changegonnacome

@Cigarbutt Reminds of me of Steve Martin in LA Story....medical establishment running a conspiracy....."myocarditis risk from COVID vaccines! and this is how I find out, the medical establishment tells me!!!!!"

being murdered in your home regardless of your ethnicity - is a pretty common occurrence in South Africa writ large if you look at the stats......

I guess cause Holland can do math - and can see there is no white genocide occuring......just a country with an outrageously terrible homicide problem that results in thousands and thousands of human beings killed every year of every skin color, religion and ethnicity you can imagine. If homicide rates we're enough to declare a genocide...and so to extend US asylum protection.....there would be literally nobody left in Haiti right now.....and a bunch of other countries where homicide is effectively out of control.

your own link gives the correct context “Trump has falsely asserted that white farmers in South Africa are undergoing a “genocide” and deserving of special status. By contrast, he suspended the US’s refugee resettlement programme on his first day in office in January, in effect stranding 100,000 people previously approved for resettlement. Kaine asked why Afrikaners were more important than the Uyghurs or Rohingyas, who have faced intense persecution in China and Myanmar respectively, and also cited the cases of political dissidents in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, as well as Afghans under the Taliban.” The Trump admin is doing the classic over reactionary move……dems overly coddling to non-white folks…. Trump admin will literally invent persecution of foreign white folks as a way to I dunno ‘own the libs’. Inverse culture wars…..can we just have like no culture wars for a change?

Government debt should be understood primarily as a flow issue rather than a stock issue. Instead of focusing on debt-to-GDP ratios, one should emphasize net annual interest payments as a percentage of the fiscal's annual budget to asses the constraint it places on the cash flows and budgets of the sovereign authority. Japan's debt to GDP ratio is actually approaching 250%!!!! but its interest costs on that debt stack have represented relatively low amounts annually and only consumes about ~9% of its annual budgetary costs for fiscal 2025. God bless a decade of yield curve control! It might concern one to realize then that the USA is already in a WORSE net annual interest payment position than Japan with debt to GDP sitting at 'only' 124% of GDP...in 2025 interest payments on the debt will consume ~14% of the annual federal budget exceeding defense and indeed Medicaid as a line item. The reason Bessent and Trump get yippy thinking about the bond market is the maturity profile of the US debt stack is very short in tenure meaning annual interest payments on the stock of debt are hugely interest rate sensitive as so much of it rolls into spot rates on an annual basis...if that weren't bad enough the stock of debt continues to rise meaningfully annually at a sizeable ~7% of GDP clip which again exposes a lot of incremental debt interest rate payments to spot interest rates....put simply its matters a heck of alot what happens in the bond market to this WH and subsequent White Houses. The USA standouts amongst developed large nations for how onerous interest payments are now becoming to the fiscal authorities....I can't find any nation Greece, Italy etc in a worse position....nearest I can find are Costa Rica and Turkey- put simply interest costs are consuming a greater and greater proportion of the budget space forcing ever higher borrowings to maintain other programs.....the classic debt spiral. When you see this I think one can conclude that the next Fed chair is going to be asked to try to get the FOMC to engage in some kind of yield curve control ala Japan to create a re-financing window to allow the US fiscal to get its debt stack into lower yielding paper and ease this interest payment budget problem. Perhaps you can get away with something like this like the 1972 Nixon reset....Dollar is likely to get absolutely killed in such a move and inflation would spike meaningfully...guess the plan would be for fiscal dominance to exist briefly to allow a reset in debt dynamics. Forget Mar-A-Lago accords - this requires multilateral action...that is not Trump's style......yield curve control would be a unilateral act....our dollar, your problem....as the bottom falls out of dollar reserves and treasury holdings overseas......an aggressive one time transfer from creditors to the debtor Uncle Sam to help reset the fiscal position.

