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Trump 2.0

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Free trade has made the world richer.
The rest of the world will likely retain free trade. The rest of the world will work together. China, Japan and Korea just did a major trade deal. They were enemies a short time ago.

The USA will be increasingly left out as an untrustworthy foe.
The headline of this article says it all

Thu Apr 3rd 2025 - 1am Edition

Trump delivers US its worst economic defeat in 40 years
edition.theage.com.au edition.theage.com.au
 
Knobby22 said:
Free trade has made the world richer.
Click to expand...
As with anything that becomes accepted as a universal truth, my approach is to challenge and question it.

Has free trade really, actually made us richer?

Comparing now with pre-free trade what I can see is:

Manufactured goods are a lot cheaper in real terms.

Pretty much everything else is more expensive in real terms, in some cases drastically so.

Society is now far more divided. If you're a highly paid professional, a licensed trade or are in management then you're doing nicely. Most others not so much.

Things that were taken for granted are no longer givens. Go back 30 years and anyone with a full time job could afford their own house, they could afford a car, they could afford to drink at the pub, they could afford utilities, and so on. And whilst I certainly don't advocate it, many smoked and doing so was easily affordable.

Now in 2025 can someone with a basic job, something that isn't a profession, licensed trade or management, do the same? Can they buy themselves a 3 bedroom house with a backyard? Can they also have a car? Can they afford to go out for a drink? Do they turn the heating on when it's cold or do they have to think seriously about the cost of doing so? Do they even water the garden or is cost an issue?

Suffice to say I'm not at all convinced it's really making society wealthier. For managers, licensed trades and selected professionals it's all nice yes, but for those outside that group I'm far from convinced it's a benefit.

I suspect there's a lot of confusing the benefits of technology with the impact of free trade in all of this.
 
That sums it up perfectly and explains why some aren't happy.
 
I agree technology has assisted but trade has also been part of the equation.

Trade is much more interconnected. Buyers will go to new markets. The USA used to be the main supplier of soy beans to the world but now its Brazil after China sought new markets after the last Trump Presidency actions.

Trade makes things more affordable and plentiful.
 
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Free trade has made SOME in the world richer.
The disparity in incomes and wealth has grown staggeringly large compared to the past.
The rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer is not just an idle saying.
Why anyone should be paid multi millions in doing their jobs is morally untennable.
Great if you are part of the elite.
Tough t1ts for the rest.
Mick
 
Yes Mick, as long as the elite's are getting their junk cheap, the poor are just collateral damage, the fact the working poor can't even afford to rent is a minor issue.
As long as the elite's can find someone to rent their property, who cares about those that can't. At least if they can't afford rent, their fridge will be cheaper, it's just a shame they have no where to put it.
 

 
I noticed that Iran has pulled its troops out of Yemen and has abandoned the Houthis.
It comes after Trump told Iran to stop arming and supporting the Houti rebels, or else they would be next.
Sometimes walking , talking, and carrying a big stick works.
Mick
 

It has but lack of regulation has allowed unequal distribution of that wealth something Trump supporters fail to explain how Trump’s policies address that. Having said that Democrats failed to address this issue as well after conservatives ran the market solves all and hollowed out workers conditions
 
100%.
You know the famous Adam Smith believed and published in his books the need for a progressive tax system to limit this occurrence.
 
Dan Denning nails it succinctly when he said

Despite all the rhetoric about Trump being a stooge for big Business/ Russia/Far Right/Nazism/pick your poison, he needs nobodys support, relies on no one. and is beholden to no one except his own ego.
The smart ones will get what they want by massaging said ego.
He goes on to say


Mick
 
Is the American Age Over ?
Obviously Donald Trump says it is just starting. And we know how right he is. Everyone else can read the room.

The American Age Is Over​

Emergency Triad: The United States commits imperial suicide.​

Jonathan V. Last
Apr 04, 2025



1. Canada​

​

Fittingly, it was the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, who declared the official time of death.

