Yup, sounds like the other countries “tariffs against America” were really just Drump complaining that they weren’t buying as much as he thinks they should lol
He literally, fundamentally, does not understand the concept of a trade deficit… nor a tariff… and he has surrounded himself with people too stupid and too sycophantic to be able to disagree.
Giant Wall of Text attempting to basically psychoanalyze Trump's fundamental misunderstanding of Econ 100 courses and apparently the English language
With trade defecit, I am 99% convinced he … hears ‘deficit’, and then just assumes that must be like a balance sheet defecit within a business, that a trade ‘defecit’ must mean some account somewhere (presumably the ‘trade account’) is decreasing, and the ‘losses’ need to either be stopped by pouring more money into that account, or stopping money from leaving it.
He just literally doesn’t understand that the term ‘trade deficit’ has a different meaning in an economic context.
You could be talking … per country, per economic sector, per category of physical producf… or all those things summed together, etc.
He seems to think that the US Federal Government budget just is the same thing as the entire US economy, that there is some US gov ledger just labelled ‘trade balance’, and that it is in the red, and that means uh… the government is losing money.
I genuinely think that he is conflating ‘the deficit’, as in, the amount the US gov has to borrow every quarter or year to keep funding itself… with ‘the trade deficit’.
They both have deficit in them, must be the same thing, right?
He does not grasp that… the economy’s GDP can grow just fine even with a persistent trade deficit if it figures out how to ‘export’ non physical goods… you know, services? Talented workers doing desk jobs of some kind, finance, software, or exporting art or movies or music or something non physical?
Yes, hollowing out is a thing, neoliberalism errodes and corrodes the old baseline foundation of an economy… but you solve that with specific, targeted proposals to protect and promote certain specific either vital industries or industries you can achieve a reasonable regional or global comparative advantage in, in some way.
Maybe part of that plan is some specific, precise, targeted tariffs on very specific things.
But he just has absolutely no understanding of macroeconomic policy… at all.
Remember when in his first term, his actual plan for restarting American domestic manufacturing… was to go, one by one, to every manufacturer, and attempt to negotiate, personally, some kind of deal whereby they would not close, or would not lay people off?
I think he actually called himself ‘the negotiator in chief’ during that several month span when he tried that.
He is literally too myopic and self centered to be able to concieve of a large scale plan that is not personally micromanaged by him.
He doesn’t understand that you would have to craft a detailed and comprehensive set of policies to subsidize local manufacturing… which you would then wash your hands of, step away, and watch it work… because the economy is millions of people making decisions, and you can’t personally be in all those meetings.
With tariffs, it seems very clear to me that he genuinely believes he … is taxing another country directly, like he is taxing their exports… not our own imports.
He thought he could force Mexico to pay to build the wall. At no point did he even come close to describing a mechanism for this… but his big dumb idiot fraudster mobster bully brain doesn’t care, that’s for the eggheads to figure out, he just ‘sets the terms’ and ‘makes the deal’.
Combine all this insanity together and you get a moron who thinks he can directly tax other countries (he can’t, unless he literally invades and subjugates them and makes them vassal states) to balance an account that doesn’t even exist, but he can’t figure that part out because he is conflating two terms that both have the word ‘deficit’ in them.
Like a goddamn woo woo person who thinks the ‘energy’ stored in a battery or nuclear bomb is exactly the same kind of ‘energy’ that an upbeat and enthusiastic person brings into a social gathering.
…
More details about his insanity regarding the CHIPS Act:
The CHIPS Act is an actual example of that kind of targeted domestic industrial policy that spurs and protects a vital domestic manufacturing sector.
You know, that thing Biden did.
Trump has claimed he killed it, because it was bad, because Biden bad.
Then picked one of the numbers from it ($100b planned total investment from Intel over the next decade or two or three, after an $8 billion grant from the US gov to kickstart it), got the Intel CEO to do a very awkward press conference where Trump gave the impression that he had strongarmed Intel into… an agreement they had made in the last administration…
… and now Trump is trying to actually stop more CHIPS money from going to spur further similar developments, and is actually saying the CHIPS Act should be repealed.
