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Once they're done with the US they'll just move onto the next country, same as they moved onto the US once the British empire was done.
They're just locusts
You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West.
There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU... WILL... ATONE!
Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.
What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.
We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that... perfect world... in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.
(Obama is so far the only US president born after 1946)
From 1945 to Reagan may have been one of the most extraordinary times for the “middle class” of any nation in the history of the world. The distribution of wealth kept pace with the advances of efficiency. What a privilege it must be to have been an adult in a non-discriminated class during that period, and the honeymoon phase that kept steam until the Great Recession.
The march of technology papered over a lot of cracks, but the cracks keep on growing.
I imagine the US's poor showing against Iran and the implied inability to coerce medium powers is a factor in the decision making of the serious buyers of US treasuries. It has never been entirely clear how much value the US military's ability to control global trade really backed the dollar; but Trump's style is to hit people with every possible threat and reason to do what he wants in case it helps.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrocurrency#1970_to_2000
People who didn't mind that he is a racist, xenophobic, anti-semitic, bigoted philandering malignant narcissist grifter made him president.
Intelligent lawyers degraded themselves to make it happen again.
I do think trying to backdate the idea that intelligent people are behind Trump's rise because supposedly intelligent people are now on the Trump train for their own expedient reasons ignores that the beginning of the Trump movement was grounded in his explicitly bigoted and racist proclamations.
It's not like he came down the escalator with any pitch to intelligent people. Appeals to hatred, bigotry, conspiracy theories and racism were a key plank of how he drove his candidacy from the very beginning. Enough Americans chose this revolting human being as their avatar to make it happen. Twice.
Nobody was conned by intelligent people: they went along with the racist carnival huckster.
It's not that they "didn't mind", but many probably were happy that he was those things:
> If you’re a racist, you found your guy. If you’re a misogynist, you found your guy. If money is your only religion, you found your guy. If your heart is armored shut, you found your guy. If you mock the disabled, you found your guy. If intelligence makes you insecure, you found your guy. If you’re a sexual predator, you found your guy. If you trade in humiliation and conspiracy and filth, you found your guy.
> If you’ve never done a single hour of emotional inventory, you found your guy. If you cheat, stiff contractors, bankrupt your obligations, and call it savvy, you found your guy. If you lie as easily as you breathe, you found your guy. If cruelty feels like strength, you found your guy. If white grievance is your comfort food, you found your guy. If your ego is a black hole no title can fill, you found your guy. If warmongering fuels your ego, you found your guy, If empathy feels like weakness and dominance feels like oxygen, you found your guy.
> If he’d only carried one or two of these pathologies, he might have been dismissed as just another loud, damaged man. But he carried a buffet of them. That was the appeal. Millions could locate themselves somewhere in the wreckage. They didn’t have to agree with all of it. They just had to recognize a piece of themselves in it.
> It was never really about him. It was about the validation. The absolution. The permission. He didn’t invent the resentment; he amplified it. He didn’t create the cruelty; he normalized it. He gave millions the intoxicating relief of hearing their ugliest impulses echoed back at rally volume.
[…]
* Michael Jochum, Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition
You could argue that the buffet was so large that combined with confirmation bias people often didn't see or believe the statements at the other side of the buffet. Allowing the convincing of opposite groups to both offer support.
This is very different from "traditional" politics where often one group is supported and the other fought.
I think many of them were determined not to vote for a Clinton, or a woman, or that particular female Clinton, and they casually brushed off the very evident problems with his character to vote for him.
There are also moderate, supposedly principled Republicans who you would think would vote for a hawkish conservative Democrat over a revolting malignant narcissist philandering racist bigot and crook, but no.
So no, I think "didn't mind" is the right phrasing for the people with selective morality who pushed him over the edge to elected. They are negligent, immoral people who don't really have a problem with any bigotry not directed at them. They didn't pay it any attention. Not their problem, don't mind it.
All the evidence is "didn't mind" won it for him again, right? He wasn't going to come for the law-obiding immigrants, just the bad ones, etc. etc.
It's a sucker's game, and the voters on both sides of the spectrum get taken again and again and again. "Sure, Our Politicians are Bad, but the Other Side's Politicians are Much Worse!" Voting for the lesser evil for decades is just taking the scenic route to Hell as a country.
Meanwhile, no matter who's in charge, there's always just enough votes in Congress for military spending and corporate bailouts, but never enough votes for any sort of significant populist economics or meaningful regulation that might push back against the billionaire/big corporation stranglehold on the country and government. (President Obama, with a working Democratic majority, delivered... a national health care plan designed by the right-libertarian Cato Institute and pioneered at the state level by his Republican opponent Mitt Romney.)
