changegonnacome

I shouldn't be so harsh.....I know the MAGA folks give him the benefit of the doubt....I do know that the left loonies are slightly to blame for alot of that as they their boy who cried wolf act was trotted out again and again in Trump's 1st term....but do think MAGA also needs to re-boot from that stuff every now and again....and go back to 1st principles....which in this case would have told you the letter was real and the President was lying cause why else would the WSJ basically put its very existence on the line publishing a slanderous (if false) story about the MOST litigious President in history connecting him to the biggest (by media interested) peado in history.

So whats the MAGA story now?......Donald Trump bold face lied to the American people and his supporters.....told you guys it was democratic hoax, that the WSJ faked this letter, that it wasnt real........so let me guess whats the story today?......Democratic operatives created this dumb letter, infiltrated Epstein's Estate and inserted this letter in there while leaking it to the WSJ a couple of months ago, knowing a congressional committee would later subpoena it?

I hope the MAGA folks are as supportive of AOC sending in the national guard to various states in the future.......my guess.....they'll cry blue murder about States rights and Federal overreach.

What your describing of course is a diminution of the United States from a global hegemon to a greatly diminished regional one. Not alot to celebrate here...its like a billionaire trying to put a positive spin on becoming a millionaire again. "You dont miss your water till your well runs dry" - but one day @cubsfan you'll rue the reality that the US no longer dominates and controls Europe the way it did, that our Asian partners (Japan/Korea/Australia) are getting awfully close to China and dont quite take our suggestions the way they did and Africa, if it ever emerges into a continent of strategic and economic importance that we lost that too to the Chinese. Trump likes to say that the world was ripping us off...the world says "hold my beer".....cause the GDP data says otherwise. That some US towns and cities descended into a fentanyl poverty hell is a failure of domestic policy rather than the worlds fault. The one area of conservatism I most greatly admire is its deep commitment to personal responsibility & accountability. When I see this version of the GOP under Trump running around blaming everyone except ourselves for our own problems I laugh. Its so very liberal of him/them to be the victim of somebody else rather than the author one's own fortunes and misfortunes. This global retreat, this shrinking of the American Empire is for what?....a lousy few hundred billion in tariff revenue and some marginal troop deployment costs saved......when some relatively small tax increases/spending cuts could have achieved the same thing instead.....Trump is IMO burning the furniture to stay warm.....that rarely works out well in the long term. Its not all his fault successive administrations have got us here.....his remedy however is as radical as it is stupid.

For sure it isnt....but on a continuum of alliances India has been moved towards the Axis centre of gravity even slightly. Its simply poor international relations & security policy to take a country of such consequence and growing consequence and do anything to push them towards your adversaries in even slight ways (for no discernible outcome). You bet......the international system for countries is a constant jockeying to increase your relative power within it...sometimes alone, sometimes as part of alliance......I cant think of a President in my lifetime or since the new world order came into being in 1945 that has done more to diminish the US's relative power within that system than Trump. The European's are running off on their own now and while potentially still dependent on us for a long time their relative dependence will diminish in time as they build out their own strategic autonomy....with that strategic autonomy expect a greater divergence between their view of the world and ours.....Japan, South Korea, Australia.....the alliance structure we rely on to remain the 800ilb gorilla in the world with all the benefits that entails is being proactively diminished. Why? Idealogical for sure but also make no mistake about its because we are slowly going broke and US politicians (incl. Democrats & Republicans) don't have the balls to raise domestic taxes and cut spending as they should....so Trump is selling the US's family jewels to pay for day to day expenses....his liquidation of the US's untapped international leverage.....is like burning the furniture to stay warm in winter.....it works one time but has severe long term consequences.

Its all showbiz baby!

Its hard to express fully how dumb its been to give this group a reason to come together so closely. That India is now being nudged in that direction is just plain bat shit crazy...crazier still when you consider that our actions against India are in service to a proxy war that is already in my opinion fundamentally lost which makes it doubly stupid.

Extract from Bob Woodward's book which Gary Cohn has subsequently confirmed to be accurate. It's the central problem of Trump's make America Great Again manufacturing thesis but only for US citizens .......when you get down to it US citizens aren't all that interested actually to work in factories or indeed construct factories.....Trump on this central foundational idea that underpins so much of his second term is simply dead wrong and he was told clearly about it back in 2019.

Yeah so many puts and takes to unravel..........100% expensing should be a boom to Deere, Caterpillar if the economy improves....but 100% expensing doesn't really matter if you've lost confidence that next year will be better than last year....you just defer your purchase and don't expense anything or alternatively on a micro basis Deere gain some marginal extra sales but their margin is killed by higher input costs and so EPS goes down even though volumes are up. Alot of the Trump economic plan rests on 2026 being an avalanche of tax refunds buoying consumer spending in the first half of the year and this manufacturing renaissance + de-regulation boom getting going driving things beyond that. Its the trillion dollar question.....will his cockamime scheme work?......as we know sending people cheques work this feels like an administration trying every trick in the book to pretend that things are going great till the sugar rush of those refund cheques start hitting the populace .....the 2nd part of his plan (on-shoring manufacturing led boom) looks IMO increasingly shaky....cause (a) maybe it was always destined to fail or (b) the courts are going to dismantle so much of it that its much ado about nothing as the clock will have run out on the whole thing....I mean...factories take time to deliver.....and fairly soon 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential hits.