I mean, if the intention is just to crash the economy the methods don’t need to be smart. Who the fuck knows what the real goal is here, the stupidity might just be there to obfuscate what the real intentions are.
Even if Trump has no clue what’s going on his bank rollers and handlers like Thiel and Putin might have more strategy in mind.
I genuienly think Trump is so stupid that he thinks what he is doing will work and makes sense.
Of course, many smarter people with lots of money, inside of his orbit or outside of it, are capable of being comparatively better off after this all blows up… but I really do think this is more hubris and incompetence than intentional evil.
Like, I wouldn’t say Warren Buffet is a big Trump fan, but he started pulling huge amounts of his investments out into just liquid cash, and has just been sitting on that cash… over 6 months ago now.
I would think you’d want to be smart enough to lie, to intentionally obfuscate, but Trump has been lying so egregiously, for so long, and so often that he just created a cult of personality where he is a God King, and he just now believes … that he really is, that there is no need to worry about a cover story because many people are saying he is always right.
But yeah, Theil, Putin, many others have, can and will continue to manipulate Trump, and the wider economy he is currently immolating.
Like, I wouldn’t say Warren Buffet is a big Trump fan, but he started pulling huge amounts of his investments out into just liquid cash, and has just been sitting on that cash… over 6 months ago now.
What does he know and how terrible is it for common people? 🤯
Well, a good ‘smart money’ investor … doesn’t tell you their exact reasoning… because then everyone else knows what you know, and you lose your advantage of being able to do something first.
But uh basically, even before the tariffs… pretty much every possible warning sign that exists has been flashing red for years now.
I am not Warren Buffet, but uh… as I see it:
The housing market is now starting to crash.
Consumer debt has exploded, along with delinquencies.
No one is actually hiring, companies just post ghost jobs, fake openings, to look like they are rapidly growing when they aren’t.
Many, many companies have been actually laying people off in the 10s of thousands.
The stock market is wildly overvalued and based on speculation, very far away from fundamentals, from reasonable pricing.
The bond yield curve has now inverted and univerted twice without yet a massive economic downturn.
In the history of basically all modern economics, last 200 years, any time the bond yield curve inverts, the economy crashes when it uninverts.
When people with a lot of investments, who are not otherwise facing some immediate cost… literally cash them out, and hold cash, as Buffet has done /is doing…
That means he is betting the losses from inflation will be less than the losses from those other investments tanking.
That means Buffet is roughly predicting something like a -2 or -3 % (or worse) Q1 25 GDP ‘growth’… ie, general economic decline.
I don’t disagree, but I hear the same sentiment often and it downplays the reality of the fact they keep succeeding in various ways, like trump staying out of prison and the supreme court getting stacked.
Yes, those things are very important as well, the fact that he has basically avoided serious punishment (actual jail time) for all of the numerous crimes he’s committed his entire life… teflon don thinks he can get away with anything.
A lifetime of that and you get a delusional megalomaniacal personality.
I’m not trying to say he isn’t evil in general.
I am just trying to say on these specific things (tariffs and ‘deficit’), I think he has gone past the event horizon and is basically just senile/delusional.
Either I am misunderstanding you, or you have it backwards.
America exporting less would result in a larger trade deficit, from America’s pov.
If exports are 10, imports are 20…
10 - 20 = -10
Trade deficit is thus 10.
If exports drop to 5…
5 - 20 = - 15
Trade deficit has increased.
You would either increase exports, or decrease imports, to balance a trade deficit… which is, very simplistically, what tariffs try to make happen.
But, a basic macroecon course will tell you that all that does is make everything more expensive for everyone, a lose-lose situation.
Advanced macroecon will tell you there are sometimes good reasons for highly specific, targeted tariffs, coupled with domestic policy to incubate or support a specific industry…
But willy nilly, slapdash, tariff everything?
Just historically verified to blow up every large, developed economy that implements them.
I genuinely think turd is not able to understand what a trade deficit is. He probably just saw the minus sign and the word negative and thought right, let’s see about this
Yup, sounds like the other countries “tariffs against America” were really just Drump complaining that they weren’t buying as much as he thinks they should lol
Yep. Been saying this for months now.
