USA Economics - Protectionist Waste Management down 2pc

New American economics thread

would love to post here but need to spend the afternoon reviving beatles threads in order to make up for the current deficit

calstars just woke up, maybe we can see what he thinks about futures for imported beer

how bout that american economy yall

previous thread from the 2008 crash:
Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

USA: "hold my beer"

line go down

if you were in australia then line go up, makes u think 🤔

maaaate

that's a bloody outrage it is

I have had it up to here waiting for the US economics thread to get rebooted!

lol markets were up bigly this morning and took like a 2000 point swing to the negative by close

no one has any idea what going on or why theyre doing what theyre doing

we did it

idk shit about the market but the upticks right now are the admin trying to hold things up with twigs and bubblegum until the investors see through it and down she goes

Surely you can leak a story every morning about how tariffs are being clawed back and then say "nuh-uh" in the afternoon and the stock market will stay even forever.

lol markets were up bigly this morning and took like a 2000 point swing to the negative by close

Brokers clocking in saying to each other, "Surely he'll have given up on this insane bullshit, right?" Then realization that no, insane bullshit is pretty much his only mode now, and... down, down, down we go.

Public Image Ltd. Album Titles appropriate for the moment:

This is what you want…this is what you get
Happy?
The greatest hits, so far

I think it was the doubling down on China that punctured whatever hope helium there was. Or that plus just everyone trying to guess where the bottom's gonna be.

I alone can fix it.

cool thanks

Sorry, that was supposed to read “AI alone can fix it.”

damn

that's what you get for asking chatgpt to make yr posts ;)

I can call you Betty, and Betty when you call me you can call AI

Mr Krasnov, tear down that wall!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNrQOUtXYOo

I think it was the doubling down on China that punctured whatever hope helium there was. Or that plus just everyone trying to guess where the bottom's gonna be.

― paper plans (tipsy mothra)

we're in portland. we're _all_ in portland.

please send tops. don't worry about that hope helium, we're all _very_ good at blowing.

lol

Trump claims tariffs bringing in $2bn a day for US
Donald Trump has been speaking as he signed executive orders from the White House.

Trump claimed that the US is making $2bn a day from tariffs. He did not provide any details.

“The tariffs are on and money is pouring in at a level we’ve never seen,” he said.

“America is going to be very rich again very soon,” he said.

What can you even say...

“America is going to be very rich again very soon,” he said.

with U.S. taxpayers' money

I was just thinking if he was referring to people paying taxes which include higher capital gains in 2024 and more babby boomer RMDs

What can you even say...

― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, April 8, 2025 4:03 PM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Thread for Screaming Into the Void

Here is more details on who might be making that money.

https://rajivsethi.substack.com/p/engineered-volatility

^^^

"buying the dip" but on AI steroids

An economic lesson from er, Ronald Reagan, tweeted by er, Chinese embassy US account.

Ronald Reagan vs. #tariffs : 1987 speech finds new relevance in 2025pic.twitter.com/CuAMw1eQXN

— Chinese Embassy in US (@ChineseEmbinUS) April 7, 2025

as one does

William Huo, Intel’s first rep in Beijing: “America got conned by its own elite. And now we’ve got the privilege of importing our own poverty in shiny containers labeled “Made in China. When a politician promises to bring back American manufacturing with tariffs, ask them: who’s going to rebuild the ecosystem Wall Street torched three decades ago? Tariffs won’t fix decades of deindustrialization driven by elite consensus. Only massive, consistent investment in R&D, education, and infrastructure ever could. But first we have to say the quiet part out loud: America was deindustrialized not by China or Mexico, but by its own ruling class chasing yield.”

Yep.. anything to get away from paying a living wage to American workers

on the other hand we got cheap tvs have you seen these things its like $300 for a big flat screen tv

theyre quasi disposable

my (much-older) cousin runs a small music store in a small CA town, and as much as he'd love to have his walls lined with shinty Fender, Martin & Gibson guitars, he just can't really afford to, so he orders guitars from Korea, China & Indonesia. He's shown me a few and I have to admit they seem pretty well constructed, probably using a lot of computer-assisted machinery. They're not 'rough' like we think of Japanese & Italian guitars from the 60's. And they actually sell, because he's not really selling to pros but to people just starting out.. same with brass & woodwinds

theyre quasi disposable

the alleys of Oakland are littered with them, I can attest

This passage from Bob Woodward's book Fear shows just how fucked we are:

Of course the United States manufactured things, but the reality did not match the vision in Trump’s mind. The president clung to an outdated view of America — locomotives, factories with huge smokestacks, workers busy on assembly lines. [Gary] Cohn assembled every piece of economic data available to show that American workers did not aspire to work in assembly factories...

