▲The US drift into Adam Curtis' broad thesis in hypernormalisation(a) continues apace I see. Great to see J Pow putting up a fight but I fear this is all going one way.
(a) >We live in a world where the powerful deceive us. We know they lie. They know we know they lie. They don't care. We say we care but do nothing.
> I fear this is all going one way
That belief isn't the consequence of the situation, but the cause. There is ample ability to change events, but people must believe they can act and act together, as they have for centuries of democracy and for all human history. They do it in Iran. The Republicans and MAGA movement have made changes that would have been unbelievable ten years ago.
>
There is ample ability to change events, but people must believe they can act and act together, as they have for centuries of democracy and for all human history.This is the political will of a plurality of American voters. They certainly can't claim they didn't know what they would get, and they seem unconcerned by any of these actions that many of us find terrifying.
It is difficult to see how we can democracy our way out of this situation.
rhubarbtree1 minute ago
[-] This is disingenuous and a way to rationalise your feelings by blaming trump voters.
Firstly, it’s a two party state and choice is limited. People vote for the least worst option, or for a candidate that shares at least some of their values.
Second, many people did not vote.
Third, approval ratings show that many trump voters do not approve of his actions.
Fourth, where did “annex Greenland, abduct Maduro, remove independence of the reserve” appear on his manifesto?
> This is the political will of a plurality of American voters.
This fallacy gets repeated over and over, but it's obviously false.
Have you really never voted for a candidate who went on to do things you didn't agree with? It's a quintessential fact of politics that voting for a candidate is not equivalent to an endorsement of everything that candidate does in the future. It's a premise that is obviously false when we consider our own votes, but it feels cathartic to force the claim on to the other side.
This administration's net approval rating flipped net negative very quickly after his election and has been trending downward. It's just navel-gazing to pretend like what he's doing has high approval.
>> This is the political will of a plurality of American voters.
> This fallacy gets repeated over and over, but it's obviously false.
And it's used to condemn and justify. Most politicians, including Democrats, like to pretend that winning means the unpopular policies they happen to like are the will of the people. They will constantly gaslight you on it.
In reality, American politics gives people coarse choices that few are entirely happy with and many are very unhappy with. It's really hard to justify radical partisan action without denying that fact.
It's true that partisan politics provides only coarse choices. That's true of America's bipartisan system as well as multiparty parliamentary systems. But the parties are still dynamic coalitions that can change dramatically over time. Just look at the difference between the 1950s Democrats vs the 2000s Democrats, or the 2015 Republicans vs the 2020 Republicans.
The coarse options that are available at election time can be massively influenced in the years leading up to the election.
This is not a fallacy, simply an opinion you disagree with. But one which I strongly agree with.
I'm not American, and though I may not agree completely with the politicians I voted for, I have not been blindsided yet. The second election of Trump is a symptom of Americans either unable or unwilling to look beyond single issues or sports team politics.
To then turn around and act surprised is just a way to conveniently absolve themselves of the responsibility of electing him to begin with. If this wasn't the case, Trump voters themselves would be calling for his impeachment, not Democrat voters.
Approval rating means nothing if it enforces nothing.
If you're not American, then you may not understand the way the American voting system works.
We only have two parties. (Technically, there are some third parties, but they're effectively worse than negligible—voting for them is guaranteed to either do nothing or harm the cause you're interested in, unless the candidate is already a member of a major party and merely cross-endorsed.)
This means that if you care about one thing that one of the two major parties ostensibly supports (or is ostensibly better at than the other), more than any of the things on the other side, you have no choice: you have to vote for that party's candidate.
We also have a mainstream media landscape that is fully captured by the wealthy on the right. It is hard to overstate the extent to which our media carries water for the Republican Party.
And finally, we have absolutely abysmal civics education. It has been steadily gutted over the course of decades. To some extent, this is a deliberate move to make it easier to use the aforementioned media capture to control the average voter.
So if you're a low-information voter, you think the economy is bad, and you want to fix that, you're going to vote for the candidate of the major party that media has been telling you for 50 years is the party that's good at the economy, despite the fact that every time they're in office the debt goes up, regular people's lives get worse, and more protections go out the window.
In this case the candidate they voted for was a convicted criminal and pathological liar.
Dishonesty is the through line of Trump’s entire life. There was no reasonable expectation his second term would bring anything else. Anyone expressing buyer’s remorse at this point is impossibly naive.
thunderfork2 hours ago
[-] If there was ever a quintessential American quality, "impossibly naive" would be it.
reply▲Frankly I don’t think Trump 1 vs Trump 2 admin wise are the same. Many people were duped. They’re idiots, but not malicious idiots.
reply▲Plenty of them are malicious idiots. See quotes of them saying "They're hurting the wrong people"
reply▲If food keeps going up, it might get there but in the affluent west we run on our stomachs and as long as most of the middle class can still afford bread there won't be enough of a mass mobilization to affect any meaningful change.
reply▲Stated differently, if things really are so bad (and I would be the first to agree that things are pretty bad), then why are so many comfortable people (like me) not out on the street every day?
There are a lot of reasons for that, of course, but the bottom line is that when things get bad enough -- much worse than they are today -- then more people will take to the street, along with whatever sacrifice that entails. We're just not there yet, because for many, there is far too much to lose.
People are (and have been) taking to the streets. Americans tend to think that a protest must involve everyone otherwise it’s pointless. They don’t realize that protests typically involve a tiny fraction of the population. The more, the better of course, but stop sitting around waiting for it to get big. Either get out there now or find other ways to contribute. There’s plenty to be done.
reply▲People are taking to the streets. People are getting beaten, their property destroyed, their homes invaded and even murdered in Minneapolis as a result. The problem is that the US is massive; most people don't live in an active ICE zone where agents are going door to door kicking it in and pulling people out.
But even then, people are getting angrier. The injustices in Minneapolis triggered waves of protests here in Seattle. Eventually these things compound and more people become aware that we're living in the Great American Collapse.
I was just talking to someone close to me about what to expect if (when?) Trump starts annexing Greenland. I truly believe a national strike is our best bet.
But the reality is many (most?) people are living paycheck to paycheck and can’t risk that. But knowledge workers and especially software engineers can probably fare much better in the event of immediate job loss.
Now that’s not to downplay or minimize that risk, especially if you have a family, dependents, or some unique circumstance. But I’d hope for the majority of workers in our profession, it’s the difference between “I can’t buy food next week” vs “I have about 4-8 months before I’ve drained my liquid / emergency savings”
The sad thing is I don’t know what to do. Would this make headlines? Would they cover it? Would it get condensed into a single sound bite “big tech goes on strike”?
I’m conflicted but I feel like the choice should be obvious and simple. Just do it.
Not sure being out in the street really does much. Gives the jack booted thugs an excuse for a little recreational violence.
A general strike might have an effect, but I'm not sure how you organize such a thing.
A general strike at the level required to change things requires roping in unwilling participants as well. Probably on the scale of breaking infrastructure like payment systems or over the road shipping. If nobody can ignore current events because it's not just impacting but impeding and quickly degrading their quality of life they'll get angry. However just so long as people can go home and play their videogames, or listen to their podcasts, or read their books, they'll be able to focus enough of their attention away from events and keep their stress below the critical threshold just enough that they won't do anything. Calhoun's Rat Utopia Experiment comes to mind in that the rats suffered any number of indignities, maladies, and stressors just so long as they had ample access to endorphin and melatonin sources in strong enough bursts to stave off the constant floods of cortisol and norepinephrine.
Political theory is that ten to fifteen percent of a given population needs to actively rebel in order to enact change in a nation. The U.S. is fragmented enough by distance that you would need at least thirty percent of the national population to reach this state in order to get the ten percent in each of the six regions. Currently the number of people protesting is thought to be around four to six percent nationally, meaning it's less than one percent regionally. Part of that is because it's January, and most large scale protests happen in late spring or in the summer because schools are out and the weather doesn't suck. But part of it is simply because not enough people are motivated to act. Either pessimism or lack of direct harm is keeping them from caring.
So no matter what you're going to have to piss some people off. But it'd be better to piss off the people who will share your goals and ask forgiveness, because the other group was pissed from the beginning and have no forgiveness to ask for.
Shawn Fain, head of the UAW union, has already started calling for a general strike—in (IIRC) 2028.
Because that's how long it takes to organize one.
You can't, because everytime that happens, a group comes out of the woodworks that says X, Y, and Z need to be done before a general strike can even be considered.
X, Y, and Z usually involve community building, mutual aid, strike funds, housing security, and other precarity reducing actions.
If protests worked better than the alternatives then that's what megacorps and multinational corporations would be doing instead of bribes and lobbying. 'The people' still dont understand they're playing an entirely different sport.
reply▲> Not sure being out in the street really does much.
I agree; this phrase was just a stand in for doing something -- anything -- about the state of affairs I don't like. Other than things I can do from my couch like commenting on HN.
>then why are so many comfortable people (like me) not out on the street every day?
because a lot of people have a kind of built-in main character syndrome and believe they're the protagonists of the world and things can't really go bad. They haven't internalized that there isn't some god behind the curtain that saves them.
That's how it goes in every country that ends up in the dirt, they all thought they were special, they all thought "surely we're not there yet" and you can pick their remains out of the rubble.
relevant piece from a few years ago: https://indi.ca/i-lived-through-collapse-america-is-already-...
class3shock4 hours ago
[-] When I first watched a bunch of Adam Curtis stuff I thought it a long winded way of stating bad things have happened and have resulted in these bigger, overarching, bad things.
Thinking about it now 10 years later it feels alot different. The pervasiveness of tolerance of lies and fakeness has gone so far past anything I could have imagined being a big contributor to that.
For me, the key lies in the "We know they lie. They know we know they lie.". I'd argue that the transparency of lies is a fairly immature theme, relative to the long arc of history. Probably post-Iraq WMD is where I think it really started to ramp up and the emergence of virality/segmentation aspect of social media has really revved it up.
reply▲wanderingmind5 hours ago
[-] Hasn't this always been the case, what is different right now is that the tech enables to do this at scale, at much higher frequency that makes them more audacious, since no regular person can keep up with it. The over saturation of lies/fake news has lead to numbness and the hyper-normalisation. So, unless something directly is affecting us currently, we won't care
reply▲No. The modern Republicans want you to believe that because it’s an easy path to despair and inaction, which means they win, but the magnitude and degree have varied significantly in the past. Where we are now is something living Americans don’t have experience with unless they escaped somewhere like the Balkans in the 90s.
reply▲I think the real test will be, not whatever this administration does, but how much of that survives into the next one - how much is the new normal versus how much is a temporary aberration.