He literally, fundamentally, does not understand the concept of a trade deficit… nor a tariff… and he has surrounded himself with people too stupid and too sycophantic to be able to disagree.
Giant Wall of Text attempting to basically psychoanalyze Trump's fundamental misunderstanding of Econ 100 courses and apparently the English language
With trade defecit, I am 99% convinced he … hears ‘deficit’, and then just assumes that must be like a balance sheet defecit within a business, that a trade ‘defecit’ must mean some account somewhere (presumably the ‘trade account’) is decreasing, and the ‘losses’ need to either be stopped by pouring more money into that account, or stopping money from leaving it.
He just literally doesn’t understand that the term ‘trade deficit’ has a different meaning in an economic context.
You could be talking … per country, per economic sector, per category of physical producf… or all those things summed together, etc.
He seems to think that the US Federal Government budget just is the same thing as the entire US economy, that there is some US gov ledger just labelled ‘trade balance’, and that it is in the red, and that means uh… the government is losing money.
I genuinely think that he is conflating ‘the deficit’, as in, the amount the US gov has to borrow every quarter or year to keep funding itself… with ‘the trade deficit’.
They both have deficit in them, must be the same thing, right?
He does not grasp that… the economy’s GDP can grow just fine even with a persistent trade deficit if it figures out how to ‘export’ non physical goods… you know, services? Talented workers doing desk jobs of some kind, finance, software, or exporting art or movies or music or something non physical?
Yes, hollowing out is a thing, neoliberalism errodes and corrodes the old baseline foundation of an economy… but you solve that with specific, targeted proposals to protect and promote certain specific either vital industries or industries you can achieve a reasonable regional or global comparative advantage in, in some way.
Maybe part of that plan is some specific, precise, targeted tariffs on very specific things.
But he just has absolutely no understanding of macroeconomic policy… at all.
Remember when in his first term, his actual plan for restarting American domestic manufacturing… was to go, one by one, to every manufacturer, and attempt to negotiate, personally, some kind of deal whereby they would not close, or would not lay people off?
I think he actually called himself ‘the negotiator in chief’ during that several month span when he tried that.
He is literally too myopic and self centered to be able to concieve of a large scale plan that is not personally micromanaged by him.
He doesn’t understand that you would have to craft a detailed and comprehensive set of policies to subsidize local manufacturing… which you would then wash your hands of, step away, and watch it work… because the economy is millions of people making decisions, and you can’t personally be in all those meetings.
With tariffs, it seems very clear to me that he genuinely believes he … is taxing another country directly, like he is taxing their exports… not our own imports.
He thought he could force Mexico to pay to build the wall. At no point did he even come close to describing a mechanism for this… but his big dumb idiot fraudster mobster bully brain doesn’t care, that’s for the eggheads to figure out, he just ‘sets the terms’ and ‘makes the deal’.
Combine all this insanity together and you get a moron who thinks he can directly tax other countries (he can’t, unless he literally invades and subjugates them and makes them vassal states) to balance an account that doesn’t even exist, but he can’t figure that part out because he is conflating two terms that both have the word ‘deficit’ in them.
Like a goddamn woo woo person who thinks the ‘energy’ stored in a battery or nuclear bomb is exactly the same kind of ‘energy’ that an upbeat and enthusiastic person brings into a social gathering.
…
More details about his insanity regarding the CHIPS Act:
The CHIPS Act is an actual example of that kind of targeted domestic industrial policy that spurs and protects a vital domestic manufacturing sector.
You know, that thing Biden did.
Trump has claimed he killed it, because it was bad, because Biden bad.
Then picked one of the numbers from it ($100b planned total investment from Intel over the next decade or two or three, after an $8 billion grant from the US gov to kickstart it), got the Intel CEO to do a very awkward press conference where Trump gave the impression that he had strongarmed Intel into… an agreement they had made in the last administration…
… and now Trump is trying to actually stop more CHIPS money from going to spur further similar developments, and is actually saying the CHIPS Act should be repealed.