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Correction - poltics itself is now entertainment - I mean it doesn't get funnier than this stuff - owned and run directly by President of the United States....these aren't joke sites...they are real life business ventures by the sitting President of the United States adminstrated by his friend & business assocaite Bill Zanker with profits going to Donald J Trump - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-21/trump-s-old-partner-sells-memecoins-cologne-and-access?sref=7zqHEcxJ If y'all arent laughing you should be.....problem is you should also be wondering how the hell we got here too! 1 > Perfume/cologne - https://gettrumpfragrances.com/

Agree - I think business/stock market loves the government running deficits.....that deficit shows up as increased profits, margins and lower taxes. This tailwind works until it doesn't. We are closer to the end game than we ever have been re:deficit fueled corporate tailwinds. Buffet is likely right if a little early - personal and corporate tax rates post the 'big beautiful bill' are only going one way and that is up over time. I'm beginning to arrange my tax affairs with this in mind. IMO the next few years are a wonderful opportunity to take your medicine and pay some cap gains & conversely come up with a strategy to move as many assets as is humanly possible into triple tax advantaged wrappers (roth etc.)

Well I think its more that the Trump coalition is made up of die hard Republicans who'd elect a donkey if the GOP put it on the ticket, then single issue abortion voters and then what I'd call potentially the most politically disengaged & uninformed voter bloc ever assembled (lets call them the non-college educated males who get their political 'news' on TikTok in-between onlyfans thirst traps and old Joe Rogan clips). Its why Trump is a gift and a curse for the GOP - he'll get himself into the White House and the GOP a wafer thin majority in the House but once the midterms rocks around the 'Joe Rogan voter' doesn't even realize there's a midterm election being held. Let's see midterms are really not that far away now will be very curious to see if Trump can buck the poltical gravity of the cockmamie coalition he put together to win 2024 so narrowly. I find it implausible that he can and so we'll get a bunch of spendthrift Dems controlling the House.....quite the toxic mix....a low-T Republican party that's lost its deficit hawk mojo twinned with a Democratic party so lost in victimhood that if you let them they'd transfer a billion dollars to every non-white male voter as reparations.

Yep - Trump lives and breathes for press conference or press release 'wins'....all politicians do but Trump is the quintessential salesman......ABC - always be closing....but given Trump's cult following and frankly the lack of rigour by which his supporters follow these things its enough to feed them surface level truth social 'wins'.....the impression of relentless 'winning' is more important than long term structural wins. This is what ADHD tiktok politics looks like in the modern era and Trump's surface level style is perfectly suited for it. Its about winning the phone lock screen news/social media notifications. Smash and grab 15-second win politics. An Iran deal will follow the same playbook - we'll get a JCPOA-like deal dressed up in the emperor's new clothes.....it will be heralded as triumph of diplomacy that only Trump could have achieved and where he's saved us from nuclear armageddon.......till you realize he ripped up the old JCPOA and in effect manufactured the current Iran/Israel nuclear tensions for no good reason only that he wanted to rip up something Obama had done. It will join a fairly substantial and growing list of crisis that are directly manufactured by Trump himself but where we are asked at the end to thank him and praise him for resolving the crisis. Like a toxic marriage where the spouse beats his partner but wants to be heralded as hero for bringing them to the emergency room.

To @Spekulatius's point....Yellen in 2021 was sympatico with the Fed.....it was all about flattening the curve back then to support the COVID economy .....Fed did their bit via rates/QE....Treasury too....fair enough.....then we got monetary inflation and the aim of the game was cooling the economy.....the Fed and Treasury diverged at that point....Biden/Yellen kept their equivalent money printer going via ever greater deficits funded via t-bills while the Fed raised rates & did QT....foot on the break and accelerator at the same time.....it hasn't come out yet and been confirmed by officials but my working theory is that the Biden admin had a policy of helping to 'fix' inflation by flooding the US with immigrant labor by opening up the southern border....it kinda worked if you think about the relatively painless disinflation that occured 2022-2024...however the immigrant flood + the memory of high inflation cost Biden politically.

Well the criticism of Yellen was not during QE but rather when QE had stopped due to monetary/covid inflation…let’s call it ~2023/2024…..the Fed was trying to cool the economy via higher short term rates….Yellen doubled down on short term issuance instead of a more balanced issuance book….it was political yield curve control targeting the 10yr….in some respects the Fed had its foot on the brakes while the White House/Treasury was putting its foot on the accelerator pedal via ever larger fiscal deficits and non-normal t-bill issuance to fund that deficit…and conversely abnormally low long term bond issuance. This - the deficit growth & ST issuance - was not in the best interest of country but rather they (Biden/Yellen) saw it as means to an end to win the next election. Biden/Yellen don’t get a pass here they played their part in the deteriorating fiscal position of the United States….Captain Chaos & his big beautiful bill are in the process of blowing the doors off that fiscal position…and Bessent has continued the financing of treasury at the short end….its all getting very emerging market-esque