That’s true even if the next administration is Republican (Vance or whoever), but especially true if the next administration ends up being Democratic instead-which while not certain, has decent odds-the more Trump defies norms, the more voters who will wish to go back to a “normal” Presidency
I think the test beyond that is how willing the next government will be to codify meaningful changes into law. After Trump’s first time it’s as if there was a big sigh of relief and a notion of “well, we just won’t do that again”.
It’s very clear now that we need a lot more regulation of what presidents can and cannot do. Not to mention judicial reform. But if you’re a democrat theoretically getting power in 2028 you’re going to have immense pressure to move forwards, focus on kitchen table issues, yadda yadda.
Not sure how regulation helps when you have a Congress and/or Supreme Court willing to ignore it, alas.
reply▲dredmorbius4 hours ago
[-] Both institutions, and those who've failed them, must of course be addressed directly.
reply▲And extremely severe punishment as a deterrent against future efforts. Instead of a bunch of slow-rolled court cases and deferral back to the political process.
reply▲What's the point of law if no one is willing to enforce it?
reply▲One thing I think is sometimes forgotten about shifting the overton window is that it sort of doesnt matter what political leaning has their hands on the lever. When it serves a purpose, which is not always a public first purpose, people in power will leverage any lever possible. Shifts in the overton window, just add more levers and it comes down to benevolence or luck that those levers aren't used incorrectly
reply▲>
I think the real test will be, not whatever this administration does, but how much of that survives into the next one - how much is the new normal versus how much is a temporary aberration.A reminder that this is the second time that Trump has been elected.
(People were saying what you're now saying after he was kicked out—an event that he says was rigged—the first time.)
Exactly: there was a brief moment when it looked like Republicans were willing to hold him accountable after the January 6th insurrection but that faltered and they circled ranks, especially when Roberts signaled that Trump had the support of the Supreme Court to the extent that they were willing to concoct a new constitutional doctrine to shield him.
A lot of people were hoping he’d just go away without them having to do anything difficult, but it’s clear that the next government has to reestablish the United States as a constitutional republic with the rule of law, even if it means hard things like trials for officials who abused their power. This kind of slide into authoritarianism isn’t an accident, and without consequences the people pushing it will keep trying.
hackingonempty3 hours ago
[-] What makes you think he is not going to pardon every single person in his administration, every single loyal Republican?
reply▲The presidential pardon is clearly something that needs to either be heavily reined in or removed. How you do that I don't know, but turns out the US Constitution is something you can ignore, so...
The entire system of checks and balances needs some rethinking because it's clearly not as "perfect" as we've been told over and over again.
_DeadFred_56 minutes ago
[-] ex post facto can be ignored, and a new law of the land passed voiding pardons during 47s term. Because repealing pardons isn't weaponizing the person pardoned's behavior after the fact, it's against Presidential authority, so isn't ex post facto when it comes to the person who's behavior was legally determined to be criminal. Voiding a commutation for cause would be tougher and potential ex post facto, but not a pardon. We can void those without violating our ex post facto standards.
reply▲rootusrootus4 hours ago
[-] A lot of us are really, really hoping that there is something unique about Trump that cannot be easily reproduced by the next MAGA leader. That the movement will fragment into irrelevancy as the usual elites regain control.
reply▲reply▲rootusrootus4 hours ago
[-] It may be that I'm a naive optimist, but I agree with him. When I look at who the hard core believers envision as the next torch-bearer, none of them have what it takes. Not Vance, not Rubio (Rubio! Suddenly he is 'strong'?? When was that ever a widely held opinion??), not the Trump kids. Trump has a way of defying political gravity and repeatedly escaping the consequences that take down every other politician. In this case the liberal consensus that it's a cult may not be that far from the truth -- maybe that's a loaded term, but how else do you describe a group of supporters whose faith is so strong that their ideology changes by the day to match whatever their leader currently says, even if it is diametrically opposed to what they said last week?
reply▲I'm not sure?
Some things, it just doesn't matter what the next administration does. The people of the US may, at any time, elect an administration that continues the course of breaking norms. The fact is that businesses, industries, banks, and nations have to guard against that possibility more than they need to cooperate with the next administration.
I think it's a bit fanciful to think you can take all the policies back to normal and have, Europe for instance, say "Oh good! Everything's back to normal!" I could be wrong, but I think that ship has sailed. Europe will work towards a new normal that looks to their own interests. And no action the next administration can take will change Europe's determination in this regard.
I think this will be as true of actors in the financial and industrial spheres as it will be of Europe in the security sphere.
SilverElfin3 hours ago
[-] This is clearly a fraudulent criminal investigation. Classic dictator strategy of charging opponents with trivial crimes to achieve political power grabs. US futures in stock market are way down.
But I bet a third of the country will blindly support it. They will see it as a just investigation into a crime. And they won’t care about the consequences. Or connect cause and effect. And with that much support the administration can get away with anything.
As for their various unconstitutional and illegal acts - what method is there to hold the executive branch accountable? It’s not like there’s a police force to arrest them right?
He certainly doesn't beat around the bush here. Very nice too see someone of his stature stand up and call out these shenanigans for what they are.
reply▲So I'm sitting here as a Canadian wondering what the American people are going to do? I understand a lot of what the President of The United States says - I even agree with some of it, the problem is I don't feel like we're engaging with the American people anymore. I really wonder where you guys are headed and what it means for the rest of us, I spent 15 years in the states, built a public company there, I really like the Americans, but I don't want annexation. I wonder where you guys are headed.
reply▲> I wonder where you guys are headed.
You need to know only two facts about America to guess that:
* Fifty three percent of Americans now read below the sixth grade level.
* As (ostensibly) a representative Democracy America's fate is dictated by the majority of it's citizens.
Our future is to become a broken nation governed by middle-school student level thinking. The only way to build a better America is to build a better populace, and that would be contrary to the interests of the angry, spoiled, children who seem to hold all the power now.
> * As (ostensibly) a representative Democracy America's fate is dictated by the majority of it's citizens.
No, it's determined by the people who actually go out and vote.
Bizarrely, voter turnout among younger people remains low. It's beyond frustrating to work with large groups of young people who are seemingly always talking politics and angry about something political, then to watch as half of them either forget to vote or act like they're too apathetic to vote.
The craziest part was seeing this apathy play out in states with vote-by-mail systems that required as little effort as possible. I still don't get it.
It was determined by voters. Pretty sure that's over now too.
reply▲It's not too late. But it will be too late as soon as too many people think it's too late.
reply▲I think it’s also important to talk about what it means to “read at a 6th grade level” when this is mentioned, because a lot of people (myself included) might assume that just means they could finish and understand a book intended for 6th graders.
But there’s actually meaningful criteria that sheds some light on the critical thinking capabilities of people who can or can’t read at certain levels, especially as it pertains to propaganda. Below a certain level, people are not well-educated enough to critically assess a text against the motivations of its authors (somewhere around 9th grade). Americans are prone to conspiratorial thinking so you might think that that’s alright because they’re often skeptical of any text, but it just seems like it causes them to dig even deeper into the propaganda that’s targeted to them.
It’s kind of like learning that some people don’t have an inner monologue, or that they aren’t capable of imagining shapes or objects abstractly in their mind. Except it’s a lot more serious as it deals with critical thinking directly: these people don’t understand that what they’re reading was written for a purpose.
shepherdjerred4 hours ago
[-] Why is literacy so important? Wasn’t literacy lower in the US at other points in time?
reply▲The Lippmann school of democracy sort of predisposed that people were too stupid and that through journalists would emerge a reasonable set of choices. For the most part that matches the way politics worked in the USA and most democracies until recently. Unfortunately the internet disrupted things such that suddenly everyone needs to actually be democratically adept in at least some form more akin to the Dewey school of thought.
The combination of literacy and the algorithmic propaganda machine is a pretty big stumbling block.
Interesting comment. I haven't heard this problem phrased this way nor have I heard of these schools, do you have a recommendation for learning more about this?
reply▲Adapt! (Barbara Stiegler)
She puts it all together relatively succinctly if dense. You can just read Dewey too if you want to be closer to the source. He's a bit more interesting because it is more of the road not taken out of the progressive era.
In what language?
78% of Americans have English as their first language.
reply▲I don't think that's right - it looks like the stat is that 78% of Americans speak *only* English at home.
I'm not American, but anecdotally, a supermajority (like 80-90%) of people I know who speak multiple languages at home speak English at native fluency. (e.g. in my semi-extended family - parents/siblings/nibblings/partner/parents-in-law, there are 9 of us, and only 2 are more comfortable in French than English, but none of us would qualify as speaking *only* English at home.)
renegade-otter6 hours ago
[-] America has enough power to help someone else. No one has the power to save America from itself.
The cavalry is not coming, and this fire is going to take its course.
One day, maybe we will rebuild from scratch.
> No one has the power to save America from itself.
Wrong!! Please don’t say that! We all have power inside the US. Congress had the opportunity in 2021 to correct the wrong, but Republicans kowtowed and they are still doing so. That was the easy way. Now for the hard way, American people will have to do something about it.
Edit: Grammar
> One day, maybe we will rebuild from scratch
The current situation is bad, but this is just doomerism.
The current administration will end. Trump can't live forever. His approval rating is already low and falling.
We're in for a bumpy ride, but then it's going to start reverting toward the mean. Not necessarily back to the way things were, but periods of extreme like this are followed by a reversion to the mean more often than not.
TheAlchemist4 hours ago
[-] > The current administration will end
They way the current administration act, I start to think that their plan A is to stay for a long long time. There is so much open corruption that half of them would land in prison really quickly and they don't seem particularly bothered by that fact.
You're thinking about it with the wrong basis. They will not land in prison because they broke enough enforcement mechanisms to escape punishment. The administration will end, but the regime will not. Even if Trump died tomorrow, enough people have followed him through the holes he created that things will continue. You will of course have factions form and have those factions fight amongst eachother as they head off in their own directions, but the factions will exist in the first place. There is no way to stop them from forming and pursuing their goals without building new enforcement mechanisms, which they will obviously and vehemently impede the construction of. These people will likely die of age before they spend even a second getting a burning hot de-lousing shower and an orange one piece. This has happened every two decades in the U.S. since Reconstruction was sabotaged and prematurely ended.
reply▲hackable_sand2 hours ago
[-] I have no problem building from scratch.
