An interesting subtext to the election of Donald Trump is one that has been largely ignored by the usual sources. It was not cultural issues, foreign policy or the ineptitude of Kamala Harris that drove the election. It was the economy. Widespread anxiety over the economy is what drove down support for Harris, despite the billion-dollar campaign and the billions spent in media gaslighting. No amount of jawboning could convince the public that the economy is doing as good as claimed.
There is a good reason for this. As some have predicted, inflation has been creeping back up after having moved down for a period. The American economy is experiencing what happened in the 1970’s. Contrary to popular belief, inflation did not rage for the entire decade but ran in spurts. There were periods where inflation rose, plateaued and then fell to a tolerable level. The latest data on the CPI and the PPI indicate the current economy is stuck in a similar pattern.
Regime media dismisses this as a minor blip in an otherwise glorious economy, managed by the wise and noble Biden administration, but that has not convinced anyone who buys things. The government does not measure inflation the same way it used to measure it in the 1970’s, so no talk of stagflation. If they used the old methods, inflation would be a daily feature. Of course, you also have the fact that the government now lies about all of the economic data.
This is why the gaslighting failed so miserably in the election. One of the secrets to trick people is to overcome the expectations gap. This is the difference between what people expect to be the basis of the argument and the actual basis of the argument. If you confirm what people think is true and make your argument from that basis, you can convince people of most anything. If you start from an alternative reality as your basis, then you have little chance, no matter how clever the argument.
That does not alter the fact that the economy may be in worse shape than the government and media are willing to admit. There are systemic problems that go back a long way that may finally being coming to the fore. Twenty years ago, everyone talked about what would happen to the labor force when the baby boomers started to retire, but no one talks about it now that they are retiring. Of course, no one dares talk about is replacing those baby boomers in the workplace.
For his part, Trump talks about the need to reform the economic model away from everyone doing each other’s laundry back to building things again. Part of his approach to China is to bring back important parts of the industrial base. Trump is committed to a form of Abenomics which means massive new spending to attract private capital, along with policies to coerce those investments. He will come to office just as government spending is setting new records.
This sort of worked in Japan because they have a strong industrial base that supports their export economy. They also have a homogenous culture with a commitment to self-sufficiency and a savings rate to prove it. For America, this can only work with low interest rates and that can only happen if the dollar returns to its dominant position in global trade and investment. It is why Trump is threatening to nuke any country thinking about going off the dollar.
The trouble is, people will trade in a currency if it is backed by something accepted everywhere like gold or the issuing country produces things that the rest of the world covets, like food, manufactured goods and energy. Alternatively, as has been the case for decades, countries will transact in a currency if it is viewed as a stable store of value by the rest of the world. The dollar has been the reserve currency because of the petrodollar and because it came with a stable set of rules.
Constant rule breaking by Washington has depressed the trust in the dollar because the rules behind it have collapsed. The only reason that the BRICS countries are working on an alternative payment system is they fear dependence on the dollar makes their governments unstable. Added to this is the fact that the Saudis have not renewed the petrodollar agreement signed in the 1970’s. This has not resulted in a change in policy, but China just sold dollar-denominated bonds in Riyadh.
This is one reason the foreign policy establishment is committed to creating chaos in the Middle East. The United States is not just the world’s banker. It is also the world’s protection racket and the countries that need protection the most are those near places with lots of instability. You can be sure that the collapse of Syria is keeping the sheiks in Riyadh tossing and turning at night. Here you see the connection between foreign policy and economic policy. In the end, it is always about money.
This is what Trump will inherit next month. On the one hand, the economic model of the American empire relies on the world being a dangerous place. This is what makes the world willing to put up with Washington in exchange for protection. At the same time, that model is slowly hollowing out the American middle-class. The imperial model works just fine if American citizens accept being mere subjects alongside the rest of the world’s population. Clearly they do not like this.
To some degree you can understand why permanent Washington has reacted to Trump and the populist movement that has made him possible with such fear. They understand the risks that come with putting the American people first. It is not just the cultural stuff or the paranoid fear of the past. It is the understanding that the imperial economic system cannot prioritize Americans over the others getting protection. Protection rackets must protect everyone inside the racket.
Whether or not Trump understands this is a mystery, but he is committed to an American form of Abenomics. It was not an accident that he hosted Abe’s widow last week at Mar-a-Lago. Scott Bessent, Trump’s pick to run Treasury, is known as “The Man Who Broke the Bank of Japan” because his hedge fund made billions from Abenomics by understanding it in great detail. Whether it can work in America is unknown, but we will know soon enough.
That is the irony of the Trump election. He was elected in large part to fix the economy, by which people mean lower inflation and increase wages. Republicans have done this with tax cuts and corporate giveaways and Democrats have done it with spending programs and corporate giveaways. The Trump plan is to restructure the economy, which will require massive spending and a considerable amount of pain. It is a radical departure from what people have come to expect.
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The disfiguration of America is striking. In the 80s it was the suburb, the suburban strip mall, the shopping mall/galleria, and the mega church. Now that is decaying and you have a mass human disfigurement.
It is absolutely striking to see TGR and its disfigurement of the population itself. In some areas you can drive vast distances and not see a single American – a person who looks like you.
It makes Starbucks, Little Caesar’s and Taco Bell happy.
Disfigurement. That is the legacy of the Regime on The Potomac.
Well said!!
Even the white folks are largely disfigured now, obese and covered in tattoos.
The suburb/strip mall/indoor mall thing was itself a gay op and now they can’t even do that anymore. It’s like our system trades one gay op for another
“Of course, no one dares talk about is replacing those baby boomers in the workplace.” Come now. We all know those thieving Boomers will be rightfully replaced by those Millennials and Zoomers whom they wrongfully displaced through dint/luck of birth cohort. Right? Wrong. The Boomers were overwhelmingly White and the powers that be have decided to replace them with a non-White demographic—a demographic woefully not up to such a monumental task as extending a 1st world technological society such as they were given. The Boomers will all be dead and gone in 20 years. Gen X’ers will mask the decline,… Read more »
Compsci- Good points, I just slightly disagree with your timeline. I feel as though we are already seeing significant declines in the workforce due to Boomers and early Xers retiring or being forced out of the workforce via ageism. I think this will accelerate as all the Boomers cycle out of the workforce because X is a numerically smaller generation and the relative quality of our education was less than that of the Boomers and other prior generation. I write this as a very late Xer. I’d like to be able to argue that my generation will somehow turn things… Read more »
What concerns me is that as the Silents and Boomers (and Millenials) pass, so goes the deep talent pool of knowing how to do things from scratch. There’ll be nobody left to teach the next generations how to bootstrap or even do anything.
