sp3ctr4l

So, its now around a day or two later.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/apr/09/dramatic-sell-off-of-us-government-bonds-as-tariff-war-panic-deepens

I was right, Varoufakis is wrong.

Again, Varoufakis idea is:

Central to this new global order would be a cheaper dollar that remains the world’s reserve currency — this would lower US long-term borrowing rates even more. Can Trump have his cake (a hegemonic dollar and low-yielding US Treasuries) and eat it (a depreciated dollar)?

and

Consequently, the euro, the yen and the renminbi will soften relative to the dollar. This will cancel out the price hikes of goods imported into the US, and leave the prices American consumers pay unaffected. The tariffed countries will be in effect paying for Trump’s tariffs.

Summarized, he thinks that:

US Bond prices will go up

and/or

US Bond yields will go down

and

The USD will appreciate compared to the Yen, Euro, Renminbi, that is to say, a dollar will be worth more yen, euro, ren.

What is actually happening is:

US Bond prices are going down.

US Bond yields are going up.

https://www.google.com/finance/quote/USD-JPY?window=1M

https://www.google.com/finance/quote/USD-EUR?window=1M

USD is depreciating, not appreciating, compared to yen and euro.

The USD/CNY is exchange rate is set at a fixed rate by China, and they haven’t moved it yet.

So uh, no Mr. Varoufakis, Trump cannot have his cake and eat it too, infact he shit in the cake and then threw the mixture all around the room, now he gets nothing that he wanted.

Trump has destroyed the Bretton Woods USD hegemony, but in a way that is utterly catastrophic for the US, not some extremely clever 12D chess move.

For what its worth, CyberPunk 2077 is … an alt history that diverges from our own … at some point in the 1960s I think?

Like… the Soviet Union still exists. In 2077.

Point being: The ‘Japanese megacorps taking over much of the American economy’ fear of our own 1980s is very, very much a big part of the lore/universe.

Pondsmith published the first version of the lore in 1988 as the TTRPG ‘Cyberpunk’, originally set in 2013, and this kept getting added to and expanded with subsequent editions.

Arasaka is… well hopefully without spoiling too much, Arasaka corp is basically run by a Japanese fighter pilot ace who pretty much swore eternal vengeance on America after Japan got nuked and lost the war, and his idea of how to do this includes figuring out how to become immortal, so that he can continue to run a megacorp that ultimately usurps American sovereignty and turns the country into his neo-corpo-feudal subjects.

You can get almost all of that by playing through the Corpo intro character path and actually watching the informative slideshow thing in the elevator and on walls/screens in the … megalobby, so hopefully thats not too spoilery.

Also in Die Hard it is Nakatomi Plaza iirc, Nakatomi being the name of the fictional Japanese corp.

Anyway woo random trivia.

Ah.

I am American.

I live in hell.

We have a much broader problem of corrupt grifters in… basically everything, at every level of society.

=[

Sorry for doing the American thing and assuming you are also American.

No problem!

But uh… I dunno exactly what your masters in the medical field is, but the medical field is also absolutely chalk full of people with sometimes real, legit degrees and sometimes absolute bullshit ones like chiropracty and naturopathy…

Who routinely publish pop-medical books oriented toward the general public, using their official credentials for clout, often promoting dubious or utterly false and dangerous misinformation.

Yout field is not immune… though yes, there generally is a better unified official condemnation… but only after a certain person has reached a certain level of popularity/infamy, and the seeds of nonsense have already been sewn.

Then the official condemnation is seen as censoring heroic truth warriors and the conspiracy theories abound.

Yep.

He just assumes he has god mode on and whatever he says will happen the way he says it will.

Megalomaniacal psycopathic narcissist.

Dark triad shit.

A pampered life of being born into money, never being told no, raping whoever he wants, scamming whoever he wants, … never any consequences.

I’ve very recently also seen this.

Basically uh, yeah, that tracks, that seems completely inline with the rest of how completely ridiculous this all is.

So… why haven’t the books been withdrawn?

Because academia, academics, … they regulate and peer review Journals. Published papers. Textbooks used in classes.

Not books designed for popular consumption, pop-econ, pop-psych, pop-whatever.

Why hasn’t he been rejected by the Econ community?

Ironically, because of the nature of the incentive structure of the field of Econ.

Way, waaay too much overlap with politics and business, so its basically split into psuedo religious ideological camps, who often realize they can make way more money or have may more power by working for a hedge fund or being some kind of propogandist.

So… in that sense… the academic Econ community rarely is even capable of coming out as a unified body of academics and rejecting someone. There are too many different ideological camps, they’re all arguing with each other all the time.

There is no broad consenus view as there is with say all climate scientists saying climate change is real, all biologists and archaeologists and geologists saying evolution is real and the earth is 4.5b years old.

But with Navvaro… he apparently hasn’t done much or any really groundbreaking research, spent about two or three decades teaching, and during that time he realized he could make way more money selling pop-econ books to people who want to be able to argue about Econ to support their ideology without actually learning Econ.