And just like that, the age of American empire, the great Pax Americana, ended.

Share

We cannot overstate what has just happened. It took just 71 days for Donald Trump to wreck the American economy, mortally wound NATO, and destroy the American-led world order.

He did this with the enthusiastic support of the entire Republican party and conservative movement.

He did it with the support of a plurality of American voters.

He did not hide his intentions. He campaigned on them. He made them the central thrust of his election. He told Americans that he would betray our allies and give up our leadership position in the world.

There are only three possible explanations as to why Americans voted for this man:
  1. they wanted what he promised;
  2. they didn’t believe what he promised; or
  3. they didn’t understand what he promised.
Pick whichever rationale you want, because it doesn’t matter. Whatever the reason was, it exposed half of the electorate—the 77 million people who voted for Trump—as either fundamentally unserious, decadent, or weak.

And no empire can survive the degeneration of its people.

2. No Going Back​

​

Understand this: There is no going back.​


If, tomorrow, Donald Trump revoked his entire regime of tariffs, it would not matter. It might temporarily delay some economic pain, but the rest of the world now understands that it must move forward without America.

If, tomorrow, Donald Trump abandoned his quest to annex Greenland and committed himself to the defense of Ukraine and the perpetuation of NATO, it would not matter. The free world now understands that its long-term security plans must be made with the understanding that America is a potential adversary, not an ally.

This realization may be painful for Americans. But we should know that the rest of the world understands us more clearly than we understand ourselves.

Vladimir Putin bet his life that American voters would be weak and decadent enough to return Donald Trump to the presidency. He was right.

Europeans are moving ahead with their own security plans because they realize, as a French minister put it, “We cannot leave the security of Europe in the hands of voters in Wisconsin every four years.” He was right.

The Canadian prime minister declared the age of American leadership over. He was right.

Instead of arguing with this reality, or denying it, we should face it.

It’s bad enough being a failing empire. Let’s not also be a delusional failing empire. Let’s at least have some dignity about our situation.

The world will move on without us.

Economically this means that international trade will reorganize without the United States as the central hub. Relationships will be forged without concern as to our preferences. The dollar may well be displaced as the world’s reserve currency. American innovation will depart for other shores as the best and brightest choose to make their lives in countries where the rule of law is solid, secret police do not disappear people from the streets, and the government does not discourage research and make economic war on universities.

There’s a reason why countries like Belarus and El Salvador aren’t tech hubs.

All of this will mean slower growth at home and declining economic mobility. The pie will shrink and people will become more desperate to hold on to their slices.

If you want a small preview, look at what has happened to the British economy since Brexit.

The drag we experience will be much greater, because we had much further to fall.

In the security space, Europe will organize apart from us. The Europeans will create a separate nuclear umbrella and will likely include Canada, Japan, and Australia in their alliance. The “free world” as we have understood it for the entirety of our lifetimes will no longer include America.

As a result, America will either drift, or find itself becoming more closely allied with the world’s authoritarians. We may become closer with Putin’s Russia or Xi’s China. We may find that we need them—Russia as a counterweight to democratic Europe and China as a source of cheap manufacturing to relieve some of the price pressure on American consumers.

The end of the American era doesn’t mean everything will become chaos overnight. We aren’t going to wake up tomorrow to the sound of the blaring war rig horn from Mad Max. We are still a rich country, with momentum carrying us forward. But in ways that will soon be perceptible and eventually be undeniable, things will get worse. And facts about America and the world that we have taken for granted since the end of the Second World War will no longer hold true.

3. Idiots​

​

On the day that Trump’s tariffs collapsed America’s position in the world, Secretary of State Marco Rubio went to Brussels to demand that NATO allies increase defense spending to 5 percent of their budgets.

But here is how utterly stupid and unserious our government is:

Europe is going to rearm. And they are going to do so by building up their internal defense industries so that they do not have to rely on America, which is in the process of threatening military action against a NATO member.

And the American response to this has been to cry foul.