Happy to show everyone how to do that.
Probably the mantra Chuck Schumer recites before sleep every night.
reply▲potsandpans5 hours ago
[-] Always amusing. So sure. I like to imagine the conversations at the begining of the late bronze age collapse, or perhaps aristocrats of the western roman empire living in Gaul.
"To say anything that challenges the current trajectory is doomerism. We're in for a bumpy ride for sure, but this will all correct itself. _it has to_."
> periods of extreme like this are followed by a reversion to the mean more often than not.
Cite evidence please.
Trump is not the problem, he’s a symptom. The problem is the roughly one third of Americans who think he’s great, and to a lesser extent the roughly one third who don’t care.
After all that’s happened, his approval rating is still above 40%. Those people aren’t going away or changing their minds any time soon.
That is the truly scary thing.
And from what I've seen, the rest of 'the west' has similarly sized undercurrents of similar sentiment.
Strangely, that 40% will be made up of, largely, people whose grandparents lived through WWII.
baby_souffle2 hours ago
[-] > Trump can't live forever.
Trump is a symptom of the problem, not the actual problem.
There's basically nothing the American people
can do short term.
The US government is entirely non-responsive and only nominally representative.
Barring a wave of Republican retirements in the House, the absolute soonest there are any guardrails are after the 2026 midterms when a new congress is seated in 2027.
Of course there’s, it’s just that anti-Trump people don’t care as much and are not as brave as the pro-Trump people. MAGA people stormed the capitol, anti-Trump people just write well thought concerns on the internet. MAGA people for years endured deplatforming and being outcasts but developed methods to deal with it, the anti-Trump people are scared to lose what they have and are too concerned about their differences within and they are unable to build anything. It’s people with nothing to lose and everything to gain vs people with everything to lose and nothing to gain from having a fight.
Those who stormed the Capitol did it because they were against the current course of affairs. Are the anti-Trump people ever going to do something like that if they are against the current course of events? I don’t think so.
Consequently, Trump will win. That’s why people who control the capital are aligned with MAGA.
sapphicsnail1 hour ago
[-] People are out there protesting right now even though ICE and the police have a history of shooting unarmed protestors. Leftists protestors are and always have been more harshly treated by this government than the other side.
reply▲> People are out there protesting right now even though ICE and the police have a history of shooting unarmed protestors
I never understand what's the point of those protests. They should be taking over power by force or GTFO. Notice that successful revolutions storm the HQ, destroy some building of iconic significance or kill/capture the leader, not just enduring the atrocities of the foot-soldiers of the people who they are against.
The peaceful protest thing works when the people in the HQ care about what you think about them, which means it only works if those protesting are their people and not the opposition.
The lefties should start taking notes on what works and what the far right did to gain so much power and start stealing their methods. Display of dissatisfaction isn't going to work, if anything that dissatisfaction is satisfaction to the right fingers. They feel giddy when see the people they hate protesting, their only complain can be that the protests are not big enough.
The pro-Trump group don't think about consequences is the thing. The anti-Trump group do, and that's a big reason why they're slow to respond. Performing a siege on the Capitol was a stupid, angry, and impulsive reaction with no thought of the consequences afterwards. That's the way the entire pro-Trump group tends to act. Meanwhile the anti-Trump group think about knock-on effects and long term consequences because they understand that nothing is an island and that everything is connected to everything else, even through degrees of separation. It makes them hesitant to do anything right away because they first have to consider what the ripples are going to affect outside of the area of their immediate focus. One group is reactive and the other is proactive, and being proactive is always going to be slower.
reply▲burnt-resistor5 hours ago
[-] Gerrymandering, infinite lobbying corruption, and manufactured consent are supposed to keep the populace doing and thinking what the 1% want, and cheating to help them. They can't even do those properly anymore with vast resources. Perhaps billionaires and failed celebrity reality stars don't make the best public administrators.
reply▲Not doing much. Playing PC games and watching the world burn. Not much I can do.
Just bought a new 5080 this week. Hoping I can hunker down in my cave for the next couple years and see what's left of the world in 2030.
Oh yea, beer, lots of beer.
Nothing? Trump is playing freeway chicken with Powell, he's driving a Pontiac Fiero and Powell is driving a bulldozer. The Supreme Court has already signaled that they're not on board fucking with the Fed. This will potentially cost Trump his next Fed nomination for awhile, because GOP Senators are putting a hold on his nominations until the legal stuff resolves.
reply▲threatofrain2 hours ago
[-] I fear we are headed towards world war, something bigger than America.
reply▲Time to get your PAL buddy
reply▲Complain to our representatives who will do absolutely nothing because the system is ripe for abuse and we’ve put people who actively want to abuse and exploit it into office.
I keep telling everyone and have been for a year, it’s not just our problem, due to global US positioning it’s now a world problem. Just ask Venezuela. Regardless of what you think about the end result the ends did not justify the means.
I for one will be collecting my (completely legal) hunting rifles and weapons I’ve had in storage since I was a kid, have them professionally serviced and grab some ammunition, on the terrible case I need to defend myself which I thought I’d never ever have to consider and I’d just sell them some day. But alas we have a lot of really really stupid as well as downright toxic voters in this country.
You’re all tooling up to defend against your neighbours instead of the people causing the political instability.
The outcome of this is all too predictable.
We vote. That’s all we can do. 50.5% of the people voted for this insanity in 2024. We can only hope they see how this is going and vote differently in 2026 and beyond.
reply▲They are headed for complete fascist take over. Going through a phase that Europeans went through a century ago, end up destroying themselves.
It’s very concerning that they have nukes. JD Vance said something about the risks UK and France owning nukes, I think he just wanted to start the conversation because I think he believes that it’s actually US that is the risk. We know that the guy is not actually a Trump ideology zealot from his pre-Trump alignment.
I think it'd be a mistake to assume that JD Vance is not exactly what he portrays himself as at this point. He certainly seems onboard with everything thats happening and is happy to defend it and push the boundaries for more lawlessness.
reply▲I agree but IMHO he is not in for the ideology of it, therefore he might prefer not to destroy the world for ideological gains.
reply▲Waterluvian6 hours ago
[-] Remember early in his first term when he tested waters but the governmental system pushed back and kept him in check? It feels like an out of body experience to look at this and contemplate how much he’s changed about how the U.S. government conducts itself.
reply▲In his first term, he probably didn't yet understand how much power the office truly holds and how to wield it and just how far you can go with that. Because the main restriction on all of that power has always been convention rather than any actually robust guard rails. But no one, not even someone like Nixon, has ever dared to truly test that out.
reply▲CodingJeebus5 hours ago
[-] He knew how much power he had back then. The difference was that the government bureaucracy worked hard to counter his agenda throughout his term. It’s why The Heritage Foundation came up with Project 2025: an organizated and cohesive plan to dismantle the bureaucracy and consolidate power. And it is working.
reply▲The first term laid a lot of the groundwork for this term as well - had he not appointed three SC Justices, things would look very different. This court has said basically that all executive actions including pretextual investigations via the DOJ are legal and that there is no such thing as agency independence, even when written into the laws that created the agencies.
reply▲zarzavat18 minutes ago
[-] Yes, too much emphasis is put on Trump. He's
just the President. This crisis has been 80 years in the making.
It's the Supreme Court that has expanded the powers of the President, and previously of the Federal government, far beyond what was ever intended.
By allowing the federal government to dominate the states, the Supreme Court created a position of unrivalled power.
Trump may be an evil narcissist by the standards of normal people, but there's plenty of those sorts of people in politics. That's why you have a constitution.
>
He knew how much power he had back then. The difference was that the government bureaucracy worked hard to counter his agenda throughout his term.He did not know. He was also not expecting to win, and so had to scramble to get people appointed.
He asked around and got people who were experts in their respective fields. The problem is that those experts (a) knew his ideas were bad, and (b) had integrity. It was, by and large, Trump's appointees that worked hard to counter his agent and not the government bureaucracy.
Trump did not make the same 'mistake' this time around: he appointed folks not for their competence but for their loyalty to him. That was and is the only criteria for serving under Trump.
cosmicgadget5 hours ago
[-] Cause most of the capricious use of power is expensive and people used to care about the budget.
reply▲No? Because most people who have held POTUS aren’t malignant narcissists.
reply▲3eb7988a16635 hours ago
[-] I hate to assign him so much agency. The man seems a complete buffoon who lacks the ability to plan anything beyond real estate fraud. Instead, I look to all of the people in his orbit who can orchestrate long term goals. Sure, he will self sabotage many schemes, but will directionally go where the handlers want. Vance, Miller, Heritage Foundation, etc are the ones guiding most policy decisions.
That tariffs have been so absolutely scattershot, says Trump actually is the one calling the shots there.
His orbiters/handlers are totally throwing all kinds of stuff at him to see what sticks to his cooked brain. It's clear he's barely aware what's happening anymore. The only coherent things he can focus on are things from the 80s and 90s heydays and old and recent grudges.
reply▲It’s clear that he’s very easily persuaded on many topics that he already has a slight bias towards, but that he also has his pet projects that his handlers don’t want to mess with because that would jeopardize their political capital (ball room).
Quick heuristic I have is: vanity project = Trump; neocon pet project = Heritage Foundation; anything related to racial purity = Stephen Miller; quackery = RFK and other grifters.
The tariffs are partially his bias, but also Navarro who lost his mind somewhere around 2015 and became an economics pariah.
He was rewarded with full control of every branch of government. What did we expect?
reply▲And that happened even after they arrested him and tried to put him in jail. What's happening now might be shocking but not unexpected at all.
reply▲>tried to put him in jail
They really didn't. It was a dog and pony show under the belief that he would not make his way back into power. The dems/reps did not want to set a precedent of holding a president to account for doing terribly illegal things. They didn't intend to actually do anything to prevent this.
And so here we are.
colejhudson5 hours ago
[-] Through what mechanism is he controlling the other branches of government?
reply▲galleywest2005 hours ago
[-] The GOP in Congress abdicating its role and deferring to the executive, as well as SCOTUS continually using the “shadow docket” to rule in his favor with little to no explanation provided.
reply▲cosmicgadget5 hours ago
[-] Congress: anyone falling out of line will lose his support in midterms.
