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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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  • So, its now around a day or two later.

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/apr/09/dramatic-sell-off-of-us-government-bonds-as-tariff-war-panic-deepens

    I was right, Varoufakis is wrong.

    Again, Varoufakis idea is:

    Central to this new global order would be a cheaper dollar that remains the world’s reserve currency — this would lower US long-term borrowing rates even more. Can Trump have his cake (a hegemonic dollar and low-yielding US Treasuries) and eat it (a depreciated dollar)?

    and

    Consequently, the euro, the yen and the renminbi will soften relative to the dollar. This will cancel out the price hikes of goods imported into the US, and leave the prices American consumers pay unaffected. The tariffed countries will be in effect paying for Trump’s tariffs.

    Summarized, he thinks that:

    US Bond prices will go up

    and/or

    US Bond yields will go down

    and

    The USD will appreciate compared to the Yen, Euro, Renminbi, that is to say, a dollar will be worth more yen, euro, ren.

    What is actually happening is:

    US Bond prices are going down.

    US Bond yields are going up.

    https://www.google.com/finance/quote/USD-JPY?window=1M

    https://www.google.com/finance/quote/USD-EUR?window=1M

    USD is depreciating, not appreciating, compared to yen and euro.

    The USD/CNY is exchange rate is set at a fixed rate by China, and they haven’t moved it yet.

    So uh, no Mr. Varoufakis, Trump cannot have his cake and eat it too, infact he shit in the cake and then threw the mixture all around the room, now he gets nothing that he wanted.

    Trump has destroyed the Bretton Woods USD hegemony, but in a way that is utterly catastrophic for the US, not some extremely clever 12D chess move.


  • The initial comment it was replying to was exaggerating for comic effect.

    The initial comment it was replying to was written by me.

    I was not exagerating.

    Gerudo just popped in and basically said that they thought I was being intentionally harsh as well.

    Both of you have now ascribed a motive, a goal to my description of Seattle… that I do not have.

    I was simply flatly stating my lived experience in Seattle.

    People in Seattle are actually terrible at forming genuine relationships, that is my completely honest, not exaggerated assessment.

    I am also an introvert.

    I was just describing that yes, Seattle is full of introverts, who suck at socializing.

    There is no joke. There was only an attempt at being contrarian in an equally exagerated manner back toward a percieved exageration that did not exist.

    In fact, quite hilariously now imo, this entire course of discussion is itself an example of how an anti-social behvaior, assuming unstated intentions behind statememts, reading in context that isn’t actually there… produces confusion and interpersonal friction.


  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.ziptoScience Memes@mander.xyzain't your buddy, pal!
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    2 months ago

    I appreciate your willingness to explain, but I am still confused.

    … I am the person who described Seattle as introverted and anti social.

    You are ascribing motive, intention, to my original description, that motive being ‘to talk down about something’, ie, to insult or degrade.

    I am not doing that. I am describing my lived experience in Seattle as objectively as I can.

    Yes, it is my personal, anecdotal experiencd, so it may or may not be truly representative…

    But I am not exagerating in my assesment.

    You have assumed I am doing that, and just said something with a contrarian intention than the intention you incorrectly assumed I had.

    That still isn’t a joke.

    It is just being contrarian.


  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.ziptoScience Memes@mander.xyzain't your buddy, pal!
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    2 months ago

    I am not trying to be an ass, I am autistic and I do not understand what the joke is supposed to be.

    This reads to me as a contradictory paradox.

    If you say the joke is that Gerudo was facetious, ie unserious, sarcastic, didn’t actually mean they liked Seattle when they said they ‘liked Seattle for a reason’… and then they do indeed confirm they do actually like Seattle’s social introversion because they are an introvert…

    Then… they were being serious in the first statement… ie, not facetious.

    So… that cannot be the joke.

    If I exaggeratedly said 'Man I LOVE~~~ hamburgers!" … and someone said ‘wait are you serious?’ and my response was ‘Yes I do really love hamburgers.’

    Then again, the only thing I can see as the part that is supposed to be funny in any way is the exaggerated tone.

    That to me just reads as … dramatic, quirky, enthusiastic? Not inherently funny though?

    … Is the ‘joke’ that they didn’t realize why they liked Seattle untill I described the social norms?

    The… joke would then be… it is funny that they couldn’t describe or put words to why they liked something and had to have their own thoughts described by another person before they could articulate them?

    That… seems more like an insult than a joke? I guess that could be funny if I were predisposed to enjoy cruelty/mockery against Gerudo… but I’m not, so that just seems rude.