Our government thinks it can simultaneously:
  • demand that Europe re-arm;
  • threaten our European allies with territorial annexation; and
  • demand that Europe buy American weapons.
We have a deeply stupid government—from our economically illiterate president to our craven and foolish secretary of state, from the freelancing billionaire dilettante who is gutting American soft power to the vaccine-denying health secretary who is firing as much talent as he can. From the senior economics advisor who thinks comic books are good investments, to the senators who voted to confirm this cabinet of hacks, to the representatives who stumble over themselves justifying each new inane MAGA pronouncement.

But also, we have the government we deserve.

The American age is over. And it ended because the American people were no longer worthy of it.

The American Age Is Over

Emergency Triad: The United States commits imperial suicide.
www.thebulwark.com

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This is "old" news isn't it ? Another day another rout. I just realised I hadn't press send when I copied this story into the thread.
 
This bit is an excellent summary
 
Another a view on Trumps power processes and an excellent analysis of the historical source of US political power

​
​

WTAF is Going On? In Search of the Plan Behind Trump’s Global Economic Crisis​


WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 07: U.S. President Donald Trump delivers remarks on the jobs report from the Oval Office at the White House on March 07, 2025 in Washington, DC. The U.S. economy added 151,000 jobs, with the unemployment rate rising slightly to 4.1%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images) ​
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To share confidential tips about events unfolding in the federal government you can contact me on Signal at joshtpm dot 99 or via encrypted mail at joshtpm (at) protonmail dot com.​
Everyone in the country at the moment, albeit from different vantage points, seems to have the same question: What the actual **** is going on?

Is the plan to have permanent tariffs? Are these meant as the basis of some kind of negotiation? Are we going to have blanket tariffs as the basis of a system of corruption in which favored industries and companies gain exemptions in exchange for fealty and cash? (So, countries as universities and law firms?) Is the idea just to replace income taxes with tariff income and fundamentally shift taxes to the middle and working classes?

At a basic level, the entire MAGA movement, and Donald Trump from whom all of it stems, simply doesn’t grasp the nature of American power or its limitations. In their view, the United States is the natural and inherent dominating power in the world. We’re the most powerful and the strongest. And starting from that view they look out onto the world and think if we are in charge why don’t we act like we’re in charge?

Instead of acting like we’re in charge, we do a lot of consulting and asking. That’s weak and leads everyone to take advantage of us, protecting their industries while we keep our markets open, letting their defenses atrophy and relying on our protection, etc. It’s lost on them that the U.S. is not actually the inherently dominating power on the planet. U.S. primacy is based yes on a vast military, access to the American domestic market, American wealth. But really it’s based on America’s role as the custodian of a global system that on balance works quite well, at least for the other advanced economies of the world. It provides a general peace, a system of more or less known rules enforced with some consistency, a U.S. primacy that keeps the peace without dominating other middle powers, etc. The U.S. global order is like a trampoline with a bowling ball in the middle; like a giant star, the very fabric of the system is subtly angled in the U.S. direction. But on balance it works. The U.S. is the first among equals more than a dominating power.

In other words, precisely what MAGA views as examples of weakness are the bases of American power. Donald Trump wants to hold the rest of the world in subjection. But the U.S. simply isn’t powerful enough to do that. It may have been just after World War II for a while. But it certainly isn’t now. That’s also why the American primacy has so long outlasted the Soviet one, whose satellites tore away from it at the first opportunity, and even before any real opportunity: because the U.S. primacy actually worked quite well for allies in Europe and East Asia. Donald Trump is only able to look at America’s persistent trade deficits. The role of the dollar as the global reserve currency and the massive advantages it brings are lost on him and that’s what makes the trade deficits in some ways inevitable and also sustainable. It also gives the U.S. a whole series of other vast advantages, one of which is being able to borrow and borrow and have it mostly not matter.