And that would have been the correct choice. Because he's not just the worst person to be president, he was very clearly, even in 2015, among a small handful of the worst people with any kind of following to ever run for the job (maybe not as bad as David Duke, at least as bad as Lyndon LaRouche).
It's really simple: if there are two candidates with a chance of running for the job and only one of them is very evidently a malignant narcissist, you pick the other one. Regardless of their policies!
Trump was easily identifiable as erratic, self-centred and profoundly dangerous and that has been borne out.
(You'll get no argument from me that Mitt Romney got a raw deal both from timing and from the old school of political rough-and-tumble, especially seeing as he's often to the left of Gavin Newsom)
The main obstacle for the opposition is itself.
That behavior is the cause. The question must be answered, and if you haven't answered it after 8 (since 2016) or 26 (since 2000) or more years, you aren't trying.
How does the Republican party do these things without losing votes? The likely causes seem obvious to me, but the real problem is that people who oppose them need to believe again that they can do anything, that they are responsible, that they won't be stopped, and stop accepting helplessness.
Well, a lot of them didn't vote for him. Roughly a third of eligible voters stayed home (actually the largest group) while Trump and Harris each got a bit under a third, with Trump narrowly ahead.
But yeah, I guess its still baffling about 31% voted for him.
Now, people accept the "no angel" defense for Iran and Venezuela. Just like a cop is allowed to execute someone in the street if they have a criminal record. But now we have to work out how serious the threats against Western countries are, or whether they're just routine Trump bullshit for social media. Is there a real prospect of the use of force against Canada, or Canadian nationals in the US? Is there a limit to the trade sanctions? If the US can sanction individual ICC members, can't they exert pressure on Carney by debanking him too?
Putting aside the possible change of guards with the other party getting into power, the USA are long-term heading to a serious crisis. The dems were able to reduce deficits in the past (a bit surprisingly because that contradicts the narrative), but I think their space for maneuvering is getting increasingly small. There is a serious possibility that notwithstanding efforts to save the ship the long term trend cannot be reversed because so many critical processes had been set in motion, about which control has been lost.
What happens after a decade? You can do the math. A disgruntled electorate want final solutions to an increasingly heavier crisis. It takes real states(wo)men to re-architect the USA in favor of the public. Also, if you ever open 'social' media or regular media even, you could experience first-hand how hard it has become to reach the public. The vested interests are not willing to give up their power.
All the other options are infinitely worse. The problem is that such a deal is political suicide. MAGA will run on repealing the deal like they ran on dismantling Obama care. They are the party of financial self immolation.
The problem is that every time democrats make progress republicans pass massive tax cuts. Four successive republican administrations have passed massive tax cuts. Trump alone is responsible for 30% of all debt.
The problem is that voters punish anyone who raise taxes. The first bush lost reelection because he broke his “read my lips no new taxes promise” when he was actually trying to behave responsibly.
And I gotta be honest, the carrot danglers don't seem to have a prosperous and thriving democracy in mind as one of their goals lol
The future they're creating, no matter how much money they have and pass on, is going to be worse for their children and grandchildren. That's not smart, that's incredibly selfish and, regarding biological legacy, self-defeating.
Obama was on tracy to reduce the deficit and likely would have had the financial crisis not required stimulus.
Biden was using debt to invest in infrastructure and things like power generation that would yield returns unlike tax cuts that just exacerbate wealth concentration and inflation by asset appreciation due to capital chasing the same assets.
It’s not symmetrical one party is driving this and the irony is that they are the “fiscally responsible” party.
No amount of discipline is possible for democrats if every time they balance the budget republicans use the savings to cut taxes further.
If the fire wasn't already burning, Trump wouldn't have been able to bring such a number of cronies together - just look at the tech bros, they already had everything, but they still chose to lick the boot because they want moar!
https://archive.ph/2026.08.24-074023/https://www.ft.com/cont...
Until that is fixed, the US will end up as a banana republic with lots of nukes.
> rates on mortgage loans and other long-term lending across the economy – are walloping his popularity, helping freeze the housing market
Looking like 2007 again ? The GOP loves flirting with creating a massive depression.
What was inflation like before Regan?
Strange enough, I was alive back then and clearly remember my grandmother applauding Nixon's attempt to 'freeze prices'. Did not work.
The numbers published by the government may not reflect how it is felt in the populace. I think the current inflation is 'worse' than the 1970's. One thing is that wages were getting bumped all the time to compensate; not something we see today.
Strong agree. Raise taxes for everyone (except those at the bottom, please). Draw the line wherever you want, we can argue about where, but it has to be drawn.
That was my point
> Strong agree. Raise taxes for everyone (except those at the bottom, please).
Again, what does this have to do with inflation? I'm not even questioning the (de)merits of the current tax rates, but pointing out that the tax rates before Regan were in no way correlated to low inflation.