Judiciary: appointments and ideological alignment with some of the Supreme Court. Thomas and Alito are fully controlled, Kavanaugh just loves a powerful executive, the rest aren't controlled but often in agreement.
Then there's his use of executive power to punish his adversaries, e.g. Perkins Coie.
zaptheimpaler5 hours ago
[-] The question is through what mechanism are other branches curtailing his power? It seems to be limited to strongly worded letters and speeches, indignant comments and scathing news reports but nothing real.
reply▲The execution of the Unitary Executive theory, a clear ideological descendant of Carl Schmitt’s Decisionism. Carl also had some beautiful prose describing the weaknesses of liberal democracy and how to exploit them that are very relevant to today as well.
reply▲Through the flawed primary system. Relatively few people vote in the primaries, which means they skew towards extremists. Trump can motivate MAGAns to vote in Republican primaries, which makes MAGA essentially a gatekeeper to Republican seats even in districts where the electorate at large is Republican rather than MAGAn.
He's not directly controlling the judiciary yet, but he has appointed wildly extremist judges and threatened judges who rule against him with impeachment, so he's certainly making an effort.
He's also appreciably more senile now, and a common manifestation of that is lowered inhibitions. I'm not saying that Trump was great at 70, but now that he's 80 he's considerably less in control of himself.
(If you doubt this, go watch some clips and compare how he talks now to how he talked during his first administration. If you were concerned about Biden's state in 2024, you should be concerned about Trump now.)
Trump #1 came unprepared, that hasn't repeated.
reply▲I think it’s more like the opportunists weren’t prepared. Now they’re feasting, and Trump is easily exploited.
reply▲prodigycorp6 hours ago
[-] Many times I've disagreed with Powell, but major props for this statement.
reply▲I came in to say the same thing -- major, major respect to Powell.
I am not a big fan of his earlier policies (or of Greenspan's and anyone after him for that matter). His "unlearn the importance of M2" did not age well. He made the tail end of the ZIRP more painful than it needed to be. But those were honest mistakes from a public servant who did his best and believed in what he is doing.
And standing up for what he believes is right, against this insanity from the president is the gold standard of what we need from public servants. My 2c.
toomuchtodo6 hours ago
[-] Courage in short supply, refreshing to see it flexed.
reply▲I hope that some heads of universities, CEO's and people running important journalism outfits are looking at this and feeling a deep sense of shame.
reply▲abrookewood6 hours ago
[-] It's honestly depressing how little push back there seems to be.
reply▲Yes.
His statement is firm and well articulated. I have nothing bad to say about the man right now
I have bad things to say about him. But they're firmly on pause. What Trump wants for the Federal Reserve is far worse.
And anyone who is a hard-currency quantity-theory-of-money conservative, should also be appalled by it.
Trump is way worse than what the harshest critics of the Federal Reserve think about it. Nobody right or left should support it. Only the billionaires will profit off the monetary disorder.
AnimalMuppet5 hours ago
[-] > Only the billionaires will profit off the monetary disorder.
Maybe not even them. Certainly not all of them.
By design, kiss the ring. It’s a natural progression of the kind of grifting that has been occurring through 2025: shitcoin rugpulls, tariff announcements, etc.
reply▲Would love to hear what you've disagreed with because the man pulled off what can only be interpreted as a miracle in landing the economy nearly back on the 2% target with no massive economic problems after we went through an unprecedented pandemic, during which Trump printed $3.5 Trillion, causing massive inflation (yes, Trump did that, not Biden).
reply▲Its crazy how you can see where things are heading and still be surprised when they arrive there.
reply▲Everyone calling it out was named a doomer.
Well doom is here. Congrats.
LorenPechtel6 hours ago
[-] Fundamentally, people don't like situations with no good answer. I see it again and again, present a problem with no good answer and most people will resort to the answer that aligns with their political leanings even when faced with clear evidence they are wrong.
Look how quickly big business rolled over for The Felon--because they saw what mot people have been denying since the election.
Gradually (last 3 decades) ==> Suddenly (we are here)
reply▲Shots fired. Even the republicans will not be able to ignore this and they know that if Powell caves in the American economy will likely collapse. So who will speak up in his defense?
reply▲12_throw_away4 hours ago
[-] > Even the republicans will not be able to ignore this
Oh boy would I love to join you in whatever alternate dimension you live in.
breakyerself5 hours ago
[-] It's probably going to collapse anyway. He's been hitting all of the pillars of the economy with a sledge hammer.
reply▲altmanaltman4 hours ago
[-] I wonder how the stock market would look if AI wasn't such a big driving factor. Or how it would look if there was no sledge hammer. Insane times.
reply▲My working theory is that the ai bubble is caused by trump. People are too uncertain to want to invest in most industries, but they have to put their money somewhere, so they put it in ai stocks. Since the supreme court is likely to rule trump's tariffs illegal in a week or so, this may lead to a stock market crash. As people reallocate their portfolios, they will sell their ai stocks, which will pop the bubble and cause a crash. Something to watch out for.
reply▲altmanaltman3 hours ago
[-] Valid theory, and if you look at the prices of assets like gold, the reallocation is already happening. But I feel a near-term crash in AI stocks is just not coming unless we are headed towards catastrophic economic conditions. Lots of market forces are involved in AI now and even people selling stocks (or a major correction) will not pop the AI bubble since the major players have invested way too much cash to just let it go away at this point. (IMO)
reply▲Yes, but for now the USD has more or less survived. If Trump forcibly removes the FED chair on a pretext things could go downhill very fast. You can probably kiss the USD as a reserve currency goodbye overnight and China is going to have a real problem given the amount of debt they hold. This could easily knock the last pillar that holds it all up away.
reply▲> Even the republicans will not be able to ignore this
GOP: "Hold my beer."
Uh have you met Republicans? Anyone not fully onboard that had even half a spine retired or got voted out. The rest either love it or just fall in line so they can collect paychecks.
reply▲This is... just crazy. One of those mostly boring bits of plumbing that has been left to professionals throughout the entire 50 years of my life - and they're trying to wreck it.
reply▲abrookewood6 hours ago
[-] It's also completely in character with Trump's behaviour. He is a dictator who wants what he wants and can't abide anyone standing in his way. He wants absolute authority to do as he wishes. This extends to removing foreign heads of state so he can access their countries resources and also threatening 'allies' so he can take their territory. We're watching him systematically destroy any good will or moral authority that the USA held.
reply▲He was the owner and CEO of a private company — essentially a dictator without even a board or the SEC keeping him in check.
For decades he hasn’t had to tolerate “checks and balances”! Nobody could say “no” and retain their jobs under him.
The American public decided to put this type of person in charge.
The consequences were predicted.
It goes back before Donald was in charge of the Trump real estate business. It started with a really really shitty father who desired a “killer” business instinct in his children (read: cruelty) above all else.
Reading some of Mary Trump’s books will give some insight on the family that Donald grew up in. No love, all cruelty.
Donald is just a rich kid who inherited a big business and learned nothing but cruelty from his daddy.
It's also for very stupid reasons: The fed dropping rates to the degree that would satisfy Donald Trump would greatly accelerate inflation which in turn would further upset voters, who would in turn blame Donald Trump (just like they did Biden before).
reply▲Is it just a cynical view that enough voters can be convinced it's the other side at fault?
Someone who supports trump, please let me know the logic on this. Genuinely. I'm trying to read other places about these charges but they're just so slanted that they're not really trustworthy. Is there anything to this, or is it really just to pressure the federal reserve?
I don't think it's that deep or that Trump is even thinking ahead. He just wants the rates to be lower.
reply▲Exactly. He thinks he knows better than the experts. He thinks lower interest rates are good and people saying they should be higher are just trying to make him look bad. Nothing he does is a clever gambit.
reply▲JumpCrisscross5 hours ago
[-] >
He thinks he knows better than the expertsIt’s a kleptocracy. He doesn’t care. He just wants cheap money from the Fed as patronage.
SpicyLemonZest6 hours ago
[-] I implore you to stop being credulous before it's too late. Trump supporters deeply believe, and are not shy about saying, that anyone who stops Trump from achieving his political goals should be imprisoned or murdered.
reply▲I have a family member like this who I interact with almost every day. When Renee Good was fatally shot in the face three times this family member said that she deserved it for "getting in the way" and that if she just ignored them she wouldn't have been murdered. With all of the video recordings that have come out and been extensively disseminated, pretty much everyone knows that she moved out of the way and stopped, and it was Jonathan Ross who initiated the encounter. There is no way to "get out of the way" and "ignore them" when armed figures enact force on whims. But people like my family member believe that these armed figures direct violence towards those who are dangerous rather than simply directing violence to anybody who is close enough to hurt. You cannot reason with people like that because they retroactively justify any harm in order to protect their belief in the systems of enforcement. To them order and structure are more important and valuable than agency and safety or in some cases even life itself.
reply▲> would further upset voters
I continue to be surprised by people who have seen things unfold as they have over less than a year of this administration and still somehow believe we'll continue to have "free and fair" elections anytime in the near future.
We have over, and over again seeing virtually all of the "checks and balances" we learned about as kids being overridden without consequence.
This community of all other should be aware of how easy it is to exert total control of information (I'm still surprised this article is on the home page). Everyone consumes almost all of their information through digital, corporate controlled means. Even people getting together a organically socializing in bars, something that was common 30 years ago, has been replaced with online interactions. Trump does not need mandate from the people to continue to rule the country.
