Summary
Trump snapped at a reporter who asked how much economic pain he was willing to inflict amid plunging markets triggered by his new tariffs.
Speaking after a weekend at his Florida resort, Trump dismissed speculation he was trying to crash the market, claiming tariffs would bring in “$1 trillion” and spur U.S. manufacturing.
When asked about a pain threshold for Americans, he called the question “so stupid,” arguing economic “medicine” was necessary to reverse decades of “stupid leadership.”
He insisted the strategy would make the U.S. “solid and strong again.”
This article has been posted by me several times. You are only the second person who notices. The US cannot have it all. I think Varoufakis just doesn’t want to be the one who delivers the message. He must have known better.
I don’t fully agree with your outlook. The companies are not massively objecting. I think the concept has already been discussed by key people, in the US and internationally. Like Japan is prepared to build a nuclear bomb and Britain was prepared for Brexit, the big companies are prepared for decoupling from China.
Probably because I am one of the few people on lemmy that actually has a degree in Economics on lemmy.
EDIT
jammed the rest in spoiler tags for the thread's sake
Granted, just a BSc, but I got it during and after the 07 08 financial crash in the US, and remember arguing with my PhD professors that uh actually, the fact that Iceland just literally jailed all their bankers and did not bail them out… and then their economy just suffered a moderate down turn, instead of a complete collapse, meant that their whole reasoning behind ‘we have to bail out the banks and do QE, there is no other way’ … well here is a case study that disproves your model.
I get that he is attempting to explain what he thinks the real plan is, and he’s done a decent job of theory crafting…
But he is wrong. There is no hidden well thought out plan.
The people in the Trump admin are unqualified, uncoordinated morons. They are only there because they are loyal to Trump.
It is chaos. Not 12D chess.
Varoufakis, and you, are sane-washing the Trump regime. You both cannot comprehend something this tumultuous would occur without some reasoning behind it.
There is none, at least none that is coherent and makes any sense.
These people are dangerous megalomaniacal idiots who failed upward because of nepotism and corruption.
They are idiots, as are the Americans who voted them in.
There is no silver lining to this.
America is now as corrupt and broken and oligsrchichal as Russia, if not more.
Please give me some examples of any companies based outside of the US who are doing anything other than cowering in fear and issuing statements that amount to ‘We believe in Donald Trump’s plan, we love Trump, please don’t hurt us, please give us a tariff carve out, we’ll bribe you.’
I genuinely have no idea what you’re talking about.
Even domestic US companies are going fucking nuts.
Are you just stating your opinion?
Britain was not prepared for Brexit, and it was a disaster.
The US is currently trying to do… WorldExit, just fuck over our capacity to trade not just with the EU, but the entire fucking world.
It will be a much larger disaster.
What big US companies have plans to just somehow not use any imports from China?
What are you talking about?
We do not have the capacity to source the needed materials internally, at comparable prices.
The only plan there could be would be basically ‘fire half our workers, pare down operations to the bone, focus on core competencies, pray to baby jesus that somehow this nightmare all ends.’
Britain always had bad news about the EU in the newspapers. Their population was never fully committed so it was possible to create a majority against the membership.
Likewise US companies will regularly discuss what they will do when China is going to overtake them. That moment has come. I don’t believe in the coincidence that the US is doing its biggest blunder at the most crucial time of their history.
Of course, the strategy can be that half the workers are fired, but with the expectation that they are hired by somebody else.
Cool, Brexit was still a disaster.
Overtake is a gradual, predictable process.
Suddenly putting roughly 30% tariffs on the entire world in a very sudden and chaotic matter is not even in the same galaxy as US corporations making business plans based on predictable market trends.
We are making a blunder because we became decadent, entitled, and privileged, and aggreived and then fell under the allure of an incompetent fascist, who, again, is a fucking moron at policy.
… What? If everyone is firing, no one is hiring.
This is called a recession or depression.
Lose your higher paying job and maybe replace it with a shitty part time job.
Net result is everyone is poorer.
… If you wanted to kickstart making new manufacturing jobs in the US, well you’d need actual money to build the factories.
If the entire economy crashes, no one, no companies, have money to invest in new capital expenditures. Foreign investment won’t come because exporting out of the US will be a shitty prospect due to retaliatory tariffs, and the general lack of a skilled manufacturing labor force in the US.
There would have had to have been some kind of accompanying domestic fiscal policy to throw government money, subsidies, tax breaks, whatever to kickstart domestic manufacturing… before you throw the tariffs on.
But Trump is an idiot and is ideollgically opposed to the government spending money on seemingly anything other than bitcoin and explosively liquifying brown people in ‘removed’ countries (his words).