India isnt rolling over though....and its pushing them closer to China and away from us....Russia is going to 'win' in Ukraine....its more or less baked in the cake now....seems like the neocons have got a hold of Trump....very poor decision IMO.

Fair play for calling it out - really counterproductive & risky move to push India even an inch closer to China….i hope your right and its theatre designed to make it look like Trump is trying to ‘win’ against Russia in Ukraine such that when Ukraine has its ‘Afghanistan moment’ and the front line collapses that he can say he tried everything to support them…the noises from Modi…the four refused Trump calls etc…point to something a little more than theatre and a genuine schism in relations indeed internal Indian media speaks openly about the US being an untrustworthy and unstable partner that might require a pivot to the East. Let’s see I mean it’s only 1.4bn people & 4th largest GDP country globally cozying up to another billion or so people & the 2nd largest GDP country and our strategic foe. I mean what could go wrong, it’s probably nothing.

One of the truly dumbest things Trump has done in his time in office......apart from broadly destroying the US's reputation as reliable partner which will have untold soft and hard costs moving forward for the US.......is to destroy broadly bipartisan decades long Presidential bridge building with India with this frankly dumb secondary sanctions escapade....Trump has correctly identified (in the global trading system) untapped US coercive leverage. The issue of course is once you tap it you don't get to quite tap it again so you want to be certain its being done for a good long term strategic cause. Trump has incinerated this untapped coercive leverage for what> - a lousy $400bn a year in fiat money - achieved by creating a defacto domestic sales tax that will soon piss off domestic low income and middle income voters - that has pissed off foreign friends and foes alike - to what? give a tax cut to the rich in a time of record fiscal deficits? - now secondary sanctions on India (that won't work) for a war in Ukraine that is fundamentally unwinnable - pushing in the process India (the world's most populous country & 4th largest by GDP) even a millimeter closer to China (the world's second most populous country & second largest by GDP)......is just terrible terrible terrible terrible terrible strategic risk management I think it's fair to say now that Trump has presided over the largest relative fall in American global power and influence since the founding of the country in 1776. History won't be kind to this episode in our history. MAGA tends to get lost in the weeds of immigration, trans people in sports and imaginary voter fraud.....and completely misses the big overarching picture.....the really big drivers and levers of American prosperity and security over the very long pull. 'Making America Great Again' will prove to be one of the great oxymorons in history.....an international relations joke that will echo across decades. You can see Modi, Putin and Xi chuckling in the picture above as they must sit in glee as their relative global power increases at the expense of ours.

I assume if that ever happened the risk weights attached to that would be so absolutely massive that most banks wouldn't bother and so you'd probably get Silvergate-esque speciality banks that would lend against it. I'm with you though.....conceptually......the leverage out in crypto land is quite spectacular because for all the implied market cap I've yet to touch or pay for in my day to day life products or services underpinned by utility tokens, staking, mining or blockchains. A lot of ink has been spilled and a lot of hot air ejected (and admittedly a lot of fortunes made) for something that is yet to be a meaningful product or underlying enabling technology out in the real world.

In this instance....its so binary....if you've the right to vote, you've got the right to vote..and your vote gets recorded.....in an inverse way it might actually drive liberal voter turnout..........as regards the cost....and because its close to impossible to goose the result....it would be an excellent use of taxpayers dollars to restore 'voter integrity'.....I say let it rip.

If its irrational....and stupid...fine...its irrational and stupid.....sure a waste of resources and money to do so...but I guess one can argue that you let the experiment run one time...to find out quantitatively how stupid and dumb it is........I wholeheartedly disagree on the voting conspiracy theories of the right....but lets let them run their retarded experiments one time....if there is such confidence in the outcome why be so afraid of the results?

Yeah i think thats right.....when a party is advocating for something less than this (basic basic ID).....it makes me question their motives...folks need to take a step back and think for a second

Yes but @Parsad is kinda directionally right....and I made this point at the time.......Silvergate caused folks to go hunting for institutions that had enjoyed large influxes of deposits in 2020-22 and had unwisely taken duration risk with them getting upside down in the process with their balance sheets as rates started to rise......Silvergate started a 'who's next' treasure hunt.....the crypto/FTX butterfly flap took down Silvergate....IMO because VC and crypto communities had become quite intertwined in this 2020-2022 period the fear 'contagion' had a comms network to work its way from crypto land to silicon valley VC land.....put another way silicon valley VC's had 1st and 2nd business contacts caught up in the Silvergate 'run' and subsequent collapse.......Silvergate announced its voluntary liquidation on the morning of March 8th...and SVB admitted their own b/s issues, cap raise on the afternoon of Mar 8th...........the issue is their VC depositors via VC/crypto contacts we're already hyper-contagion sensitized by Silvergates issues and collapse that morning and so they started their own mammoth run on SVB fearing it to be Silvergate 2.0....their fear became prophecy. Not to beat up on crypto....but again seemingly insignificant financial backwaters....like crypto....can have some outsized affects....one can argue that cryptos financial backing of Trump so fullsomsley in 2024 could have 'tipped' him to the win......and Trump (like him or not) will be highly consequential President (in a good or a bad way).