You know, pretentious blowhards.

Anyway he also went to jail for Contempt of Congress for lying to the Jan 6th committee.

He is an absolute hack fraud at this point.

So there, me with a BSc. in Econ, I’m calling him out rofl.

Britain always had bad news about the EU in the newspapers. Their population was never fully committed so it was possible to create a majority against the membership.

Cool, Brexit was still a disaster.

Likewise US companies will regularly discuss what they will do when China is going to overtake them. That moment has come. I don’t believe in the coincidence that the US is doing its biggest blunder at the most crucial time of their history.

Overtake is a gradual, predictable process.

Suddenly putting roughly 30% tariffs on the entire world in a very sudden and chaotic matter is not even in the same galaxy as US corporations making business plans based on predictable market trends.

We are making a blunder because we became decadent, entitled, and privileged, and aggreived and then fell under the allure of an incompetent fascist, who, again, is a fucking moron at policy.

Of course, the strategy can be that half the workers are fired, but with the expectation that they are hired by somebody else.

… What? If everyone is firing, no one is hiring.

This is called a recession or depression.

Lose your higher paying job and maybe replace it with a shitty part time job.

Net result is everyone is poorer.

… If you wanted to kickstart making new manufacturing jobs in the US, well you’d need actual money to build the factories.

If the entire economy crashes, no one, no companies, have money to invest in new capital expenditures. Foreign investment won’t come because exporting out of the US will be a shitty prospect due to retaliatory tariffs, and the general lack of a skilled manufacturing labor force in the US.

There would have had to have been some kind of accompanying domestic fiscal policy to throw government money, subsidies, tax breaks, whatever to kickstart domestic manufacturing… before you throw the tariffs on.

But Trump is an idiot and is ideollgically opposed to the government spending money on seemingly anything other than bitcoin and explosively liquifying brown people in ‘shithole’ countries (his words).

LOL .world mods strike again!

No joking about effectively resisting fascists allowed!

When politicians murder via proxy, via systems, its totally fine and just the news.

When people joke about violence aimed back at them?

DAS IST VERBOTTEN!

Go fuck yourselves.

This article has been posted by me several times. You are only the second person who notices.

Probably because I am one of the few people on lemmy that actually has a degree in Economics.

EDIT

Removed by mod

Varoufakis is wrong.

Central to this new global order (Trump’s plan) would be a cheaper dollar that remains the world’s reserve currency — this would lower US long-term borrowing rates even more.

What Trump is doing will result in a cheaper dollar.

It was also destroy the USD as the world’s reserve currency.

Yep. Im a US citizen, we are so beyond fucked it is actually funny, at least a third of the population are in a hardcore fascist cult of personality, our media is dominated by idiots gargling the balls of even more powerful and even more stupid idiots.

If anyone wants to do a sham marriage, I’d love to be able to leave.

I got basically crippled in an assault and now live off of SSDI. If Soc Security gets gutted further… I’m fucked, on the streets homeless, in a wheelchair.

He is acting like there is basically perfectly inelastic demand for Americans to pay for imports and importers to pay the tariffs.

Elasticity is basically how demand changes in accordance with price.

Generally speaking, absolute necessities like food, water, housing… are less elastic than unneccesary luxuries.

… But… basically nothing is perfectly in elastic.

If anything was, the price could literally be either infinite, or totally free… and demand would not change.

Obviously that is nonsense. Even if you die without food, demand will drop if a meal costs a billion dollars.

Trump is acting like the US is so lucrative a market that… our volume of imports will be… the same… and … the importers just have infinite money to pay tariffs… and not do cost pass thru to consumers.

Even though every economist since the 1700s will tell you tariffs result in less imports, and higher prices for consumers.

He seems to genuinely think he is directly taxing other countries, when he is… just taxing American consumers and importers.

Its like when Elon got mad at advertisers leaving twitter and he threatened to sue them for… not buying his ad service.

These coddled corrupt criminal capitalists have gotten so used to just always getting their way… that they’ve broken fundamental underlying concepts of how the ‘free market’ works.

Their worldviews are internally inconsistent and do not make sense, they hold fundamentally contradictory ideas simultaneously, and when people point this out, they flail and bitch and moan and insult like the petulant spoiled brats they are, because facing the contradiction, resolving the cognitive dissonance would cause ego death… which is the same as suicide for a megalomaniacal narcissist.

For them, it is literally:

I can’t be wrong.

Ergo, everyone else is.

I am trying to give him a delusional level of benefit of thr doubt in thinking that some fucking how these tariffs actually result in 1 trillion in new US manufacturing industries/investments.

Even by his own… “”““logic””“” … his plan makes no fucking sense.

Of course yes, in reality… it makes even less sense, because you don’t get new manufacturing in a very high cost of living country without extremely well thought out industrial policy, subsidies, ways to attract needed talent, and investment, and … you get it.

China’s growth is not a story of self-sufficiency.

It is a story of doing state directed capitalism, making extensive use of international trade, much more productively, intentionally, and strategically competently than… basically any other economy in the history of the post ww2 world.