We have YouTube as a great repository of human knowledge until some future 28 year old MBA at Google decides that maintaining 50 year old video files that no one watches is too expensive and has them deleted.
Howard, can’t argue with you there. My weakness is being an overly optimistic sort wrt my dire predictions. 😉
The declining education system was a good catch. In these matters of prognostication there are any number of confounding factors. Your observation, educational decline, might be ameliorated by AI as such unfolds in the current decade. Who knows?
It’s interesting that the Harvard Bus School MBA program currently runs a teaching case study on the decline of Boeing – with a grand reveal that Boomer accountants and top management *a quarter century ago* are directly responsible for the lethal decline of a once gold standard aviation company. Nothing is dare said in class (and the teaching notes make no mention of it) about the loss and marginalization of pale, stale and male Boomer engineers and their replacement by vibrant DEI quota “talent”. Thus one of the *real* teaching and learning take-aways is a strong validation of Z-Man’s Expectations… Read more »
Yep. Recently speaking to an old friend I went to school with (50 years ago and just reunited) who is familiar with Boeing’s quality control decline. Oddly, he could not lay his finger on the cause of the problem until I pointed out demographic changes and DIE initiatives out to him. He has not stopped talking about such since. It was a revelation. This guy is bright, yet blinded because no one he interacts with dared be the first to “cross that line”.
I happened to go in a Verizon office yesterday for a phone problem. The staff were young people, mostly non-white, heavily pierced and tattooed,a few of the men effeminate-looking and all dressed in very unbusinesslike, casual, almost scruffy clothing (their equivalents are everywhere). We Boomers are leaving the country to a generation of pitiable Sad Sacks.
“We Boomers” largely welcomed in our progeny’s replacements with open arms in the name of luv and equality. “We Boomers” are considerably less likely than Millennials to gift any of “our” money to our own children during our lifetimes. Too busy spending it and ‘living our best lives’ to think about future generations. “We Boomers” are a prime example of short-time preferences. The fact that Boomers tend to be White and better educated is a legacy from earlier generations – one we squandered. Those “pitiable Sad Sacks” are the result of “We Boomers” preoccupation with ourselves.
No argument here, but a bit of a clarification/addition—for what it’s worth. This “Boomer” married another Boomer who also has three degrees. We Boomers put our children into private schools as soon as the public ones revealed their true nature. We Boomers put our children through university while 1) approving the major and university, and 2) requiring that both children work while going to school in order to pay their share, which actually was about the total cost if one considers the scholarships they received. The result. Two offspring who graduated with honors, no debt, and walked immediately into 6… Read more »
No, Compsci, we must break from those hidden chains and forge anew. They are too easily swayed, buoyed by the illusion of belonging to a past that never was.
You have done them a service; I suspect that your decency was intrinsic, not learned from an artifice. That is the true heritage you have given them.
The purpose of the system is the System. Christianity was such a vessel, but having been turned, is become social gospel and messianic projection. It could not keep up with the modernized environment.
For some boomers that may be true, it’s definitely the stereotype.
Not all.of us are selfish bastards that retire to a vineyard despite what you see on TV. I plan to work.till noon on the day I die. Just not for the man.
Of course it’s a generalization – I’m just tired of the ‘Not all boomers” standard reply, plus the generalization about younger generations that disregards how they ended up the way they did. My kids have not been all that successful by most metrics, and I have plenty of frustrations with them – but they both remain believing Christians and they are both race realists. And they know we love them and have their backs – perhaps too much so.
Exactly 3g4me. This “hooray for boomers” circlejerk going on in this thread is a little nauseating. It certainly wasn’t the face tattooed 20somethings that sold the country’s patrimony to China in order to buy themselves a 40 foot RV to cruise in with their 3rd spouse. As someone just barely old enough to know what they missed out on, I say that today’s youth deserve pity far more than scorn, they don’t even know what they could have had. Vox day is a huge clown, but he isn’t wrong about the boomers and their infinite self-regard. For some reason that… Read more »
What is nauseating is this total cluelessness. As a group, Boomers had less to do with selling out to China than you do with the border jumpers.
Boomers had no right to tell people what they could and could not do with their own stuff. While we were not happy with it, legally and morally, it was not our call.
Gen Z is a larger cohort than Boomer. Millennials are only a bit smaller. Why can’t they stop the migrants? This is legally and morally their call.
Todays youth. I never wanted to be the old bastard complaining about the lazy young people.
I think most of todays problems stem from the old saw. Hard times make hard men etc..
The good times have lasted for a long while. Now it’s looking like the sky really is falling.
I home daddy trump finds a way through that isn’t war.
‘The American economy is experiencing what happened in the 1970’s.’ But America is a vastly different country today than in the Seventies. I drove around the western U.S. before I left the nation, for an evaluation. I saw an utterly transformed country. Shops boarded up everywhere, litter all over the avenues, crazies wandering around. Tent-cities everywhere . . . streets full of men cast away in the 50-year pogrom to replace them en masse in education and employment with The Empowered Ones. Replacing an 80 million-strong productive workforce with an unproductive and entitled workforce has consequences. That isn’t about retiring… Read more »
I live near San Diego, CA, which likes to bill itself as “America’s finest city.” The decline of the city has been striking, with many of the signs of decline you cited. Not coincidentally, what used to be a Republican stronghold is now dominated by Democrats. They hold three of the four congressional seats in the county, all of the seats on the San Diego city council (and the mayor is a homosexual to boot) and a majority on the County Board of Supervisors. That board recently voted to make the county a sanctuary county. Fortunately, the county sheriff said… Read more »
My brother was born in San Diego. Fifty years ago it was a gem of a city. I’m sorry, but not surprised, to receive your updated report.
‘the county sheriff said she’
No. Just no. A very hard no. And the same for the feminist ‘conservatives’ that infest the GOP.
Hahahahaha. I too had my brain “fart” for a second, when I read that the sheriff was a “she.” Hmmmph. Women need to be keeping the home, and having babies. And the men need to be repealing the 19th Amendment. But of course all of that is a pipe dream. We are right to ask the Big Question: “How on earth did we get here?” I honestly think it’s a collection of factors: NWO, brown horde invasion, Boomer lack of understanding (not entirely their fault, I must admit), Satan’s successful activity, decline of education (but I repeat myself)… and more.… Read more »
The problem with Trump’s plan is that no one trusts the US anymore (and that includes the mercurial Trump)….and with US debt soon crossing the 40 trillion level and escalating rapidly, owning dollars that you can’t spend right away is beginning to look like a bad bet…
Quite right. No-one trusts the dollar to be a stable repository of purchasing power. Probably not a single person here does. Holding dollars or dollar-denominated paper such as T-bills is to watch your purchasing power erode away like a sand castle to an incoming tide. But the empire needs others to want to accept dollars in exchange for hard goods. And this can perhaps only be done (and that too only in the short term) by an escalating level of violence. This is the crazy and desperate logic of a hollowed-out empire.