SpicyLemonZest5 hours ago
[-] We've had a number of free and fair elections in the past year, including some where the Trump-supported candidate lost. That doesn't mean we're out of the woods, but Trump has not historically been willing to go out of his way to protect the electoral fortunes of people who aren't himself, and at least some of his allies are well aware that the peace and security we presently enjoy is not guaranteed in a post-democratic US.
reply▲When it comes to harm on this scale, always expect the worst, because the harm will be generational. More importantly, Trump doesn't give a flying fuck about anything outside of the executive branch and below the federal level, because the federal level executive has control of the instruments of war. And he has already proven that nobody manning those instruments of war will disobey him. The Marines got recalled, but the National Guard didn't. This latest thing with Venezuela is just one more section of the window that's been wiped clear enough for him to see what he can do. The final bit that's still obscured is whether or not he can give direct orders to the military and security agencies to subjugate the state levels of government. I've got a large amount of certainty that within the next week or two even that bit of obscurity won't remain.
reply▲SpicyLemonZest2 hours ago
[-] As I always tell people, if you're right there's no point in arguing about it, so the only thing I would say is that you owe it to yourself to check your predictions. Set a reminder for January 25 to confirm whether Trump has ordered the military and security agencies to invade any state capitols. I did this a few times last year, and immigration policy is really the only topic where the "expect the worst" heuristic has worked for me.
reply▲My personal belief is that he will try it and it will fail, but that will of course lead to the Coast Guard and the National Guard being rescinded from the DHS and governor's control by decree and being placed under the Navy and the Army respectively. Currently this power exists in theory, but it's never truly been implemented, even during World War II. This is something that Hegseth publicly considered when West Virginia's state Congress decided that the extended deployment of the state's National Guard troops to Washington D.C. was not within presidential power and ordered them back.
reply▲especially as if the risk premium for the US increases because of the methods used to challenge Fed independence, the rates that truly matter, treasury yields, will increase causing limiting how much consumers can actually benefit from lower headline rates
reply▲There's no inflation if they don't publish the data.
reply▲Im not convinced Trump cares anymore. For whatever reason that may be, he has decided there is nothing that can stop him at this point. There is no congress or court that will hold him accountable. His supporters are unwavering and drunk on unchecked power right now.
reply▲The MAGA crowd and their lickspittles/enablers are so far removed from reality that they only believe their leader.
And many others will vote for system-wreckers (broadly: conservatives) again, because the democrats cannot fix much of the damage done within the next legislative periods, let alone just one... even if the miracle of a trifecta happens and SCOTUS loses its majority on top of it. Rinse, repeat.
quadragenarian5 hours ago
[-] These are the very people who would help him rewrite history that yes he indeed did earn the Nobel Peace Prize as it is obviously and prominently displayed in his office, the words and records of the Nobel committee be damned.
reply▲bediger40004 hours ago
[-] blame Donald Trump (just like they did Biden before)Respectfully disagree. Republican presidents get a lot more economic leeway than Dem presidents, especially from the media. This has puzzled me my entire adult life. Inflation will bother media and public, but not to the same extent it did 2021-22.
reply▲> This has puzzled me my entire adult life.
Big media works for the capital class, community newspapers and other forms of local news that are largely pro-public have been gutted. The remaining large-ish public media orgs (PBS, NPR) are currently under attack to consolidate corporate-friendly agenda-setting.
SpicyLemonZest4 hours ago
[-] The last time inflation was that high was 1973-1982, and the incumbent lost both presidential elections within those years.
reply▲bediger40002 hours ago
[-] Sure, but the Republican president gets credit for economic good news thing is beyond just inflation.
reply▲Case in point, you’d think by how things are reported that Trump brought down inflation. But inflation was down when Biden left office and Trump has done nothing to improve it.
reply▲swagmoney16065 hours ago
[-] There hasn't been a single point in my shorter life so far where things have been this out of control. The fed is supposed to be as non-political as possible. I know politics and the economy are intertwined, but tell me how this won't end up a disaster please. How do we get back to the USA we had even 10 years ago?
reply▲baby_souffle2 hours ago
[-] > but tell me how this won't end up a disaster please.
Unless you want to split hairs and argue that "disaster" is really only in the middle of the spectrum of plausible outcomes... then there is no outcome here that isn't a disaster.
At *best* this only moderately raises inflation in the short-term and somehow the rest of the world isn't shaken too much and the USD somehow still remains a reserve currency.
I'm in the "USD looses reserve currency status in 6-48 months" camp but there are some reasonable arguments against this.
It never was non-political if you look at the individual votes of the board members. Perhaps it was non-political in aggregate, but never at an individual level.
reply▲This is the second or third comment I’ve seen online that says this. I’m curious how do you conclude the fed has “never been non-political?” Is this just a matter of using the right terminology? The term “non-political” (also “independent”) isn’t concerned with each board member’s individual party affiliation, or how they vote in elections. It just means that management of the fed and importantly its
monetary policy I.e. the federal rate, be guided by data; not influenced by short term goals of politicians and
especially not influenced by the President or his administration.
(Edit) all that to say, maybe that’s what you meant by “never at an individual level”?
This week's episode of "Not the Epstein Files".
reply▲Best of luck JPow - that was a perfect statement from the Fed.
It seems like theres a bit of an inflection point right now in the US. I wonder how much entropy the system can handle it has to be near a breaking point.
cosmicgadget5 hours ago
[-] I wonder if we'll see another round of resignations at Justice like the Eric Adams thing.
Powell normally talks around the political pressure he's been subjected to. Funny to see him call it out right here.
There’s no question about the independence of the DoJ. Its independence is undeniably gone and it is full on working as Trump’s enforcement arm. Anyone who tries to argue otherwise is a clown.
reply▲Thom Tillis is a liar and will immediately confirm whoever Trump nominates. There are no examples of Tillis or other prominent republicans ever coming together to actually effectively oppose a Trump nominee (see the current secretary of defense, or leader of DHS for evidence).
reply▲derangedHorse5 hours ago
[-] I dislike the existence of the Fed, but I dislike the idea of the executive branch being in control of monetary policy even more. I'll be tuning in to see how the case progresses.
reply▲pixelatedindex5 hours ago
[-] Do you have an alternative to the Fed? Likes and dislikes has nothing to do with it. Or let me ask you another way — why do you dislike the Fed?
reply▲seanmcdirmid5 hours ago
[-] You can dislike a solution but admit that you can't think of a better solution, or specify that it is better than an even worse solution.
I can see why someone would have a issues with "a bunch of rich bankers appointed by politicians" controlling American monetary policy. But I can't really see a better way at least, until we can achieve a post-scarcity economy or something.
>
I can see why someone would have a issues with "a bunch of rich bankers appointed by politicians" controlling American monetary policy.Yellen had a long academic career before going into public service (with various roles at the Fed before becoming Fed chair):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Yellen
Bernanke had a strictly academic career before going into public service (and was/is probably one of the foremost experts on the Great Depression, something that was handy in 2008/9):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Bernanke#Academic_and_gove...
Greenspan was in the finance world pre-Fed. Volcker was in government for his entire career pre-Fed:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Volcker#Career
I think people over-estimate how many "rich bankers" are in the Fed, especially at the FOMC.
Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast with some Fed members in recent years, especially the more obscure regional ones, about their work, and how they often go out and talk to local businesses about what's happening 'on the ground'.
seanmcdirmid2 hours ago
[-] Fair. I don't really have a preference for government, academic, or banking industry veterans.
reply▲pixelatedindex5 hours ago
[-] I’m not denying that, but that’s not how I read the comment. That comment comes across as a relief that the Fed is under attack, but is more upset that the source of attack is the executive branch.
reply▲ProllyInfamous4 hours ago
[-] I dislike the Fed because it has (since 1913) held an unnecessarily powerful control of our nation's (and world's) money supply.
JFK was likely assassinated for attempting to retain the species backing of silver; less than a decade later Nixon would take us off the gold-backed dollar "temporarily" (i.e. 1971 - present) — the dollar's plummet since 1913 (and 1971 specifically) has been monumental.
The Fed simply has too much power to destroy the dollar savings of Americans (which is why cash and low interest bonds are so detrimental for long-term wealth preservation).
----
But I am glad the the Fed Chairman's brass-gilded balls are so big, in this struggle against our absolutely out-of-control unified executive theory President.
Personally, bitcoin and gold/silver make up the majority of my savings. Have been slowly DCA-ing out of stocks and primarily into those, these past few years... accelerated since learning the majority of stock trades in 2025 occurred in dark pools (i.e. no price discovery via public markets).
The libertarian view is that interest rates should be decided by the free market and not a central bank. Mainly due to what we're seeing now (the executive trying to take it over) and that a small board of people can make bad decisions that have reaching effects.
reply▲This is actually quite correct. The Fed Funds policy interest rate is a clumsy instrument because it involves chasing the ever-shifting balancing point of an inherently unstable system. You "cut" rates to increase money creation, which actually pushes your long-term rates higher due to expected inflation and leads to even more money creation for a constant policy rate, and vice versa. This can all be fixed very simply by changing the instrument to a crawling exchange rate peg, which has an inherently stabilizing effect, as seen from the effectiveness of currency board systems - that system doesn't shift against you if you stick to a bad peg, whereas it very much does if you stick to a bad policy rate.
The long term policy goal (stability in the path of nominal incomes (prices + real activity) in the very short run, and prices in the medium-to-long run) would be unaffected, but the whole operational aspect would be simplified quite a bit.
>
The Fed Funds policy interest rate is a clumsy instrument because it involves chasing the ever-shifting balancing point of an inherently unstable system.I don't know about "inherently unstable system", given that as central bank independence has grown so has, generally speaking, monetary stability:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moderation
Great Moderation basically involved the adoption of price stability as a long-term policy target, as opposed to trying to keep long-term fixed exchange rates. There's no reason to change the policy target, the issue is wrt. the policy mechanism/instrument.
reply▲breakyerself4 hours ago
[-] Markets don't always seek equilibrium. Some aspects of the economy tend to be governed by vicious and virtuous feedback cycles. Always leaving everything to markets feels like more of a religion than a reasonable policy position.
reply▲don_neufeld5 hours ago
[-] I wonder if any libertarians have considered reading about the history of banking?
The Federal Reserve was not created “just because”. The US banking system was wildly unstable when run… largely as the libertarian view would have it.
the_real_cher5 hours ago
[-] I believe the fed replaced the gold standard.
reply▲No it did not. I don't know why people repeat this so often but it is very frustrating. Nixon unilaterally ended the gold standard because the US was printing money to pay for Vietnam and the rest of the world called the US on its bullshit. The end of the gold standard is relatively recent in history and the verdict is still out on the impact.
reply▲The post-World War II Bretton Woods system was a limited form of the pre 1920s depression gold standard.
Both the silver standard and bimetallism have been more common than the gold standard.
Tying complex multi faceted economies to the physical abundance of specific raw materials fails to capture the full value of activities and assets.
The true gold standard was a blip from the 1870s to the early 1920s.
I think your observation assumes that inflating the value of gold relative to the rest of economy is a problem - if you do not care about that I'm not sure it matters.
In any case gold served as a strong check on monetary policy even if it had problems. Certainly it is possible to have a "sound" monetary policy without gold. I'm just not convinced in societies ability to affect sound governance of monetary policy without some "stronger" guard rails. Especially not in today's climate.