    I am at least self aware enough of an autist to know that many people find my confusion in this scenario funny, when I would describe that as cruel, but I am genuienly baffled by how what Gerudo said was ‘a joke’.



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    2 months ago

    I do not understand how your joke works.

    If you genuienly enjoy antisociality as a norm, because you tend to be introverted, then you just like Seattle because of that.

    You would then not be joking, in the sense of sarcastically saying you enjoy something you don’t actually enjoy.

    ‘I knew I liked Seattle for a reason’ is then just the same as saying ‘Yup, I’m also anti social and I love it here’.

    The ‘joke’ isn’t that you actually don’t like Seattle’s social norms and were being sarcastic, because you just said you’re introverted.

    I honestly do not understand how this is a joke.

    Is… just using the pithy/vague phrasing… in and of itself… the joke?





  • 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.



  • 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.




  • 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.

    Cool, Brexit was still a disaster.

    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.

    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.

    Of course, the strategy can be that half the workers are fired, but with the expectation that they are hired by somebody else.

    … 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 ‘shithole’ countries (his words).



  • This article has been posted by me several times. You are only the second person who notices.

    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.

    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 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.

    I don’t fully agree with your outlook. The companies are not massively objecting.

    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.

    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.

    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.’



  • Varoufakis is wrong.

    Central to this new global order (Trump’s plan) would be a cheaper dollar that remains the world’s reserve currency — this would lower US long-term borrowing rates even more.

    What Trump is doing will result in a cheaper dollar.

    It was also destroy the USD as the world’s reserve currency.

    wall of text further explanation so as not to clutter the thread

    The USD has been the reserve currency because:

    Huge, growing, stable economy.

    Low debt to GDP ratio.

    Very, very willing to cooperate with international trade deals.

    Powerful military that can enforce its will as a hegemon.

    Many deals with many oil producing countries who agree to only sell their exported oil via USD.

    … all of these except the last are as seen in statistical comparison to other countries. Its all about comparative advantages.

    Not sure if you haven’t noticed, but all of those are now rapidly crumbling, after a last 2 decades of slower, more incremental decline.

    But ultimately, all of those things could be smoothed over by a reasonable presentation of trustworthiness and reliability generally.

    Trump has utterly destroyed all of that now.

    If Varoufakis were citing some kind of Project 2025 masterplan for this, I’d be more inclined to believe his read on the situation here is at least Trump’s plan.

    But even then, it still won’t work as he describes.

    Trump is acting with unimaginable hubris, his actions will destroy the USD as a world reserve currency, rapidly accelerate other countries looking for regional or possibly international alternatives, and as a result, less people will need to use dollars for trade, there will thus be less demand for US debt.

    Less demand means we have to offer higher yields, higher interest rates on our debt, as the us dollar weakening means the real price of debt goes down.

    Varoufakis may be correct in that this is what Trump will try to do, but I see no evidence that… the plan has actually been thought out that far by any actual administration or adjacent thinkers.

    Beyond that, this plan won’t work.

    We are acting like a rogue nation doing economkc terrorism to literally the whole world… other than basically Russia and Israel.

    China, Japan and South Korea have recently entered into a pact, an agreement, to coordinate their responses of retaliatory tariffs.

    Please take a moment to appreciate how insane that is.

    The past … since ww2, SK and JPN have firmly been in the US’s sphere of economic influence and military collaboration.

    They just fucking noped out of that the economic part of that and made a pact with China.

    Japan is now rapidly trying to militarize and there are even talks of starting their own nuclear program.

    Please, again, appreciate how fucking insane it is that the most anti nuclear weapons country on Earth is now maybe rethinking that.

    Most other world leaders are not stupid. They know Trump will try to do piecemeal, one on on negotiations.

    They are already forming into blocs to resist this tactic.

    There’s talk of Canada joining or at least much more seriously integrating with the EU.

    NATO is now basically defunct in all but paper only, the EU is finally ‘shouldering its burden of defense costs’, but uh, they’re working on an EU Army, that doesn’t involve the US, after Trump repeatedly threatens to acquire Greenland, and has totally betrayed Ukraine.

    The EU is also rapidly pivoting away from being reliant on or using US software solutions.

    These actual adults in the room have actual plans to deal with the US, and they have been enacted astonishingly rapidly given how comprehensive they are.

    … The rest of the world does not need us anywhere near as much as Trump does, as much as Varoufakis estimates Trump thinks they do.