does not cover its overall spending with tax revenues because wealthy campaign donors promote tax cuts, tax avoidance (through tax havens) and tax evasion. Remember that DOGE has gutted the audit capacity of the IRS. The budget deficit is currently around $2 trillion dollars, or roughly 6 percent of U.S. national income. With a chronically high budget gap, the U.S. trade balance will remain in chronic deficit.

Trump says that he will cut the budget deficit by slashing waste and abuse through DOGE. The problem is that DOGE mispresents the real cause of the fiscal profligacy. The budget deficit is not due to the salaries of civil servants, who are being wantonly fired, or to the government’s R&D spending, on which our future prosperity depends, but rather to the combination of tax cuts for the rich, and reckless spending on America’s perpetual wars, U.S. funding for Israel’s non-stop wars, America’s 750 overseas military bases, the bloated CIA and other intelligence agencies, and interest payments on the soaring federal debt.

Trump and the Congressional Republicans are reportedly taking aim at Medicaid—that is, at the poorest and most vulnerable Americans—to make way for yet another tax cut for the richest Americans. They may soon go after Social Security and Medicare too.

Trump’s tariffs will fail to close the trade and budget deficits, raise prices, and make America and the world poorer by squandering the gains from trade. The U.S. will be the enemy of the world for the harm that it is causing to itself and the rest of the world.
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daddycat said:
No, it's the opposite. Interest rates go up with a good economy and go down with a bad economy, and the Fed merely follows the market interest rate. The Fed cut rates -0.50% under Biden in 9/2024 because the economy was already going down and the market interest rate was already going down.
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I'd keep an open mind. There are some really good interesting ideas in the video.
 
Serendipity said:
I'd keep an open mind. There are some really good interesting ideas in the video.
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People seem to have forgotten the 1970s. The relationship with interest rates is a lot more complex than bad economy interest rates go down. (1) The Fed has multiple mandates, and the "control inflation" is arguably the most important and (2) at a certain point the Fed even if politically pressured to lower interest rates, lose control on the long end of the curve. Trump's tariffs (before we even talk about a war with Iran) are going to put a lot of inflationary pressure on the country, especially if we get an ongoing tit for tat as countries keep ratching up rates to respond to the other side. If inflation is running at 10 - 20% based on tariffs and treasury supply (from huge deficits: long bond rates either go up so there is demand, or the fed prints money to devalue the dollar to meet that demand), long bond investors are going to require 10-20% interest rates at minimum so they are not losing money on fixed income investments. Inflation based supply constraints (like the oil shortages in the 1970s) and money printing can exist despite rising unemployment. The Phillips curve in reality is more like a scatter plot in practice. Throughout the 1970s you had stagnant growth and high inflation that was only choked off by massive interest rate hikes by Volker in the early 1980s. And Powell mentioned today himself that he did not intend to decrease rates because he expected MORE INFLATION because Trump's tariffs were even higher than he anticipated.
 
One other thing people need to think about. The US benefits from the trade deficits that Trump is trying to cut in a sense because the US is able to export a massive amount of its printed dollars overseas, essentially exporting inflation from money printing to other markets. As trade slows down between nations and other nations buy less stuff, they need less dollars. That is not to mention given the US's actions the last few years, combined with these tariffs they are going to want to reduce the use of the dollar in international trade...meaning all those dollars overseas likely flood back the domestic market. This fans the flames of inflation even more. And with that type of currency dynamic, the Fed will have to keep rates high enough to defend the currency.
 
WhiteMountain said:
This fans the flames of inflation even more.
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I think they may want higher inflation in order to "inflate away" at least a part of the huge US debt. Plus, a significant "side benefit" is that the richer get richer by holding real assets that appreciate in value, while everyone else gets poorer due to higher prices.

Don't know if Trump is aware of this basic dynamic of higher inflation or if it is again a case of receiving bad advice.
 
Boom! Trump shacks the entire world. Whats going on? Will he change course quickly into something else as we've seen before? Here's another theory, the objective is no tariffs world wide. I'm clueless, wait and see.

SummerLite said:
Colonel Towner-Watkins retired is a wealth of information for behind the scenes details. She has studied Operation Gladio thoroughly so a good one if your interested in covert operations conducted around the world. Here is an example of how the tariffs are affecting the stock market. I'm not well informed on economics at all so its an interesting learning experience.

Full comment:

So you are suppose to believe that Nike had ZERO influence in Vietnam to stop tariffing US goods into Vietnam?
Vietnam tariffs US goods into Vietnam. All the US oligarchs shipped all your jobs over to Vietnam to a protected market. Vietnam won't allow your manufactured goods into Vietnam, but your living wage job at McDonald's, which doesn't allow up to buy Nikes, should continue to be made in sweat shops with slave labor by ppl who live in shacks so the oligarchs can continue to get richer.

Brian is retarded. Don't be a Brian.


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A very quick response from Vietnam.



No tariffs on Russia

All nations are forced to the table for negotiations. The 2nd clip came with the 1st which is what I wanted to post.

 
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Here comes Canada.

Canada says they will take all tariffs off if US will do the same. It sounds like Doug Ford wants to sell Canadas mineral to the US. What a turn around from Canada.....wow! Ford was raving mad the last time I heard him speak on the tariffs. Chrystia Freeland wanted to nuke us.