Taxe rates demonstrably reduced wealthy estates over time
We are now at levels of disparity greater than the guilded age. Consumers are about to run out of credit at which point there will be a Great Depression level contraction.
If you do that it can be a good idea. It's a way to accelerate investment. It can also be a good idea to modulate your deficit in a cycle counter to the economy so that it acts as a stabilizer.
The US has been failing on all these. The deficits are too large and are high both in good and bad times. Eventually that breaks things.
But if other countries tried to maintain the levels of US deficit / debt, they were given far less lenience from investors, in pressure / yields. This was because US was seen as, on the whole, fiscally responsible, very productive, and safer from shocks - to the point that when the US mortgage crisis exploded, the safe haven for assets was… the US.
As these assumptions are challenged, the US is waking up to what the European old economies experienced following 2008. Increasingly yields, increasing costs of borrowing etc.
If you’re reliably printing good GDP growth, higher level of debt may be good as it gives you more leverage, and drives more growth in turn. But leverage is a multiplier and it isn’t free, so if the engine sputters, you might find yourself falling out of the car at a greater speed…
The Fed seems already constrained by the administration to not raise rates. Yields went up anyway. US primary deficit is huge and so debt to GDP is accelerating from different angles - interest, increased spending, increased yield demand based off uncontrolled inflation expectations etc.
In fact I suspect that the mega-pivot to AI is an attempt to solve the problem by massively inflating GDP, so that the debt doesn’t matter - ie radically grow the economy. It remains to be seen if it pays off and solves US’s problems.
At the end of the day, the US cannot escape from the forces that drowned Greece - inflation, investor confidence, debt spiral. It’s totally avoidable, but the US seems determined to race full speed ahead at it. Let’s see if Trump can play chicken with economics.
Money is a created thing, a creature of the state. We maintain certain fictions about it (like “tax to spend”, allowing the market to set bond yields most of the time and keeping track of the outstanding bonds as “government debt”) because people are scared that Governments wouldn’t be controlled enough to manage money creation if they overtly used the powers they have to issue currency… But effectively they still kind of do it…
And while it’s not perfect it’s actually far more stable than attempts at fixed exchange rates and pegging currency to commodities like gold (which always fails eventually, because it doesn’t stand to reason that the amount of gold or any other commodity in a country would correspond to how much money the economy needs. You can set the exchange rate but it always drifts, so those periods tended to swing between big deflation and then inflation, with panics, recessions, and financial crises every few years)
everyone was so relieved when he was finally flown away for the last time by Marine One, he couldn't do any more damage
well this is round two, just keep voting for this kinda of garbage corruption
pray for a full impeachment because otherwise two more years is going to leave a burning dumpster fire of a country (but Vance maybe even worse)
his drapes! his golden statues! his ballroom! his ARC! his helipad! his flagpoles!
his image on passports, gold coins, $250 bill, park passes! 100 foot banners of his image on federal buildings!
renaming warships and airports after him while still in office
ONE BILLION DOLLARS in taxpayer funded renovations for all his nonsense in DC
ANOTHER BILLION DOLLARS stolen from nuclear missile maintenance for his QatarForceOne
$6 Million per day in pardons and other grift
$2 Million every weekend for his golf outings
go on, tell me any other administration from any party was ever this insanely corrupt
now imagine what else he is doing to the country, selling federal land, got the CIA mucking around in Greenland and who knows where else
and he's definitely doing Cuba after November
Yields are high because the inflation is also running high and it doesn't like it will come down anytime soon so the central bank interest rates will also be kept at a higher level.
Long term bonds can be replaced with short term bonds which are constantly rolled over. The bond yields are pricing in the future interest rates, nothing more.
They were only coupled in the first place because treasuries were seen as the safest of havens. That means everything else had to pay more interest than them. So is that no longer the case?
The last Fed meeting saw high inflation and decided not to adjust interest rates, with the stated reasoning that the market will fix it by itself. This could be how the market fixes it by itself.
Vs the 30 year bond yield: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DGS30
That’s the news. The fed is desperately trying to get interest rates lower, but the free market isn’t buying it. The treasury is also pulling out some very desperate moves to control this, like selling euro for JPY without even telling the EU, we will see how it works out.
Agree, but there's also the expectation of future debt. A bigger debt means a bigger issuance of bonds, so the new supply-demand equilibrium moves the rates higher as it's the only way to convince investors to allocate more to bonds.
Technically, yes, but if you create demand for long term bonds and create supply for short term ones, you'll flatten the yield curve and pay long term yields for short term durations.
The governments and central banks across the world have no other choice. Corporations and big money have robbed our world of capital and are now changing the game to pull up the ladder behind them