Yesterday, a friend sent me this video from a Youtube Channel called Money & Macro. It’s quite good. I really recommend it. It’s basically an effort to make sense of what the goal and plan of all this chaos really is by looking closely at the arguments of Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and his Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors Stephen Miran. The argument goes like this …

The global neo-liberal economic order created in the early 1980s by Reagan, Thatcher and the G7 powers has de-industrialized the United States to the point where it has become not so much an economic problem as a national security one. You can’t remain the dominant military power without a dominant or at least robust industrial base because that’s how you sustain a war-fighting machine. That is what made the U.S. so critical in World War II. So how do you re-industrialize without losing the dollar’s role as the global reserve currency? Because to a great degree it’s the global trade in dollars and the dollar’s outsized value that makes trade deficits so persistent.

The plan goes something like this. Put huge tariffs on everyone, create a lot of chaos and near-term pain. But their pain will be greater than our pain. And eventually the other countries will come calling, wanting to cut deals because their economies are all based around the need for access to the U.S. domestic market. Then you cut deals in which other countries peg their currencies to the dollar. That locks them into using the dollar as the global reserve currency while also allowing the value of the dollar to fall and thus allowing the re-industrialization of the United States. How much sense this makes in narrowly global economic terms I’ll have to leave to others. But the video’s host, Joeri Schasfoort, makes a pretty strong case that whatever its merits, this is the plan of these two key Trump advisors.

Joeri Schasfoort argues that the plan actually does make some sense on its own terms. The fatal flaw is that it relies on the buy-in of all these other countries. It relies on these other countries trusting U.S. protection and fair-dealing. And the countries of the world are hardly going to have a lot of trust in a country which has just bullied them into a new and unequal global economic regime through what amounts to extortion and force.

And yes, that really is the problem. This whole plan amounts to a highly destructive power play in which the U.S. will force the countries of the world to knuckle under and accept Trump’s demands. (Any of this sound familiar? It should.) But you come back to the essential problem: the point of a global trade regime is something that is enduring. But how enduring are deals made under duress? Probably not very. It goes back to the essential point: is the U.S. strong enough, economically and militarily, to coerce the rest of the planet into a new economic regime of its own choosing? I doubt it. And to the extent it can do it short term, by creating a kind of bum rush or panic response, how enduring can that be? No one stays in a deal agreed to under duress. They leave at the first opportunity.

But the whole theory has a much bigger problem. We all know there is a persistent desire, need, insistence on figuring out the plans behind Donald Trump’s seeming chaos. But that whole enterprise is flawed. There is no more plan here than a giant worm consuming everything in its path has. It eats and it moves forward. That’s all there is. What you have is a man who can only understand relationships through the prism of domination. There’s the dominating and the dominated. And you want to be the first and not the second. He also thinks countries can only be great and rich if you make a lot of heavy industrial products. That’s where the thinking stops. There’s a lot of grievance and a general nostalgia about the 1950s. But that’s really where the thinking stops. There is no thinking really. There’s a set of impulses.

Now, given Trump’s great political power, he attracts to him people either who have ideas that seem similar to these impulses or for whom these impulses fit well into their theories or strategies. And to be clear the world is due for a reform to its system of global economic and trade governance. So lots of people have ideas. Some good, some bad. People like Bessent and Miran sidle up to Trump. And in the process of sidling up to him and gaining influence with him, his goals and actions do take on more shape and coherence, on the surface. So there is sort of a plan. Miran and Bessent have one. It has some impact on Trump. But really it’s just the same guy with the same impulses, with a desire for domination and who’s super hung up about trade deficits.

And that’s the chaos. Because everyone’s desire to find a plan is based on magical and wishful thinking. None of it is real. And Donald Trump is still the guy making it up as he goes along every day.

This brings us back to another point about Donald Trump.

Trump’s self-image is that of a deal maker. But there are different kinds of deals. There are collaborative deals like the ones commercial businesses make with each other. So I make a widget and I contract with you to make one of the parts I need for my widget. You make money. I make money. It works. Great. If it stops working for both sides that deal is going to fall apart. Or it will need to be renegotiated. This is the nature of business deals in the real economy.