 
I feel like Jefferson's second inaugural has some influence in this administration. In Jefferson's inaugural address he had commended the practice of funding the government solely through tariffs and no taxes: The Avalon Project : Jefferson's Second Inaugural Address

"The remaining revenue on the consumption of foreign articles, is paid cheerfully by those who can afford to add foreign luxuries to domestic comforts, being collected on our seaboards and frontiers only, and incorporated with the transactions of our mercantile citizens, it may be the pleasure and pride of an American to ask, what farmer, what mechanic, what laborer, ever sees a tax-gatherer of the United States? These contributions enable us to support the current expenses of the government, to fulfil contracts with foreign nations, to extinguish the native right of soil within our limits, to extend those limits, and to apply such a surplus to our public debts, as places at a short day their final redemption, and that redemption once effected, the revenue thereby liberated may, by a just repartition among the states, and a corresponding amendment of the constitution, be applied, _in time of peace_, to rivers, canals, roads, arts, manufactures, education, and other great objects within each state."

And
"The suppression of unnecessary offices, of useless establishments and expenses, enabled us to discontinue our internal taxes."

These are different times given the US dollar's hegemony, so if other countries retaliate the US could see inflation. But other countries, as I understand it, are only seeing reciprocal tariffs, and the effect of inflation would be mitigated by internal projects or investment in the US, which should create jobs. Unless the rich conspire to not invest in the US.

Automation was always an issue. If machines replace workers 100%, then we will either regress into a 2D reality or live in a dreadful utopia.
 
iamthatis said:
Following up on machines replacing human labour... with Trump's tariffs, the plan is to re-shore American industry. Will this benefit the population, in particular his MAGA base? Lutnick, in line with Fink above, says robots will replace cheap labour and American workers will have the task of servicing the new robot class.



So along with Rubio's use of AI to search for 'antisemitism' in America, AI used in strike targeting in the genocide in Gaza, and a whole host of manifestations, yet another technocratic ideal is being pushed - robots to replace human workers. It's already been around the world since the industrial revolution, and I wonder if we may see an explosion of robotics onto the scene in the USA. Maybe not soon, but that's the plan. That might mean that eventually a whole lot of workers will not be needed. So what about those workers to be replace by robots? At the extreme end of the scale, here is what one technocrat envisions:



Jeffrey Sachs wrote a piece on the tariffs themselves. His piece has me thinking that this is a big lie being sold to the American public - the whole 'we are the biggest victims in the world, everyone is ripping us off' narrative. It's being used to justify a new level of technocratic advance into the American body politic and the eventual ruin/humane genocide of workers. And all the while telling Americans/MAGA it's good for them.

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It seems as though depopulation is well underway and the attacks on population numbers are coming from multiple angles. It's possible that the effects will be felt for generations. Perhaps there's a bunch of processes in tension that goes like this:

➡️ Group A: Lets depopulate!
➡️ Group B: Damn, the population is decreasing, how do we stop this? There won't be enough plebs to do our menial work or soldiers to stop Russia and China from eating us alive!
➡️ Group C: I know, lets open the borders and bring in heaps of immigrants. They can vote for us!
➡️ Group B: Damn, these immigrants are stirring up trouble and the natives are getting even more restless. We're not going to have soldiers or police officers to control everything and there won't be anyone to cook my dinner and make sure my pillows are fluffed.
➡️ Group A: Calm down you lot, don't forget robotics.
 
Automation was always an issue. If machines replace workers 100%, then we will either regress into a 2D reality or live in a dreadful utopia.
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I don't think its possible to replace workers by 100%. Thinking about this in a different way, perhaps humans are underestimated. If people are freed from tedious work they basically only endure for a pay check then they will be free to find other endeavors that are more creative and fulfilling, a more human society. Someone said recently, people would be forced to find their own value which is more of an internal change. The narrative always falls back onto this dystopian view which we've been programed to think no doubt.

We hear the energies are rising, we're in the Wave and the rays from Galactic Center reach the planet more as we move out of the dark ages of the Kali Yuga. We'll need to move out of the box and think differently. For some reason I always look for the bright side, I don't know why. :-)
 
daddycat said:
It took a little longer than 6 months. Now the stock markets are below where they were on 9/18/2024 when Federal Reserve rate cut -0.50%, which was during Biden, not Trump. I sounded a crash warning then. Now has a pre-crash look, so the weekend and Monday could be ugly.
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Post election seasonality shows a drop in the markets from Feb/March till beginning of April and then the markets rally back. During Biden we saw the same type of scenario. What's different now is the degree of movement in a relative short period of time, which is what you typically see during a crash. The drop in the past few days is the sharpest drop in recent history but considering the overinflation we are experiencing it doesn't mean it's the worse percentage wise, though a crash is a crash. During 2008 for example, the markets dropped by 50% in that year. Covid was 30% I believe. We're seeing a 6% drop in 2 days, which is very very quick price movement and If the markets keep dropping through the following week then we're entering recession levels in the market.

I was anticipating a recession in 2026 and a normallish drop this year but all bets are off. Considering the C's warning about early summer... It's hard to say for now. It could be the beginning of a minor recession now, with implementation of next level evil shenanigans, and a bigger one next year but the markets are extremely volatile right now, so we'll see what happens soon.
 
From Trump Elected: The True MAGA Era Begins, Now What?

SummerLite said:
Boom! Trump shakes the entire world. Whats going on? Will he change course quickly into something else as we've seen before? Here's another theory, the objective is no tariffs world wide. I'm clueless, wait and see.



A very quick response from Vietnam.



No tariffs on Russia

All nations are forced to the table for negotiations. The 2nd clip came with the 1st which is what I wanted to post.

Click to expand...
Canada also.
 
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