What caused Donald Trump to walk back on many of his tariffs last week was not domestic pressure but a run on the market for US Treasuries led by large institutional savers. If US debt is no longer a safe asset, then American hegemony is also at risk.
Really? You really don’t think “sow chaos in order to pump-and-dump the entire economy in order to enrich himself and his cronies in the short term, everybody else be damned” is within the realm of possibility? Or, Hell, even “intentionally crash the US economy at the behest of Putin,” for that matter?
Oh, absolutely. I am totally convinced that Trump’s main goal is to line his own pockets and those of his criminal friends.
I was merely trying to reflect what Trump’s official plan is - especially in light of the fact that the US economy actually does have some problems. These include among other things steadily rising interest payments to creditors and the strong dollar, which has very obviously been at odds with weakening industrial production for quite some time.
However, the Mar-a-Lago Accord (not an accord yet by the way but merely a strategy paper) was drawn up by his main economist, Miran. This guy is apparently convinced that the problems that the US economy has could be solved in this way.
But still: even if Trump wasn’t a criminal who is only interested in his own advantage, I still don’t think his economist’s plan could work. Even without Trump, this would be pretty absurd. But with Trump I think it is impossible, because this moron even makes it worse - for example by not introducing the tariffs gradually as planned, but immediately at the maximum percentage (prolly to make more on insider trading). This is disastrous even in the context of this already crazy plan.
So in short, Trump’s economists want to fundamentally reshape the global economy (by pure force) with a pretty absurd plan - but Trump’s greed and stupidity makes it even less likely that this could ever work.
Oh, and: In any case, all of this is very much at the expense of US citizens - except for the usual 1 percent, of course.
Edit: Probably a misunderstanding: I didn’t mean that you were wrong about Trump jeopardizing the long-term prosperity of the US economy - I completely agree with you. I just wanted to say that the US economy was indeed already fragile before him, but that’s not because of Biden, but because of a long-term development that led there.
Fair enough!
That said, as a general principle I don’t think it’s all that useful to talk about what Trump and his cronies (accomplices? co-conspirators? henchmen? whichever has the worst connotation) claim is the intent of their plans. Instead, we should relentlessly redirect the discussion back to what they actually do. People need to understand what’s actually happening and stop giving them undeserved benefit of the doubt.