This is very bad. I assume the vicious seller’s market in housing is related to dollars coming onshore. The GAE’s home territory is for sale to the highest bidder. Things are going to get way worse too.
Sorry, but there’s no other choice than the dollar (and thus treasuries) – at least for now. Name me a currency that is better than the dollar. Name me a govt bond that is in the same universe in terms of liquidity as t-bills.
I hate GAE, but the dollar isn’t going anywhere until an alternative reserve asset can be found. Heck, the biggest problem for the dollar is that it’s too strong.
Right? There are too many wealthy Chinese hoovering up real estate in the West to make anyone feel comfortable holding their wealth there. Then you have the Euro. No one is going to trust a currency backed by a federation where the government of Germany, the key power, just collapsed. On top of that, that key power is rapidly de-industrializing because it insists on trying to function using the most expensive and unreliable forms of energy. No one with any financial sense is buying into that. No one in the West will trust Russia and the ruble because there are… Read more »
It’s not just trust in the various other currencies/govts. There’s also the issue of a deep bond market. If investors, businesses, banks and central banks want to hold your currency to use later, they need someplace stable and liquid to hold that currency, something that they can sell in an instant with no loss to obtain that currency. That’s T-bills. China doesn’t even have a govt bond market for foreigners. Germany’s govt bond market is tiny – and the Euro is tied to other countries beyond Germany. Japan, are you kidding me. Russia’s not even in the discussion. Btw, it’s… Read more »
“They know what having global reserve currency does to your economy. It de-industrializes it. They don’t want that.”
I don’t recall you stating this point so starkly before.
Is resigning from being the global reserve currency a necessary prerequisite for re-industrialization of the USA?
If Trump decided to follow your economic advice, do you have any to give?
U.S. labor (and for that matter, all “rich” nations’) is horribly expensive by world standards. This is probably the major factor that so many jobs “went overseas” in recent decades. Firms in the third world don’t need to obey silly environmental, pollution, workplace safety, etc. regulations either. That (and tariffs) is why an avocado that costs you $2.00 in San Diego can be had at a fraction of that price just south of the border. In the 1990s when I was in my early 30s studying Computer Science, when I was in a sarcastic mood I would “share with” the… Read more »
“They know what having global reserve currency does to your economy. It de-industrializes it.”
I’m pretty sure that’s not true. I know of no inherent characteristic of a reserve currency that inexorably leads to deindustrialization. It didn’t happen to any degree for at least the first 20 years of Bretton-Woods.
On the other hand, it does decouple the immediate consequences from the action of profligate spending. People used to empiricism can be tempted with stupid ideas like “deficits don’t matter” or “invite the world”.
Incidents like this West-backed scooter bomb assassination of a top Russian general in the middle of Moscow are also awful for Russia’s perception:
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/head-russias-chemical-biological-defense-forces-assassinated-moscow
I mean, if you can’t protect your top people what can you protect?
Nothing like this happened in the KGB days.
Since GAE can’t win a real war, they’ll be satisfied winning the propaganda war. Perception seem to matter much more to them than to Russia.
Terrorism is a good asymmetrical weapon for weak players to use against stronger ones. I’ve noticed that a lot of what “Ukraine”** does against Russia that makes headlines pretty much falls into the category of terrorism or comes damn close. Recall that group of drones they sent to attack some buildings in Moscow. They did some damage but nothing significant. The whole point seems to have been to get a propaganda victory. Then you’ve got their love of assassinations using bombs like when they killed Dugin’s daughter and now this latest hit on the official mentioned at ZH. You might… Read more »
for us here in canuckistan the USD is rock solid.
I think this might identify the unspoken question about Bitcoin.
The coin people and Trump backers (it seems) are are pumping Bitcoin and private ‘stablecoins’ as the big new thing.
Whitney Webb warns that CBDC is unnecessary; the governments are shifting to managerial class privately generated stablecoin because it is already mature, established, and just as trackable and programmable (restrictable) as cbdc. Also, it has that unaccountable public-private vibe one finds in NGOs.
As Citizen points out, there is no deep, liquid bond market for international settlement in Bitcoin. Banks, business, forex couldn’t operate as they do now.
Currencies have always been backed by governments since the first coins were minted in the 8th century, B.C.. Because of this, I have been skeptical of Bitcoin-type currencies that bill themselves as free of government control.
Not totally true, you could take a Roman gold coin and spend it in China, no government needed. Perhaps you’re thinking of Fiat currencies?
If those coins were made of gold, silver, and heck even copper, they still have value (ignoring sometimes astonishing numismatic premium) whether a government minted them last year, two centuries or two millennia ago. Their value was effectively set by the free market, not by government edict.
“there’s no other choice than the dollar (and thus treasuries) – at least for now. Name me a currency that is better than the dollar. Name me a govt bond that is in the same universe in terms of liquidity as t-bills.” This is all correct but it’s not a choice between one crud fiat currency and some other crud fiat currency. It’s an issue of getting out of fiat altogether, whether dollar, euro, or yen. Hard assets — land, gold — and something hopefully impervious to state confiscation. I would assume (but don’t really know) that wanting to get… Read more »
“Hard assets — land, gold — and something hopefully impervious to state confiscation.”
PM’s are the only hard asset with zero counter party risk, IF one possesses them outside the system. Land has counter party risk.
Arshad Ali, what would be your top 3 destinations?
I have to agree. In fact, I had lost sight of the economic picture with regards to Syria, but it is a perfect example of how the financial kingpins of this world periodically sow chaos from the Acela corridor. They have no other tool when things look dire for the existing international financial arrangements than to sow chaos in the rest of the world. That eventually starts a flight to the dollar in order to buy U.S. debt, the “dirtiest shirt in the hamper”. It has always worked before (but of course someday it won’t.)
Syria, and many other troubled countries, will continue to economically function, albeit poorly, because their transactional exchanges will involve other currencies like the dollar and euro. This is how Zimbabwe’s populace survives.
You know the dollar is dome when you find a country in economic distress and the populace reverts to exchange with rubles or yuan.
Yes and yes. TomK and Compsci neatly summarize today’s Z-post with both its question and our quandry.
No one trusts anyone anymore.
Is there a relation between this reality and the noise about strategic bitcoin reserves coming out of Russia and Trump’s camp?
I understand bitcoin in theory but not in practice. I also understand that a lot of our guys have been holding it for a long time.
