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Notes -
Trump tariffs McDonald's:
BBC article for a more detailed overview.
Highlights or lowlights include:
I'm not an economist, but I don't think it's a good idea to throw out tariffs with such clear absence of rigor. The only saving grace is that Trump is fickle, so if enough people yell at him from his in-group, he might pivot in a week. If not, bloody hell.
You know, we were just talking a few posts downthread about how the "experts" are willing to blatantly lie in order to advance their ideological agenda.
We have been told repeatedly for years by the experts that making any sort of adjustment, pushing any buttons on the control panel at all, to the global trade system would lead to complete economic collapse, the rise of fascist dictators, the end of civilization, and in general all manner of untold horrors.
But why should we believe the experts? We know they're ideologically motivated liars. So, fuck it. Let's just start pushing buttons. Smash away and let's see what happens. If for no other reason to prove that you can do something different, alternatives are possible, even if you may indeed get burned.
Well unless you believe the stock market doesn't follow economic signals but instead is in on an elaborate ruse to discredit tariffs, the disaster predicted by the experts is already underway. You also have to engage with the object-level arguments and evidence against tariffs, especially of this extreme nature - it's utterly pathetic to say, well I don't trust experts so I will merely act at random.
I doubt this will be a persuasive argument to consumers when everything goes up in price. If what you do is a complete fuck-up, surely it will only increase the dominance of the status quo. The tariffs will be a disaster and every economist will rightly say I told you so. Pol Pot proved that 'alternatives are possible' too.
As they say in the biz: post shorts.
I've been out of stocks and in treasuries for a while myself, so I'm not about to paint a rosy picture of the coming recession, but if you believe the market is always right you would have to believe they were right about a whole bunch of rate cuts that didn't happen just in the past few years. And if you believed the experts (rather than the market) you'd have been even more wrong.
Markets aren't magic, they're just the aggregate of what people with skin in the game believe. Them being wrong happens all the time.
Where is your money atm, if not the market?
Bonds, gold and bitcoin. Mostly bonds.
There is bound to be pain, but long term Bitcoin trades like an option on its own adoption, and the current administration is quite favorable to the industry in general and to it in particular.
The recession outlook entirely depends on whether or not it's seen as a safe haven. If state and financial system adoption continues or hastens, those shocks won't matter and it'll behave like a better gold.
If it doesn't and nobody cares because everyone is buying a gold backed BRICS currency or gold directly, it'll be the worst asset to hold in 2026, even worse than stocks.
I hold it as a hedge, like the rest. But if you want some real alpha, I think that tokenizing stocks and general financial engineering around bridging crypto and the regular financial system is going to be the next big thing for that industry. Exchanges all have products like that rolling behind the scenes, Blackrock has been positioning itself in that area and with a SEC that isn't persecuting the industry anymore, people can start to do things again.
I'm unsure how that particular kind of financialization will interact with a contracting economy, but it will. GameStop trying to shore up value by buying Bitcoin might be a template for others. Or it might not.
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