Well Chamath & Freiburg did meet Bessent….maybe he slipped them the true 3-3-3 plan Of course if you’re running 7% fiscal deficits…and US real growth rate potential is only ~2%….there is a way to stop debt to gdp ratio rising….and that is to run the economy hot and get 5% inflation + 2% real growth….there you go your growing the economy 7% nominally and borrowing 7%….debt to gdp ratio has now stabilized. Given DC’s desire for easy ways out - inflation sure looks like a good option when you think about all the alternatives

The Trump folks who somehow taught they were voting in a fiscal conservative to fix the budget problem are headed for a little town outside Mar-a-Lago called Reality........DOGE might be one of the finest PR horse and pony shows in US political history.......so much noise, so much ink spilled and so little actual progress on the deficit.....David Friedberg (a real fiscal hawk) takes Trump & the GOP 'big beautiful bill' to school below.....he's exactly right and in line with what I've been saying here.....Trump is engaged in as reckless budgetary behaviour as Biden/Dems ever were.....in fact as the big picture debt-to-GDP ratio climbs ever higher one can argue its becoming increasingly reckless.....Trump pulling the poor and disenfranchised Dems into the GOP is/was a winning electoral strategy but its corrupted the fiscal conservative impulse that characterized the old GOP....and so we get this.....a Trump/GOP budget bill signing the country up to 7% annual budget deficits for as a far as the eye can see.......with the debt to GDP ratio sitting at 124%! It's a big beautiful mess Captain Chaos is going to get us in and sure Dems deserve the historical blame too.........but they ain't in charge right now so whataboutism is a pointless diversion.

Exactly who are you protecting/hurting in these scenarios - shielding any industry from competitive forces turns it into an arm of the government with all the inherent issues that brings. The protected win, the consumer via choice/price loses and society writ large loses as resources, by definition, are now being misallocated. You can have national security overlay on stuff and no doubt it's the right posture - but national security becomes the last refuge of the scoundrel industrialist looking to be shielded from competitive forces by scaring/buying the politicians/public. It's a dangerous road the US has started down with Trump - beware the industrialist who cries unfair trades practises what you just might be listening to is a crybaby who fell two steps behind his competition and is looking for a Government bailout via tariffs/subsidies. That pandora's box is now open in the US and given campaign finance rules here via Citizens United it could be deeply corrosive to what has made America great over time.

Been leafing through it.....big picture you've got ~$1.75trn of expenditure cuts and lets call it $4trn of revenue reductions (tax cuts) over ten years....how does the math, math......what Captain Chaos and GOP want you to believe in all this....is that United States already at full employment AND with immigration effectively turned off such that the underlying poor demographics of the United States take hold again.... that THIS economy can GROW sustainably at a 3% CAGR starting basically right now......if it doesn't.....well the budgetary math starts getting out of control. Instead of going after entitlements (as they need too to actually fix the budget) they figured out how to make the entitlement problem even worse by exempting social security payments from tax.....pretty damn nifty way to transfer from the young to the old again. Can't remember where I read it but I'm starting to come around to the theory that democracies only work in a demographically health society that is growing.....when you start getting an inverted pyramid in a low trust society like we have....the old people start voting themselves incremental resources at the expense of the young (& unborn). When you look around at folks in their 20's, 30', early 40's with the affordability & availability issues in education, housing, health and childcare.....and you then realize who driving the bus in terms of poltical leadership.....you quickly realize whats happening.....what is nimbyism except an artificially created short squeeze on housing such that the aged housing holder can experience higher returns to their assets via manufactured scarcity.

For sure - you start with your list of asks....get the easy concessions boxed off.....then escalate strategically and surgically to extract greater and greater wins...you boil the frog slowly.....Trump showed up with a bazooka and but the Chinese could see his hands we're shaking....we all remember him/Ron Vara nervously calling out to China to give them a call via cable news. Embarrassing episode for the country....but a profitable one for those that spotted the bluff.