He’s just a petulant, idiot manbaby.
I mean, if the intention is just to crash the economy the methods don’t need to be smart. Who the fuck knows what the real goal is here, the stupidity might just be there to obfuscate what the real intentions are.
Even if Trump has no clue what’s going on his bank rollers and handlers like Thiel and Putin might have more strategy in mind.
I genuienly think Trump is so stupid that he thinks what he is doing will work and makes sense.
Of course, many smarter people with lots of money, inside of his orbit or outside of it, are capable of being comparatively better off after this all blows up… but I really do think this is more hubris and incompetence than intentional evil.
Like, I wouldn’t say Warren Buffet is a big Trump fan, but he started pulling huge amounts of his investments out into just liquid cash, and has just been sitting on that cash… over 6 months ago now.
I would think you’d want to be smart enough to lie, to intentionally obfuscate, but Trump has been lying so egregiously, for so long, and so often that he just created a cult of personality where he is a God King, and he just now believes … that he really is, that there is no need to worry about a cover story because many people are saying he is always right.
But yeah, Theil, Putin, many others have, can and will continue to manipulate Trump, and the wider economy he is currently immolating.
What does he know and how terrible is it for common people? 🤯
Well, a good ‘smart money’ investor … doesn’t tell you their exact reasoning… because then everyone else knows what you know, and you lose your advantage of being able to do something first.
But uh basically, even before the tariffs… pretty much every possible warning sign that exists has been flashing red for years now.
I am not Warren Buffet, but uh… as I see it:
The housing market is now starting to crash.
Consumer debt has exploded, along with delinquencies.
No one is actually hiring, companies just post ghost jobs, fake openings, to look like they are rapidly growing when they aren’t.
Many, many companies have been actually laying people off in the 10s of thousands.
The stock market is wildly overvalued and based on speculation, very far away from fundamentals, from reasonable pricing.
The bond yield curve has now inverted and univerted twice without yet a massive economic downturn.
In the history of basically all modern economics, last 200 years, any time the bond yield curve inverts, the economy crashes when it uninverts.
… I could go on.
So he basically said “this shit ain’t right” and chose to pull out money from stocks even though cash loses value to inflation if sat idle?
You got it.
When people with a lot of investments, who are not otherwise facing some immediate cost… literally cash them out, and hold cash, as Buffet has done /is doing…
That means he is betting the losses from inflation will be less than the losses from those other investments tanking.
That means Buffet is roughly predicting something like a -2 or -3 % (or worse) Q1 25 GDP ‘growth’… ie, general economic decline.
I don’t disagree, but I hear the same sentiment often and it downplays the reality of the fact they keep succeeding in various ways, like trump staying out of prison and the supreme court getting stacked.
Yes, those things are very important as well, the fact that he has basically avoided serious punishment (actual jail time) for all of the numerous crimes he’s committed his entire life… teflon don thinks he can get away with anything.
A lifetime of that and you get a delusional megalomaniacal personality.
I’m not trying to say he isn’t evil in general.
I am just trying to say on these specific things (tariffs and ‘deficit’), I think he has gone past the event horizon and is basically just senile/delusional.
considering that the us is bigger than a lot of countries, the only way to reduce trade deficit is to reduce american exports
Either I am misunderstanding you, or you have it backwards.
America exporting less would result in a larger trade deficit, from America’s pov.
If exports are 10, imports are 20…
10 - 20 = -10
Trade deficit is thus 10.
If exports drop to 5…
5 - 20 = - 15
Trade deficit has increased.
You would either increase exports, or decrease imports, to balance a trade deficit… which is, very simplistically, what tariffs try to make happen.
But, a basic macroecon course will tell you that all that does is make everything more expensive for everyone, a lose-lose situation.
Advanced macroecon will tell you there are sometimes good reasons for highly specific, targeted tariffs, coupled with domestic policy to incubate or support a specific industry…
But willy nilly, slapdash, tariff everything?
Just historically verified to blow up every large, developed economy that implements them.
I genuinely think turd is not able to understand what a trade deficit is. He probably just saw the minus sign and the word negative and thought right, let’s see about this