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Notes -
Happy tariffs eve, to those who celebrate.
With by all accounts the tariffs against Mexico and Canada going into action tomorrow, actually for real maybe probably this time, let's have a slice of cake and blow some party horns. This is quite a significant change of political fortunes - symbolically at least, and one would presume economically too, depending on how quickly the reshufflings happen or if this actually goes through at all. Since the 1880s, and more definitely since the 1980s, the world and its various regional economic blocs have moved towards the free trade of goods and services between nations. It has not been uniform or without reverses, but the trend has been unmistakable.
Often I like to wonder how a given event might be thought of 100 or 1000 years from now - will some future textbook see this as the high water mark of globalism, some point in the line of history that is forever after viewed with special significance? As much as people have claimed Donald Trump has been hindered by the Deep State, they seem to be slow to react to him ripping up one of the signature features of American hegemony (something he himself has contributed to, given that it's his free trade deal that is essentially being dissolved).
At the very least this is all going to be fascinating - one of the ironclad, universally agreed-upon tenets of a social science being put to the test. Markets have not reacted well so far, but that's as much a feature of groupthink as it is reflective of material reality. It's a good time to be a prospective PhD in Economics. You're about to have more than you could have ever hoped to work with.
So, have a Happy New Era. If this is actually happening, which I'm sure a lot of people are still unsure about (certainly I am). See you on the other side.
Speaking as a Canadian, we are so, so boned. Things were already looking bad for us economically, with poor productivity, insane housing bubble, and crumbling infrastructure while debt keeps piling up. I keep hearing from my fellow citizens that we are going to need to diversify our trading partners and I really can’t believe they can be so insane. Like, you thinks it’s gonna be easy to freight our goods across the second largest country in the world, to get it across an ocean? And the buyer won’t even have dollars to trade us for it?
So boned
If we can manage to elect somebody who's not a total moron (so yeah, probably boned) I think it can be OK -- the current sabre rattling (pocket-knife rattling?) is exclusively to play to domestic morons for a sugar rush in the polls. The political is very very personal for Trump, and since he & Trudeau already hate each other deeply there was never going to be any rapprochement until he's gone -- the upside is that there is an opportunity there for the new guy to, um, build back better?
I do hope that during the campaign somebody will be able to convincingly point out that adding to the burden of American tariffs on our producers' exports with an additional domestic tariff burden on a big chunk of their input costs is the most retarded idea I've ever heard -- are we really that dumb?
Canada has no culture...except when Americans say it. Nationalism is finally a thing again and it must get its due.
Nah, it's inorganic, and probably astroturfed to a large degree. People will settle down soon enough.
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You already know the answer to that question.
You also already know the election's going to come down to being a referendum on who wants to prosecute the war; that is, in part, why the Reform party (in blue) doesn't have much room to campaign while the Conservative party (in red) is going full bore on the war- the Red party will attempt to get voted in before their idiotic policies really start taking their toll, because by then it'll be too late to do anything.
The tariffs are a liability for the Red party (no matter what they do, they lose), but abandoning the last 6 months of agitating for non-confidence votes only to suddenly slam on the brakes for political expedience is a huge liability for the Blue party. All that remains to be seen is if the Red party calls an election immediately, or tries to force the Blue party to vote for a non-confidence vote (and the pattern of constantly doing that only to not do that now is itself a liability).
They've got their sugar rush, I think they will go for it -- I do think there's some Kamala effect going on here at the moment and they will still lose, but I guess wrecking the country to avert a landslide is what these fuckers would consider a win.
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