Many Boomer conservatives have a strong libertarian streak, and naturally Trump is intrigued by Bitcoin. I think he’s considering options and plan B’s rather than grasping the USD’s fading aura like an old pagan religion.
There may be a bad side here if it involves digital currency to replace our fiat currency. No one controls Bitcoin in theory, but you can’t exchange it like the paper money in my wallet.
And the biggest threat is far and away its reliance on internet. Even if you meshnet, at some point you need a gateway out of your local community.
A social credit system is not impossible to implement in the States. Debanking and deplatforming is a real thing. So is the “kill switch” in your automobile, back to at least 2008 or so. Your ATM card stops working, your credit cards are denied at the grocery store. Your smart meter shuts off your electricity.
It is insanely easy to make us do something stupid, one at a time.
“I understand bitcoin in theory but not in practice.”
Like youtwit(x)facein, crypto is an intel fronted ponzi scheme.
Collectible surveillance. The most dystopian currency imaginable.
The teenage Randians among us don’t care what it is. They just enjoy the thought of other people being ripped off, losers and haters missing out, etc. They’ll give up everything for that feeling.
It’s been edifying, not only for those running the experiment (“intelligence,” roughly), but for us.
Total nerd death.
Bitcoin isn’t freedom from gubbermint intervention and surveillance. It is the summa of gubbermint intervention and surveillance, a highway-marker on the road to CBDC, which the globalists and banksters are gonna install one way or the other.
Then nobody (except them) will have any freedom at all.
Florida banned cbdcs so it’s not totally lost
Exactly. Once my adopted nation heard the Fed’s Build Back Better agenda (we have to destroy ourselves in order to create a More Just World) and saw America intentionally ruining itself via the Scamdemic, they jumped off the Dollar Train. Fast. I guess folks have forgotten the forced closure of hundreds-of-thousands of small businesses because, uh, Covidemic.
Thus, the dollar began a years-long tanking here, because what sane nation would place any amount of trust in a country that has announced — overtly and covertly — that it wishes to die?
Never a truer word spoken.
The debt wouldn’t be that big of a deal if our GDP was real. Problem is, the GDP is bullshit. Nov 2024 was a 76.1 billion trade deficit. I doubt we have had a single positive balance of trade number in this century yet. The national debt has grown every single year since 1963. There are all these articles and videos from the usual suspects about how Americans are so uninformed because despite everyone complaining about the economy, the US economy according to GDP is doing great. What are you going to believe, your lying eyes and purse or the… Read more »
“GDP is bullshit.”
Yep. And they know it. Its only purpose is to fool the rubes.
What is the free market price of an M1A2 Abrams? An F-35? There ain’t one. Put down whatever number gives you the GDP you want.
Man, does this essay cut to the chase – what’s good for America (more like the American government and its corporate cronies) is what’s bad for actual Americans. I guess we’ve incrementally and partially voted our way into this s*** over the many decades, but won’t be voting our way out now. Something a lot worse will happen sooner or later…
There was a video floating around X the other day where some woman with a wonderful Canadian lilt was giving Trudeau the business during a town hall for selling Canada out to the globalists. Trudeau – to his credit?? – seemed obsequious. Just a few years ago, he was yelling at the same types saying “Madame, vous êtes raciste!” Then of course a few weeks back Starmer in the UK basically apologized for immigration. I haven’t heard anything out of Australia yet, but those bloody c*nts had better get their act together, soon. It’s a shame about Australians, because they… Read more »
I was in Calgary during Thanksgiving. On the news, CBC I think, couldn’t tell if it was local or not, they were panicked about Trump’s tariff “threats” and lamenting Turdeau’s roughly 12% approval rating.
His finance minister, the woman who terrorized protesters awhile back, resig-fired in a bitchy letter to the PM.
Turdeau is trying to prevent the collapse of his leftist government as happened in France and Germany.
It’s time to pay the piper.
The debt to the piper is far greater than a no-confidence vote. Truly paying the piper would be a far, far higher toll.
It’s a start. But my favorite thing about the “government collapsed” problem is that an unelected caretaker bureaucrat force runs the country until elections are held.
IOW, when these governments collapse NOTHING ACTUALLY HAPPENS! lol
Aussies are ornery on a personal level but can be quite servile when it comes to officaldom.
Maybe something to do with being a penal colony: convicts rough with each other but following orders from the big boss.
I remember the Covid concentration camps in Oz and how little opposition there was from the people.
Australia is much like Texas in that it coasts on a reputation that ceased to be reality long, long ago. Australia has been largely urbanized most of its existence. The Covid tyranny was not a one-off, either. For example, after the Port Arthur Massacre the police with very little resistance sometimes kicked down doors to seize firearms. That was ’96. Like Texas, Australia still has a few based areas but they are and have been for more than a century in the minority.
The problem is the elite all over the US is (more or less) exactly the same.
Sticking with Texas, there is some bow-tie wearing (((Judge))) with a youtube channel who in an interview said he became (((judge))) (Judge Fleischer) to eliminate cash bail in the county he is in, at least for misdemeanors. I believe it’s Houston. He is a typical clown.
Nibbling around the edges isn’t going to fix anything. The American economy is rotten to the core. As a result of the rot, it is simply too expensive to manufacture or mine in the US if foreign competition is a viable alternative. It’s why we import steel rather than making it ourselves despite the massive iron ore deposits we are blessed with. It is impossible to compete with foreign companies which operate in places without all the regulations the US has. Even if workers in the US were literal slaves, we could not compete with workers in places like China… Read more »
This is the lesson that too few take from Mustache Man’s big mistake. He correctly realized that selling Germany’s vastly superior machine tools to untermenschen in exchange for cheap, low tech goods like food and fuel would eventually let them build their own factories. German autarky might have worked, but he quit trading tools for food way too early. German ag wasn’t close to sufficient, and it’s coal reserves weren’t suitable for autos. So he took on massive spending to get coal gasification going, and to jump-start ag. He would eventually come to realize that his autarky would only work… Read more »
Go deeper. We have been too affluent for too long and most Americans are now fat and only suited for busy work in the service or parasite industries. The value of the dollar is essentially tied to the productivity of its people, and we’ve just imported tens of millions of illegals to mow lawns and pick strawberries. Trump cannot wave a magic wand and turn this deadweight into rocket scientists. Each of us has a duty to remake ourselves as solid, strong, wise, and valuable contributors to real productive accomplishment. Anything else is failure.
“solid, strong, wise, and valuable contributors”
I was one of those in IT for many years until I got muscled out by a shitskin dot H1B.
Trump LOVES him some H1Bs and said he’s staple green cards to foreign graduates of US universities.