Capitulation was written in stone the day he announced insane tariff level on the US's largest source of imports...I said it back then and have made alot of money on the simple idea that I'm sure the Chinese saw too.....what cant continue wont.....starting out with unsustainable tariff rates with nowhere to go except down simply doesn't extract the most concessions from a counterparty.....Trump blinked twice.....first on the global pause and now on the China pause.....his bluff had no credibility because he set the rates so high it telegraphed the bluff. It’s not a fair contest.........China's best and brightest....up against Captain Chaos, Peter Navarro & Ron Vara.....god bless Scott Bessent....he's main function it seems and by all accounts is doing a good job on......is to create the correct word salad required to make Donald feel like the US beat a deal outta China....we all know Donald isn't pouring over the various documents being produced on the relative change in the terms of trade as a result of XYZ modifications. He gets the cliff notes and PR speaking points from Scott.....then does what he's done his whole life......put a PR spin on it and sell the shit out of it till he's blue in the face and his supporters are so tired hearing it from him that they internalize it and just accept it must be true.

Yep in theory - with nominal GDP growth at 4% (2% real growth & 2% inflation)....if one could get the annual deficit down to 3% of GDP....you'd be looking at a 1% reduction in the debt to GDP ratios per year. Anything I'm seeing coming out of DC right now including what came out today from the House......essentially preserves the deficit at crazy Biden era 6% plus per annum for what might be the whole of Trump's term.....very likely that Trump will come into office with a debt to GDP ratio of 123% and leave office with a debt to gdp ratio of 130%.......and this assumes no recessions which typically blow the annual deficit out by 300bps for a couple of years. This is not what getting your fiscal house in order looks like. The tax reform proposed, most egregiously the no tax on social security IMO now looks like a cert and continues the frankly disgusting practise of the boomer generation voting themselves money at the expense of their kids and grandkids...precisely what Stan Druckenmiller was talking about a decade ago....the boomer's parents saved for a rainy day, didn't overspend their income AND fought for the freedom of their kids on the beaches of Normandy, North Africa and the Pacific......the boomers today are fighting chlamydia on the beaches of Florida while they vote theirs kids futures away.

@John Hjorth I’d suggest ChatGPT or Gemini deep research for an outline on standard and non-standard budgetary manouvers in DC…it’s quite arcane at times especially when the ruling party has such slim majorities as the GOP have today.

Dude - you know the Senate sent the bill back to the House with a current spending policy baseline attached on April 10th….the fiscal hawk charade was over then….the GOP are taking FY25 discretionary spending levels and moving some numbers around for FY26…..but the pressure was taken off Johnson on April 10th and surprise surprise since then you’ve heard practically nothing around difficult cuts to Medicare or Medicaid…I watch this closely via a position in $CNC….mark my words FY25 spending will be replicated for FY26 (maybe some token minor shrinkage for optics)…while the revenue side will get hammered….CBO estimates will have FY26 deficit widening once the numbers are crunched….and Bessent & Lutnick will be all over CNBC telling a folks a deregulation/re-industrialization boom will see revenues outperform all CBO estimates under a proprietary dynamic scoring model….the same dynamic model that never paid for Trump’s TCJA cuts the last time and contributed to blowing out the deficit then too.

Yep DOGE and all this tariff revenue is a fig leaf for the reality here…..the debt and deficit are going higher over the short, medium and long term of this presidential term….fiscal hawks my ass…its all lip service…..the Republican disease is thinking that supply side economics can bail out fiscal recklessness….we’re about to hear about a growth boom that will magically fix the deficit via increased government revenues same fantasy we heard in 2016…..the Democratic disease is thinking that demand side economics can somehow do the same. Both are wrong and I guess it’s a fiscal crisis that will see them come together to cut both spending and raising revenue….both are going to have slaughter their sacred cows on the altar of a crisis….but don’t be fooled….Trump has used Elon & DOGE to give a PR impression of fiscal conservatism while in reality he writes massive tax cuts permanently into law that have no hope of ever being revenue neutral and will accelerate the deterioration of the federal public finances....all while him and his family greatly improve their balance sheet (in plain sight this time).

On this we are in total and utter agreement. As @RichardGibbons says….line crossing is a lightning rod for action & reform. Trump, via his shamelessness, is a massive opportunity for change or the opposite an acceleration of decay. See whataboutism if practiced universally is a giant vertical tube down to societal chaos & kleptocracy….if the country is full of whataboutists (on both sides)….its already lost and we’re watching the corpse rot…the only question is how slow or how fast.