I dislike that the Fed operates as if the happiness of the investor class is their number one priority.
reply▲Of the dual mandate, which would you say prioritizes the investor class, and how would you approach it differently?
reply▲You asked about which piece "of the dual mandate", but the OP said "operates as" which I am going to reply to.
Does the Fed can any data from labor sources or unions? I am asking in honest because the few reports from them that I have looked into(mostly around unemployment) all seem to be polls solely sourced from investor class assets like companies.
If they are only sourcing from one biased source for their data, they wouldn't have to have a bad mandate or manipulate it, to operate like it was for the benefit of the data source, right?
> promote maximum employment and price stability (low, stable inflation, targeting 2%)
The dual mandate says nothing about asset prices. The only prices it mentions are those involved in CPI calcs.
pixelatedindex5 hours ago
[-] > if the happiness of the investor class is their number one priority
The investor class has capital, and America is capitalist. I’m not the biggest fan either but we gotta acknowledge the reality we live in.
breakyerself4 hours ago
[-] The FED is much maligned, but has brought a lot of stability to the economy.
reply▲Monetary policy is actually under the purview of the legislative branch.
Section 8: Congress shall have the power ... To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof ...
You probably don't them in control, either.
Who should own the money printer if it’s not the feds?
reply▲derangedHorse3 hours ago
[-] No one. We should be on a hard money standard. The Fed shouldn't be able to socialize the impact of bad business decisions like what was recently done with Silicon Valley Bank using the BTFP. Sometimes consequences need to be realized, even at the cost of bad downstream impact to those indirectly involved. It's the only way for more resilient systems to arise since our current system interrupts important feedback mechanisms.
reply▲YY4387238746236 hours ago
[-] America has reached the inter-departmental warfare stage of failed states it seems. As an appreciator of all sorts of banana republics, kleptocracy and military juntas, this is a very familiar pattern of behavior.
reply▲From an institutional engineering POV (warning- I am a grouchy old former political scientist), it would be interesting to come up with institutional solutions for some of the problems America is facing right now. Specifically I think I'd remove the Attorney General role from the President's authority and give it to Senate, to nominate & confirm exclusively. Let's say 51 votes to confirm and 55 votes to impeach. Even among presidential systems, the US cabinet is unusually presidential-centric. I'm not a big LatAm expert, but I think they typically separate the public prosecutor from the president's nomination capacity.
Of course I would strongly prefer to not be a presidential system at all. But if we're discussing post-Trump constitutional reforms that could plausibly pass, I think removing the Attorney General/DOJ from the president's purview and also placing some checks on the pardon power seem doable
>Of course I would strongly prefer to not be a presidential system at all.
Having grown up in the US and having blinders on, I always thought all those parliamentary systems seemed unstable and sometimes comical. But now I see the value in it. Once a leader has demonstrated he is not up to the task, has grown out-of-touch, or has descended into madness, he can be replaced by his party, and if that didn't happen, a no-confidence vote could trigger an election. No guarantee either of those things would happen, but the option exists. The fixed four-year term idea now seems artificial and inflexible.
I suspect the current US leader and maybe even the previous US leader (maybe in his 4th year) would have suddenly found himself a back-bencher.
> Having grown up in the US and having blinders on, I always thought all those parliamentary systems seemed unstable and sometimes comical.
There are so many different variables between countries, and plain luck, that it's tough to extrapolate too much, but this just jumped out a bit for me as a Canadian - the average Canadian PM term has historically been marginally longer than the average American Presidential time in office.
mindslight22 minutes ago
[-] It's not like campaigning and running elections are terribly hard these days. The AG (and other heads of independent executive departments) should be each their own races voted on by the public. (Yes, this obviously requires repudiating this new innovative brain damage called sparkling autocracy theory^W^W^W unitary executive theory.)
We also need Ranked Pairs voting so we end this two party duopoly bullshit. Primaries can remain, but voters should be able to vote in all parties' primaries (rather than having to pick just one).
We also need some sort of recall mechanism, either periodic option to vote no confidence (twice a year when elections/primaries are already held?), or something triggered when signatures/polling get high enough.
Since I'm making my Christmas list, we also need to drastically neuter sovereign and qualified immunity - remove their applicability for any action not explicitly authorized by the legislature (and Constitution). No more general "agents of the government" who unilaterally act with impunity, with only narrow legal ways of recovering damages.
But part of the difficulty that has precipitated our current situation is the absolute gridlock in Congress for the past twenty+ years. That's what pushed more and more power into the executive and executive agencies. I don't know if Ranked Pairs will be enough to fix that with fresh blood, or we need more direct democracy (voters can override their sen/rep vote on a bill?), or what.
It seems like they learned a lot from the Letitia James and James Comey cases, which are going great (not in the way they intended).
reply▲I can't say I'm the biggest fan of the financial apparatus in general but it is more than a little heartening to see someone in the federal government with a spine for once.
reply▲He's one of very few adults left at that level.
reply▲It might be childish, but I think the “act like an adult” (or not) is a good way to frame the bad behavior that’s been so present lately.
It encapsulates so much of how I want to describe things.
Selfish behavior - this adult is just a child who didn’t learn to share.
Mean and vindictive behavior - didn’t learn to empathize as a kid
Lying? You’re still a child. Grow up and then join the adults.
mattgreenrocks4 hours ago
[-] Very apt for the current moment.
Adults push back on aggressors when necessary. Children cower behind the adults.
What an unhinged moment in time. At some point, they'll need to be courageous people with the ability and funds to speak up and say enough. But will they? It does not appear so.
reply▲this is a big deal, markets gonna tank tomorrow morning... and then realize AI is still a thing and recover
reply▲Or realize it means interest rates are sure to be dropping.
reply▲AI is a bubble; well, the stock market as a whole is, being led by an AI boom. At the end of a bubble (and it's not clear if we're there yet) markets find ways to self-finance. A crash means not just that the value is lower, but that the
leveraged bets are now due, and those have to be paid by selling more.
When it crashes (and it's not clear when that will be), it will crash back to a cash-value baseline. And, sigh, it's not clear where that is. But it won't magically start going back up. The cyclic reinvestment engine needs to be reinvented every time.
And of course equity futures immediately dropped on the news
reply▲scottarthur6 hours ago
[-] Yep, we’ll see how the free market responds. Wonder if it will be a TACO Tuesday (or even Monday)
reply▲dashundchen5 hours ago
[-] Guarantee there are dozens if not more in the admin insider trading like they have on so many announcements. Market manipulation right out in the open.
The slimiest swampiest criminals, they need to be put on trial.
Unprecedented times call for unlikely youtube heroes.
reply▲closingreunion6 hours ago
[-] The titanic amount of generational neglect that has allowed even a fraction of voters to look at Trump for more than a second and find him qualified for any public office is truly fantastic.
This is one of the clear examples that Trump is seeing Putin's Russia as a model for his vision for the USA.
AnimalMuppet6 hours ago
[-] "The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the President."
Thank you, Mr. Powell. We really want interest rates set to serve the people, not the whims of the President.
Wow that's bold.
reply▲It is. It is also rare and late. Possibly too late. But let's hope it is not and that this will inspire some other people to draw lines in the sand.
reply▲ball_of_lint5 hours ago
[-] Powell for president please
reply▲__MatrixMan__5 hours ago
[-] Nobody who takes money as seriously as either party to this case should be president. Leaders should be focused on outcomes not abstractions.
reply▲cosmicgadget5 hours ago
[-] He printed way too hard when Trump asked him to in '20.
reply▲My understanding is the United States has one of the strongest post-pandemic recoveries, the printing was definitely a factor.
reply▲cosmicgadget5 hours ago
[-] I'm not arguing against QE I am saying there was too much of it and we could have had recovered just fine without the severe inflation that landed us in the current predicament.
reply▲Lower inflation and higher growth than every peer nation?
The Fed absolutely crushed it. Totally unambiguous.
cosmicgadget4 hours ago
[-] Here are some ambiguous things:
1. Inflation
2. Comparing peer economies
3. Counterfactual timelines
What country did better (other than the imaginary retconned one in your head), so we can discuss the comparison directly?
reply▲Plus a bit of minding the til, as the fraud involved was out of hand.
reply▲Holy shit.
So our monetary policy will be just set at the arbitrary whims of the president if this new scheme works.
Why does all of this feel like it's just sliding completely out of hand? Am I just being a doomer?
I find myself seeking out non-doomer people to read, since the doom and gloom doesn't really help, it's just demotivating. "Look for the helpers" and all that.
This outlet has some good things from time to time, like https://www.liberalcurrents.com/we-are-going-to-win/
That said, yeah this is really bad.
Lots of respected limits and lines on government power are just being casually broken, so I don't think you're wrong. Whatever's going to happen next it probably won't have the stability of the past.
reply▲toomuchtodo6 hours ago
[-] Because it is, you are not. Checks and balances are at their limits (judicial branch), or non existent (Congress).
reply▲It’s been completely out of hand for some time now.
reply▲consumer4516 hours ago
[-] Well, you see... he is part of the "un-elected deep state."
Clearly, that is a problem that needs to be solved.
I know you’re being sarcastic, but Trump was the person who nominated Jerome Powell as chair.
This move is public punishment for not falling in line.
consumer4514 hours ago
[-] Thank you for pointing this out. It is really interesting, the difference between Trump 45 and Trump 47.
I would like to add one quote to be logged on this website:
> "I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler," he wrote privately to an associate on Facebook in 2016. [0]
- Trump's future Vice President, JD Vance
If we survive the fall of Pax Americana in the next few years, and journalists and historians are again allowed to operate in a free environment, I really hope that they get to the core of how we got from 45 to 47.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/jd-vance-once-compared-trum...
"Has been set," not "will be set". We've been operating under the new scheme for months. Despite Powell's protestations, there was no evidence for cutting rates, and lots of evidence for doing the opposite. Unfortunately he gave in to Trump... but that obviously wasn't enough.
reply▲The only reasonable conclusion at this point is that the fascists in the white house see their deep unpopularity, obvious loss of power in the near future (they have lost nearly every election in the past year by a landslide), and the Epstein files closing in. The obvious outcome will be at minimum jail and ridicule due to their continuous and obvious corruption, high crimes and misdemeanors like invading Venezuela, trying to invade Greenland, and sexual crimes against children. So they have to accelerate chaos to try and destroy law and order before it catches up with them and destroys them.
Its time to put up or get put down by masked goons.