Some magic wand.
Trump needs to tighten up the H1b VISA’s. To wit, a case must be made for “no American available” issue only and then for a limited duration. About a decade or so ago, there was a squawk in the IT industry when Disney obtained H1b VISA’s to *replace* their entire IT department. I remember distinctly because I had always assumed this was impossible and against the program “rules”. Disney offered something like 6 weeks severance iff their departing American IT folk stayed on to *train* their Indian replacements!
“To wit, a case must be made for “no American available” issue only and then for a limited duration.”
I’d go further than that — no way, no how.
There are all kinds of qualified people holding lesser positions. Without the H1bs, you would just hire them out of the low- and entry-level positions, freeing up space for younger programmers to get experience.
Rip the damn bandaid off. The wound is going septic.
People (or at least I used to) conflate h1b with high skill when it’s often not. Hell, even if it was, there are still plenty of Americans who can do the work
“…and we’ve just imported tens of millions of illegals to mow lawns and pick strawberries.”
Don’t forget their primary purpose — to eat us out of house and home.
Since the plandemic, I’ve kind of given up making economic predictions, because who could have predicted that, which was primarily an economic event, first and foremost. Being so informed, that they are willing and able to do things beyond imagination to save/protect their system, introduces a little humility in forecasting. I note that they did that with Trump in office, which he is about to be again.
Good point. The loss of normalcy makes forecasts shaky at best.
“I’ve kind of given up making economic predictions, because who could have predicted that, which was primarily an economic event, first and foremost.” If you had heard about the repo problems at the banks late summer 2019, you knew something was coming. I just didn’t expect the fraud of covid. Though when you consider how much of the economy is fraud, well you need an even bigger fraud to cover it up and give you excuses to print money and bailout your cronies. The covid numbers were fraud, so what do you think about economic numbers? And i’d argue they’ve… Read more »
The numbers have been fraud far longer than that. It was JFK who didn’t like unemployment. So he changed the way it gets recorded and magically we have lower unemployment. It was under Nixon that they first started really mucking around with inflation numbers, so magically, we’re whipping inflation now (WIN!).
When you consider September 2019 was when the left, out of the blue, began an impeachment against trump, it really makes you wonder what the hell was going on. Like someone should foia all communications during that time.
Then, when the impeachment was over, COVID happened almost like clockwork. Was the impeachment a time buying exercise?
The problem with Abenomics is it didn’t have any effect on Japan’s low birthrate, currently 1.2 per woman and dropping. Not enough babies were born 25 years ago to provide the workers in 2025 to design and run an industrial economy, or any economy. Our birthrate is better, 1.7 and declining. It’s 1.6 for blacks, whites and Asians; 1.9 for Hispanics. No recent data for immigrant women, but it’s been 0.4-point higher than native women. No one has a solution to this. But birth rates did tick up with the Reagan prosperity, as more families could afford to keep Mom… Read more »
I am very skeptical about any link between economics and fertility. Programs to increase TFR with tax breaks and cash prizes have all failed. Even cultural pressure seems to be failing in Asia. Now, any cultural pressure that does not address the defect of sexual equality is doomed to fail.
“I am very skeptical about any link between economics and fertility.” I’m not, its called a depression for a reason. Japan is essentially in the same boat as we are. They ran up a huge debt bubble, and then decided to put all the debts on the public ledger because letting capitalism do its thing would mean the people running the show wouldn’t be running the show anymore. That is all QE and 0% rates are about, making sure the people in charge stay in charge. Shoulda let it happen peacefully, we all know where this goes next. How you… Read more »
Birth rates have collapsed everywhere. Sure, the economy has some impact but not much. Urbanization hurts for sure.
But the big reason is equality. As soon as women are allowed to get an education and allowed (either legally or culturally) into the workforce, birth rates plummet.
Yup and yup.
Citizen, your comments are always astute and always cut to the underlying reality. Don’t know what a stute is however *groan*
It’s gotta be widespread porn. Unless your people are rapey and sex-crazed (cough cough Africans/Middle Easterners/South Asians cough cough excuse me) AND your culture doesn’t have marriage arrangements porn is enough to keep people from the arduous task of seeking out mates.
Contraception and abortion are the mothers of feminism. Women who have children to take care of are a different breed than childless singles (or childless marrieds).
Bingo! There is an outstanding graph of Japanese fertility rates during the 20th century. Unsurprisingly, the waterfall collapse begins when women were given equal rights after WWII when the US rewrote their constitution.
Watch for the white male hate to moderate some over the next few years. We will be driven to a massive war somewhere and the powers that be are going to need white males to fight it. The other demographics just won’t be up to it.
I pray that the younger generations don’t fall for it like the previous ones did.
Very few young white males now are soldier material. Obesity and brain damage are rampant among them.
Good for them. Beats bone spurs and flat feet.
‘How you gonna have a family when a base house costs 400k and the media brain washes your wife to hate your sex?’
Yup.
Dude, I’ve lived in Japan for 30 years, nobody talks about the national debt. Its not a topic most normal Japanese people talk about and never will be brought up. Nobody gives a shit about it. The economic hardship factor coming from that somehow suppressing birthrate doesn’t compute with observable reality.
What does, however, seems constant is low birth rates in countries with a presence of a high standard of living, living a “soft” life where no discernible physical danger is present, and abundance material wealth.
Economics is just an excuse not to have kids, not a valid reason.
“Japanese people talk about and never will be brought up. Nobody gives a shit about it”
And do you think they’d talk about it if they weren’t a western client state? I bet they would.
“Economics is just an excuse not to have kids, not a valid reason.”
Unless they’re someone you don’t like right? If you don’t think an endless march up in the cost of living doesn’t have any outcome on this they i’m not sure how i can convince you.
The national debt in the United States isn’t as widely discussed as in the past, either. Was it even mentioned in its last election?
Nope, and since no on is talking about it, can’t be important 😉
It’s like discussing craters on the moon: there’s absolutely nothing that can be done about it anyway.
disagree. You ignore it, the debt gets worse and the outcome gets worse with it.
Huzzah to Templar for the contrarian view. Something doesn’t wash with the ‘educated women’ schtick; I’d say it’s more a conformity with school year scheduling.
In other words, we outlawed puberty so we could match Rockefeller school schedules. Marriage after all is license to procreate. Let’s bring the young ones back into the system at an earlier age: work, marry, trade skills (remember Home Economics?). And adjust society to young people having kids, instead of scheduling kids to “society”.
Earlier participation is what we need.
An “old maid” was 18 in Mom’s day.
Seconded.