Yes but what stablecoins do is re-order the holders of money....away from bank deposits...to other forms (MMF/t-bils/ON RRP).... those funds return later as market rate funding for those extending loans -repo, CDs, FHLB, term deposits- but at much higher rates than they would have otherwise if they had remained as retail deposits...which affects the pricing, volume and availability of credit in a negative way......only at the extreme end of stablecoin adoption.

The real change is a stock of balances migrating from bank deposits to fully-reserved stablecoins (backed by T-bills/MMFs/ON RRP) these sit outside banks so the liability distribution shifts away from banks. So yes deposits don’t vanish, but banks must (in a bluesky high penetration stablecoin world) pay up more to borrow them back or raise deposit rates — this theoretically pushes up marginal funding costs, compressing NIM, and softening the loans-create-deposits loop (especially if/when stablecoins scale). You push up funding costs, compress NIM's and bank RoE's shrink....well the WACC for banks goes up, valuations go down, they become less attractive businesses.....which you fix by pushing up the cost to borrow for .....I agree with @wabuffo the core constraint on credit creation in the banking sector is fundamentally equity against RWA/CET1 regs.......but low cost, sticky deposit funding is a key cost input to manufacture loans.....without it aggregate availability and the underlying cost of credit goes up....which is what I believe banking lobby argued re:Genuis act

Treasury’s TGA....but this is a temporary drain (mainly when issuers buy new bills) it does get spent back into bank deposits. The structural change is stock vs. flow....as more transaction balances migrate from bank deposits to fully-reserved stablecoins backed by T-bills/MMFs, banks’ cheap, sticky aggregate deposit base shrinks and they have to backfill with costlier wholesale funding, deposit rates reprice, liquidity constraints bite, and the classic loans→deposits loop is weakened. Again I don't want to over-egg this.......stablecoins need to become massive for this to matter...and this is a 'what if' thread...they will not become massive IMO......it wont take long for customers to realize what value MA & V add when they use a stablecoin to pay for something and they realize they have no protection or ability to reverse the transaction.

Agreed - US banking system doesn't gather deposits first in order to lend them. But lending still requires running your b/s with preferably cheap, sticky funding after the payment clears and your borrower goes and spends that money somewhere else.....that somewhere else now includes moving this deposit into a stablecoin. GENIUS-compliant stablecoins are fully-reserved, 24/7 payment money that pull spendable balances out of bank deposits. That at margins raises banks funding costs and weakens the loans>deposits feedback loop your rightly pointed out (even if banks experiment with tokenized deposits). Again as I said this thought experiment is one where stablecoins are a runaway success. They are too outrageously small to matter now but if the stablecoin issuers dreams come true it could matter start to matter. But I'm with you - right now stablecoins are functional equivalent of turning your cash into Casino chips so you can play in the crypto casino

You bet - in America you're still innocent until proven guilty.....Lisa Cook & the Government will have their day in court......Trump has jumped the gun here with her sacking 'for cause' when no cause exists (yet)......but it all falls into the basket of undermining the Fed and flooding the zone with shit....I'd suggest Trump and team get going on filing the charges against Cook......they should get their guilty verdict and by extension an actual 'for cause' reason to sack her in about two years time if they're lucky..... But thats not the point.......all this pointless Fed jawboning for lower rates, the Powell hard hat nonsense, reno scandal, Lisa Cook mortgage fraud, and a for cause case heading to the Supreme Court to sack her......is all in service of one thing and one thing only......Donald Trump needs a fall guy for the shitty 2025 economy he created...one that is going to severely under-perform under every metric you can imagine (GDP growth, employment and inflation). Now I think his brain trust of Stephen Miran and Bessent believe this growth wobble is a down payment on an economic boom to come (and they may be right) but they also know that the American electorates patience for economic pain is effectively zero.......what they are driving at is trying to make the FED the cause of a shit 2025 economy and not them. I'm not sure the electorate are that stupid but Donald sure thinks they are.

Thought experiment you could play around with if these become huge. The bigger they get the more the issuers start to look like the oft discussed narrow banks.....deposit taking, non-interest paying but also non-lending financial institutions. You can see the attraction for the federal government that desperately needs more and more holders of its ballooning debt.....but what about consumers who want loans or help with their ballooning debt????......banks at the end of the day are intermediaries for turning inert cash on deposit into consumer credit instruments......if these stablecoin folks get huge* they could potentially start draining the banking system of a source of funds or push up the funding cost of attracting those deposits back into the banking system. * i dont see them getting huge to be clear