Mr. President, can I show this to you?” Cohn fanned out the pages of data in front of the president.

“See, the biggest leavers of jobs — people leaving voluntarily — was from manufacturing.”

“I don’t get it,” Trump said.

Cohn tried to explain: “I can sit in a nice office with air conditioning and a desk, or stand on my feet eight hours a day. Which one would you do for the same pay?”

Cohn added, “people don’t want to stand in front of a 2,000 degree blast furnace. People don’t want to go into coal mines and get black lung. For the same dollars or equal dollars, they’re going to choose something else.”

Trump wasn’t buying it.

Several times Cohn just asked the president, “why do you have these views?”

“I just do,” Trump replied. “I’ve had these views for 30 years.”

“That doesn’t mean they’re right,” Cohn said. “I had the view for 15 years I could play professional football. It doesn’t mean I was right.”

He really believes his insane bullshit, and no one can convince him otherwise.

far from the worst thing during this cursed time but can i just say that i’ve really been disliking seeing scott bessent’s stupid smug face

Cohn’s mistake was referring to other people, who don’t exist to Trump. Should have asked him do YOU want to shovel coal eight hours a day

People might actually take factory jobs over service industry/LVN/etc. jobs if they existed and the pay was decent, the idea that the two options are "blast furnace" or "incredibly easy e-mail job" isn't real life.

So many not-blast furnace trades jobs (HVAC tech, plumber who gets called out at midnight when the shitter is backed up, etc.) are a) highly demanding of overtime and b) now actually sales jobs because staying employed and making a living wage depends on upselling the person whose AC you're fixing in the middle of August.

From the old thread, ShariVari sez

Lots of angry chuds out there trying to Gamergate the fake, woke, feminised economy (in this specific case, a viral TikTok video from Australia they are all still mad about a year later).

And I was like wha? Like, doing office work is for women? Then why were they excluded from it, in living memory?

And lo, yes there are people saying things like this.

https://wapo.st/42nDYfR

Rotimi Adeoye

Like the Chinese Cultural Revolution, it glorifies physical labor as moral purification, only now the purification is from the supposed “wokeness” of desk work, filtered through TikTok, X and Twitch. It’s not about creating jobs. It’s about creating vibes: strong men doing hard things, reshared until they become ideology. As one MAGA influencer put it, “Men in America don’t need therapy. Men in America need tariffs and DOGE. The fake email jobs will disappear.”

THE DOW!

they call it the dow because it's down

The dow which can be spoken of is not the true dow

The Dow of poo

pam bondi’s in trouble

This morning saw a clip of a reporter actually invoking the word stagflation.

Financial pundits have been invoking stagflation for at least a year now … and arguing about the risk of it happening

1973 style oil crisis + 1930s style depression u love to see it

Good thing no bad things happened in the 70s or 30s

70's style oil crisis? yup.
30's style depression? nowhere close, yet.

A bit of random insight into what has been holding up Tesla stock. So far today oil prices are up about 1% for Brent and Bitcoin is taking a 2.5% drop. So far today Rivian stock price is up about 1% and Tesla is down about 3%.

Don’t worry the dow was at 50k once

https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3mhgennml4f2s

just 4834 points short of 50,000 now

The professional traders are hedging against surprise developments over the weekend. They're obviously way more worried about downside risk than about missing out on a rally from good news.

So much is automated rn tbh —- it’s also almost April 1, the deadline for boomers to take RMDs from retirement accounts, which means a larger than normal amount of stocks get sold for cash. Idk if that has a major impact though, but it is a thing that doesn’t get discussed as much as it should.

lol

Stock futures rise as Trump signals progress in U.S.-Iran war talks: Live updates

markets have contained to tank this week, I'm anticipating an announcement Monday morning that Iran has fully surrendered and is now a US territory

― (•̪●) (carne asada), Friday, March 27, 2026 2:59 PM

nailed it

also the war must be going terrible for us, and markets easier to manipulate than we give them credit for, if all Trump can do is “signal progress” and they jump.

So Gamestop wants to acquire Ebay …

That would suck, I love eBay.

I swear it’s like the 80s again…

See also the Ellison deal for Warner Bros

yeah but Gamestop was a circling-the-drain meme stock last I heard, whereas eBay is a huge & successful international company.. does not compute

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveraged_buyout

LBO otm … though now that Private Credit is a thing, LBOs are often done differently than in the heyday of Millken

If I were on the board of Gamestop, a company whose stock valuation is a castle built in midair, I'd be looking to use that meme stock windfall to acquire something solid to put under it, too.

I will be attending the Gamestop shareholder meeting in June to vote for Aimless's board seat with my shares

GameStop had a market valuation of roughly $12bn on Friday before its bid, while eBay – originally launched as a side hobby by its founder Pierre Omidyar in 1995 – is worth about $46bn.