TFR doesn’t tell the whole story. There is also the phenomenon of women waiting into their thirties to have kids. This, I would argue, is a consequence of economics. Let’s say women had their 2.1 kids at or by 21. If this pattern holds then women would be grandmothers at 42, great grandmothers at 63, and great-great grandmothers at 84. However, if women hold off on their 2.1 kids until 35, then they are grandmothers at 70, and unlikely to ever be great grandparents, let alone great-great ones. See the problem? The TFR is still 2.1, but a whole generation… Read more »
Yep. I see all kinds of analysis for why birth rates have collapsed and many of the reasons (urbanization, high costs, etc.) mentioned, I’m sure, have some merit but, ultimately, are minor.
The big issue is equality. No matter the country or economy, as soon as women are allowed to be educated and are allowed (either legally or culturally) to enter the workforce, birth rates plummet. But no one – and I mean no one – wants to admit that this is – by far – the biggest contributor to falling birth rates.
Women love their new-given supremacy over men, the international elite adore it for its griftiness and its neutralization of potentially restive men, and the parents of girls are all for it, because now my princess will never need no man.
Who, exactly, does that leave to oppose it? Not enough is who, and these are carefully kept voiceless. Nor can the real problem — feminism and its bedmate egalite — even be brought up in national conversation; it is taboo. You hear The Great Donald opposing feminism, single-motherhood and ‘equality’? Not on your life, Jack. (channeling my inner Biden)
ray – a large portion of the commenters here have daughters . . . whom they have sent to public schools, allowed on social media, helped apply to colleges, and who were raised by their own working mothers. Because they ‘need’ a career and a way to support themselves, and because it’s not an accepted idea to marry and procreate young, and because many of their male counterparts have been raised on the same lies and demand a college-educated working wife. There is sadly no way to fix this short of a return to economic and social reality – and… Read more »
My favorite thing, and i’m not sure when this became a thing, are people who aren’t married or have families buying a home……. for themselves. Talk about a coffin of consumerism
Just like all the women who can’t boil water yet demand a designer kitchen. Or a few of the ‘off grid” or “homestead” youtube channels, where the White couples (and the moronic female commenters) are all about dogs and goats but don’t plan to have children.
‘a large portion of the commenters here have daughters’ Oh yeah I figgered. Want your daughters to go to the front of every social, legal and cultural line? Well that means enraging God and forfeiting your nation. Abenomics ain’t gonna save ya. ‘There is sadly no way to fix this short of a return to economic and social reality – and that only via great economic and social hardship.’ You are likely correct, but I’m trying to show how to fix it without that. It CAN be fixed without collapse and great suffering, but it’s NOT free. Their princesses cannot… Read more »
I am in that dock. Thanks for the firm, accurate assessment– I am navigating through those waters now.
The unnoticed part of the Information Revolution was that women went from factory assembly lines (“Liberation”) to fill the burgeoning need for data entry. The system needed sterile drones, and got them: the Hive.
I’m convinced most women only like the corporate life because its a continuation of high school. They love socializing, doesn’t matter how worthless or pointless, better then being at home raising your own kids not to be idiots i guess
Compare how much time they actually spend on productive work versus time spent on office birthday parties and Christmas celebrations and scheduling vacations.
I think the same is true for men. The jocks arrange for the company softball team, the student government types way too often end up schmoozing themselves into leadership, the nerds didn’t fit in, and still don’t. Everyone just keeps living the life he knows.
But IME, most men don’t form the more vile of the high-school-esque cliques in the workplace that women do.
CitizenOASC is correct on this. The Pill made demographic collapse inevitable for developed economies. Modern feelings of ennui accelerate it. Unrestricted female hypergamy turbocharges it. There’s credible data from multiple sources out there showing the bulk of young women are all chasing the same 15-20% of men – and they’d rather become cat enjoyers than settle for ‘normal’. And of course most people are fat and gross now, so not much natural attraction is even possible. I can’t recall the source, but it was pointed out that we have instincts for sex and for nurturing, but perhaps not for reproduction… Read more »
The hypergamy thing is definitely real, as is the fat slob epidemic. Data on female mate choice shows a very skewed bell curve, especially on the dating apps, which are how maybe more than half of young people meet these days. Pareto principle definitely applies. For some young men dating is almost as easy as ordering a pizza, for others… a seemingly Sisyphean task. That said, I strongly believe that 20% could be expanded quite a bit if more young men would get off their butts and exercise just a bit. Really doesn’t take that much, 2-3 hours a week… Read more »
Better economic conditions will have no effect on fertility as long as the women retain too much freedom. They are all crazy now. Give them more money and they will just spend it on more travel or an extra few cats.
It has been reported that Israel has had some success encouraging births among their Jewish population.
The last thing the world needs is more of them . . . from the country which produces almost all the worlds puberty blockers, international body organ brokers, etc. Not to mention the exceptionally high inbreeding and birth rates among their most ‘devout’ cohort who refuse to work or fight (that’s what goyim are for).
Yes, but that’s largely among the orthodox. They have high birth rates everywhere they live. The population collapse is largely in the secular jews.
“Economics” in the sense of monetary incentives is probably irrelevant. The idea that children are unaffordable matters. It works. It’s not an economic idea. It’s a curse, a hypnotic spell that sways intelligent women and low-T men. Low birth rate is a sign of obedience. The spurious causes—educated women, true wagie buying power, etc.—are other signs of it. To restrain the birth rate in Africa, Bill Gates needs an army of needles. To make Swedes and Koreans extinct, it takes only a word. But also, not breeding may be a correct reaction to the world being made uninhabitable. It’s being… Read more »
Good data here: https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate The crashing TFR is probably nature correcting for overpopulation. Example: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/11/001128070536.htm Humans aren’t the only creatures on the planet that adapt their child bearing to the environment around them. Humans just add a layer of complexity but it’s a fairly normal biological process of adjusting the birth rate to suit the availability of resources. Thats why policy changes don’t work short of straight up paying women to stay home and have kids while simultaneously eliminating most of the rearing costs. Everybody’s got a price. A lot of women work because they can. But many more work… Read more »
When you put a price on “birthing”, you then open the doors to cheaper ways to increase population, immigration. Of course, we have enough problems with such third world immigration.
If you look at an arithmetic chart of the world population throughout history, you can’t help but think this is the biggest bubble of all time.
https://ourworldindata.org/population-growth-over-time
My husband suggested a better idea – don’t pay the women, pay their HUSBANDS the extra $100k and they can again support a family on a single wage. Then the wives can stay home and raise their own children as they ought to. Out of all the people my husband and I knew socially and economically, I was the only stay-at-home mom. It cost us big economically, but we don’t regret it.
“Whether it can work in America is unknown, but we will know soon enough.”
