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.”
Probably because I am one of the few people on lemmy that actually has a degree in Economics.
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.’
So apparently Drumpf is taking a lot of advice from the convicted criminal Peter Navarro. Navarro, it turn, takes a lot of his information from Ron Varro, a persona totally fabricated BY Navarro, and quoted extensively by himself in 5 of his academic books. (Ron Vara is an anagram of naVarRo). Why has the Economics community not come out against a guy who quotes himself in academia as an expert source? Why have those 5 books been withdrawn as academic literature, when they are in fact, fantasy? Just curious why this academic fraud has not been rejected by the Economic community…
I’ve very recently also seen this.
Basically uh, yeah, that tracks, that seems completely inline with the rest of how completely ridiculous this all is.
So… why haven’t the books been withdrawn?
Because academia, academics, … they regulate and peer review Journals. Published papers. Textbooks used in classes.
Not books designed for popular consumption, pop-econ, pop-psych, pop-whatever.
Why hasn’t he been rejected by the Econ community?
Ironically, because of the nature of the incentive structure of the field of Econ.
Way, waaay too much overlap with politics and business, so its basically split into psuedo religious ideological camps, who often realize they can make way more money or have may more power by working for a hedge fund or being some kind of propogandist.
So… in that sense… the academic Econ community rarely is even capable of coming out as a unified body of academics and rejecting someone. There are too many different ideological camps, they’re all arguing with each other all the time.
There is no broad consenus view as there is with say all climate scientists saying climate change is real, all biologists and archaeologists and geologists saying evolution is real and the earth is 4.5b years old.
But with Navvaro… he apparently hasn’t done much or any really groundbreaking research, spent about two or three decades teaching, and during that time he realized he could make way more money selling pop-econ books to people who want to be able to argue about Econ to support their ideology without actually learning Econ.
You know, pretentious blowhards.
Anyway he also went to jail for Contempt of Congress for lying to the Jan 6th committee.
He is an absolute hack fraud at this point.
So there, me with a BSc. in Econ, I’m calling him out rofl.
Thanks for your answer, I have a Masters, but in a medical field, and there’s no way that kind of fraud could fly in my world. I appreciate your time and insight :)
No problem!
But uh… I dunno exactly what your masters in the medical field is, but the medical field is also absolutely chalk full of people with sometimes real, legit degrees and sometimes absolute bullshit ones like chiropracty and naturopathy…
Who routinely publish pop-medical books oriented toward the general public, using their official credentials for clout, often promoting dubious or utterly false and dangerous misinformation.
Yout field is not immune… though yes, there generally is a better unified official condemnation… but only after a certain person has reached a certain level of popularity/infamy, and the seeds of nonsense have already been sewn.
Then the official condemnation is seen as censoring heroic truth warriors and the conspiracy theories abound.
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).