Noooooooooo

“Ebay should be worth – and will be worth – a lot more money,” Cohen told the Wall Street Journal.

“I’m thinking about turning eBay into something worth hundreds of billions of dollars,” Cohen said, adding: “It could be a legit competitor to Amazon.”

it already IS a competitor to Amazon, you can find anything there, you don't have to a member of anything, and there's a lot of free shipping

when paramount bought warner brothers, paramount had a valuation of around $12 billion while warner brothers had a valuation of around $110 billion

it happens!

Andy otm. this gamestop person sounds like a huge asshole

EBay’s been in steady decline (financially) for a while hasn’t it? Making it the drop-shipping crap emporium backfired when you could go straight to Temu/TikTok etc. for garbage and they made the platform inhospitable to everyone else with showcase fees/etc..

Don't worry -- they now have eBay live, a vertical video streaming platform where you can hold up the things you're selling or describe them. Live!

I had no idea this was a thing until someone posted about it and none of them ever have more than ~70ish viewers. There's an event on there right now for Star Wars stuff and the busiest feed is some Goodwill store in California holding up Funko pops with 47 viewers.

And then there’s this:

May 4 (Reuters) - A ?newly minted Blackstone investment ?vehicle is aiming to ?raise slightly over $1.7 billion in an initial public offering in the United States to bet on the red-hot data center industry.

Blackstone Digital Infrastructure Trust, which will acquire newly constructed data centers, is offering 87.5 ?million shares, including 725,987 bonus shares, ?in ?the IPO at $20 apiece, it said ?on Monday.

you'll have to pry ebay from my cold dead hands

in the early 2000s eBay was how I built a chunk of my record collection but stopped buying when discogs really took off. I haven’t checked it out in over a decade

^^^

I used to buy a ton of CDs on eBay (and occasionally sell some) but that hasn't been the case for years.

I buy everything on eBay and only use Amazon if I get a gift card

My experience is limited to car parts (or one fridge defrost timer), a handful of secondhand clothing things, maybe a book here or there ... couldn't be more than six or seven purchases a year, but for these things eBay has worked really well for me (I don't have or use Amazon), sometimes even feels like one of the few things from the old internet that has persisted without being majorly broken or enshittified.

ebay is great for clothing. nothing left over from the golden era of the internet can just sail on unencumbered. the doctrine of growth ruins everything.

craigslist sail on, sail on

I've found ebay useful for random old stuff — I found a 1978 Tasha Tudor advent calendar that I loved as a kid, and a particular issue of Life with an ad I wanted inside the back cover. The kind of things most people aren't going to bother to try to sell through Amazon.

it already IS a competitor to Amazon, you can find anything there, you don't have to a member of anything, and there's a lot of free shipping

I bought a bluetooth thingy to make music on my phone go to my old 70s amp off eBay because I didn't want to give Amazon my money; they had the same thingy for a couple quid more and I thought, fine, at least that villain won't get my cash. But the eBay seller just bought it off Amazon and got them to send it to me.

this story isn't related to anything really, but colour me befuddled

But the eBay seller just bought it off Amazon and got them to send it to me.

― an uncharacteristically irritated Mr. Rogers (stevie), Tuesday, May 5, 2026 3:50 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I ordered something off of ebay earlier this month that ended up being shipped to me through Amazon. Specifically had been shopping away of Amazon, as it supposed to be a surprise birthday present for my wife (we both open Amazon packages because it is a shared account, but other packages we leave on each other's desks). She ended up intercepting it before I even knew it had arrived. Guess it's just drop-shipper shenanigans.

xp

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drop_shipping

I buy a lot of stuff from eBay and it's all specific things I can't easily find anywhere else. My list of purchases from the past 12 months look like this:
- an instrument panel switch for a 60 year old car
- replacement heads for an electric shaver
- a 3D printed storage case for my soldering iron
- a couple of replacement battery cables for that same old car
- replacement remote control for our air conditioner
- used M1 Mac Mini
- used Fluke ethernet cable tester
- replacement audio board for my old Panasonic ToughBook laptop
- a couple of used Pelican equipment cases
- a set of test leads for my multimeter
- replacement lid for a Pyrex glass bowl

All of this stuff would cost 2x more if I bought it on Amazon (assuming that I could even some of that there)

it's definitely good for electronics of all kinds, and replacement parts for a variety of things. lots of parts warehouses use ebay it seems. there's something i like about how ebay lets individual sellers (even gigantic ones) to maintain something of their identity as opposed to amazon where in terms of the experience you're buying everything from Mr. Bezos. overall it's not perfect but it's a million times better than Amazon for any type of shit i'm liable to order online.