It most probably can’t, and for reasons you carefully and patiently explain earlier in your essay. Trump will be trying to bail out a sinking imperial ship that has gaping holes in a dozen places with nothing save a cup in his hand. All empires are by definition extortion rackets and these rackets have lifespans that eventually expire. The same is now happening to the US empire, on which the sun is now setting.
The smart industrialists are not going to invest in America anymore IMHO. They have gamed out all of the scenarios and come to the conclusion that it just won’t pay off. For example billions of government supplied dollars spent to place a semi conductor factory in Arizona and the DIE policies are making it impossible to ever be competitive. The majority of the perspective companies bailed out. You do have some like Elon Musk but he is just a scammer. None of his Teslas would sell, save for massive government subsidies for EVs and tax breaks for owning one. Even… Read more »
“You do have some like Elon Musk but he is just a scammer. None of his Teslas would sell, save for massive government subsidies for EVs and tax breaks for owning one. Even then people are coming to understand just how impractical they are for most people.” I just came back from another visit to Mexico. This year (2024) one car in three sold in Mexico is Chinese. You can buy a BYD (Chinese electric car) for between $21,000 and $23,000. This is probably why Musk needs US government protection (Trump is threatening a 100% tariff on imports from Mexico).… Read more »
BYD is—if I have read and viewed tests correctly—an example of a quality EV in every sense. Musk would do well to be afraid. Again, China can build crap and rob you blind if you are unwary, but that aspect of their competition will never hurt us. Higher quality will, and China does produce some good stuff.
That’s not what I heard. I’m pretty sure it was BYD which just had a recall in Australia for electrocution hazard if you go to unplug it while still charging. There are a lot of reports out of China of BYDs crashing(on their own), airbags not going off, people trapped and unable to get out of burning BYD cars. People jokingly call them Burn Your Driveway. This may be just exaggeration for effect, but we’ve all been dealing with chineseum for over 2 decades and should have learned our lessons by now. Good luck trying to service anything out of… Read more »
These Chinese cars should never be approved for our highways. Take everything you know about pure Chinese (as in Chinese branded, not American branded made in China) consumer goods and now apply it to cars. I recommend you check out the Big Clive youtube channel. My favorite example is USB charge block that put 240v (UK spec) across the USB ground, the only part easy to touch.
They just had a recall on BYD cars in Australia for electrocution risk. Not to mention the potential for spying.
Indians. They’re being replaced by Indians, and more and more people *are* starting to notice and talk about it.
True, and its sickening. Better to burn everything down than hand it over to the poos. No measure is too extreme to fix that problem.
I’d rather burn down the poos and keep the everything.
From the joos to the poos!
That’s what I mean by Erectus Resurgent.
(Hybrids, that is, tribal social instincts leavened by CroMagnon / Denisovian intelligence.)
The generally-accepted figure for those living paycheck to paycheck is 78% of wage earners. When inflation outpaces wage increases, these people feel it intensely and cannot be BSed out of that feeling. They have little in the way of savings so any monetary setback (e.g., a major car repair) goes on the credit card to be repaid at arm-and-leg interest rates.
They’re just going to start telling the truth of the economy once Trump gets into office, or something close it. Expect further massive downgrades to the 2024 job numbers, and start reporting GDP contraction to get a “Trump recession” declared in 2025, even though the media spent most of 2021 claiming that two quarters of GDP contraction isn’t AKSHULLY a recession. Trump is going to be fighting these dynamics and the City of London while trying to nudge the economy is a structural direction that is healthier for America. That takes time. Unfortunately his moves are long-term, while the City… Read more »
I do love the idea that London,rather than Tel Aviv or New York, runs things.
Moar tea, guv’nor?
Much of the “City of London” is composed of Jewish financiers. They’ve intermarried with various levels of the native nobility and ‘captains’ of industry since the 1700s, but they remain well aware of their ancestry and cultivate their international ties.
Not London, the City of London, of which New York and Tel Aviv are branch offices. There is an article on Unz which discusses it. Basically it represents global finance and opposes any sort of economic nationalism or the idea that the government’s job is to take care of the well-being of its people.
Trump wants to use the threat of tariffs to bring manufacturing back to the US. That’s fine, but if he manages that, he’ll create problems for the dollar and inflation. Bringing manufacturing back will help blue collar workers but will also increase inflation. There’s a reason firm like to manufacture overseas. I’m fine with this, but will Americans be happy about higher prices? Probably not. Also, by reducing the trade deficit, you reduce the number of dollars leaving the US and thus floating around the global financial system. Given the relatively fixed need for dollars in the global financial system,… Read more »
Yep, all negative consequences in the immediate future. That’s the pain talked about here and everywhere there are knowledgeable people in the conversation. The real discussion should be to the effect of what brings the greatest good in the long run. For me, it’s that my neighbor has a job and a hope for a better future for his children. That his/our/my standard of living declines, so be it. Our standard of living is built on debt. It was phony to begin with. It can never be made real. When I was a young boy, we had everything we needed.… Read more »
The current system – dollar as the global reserve currency and globalization (shipping manufacturing overseas and importing workers to the US) – has been good for the three Ws: Washington, Wall Street and Walmart. It’s been a disaster for working-class whites. So, yeah, let that system burn to the ground. But you’re going to get higher costs of good and services and thank God for that. The upper middle class and rich people will have to pay more to get their lawn mowed and their kids watched. Too bad. And, yes, even working-class people will pay a bit more for… Read more »
The costs would be spread over society, the benefits would be concentrated in the working class. Sounds good to me.
Very well said. Reminds me of this quote from Fight Club: “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.”
I would add that the more shit we buy, the less likely we are to reproduce, which cycles us further down the happiness scale.
Best things in life are free. Friends, family, wife/husband, children.
Problem for us now is that basic food and shelter are becoming unaffordable for many. If I wanted to buy a house in my old neighborhood it would cost me a cool million….
My folks bought theirs for less than 10% of that. 30 years years ago… wtf.
The population now is around half again what it was when your parents bought. People moved further away to get lower prices. You can still do that. Just that your old neighborhood is no longer the place with the lower prices. You have to travel further, because of the more than 100 million more people in the States.
It doesn’t help that policy choices and personal preferences have driven those prices through the roof.