I hope I turn out to be wrong, but the most convincing explanation I've seen for the "why" is that the 1945-2000 period was an anomaly, and now we're reverting to the mean: despotic governments, frequent wars for territory, and massive wealth inequality leading to powerful oligarchies as the only other important political players aside from the despot. This was the norm for the overwhelming majority of human history and perhaps it was massively hubristic to think we had escaped it for good.
reply▲Probably it coincides with the fact that the last people who remember WW2 are now gone.
None of us understand the devastation that a WW incurs.
It's not the only anomaly. There was a previous period of long peace between 1815 and 1914, between the Napoleonic Wars and WW1.
This balance of power was carefully set up in the Congress of Vienna following the (first) defeat of Napoleon, and was ended by the ambitions of a Kaiser who desired the prestige of globe-spanning empire yet couldn't diplomacy his way out of a wet paper bag to realize that empire without bumbling into war.
With the added fun of nuclear weapons!
reply▲It all started with all grants and department expenditures being tagged with the employee ID, of supervisory.
Latest 2024 budget expenses, a fairly good percentage were chocked with no ID, no supervisor or delgated authority.
Better now, no ID, no money from Treasury.
Venezuela, Greenland, and this. Anyone notice how these extreme events all happened around the same time of the Epstein files getting released with highly publicized questions about all the redactions? It certainly seems like a distraction game.
reply▲blurbleblurble5 hours ago
[-] Not to mention what's happening in Minnesota
reply▲The difference is that the actions and rhetoric around Venezuela and Greenland and the Fed reserve are direct actions by Trump. The thing in Minnesota is a tragedy but I don’t think he told anyone to go out and kill somebody on the street.
reply▲blurbleblurble13 minutes ago
[-] I ask you to look deeper into what's happening there and reconsider your stance. US citizens are being beaten up and harassed, as are non-citizens. ICE officers are using their cars to ram observers and then arresting them violently. They arrested a teenaged clerk at target and then threw him out of a vehicle onto the street upon realizing he was a citizen. A woman was filmed being taken into a portapotty in handcuffs by a federal agent. The violence is quite clearly systematic. Watch the videos.
It's highly likely in my mind that Stephen Miller yes in fact does want fatalities as a pretext to send in Pete Hegseth to punish people politically in Minnesota. If you don't believe me, fine, but I ask you to consider that it really is that bad.
jordanscales6 hours ago
[-] Threats like the ones Powell's receiving would be the end of any other presidency. Why tech elites continue to align themselves with this clownshow will be a source of incredible shame that I'll hold onto forever.
reply▲I think a lot of largest tech companies feel that they'll face retribution from the current administration for not being supportive enough but would not from future admins.
For many of the smaller players I think there's unfortunately a lot of people who realized there's significant money to be made in grifting. Many of the largest crypto proponents have pivoted into endeavors, whether crypto or otherwise, that profit off of being rewarded for being part of the 'correct' tribe.
> I think a lot of largest tech companies feel that they'll face retribution from the current administration for not being supportive enough but would not from future admins.
Hopefully we get the opportunity to disabuse them of this notion.
pixelatedindex5 hours ago
[-] > I think a lot of largest tech companies feel that they'll face retribution from the current administration for not being supportive enough but would not from future admins.
The Democrats should play hardball but the geriatrics can barely take a swing.
shermantanktop4 hours ago
[-] They don’t know where the plate is, what the game is, or what day it is. They’re just hoping for ice cream when the nurse comes around with the meds. Meanwhile they are retelling stories from the 1960s for the hundredth time.
Even the young ones act like this.
This is exactly it and parallels what happened with the end of the Wiemar Republic. There was an asymmetry in response between the Nazis and the government. You can see that in the limited prosecution and light sentences of the Beer Hall Putsch perpetrators.
The tech titans like Thiel see the Trump administration as a "big bet" a startup investment. They can "shoot for the moon" and try to realize the network state. If they fail, they figure they'll just toss the Democrats some campaign contributions and all will be good.
The scary thing is that they're probably right about that. You can buy your way out of treason now.
reply▲I would be heavily predisposed to vote for any candidate who had a public goal of breaking up the big tech companies and taxing their CEOs into oblivion. I want this primarily because of the immediate about-face they all had when Trump 2.0 was elected and them all contributing to and standing behind him during his inauguration. Had they not, mercifully, all shown themselves as the snakes that they are I probably would have mostly continued to considere them a-political-ish and not been strongly opinionated.
reply▲As I've written in another post, everyone is doomed to either align or face his rage.
reply▲So, better face his rage then. If those are the options the choice is clear and easy.
reply▲The tech CEOs will have to do a whole lot of explaining, relocating and, perhaps, other things once this clown show is gone after 2028
reply▲I really wish that were true but they won’t. They’ll just keep on keeping on.
reply▲Thank God there's one important institution that can not be forced or bullied into compliance. Powell will go down in history as hero.
reply▲laidoffamazon6 hours ago
[-] I’m aghast but numb to this now.
The biggest question for me now is how the usual defenders of this lawless administration will try to defend this or both sides it.
luxuryballs5 hours ago
[-] The defense is that the status quo has become archaic and self-serving instead of serving the public so the current operations people doing some house cleaning and tossing a few rooms to see what’s going on in there is overdue, changes need to happen and power structures need to be shaken out a bit to make sure they are not getting in the way of the people they were created to act on behalf of, and scatter the ones who are “helping themselves” to the public coffers.
This just needs to happen every across all government, it’s like brushing your teeth to kick out the bacteria, but each individual institution needs a different kind of “floss” depending on the nature of the ways they have strayed from their original purposes.
It's a funny defense coming from the most corrupt administration since Nixon
reply▲Nixon looks good in comparison -- EPA, OSHA, Clean Air Act, etc.
He'd be called a communist by MAGA.
That sounds nice, but I don't think there is much evidence that the above is actually what the current administration is doing, or even attempting to do.
Having blatantly political messages blasted across websites for national parks and on airport security video screens during the shutdown, for example, doesn't seem like a move towards "serving the public", but rather a move towards consolidation of direct control to the politicians at the top of the executive branch.
Easy, he committed fraud by blowing up the renovation budget.
reply▲Trump can’t tolerate anyone in government who isn’t a total Trump sycophant.
reply▲One of the very few lonely voices.
It's quite impressive how scared everybody is of this administration. News outlets, international leaders even in face of threats, big tech, including the delusional Musk who thought he could've handled the president's rage.
Hell even his own party is scared of speaking up, you either fall in line or you risk falling victim of the most vicious direct attacks, even if you've been a huge and core voice for the president, see senator Marjorie Green.
From Russia, to Belarus, from the Philippines to Argentina, from Hungary to Poland it's crystal clear what a failure of democracy it is to have a presidential republic.
cosmicgadget5 hours ago
[-] The turning point may have been when the Supreme Court decided a president couldn't be criminally liable for anything done in office. Having no fear of consequences is quite an enabler.
reply▲I wonder if the fed's lawyers advise him on this or if he has to use his own lawyers
reply▲Wild. Some kind of fucking banana republic.
reply▲What's a pleb supposed to do now? Convert every paycheck to BTC, gold, or EUR?
reply▲ProllyInfamous4 hours ago
[-] The most-unamerican thing you can do right now is HOLD bitcoin/gold/silver.
If you still want fiat — and they're available — Swiss Francs are deflating least-quickly.
Otherwise, as a fellow pleb, my best advice is to get enough bullets for occassional hunting (and other tax-free methods of living) and protection.
If you're of a draftable age/gender, I'd either get extremely fit or extremely disabled. If you're a lard-ass, I'd get to a state where you can live without medicines.
—fellow blue collar american
You might as well for the next 3 years.
reply▲As a side note, is there a compelling reason why interest rates aren't set algorithmically? I assume human intuition isn't really a factor in setting them. This would eliminate concerns about political motivation.
reply▲Economic models are complex and far from perfect, and we're still waiting for Hari Seldon's psychohistory models to be created to tie together macroeconomics and macropsychology.
reply▲But who sets the algorithm? Whichever department of branch of govt was in charge of that would become have the enormous power, and political motivation would then fall to that.
Equally the same for data that goes into the algorithm - if you can control that you control interest rates.
> is there a compelling reason why interest rates aren't set algorithmically?
Can’t believe you are saying that!! Then anyone can manipulate it like they manipulate stocks by writing hit pieces one day and gushing articles a few days after,
blurbleblurble5 hours ago
[-] There's some slippery feedback loops involved, even if the models were very good, the reflexive nature of doing something like this would be very hard to get around
reply▲The design of the algorithm, and the control over what data is fed into it, would be subject to political motivations.
reply▲Would that make it easier or more difficult to guide, I wonder?
reply▲America needs more public administrators like Powell in POTUS, SCOTUS, and COTUS: seemingly boring, reasonable, decent, professional, and competent.
reply▲Terrible. Trump was even the person who nominated Powell in 2017, and now he’s being squeezed for doing the job of Federal Reserve Chair instead of bending to demands.
reply▲They're already pursuing a case against another Fed board member, and now this? I have a feeling these two cases are going to suffer the same fate as the Letita James and James Comey cases: thrown out due to incompetence and/or malfeasance. It's a disgusting, clear weaponization of the DOJ.
MAGA, of course, tried to accuse Biden of weaponizing them during his term so that they could justify the Trump 2.0 revenge tour. Now we're here.
don_neufeld6 hours ago
[-] Economists: The interest rate on US Treasuries is often used as a benchmark for the “risk free rate”
Trump: Hold my beer.
So this is the bar for the next country to surpass the US as the world's economic super-power, if this continues it's most likely going to be China to surpass the US.
An opportunity for the EU to stop its bureaucracy and cleanup its act. If it cannot convince anyone that they are next, then one can argue that democracy is completely finished.
If this nonsense continues it will be the UAE + Saudi Arabia + China, cutting off the west and that's that.
AnimalMuppet5 hours ago
[-] If that's the bar, well, China is not a sterling example of central bank independence and the rule of law either.
reply▲China hasn’t dropped bombs on foreign soil in 45 years. I think I’m ok with that situation.
reply▲The US government entered a debt spiral a while ago (
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A091RC1Q027SBEA), and needs lower interest rates to service its tremendous debt while trying to inflate it away by printing money. That's all it comes down to. For decades fiscal conservatives were warning about it and were laughed at. Now that we're are the end game the inevitable shitshow will become apparent. You can hate Trump (rightly so), but as much as he did contribute to the problem directly, the problem is larger and systemic, and anyone else in office would have the exact same problem now.
