Donald J. Trump (For everyone else except Victor)

Ok, this is just a guess, but is it that he thinks South Africa is treating white people badly?

maybe, or it's about SA initiating the whole insanity at the ICC against Israel

Well, SA is a highly corrupt, dysfunctional 1 party state that has been aggressively pursuing "racial equity" for decades, and recently passed a law expanding the power of the govt to seize property/land without compensation for the "public good." I think it is pretty easy to read between the tea leaves how this is going to play out.

That being said, I doubt Trump is staying up late at night worrying about the fate of white South African farmers. However, on top of this SA has very consistently sided with the Iran/Russia/China/NK axis against Western interests in the international community, with their legal attacks against Israel just being a continuation of how they have been operating for a long time.

And consistent with what he has promised (for good or bad), Trump is going to use the pretense of SA discrimination of white farmers as rationale to punish SA for consistently siding against the US.

The neoliberal world order of the last 60 years or so worked under the paradigm that the US and allies should provide handsome aid for the global south, even those nations that generally sided with our adversaries over us, because (a) it is the moral thing to do, and (b) this way we can still exert some influence and soft power.

Trump doesn't operate this way. Either you support us internationally and we support you in turn, or you dont and if you need something go to China.

Again, I guess I am a neoliberal at heart, so I personally worry giving up influence and soft power, even dealing with highly corrupt antagonistic countries like SA, will be a bad thing for everyone. But again, Trump was voted into power exactly because he doesn't operate this way.

SA being part of BRICS

Why would anyone want to do that, when most of the non-food stuff you buy at home is made elsewhere anyway?

What made you think any other outcome was possible with a country three times the population growing as rapidly as China?

China is 4x the population of the USA, but it's growth rates are , let's say, unclear.

It's hard to believe they are growing 5% in real gdp with a shrinking & aging population, 10y yields under 2%, and housing prices going down. I mean it's not only hard, it goes against the totality of data points for every other country in history, and it defies logic and common sense to believe that combination of events is possible.

"Every other country in history" is somewhat irrelevant when global trade didn't exist on this scale.

China exports as a % of gdp are a lot lower than (say) South Korea

This is China, hovering a little lower than 20%

https://www.statista.com/statistics/256591/share-of-chinas-exports-in-gross-domestic-product/

Statista

China: share of exports in GDP 2000-2023 | Statista

SK, from 35 to over 40 in the last 15 years

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1446....

I understand the "narrative" is that China is basically only a "trade discourse", but in fact China doesn't rely on trade at a particularly high % of it's gdp, and it basically never did.

I mean most EU countries trade more than China (albeit for a decent portion, within the EU itself).

But anyway trade aside, you don't get 5% real economic growth per capita (which is INSANE, 3 % is already a dream scenario for an emerging country) and your 10y yield under 2. It just doesn't compute.

Ok. But if South Africa wants to join BRICS and align itself with China in the UN and oppose the US, then China can be responsible for al the aid it takes to keep that dysfunctional, corrupt tin pot fake democracy dictatorship running.

Lets see how badly the market reacts to the tariffs.

Dow down around 2% so far. Tesla down 7%.

and gee i wonder what trade practices led to that happening?

I think the tariffs affecting the markets will be as nothing when Musk's IT boys start messing with the federal payments systems.

It's amazing 1 unelected techbro has the power to wreck the lives of so many people in a second. And anyone who knows anything about software knows that kind of access without oversight will never end well.

yep

Personally Im selling all stocks and moving to cash and non-US bonds for at least 3 months, then figure it out from there.

If you are talking about China's population growth you should google the UN projection of their population in the year 2100. If you are instead talking about China's economic growth you should google "when will China overtake the US in GDP". The economic outlook for China isn't as bad as their outlook on their population, but nonetheless China isn't as real of an economic threat to the US as it sounds like you all think.

I believe most economists are now predicting that China economy won't overtake the US' economy until 2060, if ever. Personally I think it would take world war or a massive shift in economic policy in one or both countries for this to actually occur - China would have to become far more economically free or Bernie Sanders (or similar) would have to be president and even then it may even take him two terms to accomplish this.

Even if the point comes where China's GDP outpaces the US's GDP I don't think we would see as many changes as you think. Think about all of the major health care and technological breakthroughs the world has seen over the last 20 or 30 years and how many of them came from a centrally planned economy like China - hint it is very very few. Look at which countries people all over the world have been investing their money over the last 20 years - hint: the US is soaking up money and that isn't likely to change just because China's GDP is greater. In what world would people across the world start using the Yuan over the USD - people prefer the USD over every other countries currency because of how stable it is and there is a long history of that.

The usual suspects who seemed concerned that Kamala was unelected.

DOGE has no power. It can only recommend actions.

Every single action has to be implemented by someone in the executive branch with actual power.

DOGE will just point at the problems, and the trail that led them to it, and the context and so on.

There is no possible "misuse" of information which should always have all been completly public to begin with.

Would it be better if all those data were made completly public? yes. Is DOGE having access to that data in any way or form a problem? no, UNLESS you think there shouldn't be cuts to leftist programs , in which case ofc you need to be terrified by DOGE.

Because DOGE approach works. It will clearly identify multiple leftist (and not exclusively: also a lot of RINO stuff) sources of fat to cut, damaging the left hopefully forever, their voting and power base gets reduced if fewer people have sinecures paid by american taxpayers and have to approach real life in competitive markets.

Once in competitive markets, often with garbage degrees based on marxist nonsense that were required to get the sinecures, some of them will realize they have been duped by leftism and join us. The rest will be too preoccupied to put food on the table to be as much as a nuisance as they were when they "remotely worked" for the "charity project"

It is nearly impossible for the government to actually cut spending because there is always a group that is negatively effected by a cut. It is the classic, let's tax everyone in the US a penny and then give all that money to this group of voters then next month we will take a penny from everyone and then give it to this group and this trend continues all the while politicians say nobody is hurt by taking a few dollars from everyone and look at these groups we are helping. Then a politician comes around and says now these pennies we've been giving to the special interest groups add up to hundreds and thousands of dollars from tax payers pockets, but he is a monster for wanted to cut some of these programs. It is the same logic people use to say stealing from a billion dollar company doesn't hurt anyone despite every future customer now has to pay a bit more and employees don't quite get the raise they otherwise would if there was no theft.

Continuing to grow the size of the gov't at its current pace is not sustainable - at some point we have to cut, or at least stop growing, gov't spending.

You can stop right there. It's utter bullshit. They already seized the treasury.

If you think all of this bullshit is about government spending then you are dumber than I took you for.

You are really, really missing the point.

I mean, spectacularly missing it.

they didn't "seize" anything, they got access to a data stream.