Yes. The incoming Trump Administration seemingly has baked into the cake continued inflation and increased interest rates. It will engage in deficit reduction kabuki and blame the cost cutting’s inevitable failure for the higher prices and the higher cost of borrowing. Will that work politically? Don’t discount it in a country with a high rate of innumeracy and economic illiteracy. If the rubes can be fooled into transferring the blame and the nation can reindustrialize, the country theoretically could thrive a long time. Also helpful is a media, including the financial press, that has discredited itself and will be ignored… Read more »
Agree, except the govt can’t afford positive real (above inflation) interest rates. They will deficit spend and one way or the other, keep treasury interest rates below the true inflation rate. If GDP is real growth + inflation, positive real interest rates are a budget killer. Assume 3% inflation and 2% real GDP growth, so 5% nominal. If you have the real interest rate on govt debt at just 1%, you’d have a 4% rate. With debt to GDP at 125%, that’s 5% of GDP going to interest on the debt. The govt only takes in ~17% of GDP, so… Read more »
I didn’t know there would be math!
I actually follow you but don’t see how negative interest rates could be imposed long term unless there were more political control of the Fed than there currently is. From memory, Europe’s experiment with negative interest rates ended after quite a bit of central bank grumbling. Also, hasn’t there already been some movement toward requiring financial institutions buying Federal debt? I know that’s at least been put on the table. If interest rates reflected reality even now, what would they be? It certainly would exceed those of the Seventies.
eta: I fact-checked myself and it seems Europe is considering a return to negative interest rates.
The Fed doesn’t necessarily have to buy the debt. They or Treasury Debt could just change the rules on banks, hedge funds and the mutual fund industry to require holding more treasury bonds. The Fed could also open a lending window to bank where the bank could borrow at a rate slightly below the interest on treasuries if they use the money to buy treasuries. Or the Fed could just guarantee treasuries so the banks could buy without fear. It’s not my world but even I know of five or ten things the govt could do outside of directly buying… Read more »
Btw, they could also just lie about the rate of inflation. If the govt says inflation is 3% but it’s really 6%, then nominal GDP growth will be ~8%.
If treasuries are earning 1% above the govt-stated inflation rate of 3%, the rate would be 4%, well below actual inflation.
The way core inflation is calculated now is a lie. Stripping out food and energy is said to be “helpful,” but that’s a double entendre.
Glad I bought them new-fangled “TIPS” 20 years ago and totally protected my investments from inflation.
“Totally protected”.
Poor, dumb, Moe…
Yes. To be clear, there has been movement by the Fed to require financial institutions to buy Tbills. I don’t know where that stands now.
Agreed. More simply stated, the only way to keep from bankruptcy is to reduce real debt with inflation. The only other option is spending cuts to everything, including the military and entitlements, but those are impossible politically until you are already in bankruptcy.
Correct. It sounds crazy, but the best option is to inflate away the debt. The alternative is a depression where the debt is wiped away via bankruptcy.
People hear this and think Weimar Germany, but it doesn’t have to be so drastic. However, the problem with this plan is that voters hate inflation.
For good reason. The average voter would be vastly better off with a deflating currency. “Sticky” wages have long been studied, and though there’s no rational explanation for it, it’s still a thing. Joe Q. Public would be vastly better off with “sticky” wages and falling prices.
Inflation as a relief valve does not work the same. See the Cantillon Effect for details.
Well, I don’t know. When The Male Starts To Hate…after all, sex might be women’s provenance, but violence is ours.
I’d say that makes a renaissance unlikely in the short term, which means a true renaissance in the long term…if only we can find our balls again.
Mayor LaGuardia didn’t call out the pipefitters’ union to fix the plumbing.
To be clear, I think a renaissance of any type is at best unlikely and most likely impossible.
I like Paul Craig Roberts’ idea for a corporate tax based on the percentage of domestic production. The more you produce here, the lower the rate. It’s a better idea than tariffs.
Interesting idea, but just as effective as the VAT in vertically-integrated businesses. The only ones who could not exploit the system are the smaller firms and non-MNCs.
When the baby-boomer retire, Gen-X will bail water for a while, then Gen Z and asylum seekers will stand around while the economy sinks. They don’t know how to turn a wrench, much less run a five axis mill or program a PLC.
“The Trump plan is to restructure the economy, which will require massive spending and a considerable amount of pain.” This hits the spot! A fair measure of system resilience is its ability to withstand pain in order to improve efficiency. Few countries have such systems. Even China is struggling with this. Ironically, Russia stands out here because they are willing to accept a lot of pain to avoid Western domination. Argentina is taking some pain but perhaps they had run out of choices. I’m skeptical the US oligarchy will be able to endure pain. Beating up on the working class… Read more »
I just watched a video about Argentina by some economist on youtube. He says there are a bunch of payments due in 2025 that they don’t have the foreign reserves to make. IIRC, he said the central bank had a huge net negative of foreign reserves, albeit slightly less negative than the day Milei took office. According to him, they have a ton of Dollar or other foreign currency denominated debt. There had been a 5 year grace period on that debt that ends this year.
What can’t be paid wont be paid.
I remember reading somewhere – I think it might have been in Caldwell’s book – that the unspoken rule used to be that democrats were able to have control over the culture while republicans were able to make money. At what point did that agreement get broken – maybe Obama?
Those dynamics started to change under Clinton. Obama probably cemented it though, especially as he sat back while big tech took over our society.
As somebody here (Alzaebo?) pointed out the other day, it happened because the corporations were taken over by the indoctrinated products of the pozzed academy, which just happened to coincide with Clinton being in office. The revolution began in the academy.
My mom made me see that movie where Dennis Quaid played Reagan and it was irritating. While it is true that the Berlin Wall fell not long after he left office, I feel that people like him misdiagnosed communism. It’s like when someone is cured of cancer and it comes back a few years later and kills them. Whatever system we have in america now is basically a more implicit form of communism. I also think Reagan may have had an outdated view of the soviet union. It obviously wasn’t heaven on earth in 1981 but all the things Reagan… Read more »
Clinton re-oriented the Dems towards the economic oligarchs (he was a member of The Democratic Leadership Council, which Jesse Jackson mocked as The Democratic Leisure Class Council).
150 years ago, you eeeeeeevil capitalist American pig dogs sailed your fiendish gun boats across the Sea of Japan, parked them in Tokyo Bay… and then went ashore and declared that Japan was now open for business. Samurai warriors armed with swords looked down their noses at you and wondered what in hell was wrong with you people. Horses crapped in the street, and shrines to exotic gods were everywhere. 80 years later… The Japs sailed their aircraft carriers across the Pacific, and Japanese planes bombed the shit out of Pearl Harbour. The Americans coughed in the fire and smoke… Read more »
Restructuring the US economy will cause moderately high inflation, at least for the short term. So invest accordingly.
US trade sanctions are building BRICS
‘The Trump plan is to restructure the economy, which will require massive spending and a considerable amount of pain’
As necessary as a restructuring is, the considerable amount of pain is precisely why I believe this won’t happen. I don’t think Trump’s ego would be unable to accept this.
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