Exactly, interest rates must come down due to the government debt burden. This debt burden creates a strong incentive to force rates to zero, but we have to pretend the Federal Reserve is independent.
Separately, I think Jerome Powell is one of the worst Fed chairs as he is most (but not exclusively) responsible for what happened to the housing market by creating a lock-in effect and focusing on their CPI basket.
Or you know we could like tax wealthy people and companies...
reply▲camillomiller4 hours ago
[-] What about another nice dinner with all the Silicon Valley CEOs paying their respect to the orange dictator? I'm sure that will appease him.
What a bunch of spineless puppets.
reply▲idiotsecant4 hours ago
[-] If Trump does try to politicize the fed he is going to do the one thing that the American political system will not tolerate - messing with the money of the most powerful capital class in the world. Normally, the incentives of this class are most aligned with grinding the rest of us into a fine powder suitable for lubrication of the engines of commerce, but hopefully just this once they'll come to the rescue. My only fear is that the short term quarterly obsessions that we've built might actually lead to some business supporting this decision out of a suicidal drive for short term gains.
reply▲If Trump does try to politicize the fed he is going to do the one thing that the American political system will not tolerateI've lost track of the number of times I, and others, have said that.
Turns out there really are no brakes on the Trump Train. In the parlance of the metallic-headgear fans, any other POTUS would have been treated to a nice convertible ride through downtown Dallas by now.
reply▲burnt-resistor4 hours ago
[-] (Boring, important thing that holds civilization together.)
Dunning-Kruger effect billionaire: We don't need that. What's it even for anyhow? I'm not paying for it. All these naysaying wimps and freeloaders say we can't live without out. I will use my unelected government position and bling chainsaw to cut fraud, waste, and abuse to eliminate red tape and unnecessary big government regulation. And I demand a negative tax rate, subsidies, and lucrative government contracts! Rawr!
If you are a complete normie, turn back now, it's gonna get conspiratorial. Otherwise, read on for some insights.
First, one must understand that the Federal Reserve was the main trojan horse vehicle for the European banking families into America. Read any number of good books, starting with the latest edition of G. Edward Griffins "The Creature from Jekyll Island".
But all that is mostly known already to those who have payed attention and done the reading... so whats next?
My conclusion is that America is being setup, in multiple ways (fall guy for global empire, etc), but one major setup that is going on right now is a twofer: 1) Jack up the US economy at any time by raising rates and unraveling the ponzi scheme and 2) If you do 1), you have the perfect excuse to try to implement some CBDC-esque new system, but this time with much more surveillance tech, for example unified ledgers that merge digital identity with financial identity, with ESG and social credit style added on. Read Whitney Webb for more on the structures being put in place for this.
So what is happening is that Trump knows the people that control the Fed, for whom the Fed chair is a mere mouthpiece, really want to suddenly and unexpectedly hike rates and soon, but Trump doesn't want it to happen under his last term, so he has been doing major backroom maneuvering to influence the Fed every time a rate-change date is coming up. Essentially he wants to kick the can to the next POTUS, but since the Fed is technically independent, it really can do whatever it wants, all he can do is fire after the fact. My guess is they will drop it on him late term, a perfect excuse to usher in the political pendulum swing of the hegelian game they play with us.
To me, that this backroom maneuvering is becoming more public tells me they really want to do the sudden rate hike.
Want a decent intro to the real fed? Try this video from the great James Corbett: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IJeemTQ7Vk
Trump is, of course, wrong. But the independence of the Fed being at stake is a myth. Since the bursting of the dot com bubble, the Fed has operated as if the well being of the investor class is their number one priority.
reply▲I am surprised by the negative comments, the low interest rates = better thesis has always been somewhat popular on HN , now just because Trump is saying it (and operating to get there) it becomes an issue or something not to be aligned with.
There are countless comments and discussions on this board about how:
1) interest rates should be zero,
2) interest rates being non-zero create a misallocation of capital where there is a return on an investment without any ingenuity or creation behind
3) Banks are too risk averse to lending and their risk averse behavior is due to the risk free rate they enjoy when they park money at the Fed and when they buy T-bills
No matter how little ingenuity or creation is required to keep afloat a zombie company or a dubious startup, for sure it's a notch higher than what happens when that money is parked at the Fed or invested in t-bills...
Even if one disagrees with Fed policy, the way Trump is having the DoJ criminally prosecute Powell under unrelated pretexts is disgraceful and undermines the Fed’s independence.
reply▲This is logical end game of having these economic controls at all. Put a steering wheel on it someone will drive it.
A true free market isn’t at whims of any one person.
brcmthrowaway6 hours ago
[-] Does anyone have a steelman argument for this?
reply▲Do you think that criminal prosecution for Jerome Powell for maybe doing something wrong with some building renovations under timing that just happens to coincide with the President’s personal and public vendetta against this person is worth steelmanning?
At some point it stops being steelmanning and starts becoming an invitation for some propaganda to distract from the obvious.
The more obvious something seems the more valuable steelmanning becomes, precisely because if the only steelman arguments you get (if any) are propaganda at best (instead of reasons you just hadn't considered) then you can be that much more confident your outrage is based in reason rather than feelings. My guess is there won't be many coming up with steelman arguments for this one though anyways.
Inviting propaganda is good, let the obviously weak arguments come front and center to be logically considered and ridiculed rather than put in small private group chats where they seem to grow and grow. This only works, in any way, if people stop saying things aren't worth having consideration about because it's obvious to them.
I understand the theory of steelmanning, but in cases like this it's just an high-brow version of the "both sides" style of journalism where you pretend like both sides are similarly plausible and deserve equal consideration. At the extremes, the steelmanning can turn into a game of giving the other side
more consideration.
> Inviting propaganda is good, let the obviously weak arguments come front and center to be logically considered and ridiculed
That's literally what I'm doing: Ridiculing the obviously weak arguments.
And do you know what's happening? My ridicule and dismissiveness are being talked down, while you invite someone to "steelman" the argument instead. This pattern happens over and over again in spaces where steelmanning is held up as virtuous: It's supposed to be a tool for bringing weak arguments into the light so they can be dismissed, yet the people dismissing are told to shush so we can soak up the propaganda from the other side.
As a casual follower of economic news and completely ignorant of politics, my guess is that the administration believes the fed isn't acting according to mandate of stability and jobs. I have no clue how valid that is
reply▲Trump thinks lowering the interest rates means market goes up before election. That's all there is to it everyone knows it's not about stability and jobs
reply▲The interest rates? If you wanted to crash demand for dollar various things makes a bit more sense. Venezuela might be more about threatening BRICS if you squint at it. The EU–Mercosur agreement looks like it might pass - timing is kind of weird. There is maybe a kind of logic to it for exports but I think it lowers the standard of living for us plebs.
reply▲pixelatedindex5 hours ago
[-] I’m a little shocked to see the quality of some comments here - I would expect a more grounded discussion. This is like Reddit / YouTube comment history. Someone please tell me this is a Wendy’s.
Sure the Fed isn’t perfect. But we don’t really have a better solution as of now because our financial systems are extremely powerful and anyone in office would love to abuse it if they can.
Sure, the renovations are ridiculous. But it’s not like this administration is austere in the slightest, so that’s a bit rich. Not to mention the cronyism prevalent across the cabinet.
HN has better baseline conversation, but Social Media is inane by its very nature.
reply▲There's also little genuine conversation to be had. The situation is bad, has been bad, and seems to only be getting worse. That's the only interpretation any rational person can hold. And, when everyone has the same opinion and that opinion is drastic, that creates a circle jerk.
reply▲Why are the renovations ridiculous?
reply▲pixelatedindex5 hours ago
[-] Not the renovations themselves but the cost is supposedly at 2.5B. Personally I don’t really mind but I also don’t think government buildings need to be all that fancy with marble flooring.
reply▲It was budgeted at 1.9B (in 2019). Most of the cost overruns are from unexpected site issues like asbestos (more than thought) and water table problems. The buildings are historic, they already had marble. The marble was taken down and saved, this marble will be re-used. Some pieces are damaged, those will be new marble. These buildings are near 100 years old. I also don't think they have marble floors, but facades and other stonework.
reply▲I don't understand the cost either, apparently it only costs around a billion dollars to build a skyscraper? The Burj Khalifa only cost one and a half billion dollars when completed in 2010. I don't know that there's criminal activity here, but the cost of this is rather surprising to me. I knew the Federal Reserve was being renovated, but I thought it was something closer to a hundred million dollars.
reply▲Exciting two weeks to start the year!
reply▲I don’t think “exciting” is the right word.
reply▲Where's your sense of adventure?
reply▲There is a time for adventure, and this is not it.
reply▲AnimalMuppet5 hours ago
[-] "And did you find adventure?"
"No. Neither does anyone else. Adventures happen to other people. When it happens to you, it just looks like trouble."
- The Ballad Of Sir Dinadan, by Gerald Morris, quoted from memory
throwaway_24946 hours ago
[-] You know this part of the problem!
Politics is now consumed as entertainment, and ask any writer of books or screenplays and they will tell you _conflict_ makes for good entertainment.
Politics should be _boring_. The fact that we demand to be entertained by our political system is a big part of the problem.
Far too many people decide to occupy the us vs. them part of their brain with National politics as opposed to sports.
Both are basically useless as it relates to your personal quality of life but at least with the latter you can see nice geometric combinations between players on a pitch and some incredible athleticism in between
The issue being that one actually impacts your life and the other is a spectacle.
reply▲I’m of the opinion from the old Yiddish proverb: “when the cat and dog are fighting, the mouse is safe”.
If the admin is fighting with the Federal Reserve, it means they are not focused on figuring out how to further screw us over…
They have had no problem screwing people over on multiple fronts at the same time. This is wishful thinking.
> If the admin is fighting with the Federal Reserve, it means they are not focused on figuring out how to further screw us over…
Messing with interest rates for short term political gain would screw us over.
I don't think a fight with the Federal Reserve will stop ICE from murdering civilians.
reply▲refulgentis6 hours ago
[-] Puerile and uninformative, unfortunately. I respect that each of us has their world view, but if the last decade has shown anything at all, it is that when you are in the public square, you are asking for interlocution, not for escapism to be indulged. And the best thing is to do as you implicitly ask, and interlocute.
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