They are not self-sufficient in the sense of autarky, a hermit kingdom like North Korea with 0 international trade.

Vietnam basically 80s onward, is a similar economic story of a ‘Communist’ government/society/economy that did a good job of introducing elements of capitalistic economic systems into itself gradually, with great control, and much of its profits siphoned into further reforms and building up public services and infrastructure… lots of international trade in all that, though they have been significantly less restrictive of foreign direct investment than China has.

… So is Japan, post ww2, minus the ‘Communist’ starting position, though with a good deal more foreign direct investment.

A free market republican/libertarian who learned how large of a role the government of Japan played in directly molding the evolution of its industries and manipulating its markets, openly, would call it ‘communist’, because they think ‘communism is when the government does stuff’.

In reality, its state directed capitalism, but in Japan, they call this capitalism, in Vietnam and China, they call this same thing communism.

Their political systems and culture are all very different, but their economic organization and growth patterns actually have a lot in common.

China does capitalism, its just that the state explicitly owns the largest corporations. But these corporations are still ultimately playing the same capitalism game as all other corps… they just have a lot more subsidies from and control by the state/Party officials.

… Even… if Trump… can bring in $1 trillion… somehow…

US stock markets have wiped out $ 9 trillion in market cap since Trump became President.

… So uh. Yeah.

1 - 9 is -8, Don.

Great plan.

How to actually do games preservation:

Reform IP laws.

Mandate open sourcing of hardware and software architectures after some period of time. 10 years? 5 years after no more of that hardware/software is sold? Yes texhnicalities are insanely complicated but you get the idea.

Oh, how about government funding for emulator development? We fund libraries that preserve books, and movies, and other stuff.

Hit detection doesn’t work, going into pure darkness makes the AI hallucinate to the point it distorts the map layout, npcs will teleport around ot just disappear… runs at like 640p at maybe 20 fps, textures are a blurred indistinct mess…

Oh and it requires basically a super computer to run this.

Brilliant.

Gaming has not been ‘fine’ since:

Hypercaptialist corporate acquisitions have basically bought all recognizable IP/dev studios and manage them under an increasingly smaller number of actual parent companies who own increasingly huge numbers of IPs/dev studios, and then basically all of these companies are absurdly mismanaged by corporate nonces who make bank, and game devs are routinely overworked and underpaid.

MTX became the new norm / the mobile gaming scene exploded (basically concurrent phenomena)

Nvidia/Unreal decided that actually, having efficiently coded lighting that runs on moderately priced hardware is stupid, what you actually want is horrifically inefficient lighting that runs on absurdly expensive hardware, and then Nvidia plasters a bunch of AI Frame Gen/Upscale all over that foundation to further enforce their monopoly.

… Like, yes, there are still great indie or AA games, but those are the exception to the rule.

The overall industry is a fucking nightmare for anyone who works in it, and from the consumer perspective, we keep getting overpriced, overproduced iterations of the same basic game… sandwiched on the other side by an avalanche of garbage tier indie slop/scams. Something like 80 to 90 % of the games listed on Steam are that, and they are constantly fucking with their algorithms to be able to actually detect them and filter them.

… It also doesn’t even matter if you personally will never own a high end gaming PC.

All the AAA game dev studios need them to develop the games. And now those are all 30% more expensive, at least. Oh and all of the employees cost of living just jumped 30% as well, I am totally sure that their wages will increase to compensate this. Oh wait no, they’ll actually lay them off even faster and exploit them even harder.

Game dev in America is going to largely grind to a halt, with again, the exception of a few, now even smaller in number, amount of new games that can be developed with much less powerful hardware, or an even smaller number of AAA titles that quintuple down on MTX, addiction based pricing models.

But uh hey, basically every other industry in America is utterly fucked too.

Leisure/luxury expenditures crater the hardest during a depression. Which is what we are looking at. Not a recession for a year or two, no, this is a gonna be a decade of you learning how to cook with rice and beans, sewing your clothes back together because you can’t buy new ones, where your Xmas gift to your kid is decent shoes, not a game console.

I mean, I agree, but… politics is theatre to a very significant degree, or optics, or perception management, whatever phrase you want to use…

This at least shows that at least some Dems are making a publicized spectactle of resisting…

… As opposed to the old, or possibly still current official Dem talking point memo / strategy of ‘Do not become the story.’ … which translates to ‘be a collaborator / bend over and take it’.

Fillibustering and doing absolutely everything possible to fuck with the opposition party… is literally exactly what the Republicans did back when the Dems had a trifecta during at least half of Obama’s first term.

All the Dems have to do is literally copy that playbook… and Booker here is actually doing it.

Having a functional opposition party that actually looks like it is trying to resist fascists in the government is a pretty important part of an overall societal resistance to fascism.

It is of course not the entirety of a good resistance plan… but…

If your plan does not involve that, well then congrats, you are a terrorist in the eyes of the fascists, hope you have more guns than they do.