But there’s another kind of deal … say, the kind of deal when I sell you my car. If I get you to pay way more than it’s worth, I win and you lose. It’s binary. The only way for me to win in fact is for you to lose. I only know I won when I can see that you lost. This kind of deal only works if it’s a one-off. I don’t care if you’re mad. I don’t need to sell you another car.

If you look at Donald Trump’s career, it is heavily, heavily based on the latter kind of deal. And that kind of deal is only possible with some degree of razzmatazz, coercion or deceit. That really is his understanding of what a deal is: getting something over on the other guy. And that’s what we see here. To the extent that there’s any plan it’s basically a fast-action power play; Trump is pulling on the economic powers of the world to bum rush them into a newly subservient global trading regime. But really there is no plan. Even calling it a “regime” is falling into the Trump/retcon house of mirrors.

That notional plan is just something players like Miran and Bessent have tried to impose on Trump’s impulses and grievances. But he remains in charge. So their notional plans don’t really mean anything. It’s not that different from Trump’s war against the “Deep State.” Trump doesn’t give a crap about the federal bureaucracy or what it does. It’s just something he got mad about during his first term because he got saddled with so many federal investigations and the “Deep State” was the thing that made it hard for him to break the law or generally use the U.S. government as his personal property. For him that’s like the general counsel’s office investigating the CEO. What the ****? Then too a lot of people who had deeply articulated and pre-existing visions of stripping down the state gathered around him. Because his impulses and anger were useful. And here we are.

We saw this in the furious Wall Street run-up from November to January. Everyone wanting to convince themselves that Trump had a plan and that it was one that would be good for them. There must be a plan, right? The lure of magical thinking runs so damn deep. This is the most consistent pattern of the Trump era, the quest to divine some underlying plan or theory when all it really is is a degenerate huckster following his gut. It’s retcon, retcon, retcon all the way down.

And here we are.​
 
sptrawler said:
Yes Mick, as long as the elite's are getting their junk cheap, the poor are just collateral damage, the fact the working poor can't even afford to rent is a minor issue.
Click to expand...
Another way to look at all this is to consider what drives major social and political shifts in society?

Historically happens when unlikely alliances form. When people with very different backgrounds and circumstances reach similar conclusions it's a powerful force.

Looking around at the moment I do have the perception we're at that point. In the Australian context it's not just housing, it's not just the music industry, it's not just electricity, it's not just education from primary to university, it's not just manufacturing, it's not just nightlife, it's not just the nation's defence situation, but it's all of them. There's a long list of seemingly unrelated things that all have the same basic problem, they've all fallen a long way compared to what they once were.

Mediocrity has become the norm right across society, it's rare to find anyone pursuing excellence these days.

The elites are falling out of favour simply because they're just not perceived to be doing a good job, it's as simple as that. Their approach of putting generalists with soft skills in charge of everything and focusing on process and risk aversion just isn't producing good outcomes.

Hence the sentiment that a different approach is needed.

What a good portion of the public wants in my view is outcomes. They couldn't care less about soft skills, generalists and their focus on process, people, culture and so on. What they want is leadership and authority from those with hard skills, technical competency and a focus on outcomes.

That doesn't mean I'm a fan of Trump. Suffice to say I don't think I'd get along with him even slightly well but I do see a silver lining to all this. Given he's set the place on fire, there's at least some chance the rebuilding puts the West back on the right track.
 
Smurf1976 said:
Given he's set the place on fire, there's at least some chance the rebuilding puts the West back on the right track.
Click to expand...
If countries become more independent, yes. Another scenario is that other alliances may form that won't be friendly to the West. Places like Indonesia and Malaysia (perhaps Japan, South Korea and Pacific nations) may gravitate to China which would not be good for us, unless we do the same.

We shall see.
 
The tariffs on Vietnam 46%!!! will force them to turn to China when they were previously the poster child.
 
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