sp3ctr4l

Yay, validation lol!

Oh sure, here, buy our aircraft carriers and aircraft that even we can barely understand our own logistics and and maintenance supply lines and procedures for, that will all nearly mmediately break if they stop getting software updates.

Like, I hear you lol, but its kinda like saying 'sell your literally custom made hyper car that will depreiciate by 80% in value and the parts manufacturer will go out of business when you buy the car.'

I am saying you'd have to be an idiot at this point to buy one, we wouldn't be able to sell them at this point.

Now I am all for downsizing the military in general, have been for basically all my life since middle school... but uh yeah, that would look more like decommissioning and downsizing.

But uh also also, the military industrial complex are basically the only domestic manufacturing jobs we really have, aside of our shitty overpriced domestically assembled but internationally owned and sourced consumer cars... and the Trumpublican party is, you know, in charge, what with the fascist coup and all that.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fear-and-greed-index.asp

The Fear & Greed Index is not just some bullshit chart, with arbitrary values, it is an index of 7 different indicators, all based on real data, all indexed together, that is to say, blended by a another formula that determines how much weight to give to each of the 7 constituent indicators.

It is presented as a speedometer... because 95% of people's eyes glaze over when they see complicated but very technically information dense graphs and graphics.

I have a decade of work experience in data analysis and reporting, making things like quarterly and annual reports for a department or entire corp or non profit, making realtime views that update based on realtime or regularly reported data...

You have to dumb things down and simplify things ... and often present data in a narrative structure, as a story, even for C Suite, upper management, the Board... because they almost always have a very low attention span.

I cannot tell you the number of times a younger, brighter eyed, bushier tailed me was... fairly politely and earnestly told by VPs or Board members that... its clear that I have a broad and deep understanding of statistics and data... but you've got to dumb these reports down to the point someone with a hangover can understand the most important information in 30 seconds.

Only other data nerds, stats nerds and accounting tend to possess the actual ability to read more complex charts without their eyes glazing over.

This speedometer presentation by CNN is pretty much the same logic used in good UI or video game design:

If some complex measurement is important and should be easily understood by the user at a glance, present that info in a simplified way that makes use of a visual metaphor or motif is rooted in something most people would have tangible experience with.

They are presenting this for the average American reader.

The average American has the literacy level of a 5th or 6th grader.

Also, it would be innacurate to describe this index as just measuring volatility.

Volatility is a component of the measurement, but there are many other components as well.... that is what an indexed metric is, a single overall 'score' produced by combining a bunch of indicators according to a set formula for how to do that.

Yeeeeuuup.

This is certainly going to improve the prospects of assembled in US cars getting exported...

Oh well, fuck it all I guess, burn it all down.

I'm sure Elon will try suing the EU to force them to buy his cars next.

That is how the free market works: When people don't wanna buy what you are selling, threaten to sue them for not volunarily agreeing to purchase your service or product.

accidentally drops my latkes on the floor

Wait, what ever could you mean?

I think the common denominator is that everyone thought of something with... basically big, scary, straight teeth, as a promiment design element, attached to some kind of monster.

You're mostly right.

Most T Bills and Bonds... they don't work like a credit card or a home loan.

Those are things you pay a bit on every month, and the interest rate is an APR, which means Annualized Percentage Rate, which means the monthly interest rate you are paying is the APR divided by 12.

So with those, the bank gets money every month untill you pay it all off.

With Bonds... say a 5 year Bond... you pay for the Bond, newly issued by the US govt, and 5 years later, you hand it back to them, and they pay you the face value + interest rate.

But, people who have already bought a bond, well they can sell it again, before it matures, to... some other guy, some other country, some other firm.

Thats called the 'secondary market', and most of the time you hear a news story about bond prices and yields, its a second party selling a bond to a third party.

Generally, when the US does an issuance auction of new debt directly... well, it has to generally track the prices and yields set by the various secondary markets, sorta like how you'd wanna check a car salesman's price against kelly blue book to make sure you're getting a reasonable deal.

There were moments in thr GFC, 07 08 09, where US debt auctions ... didn't actually result in the amount of bonds expected to sell, actually selling, because there were enough potential bond buyers who assessed that the US was offering unreasonable prices and yields, given the economic turmoil.

... I am not an 'expert' either, but I do actually have a BSc in Econ, and I apparently remember a good deal of my courses, and enjoy infodumping lol.

The prices and yields of bonds have an inverse relationship:

If price goes down, yield goes up.

The yield is also known as the interest rate.

This interest rate * the purchase price is paid by the US government to the bondholder at the end of the duration of its term.

When you look at the US Federal budget, and see the amount that goes toward making debt payments...

This, bonds, are a very big part of what you are looking at.

If the interest rate on US debt instruments are going up... that means more and more of the budget has to be allocated toward debt repayment.

While yes, extremely directly, bond yields rising doesn't... mechanically make the passing of a budget impossible in some kind of procedural way...

It very much makes the stakes higher as now our growing debt problem is growing even faster.

I can only hope I live long enough to see a 'The Death of Stalin' type movie about the Trump admin.

If US Bonds are no longer the de facto safe haven asset...

The USD is no longer the world's de facto reserve currency.

That means that even if all the tariffs were rescinded, Trump croaked and somehow JD Vance took a 'be at least somewhat more competent and less stupid' pill, and never reinstated them...

Well it would mean the dollar would crash against other currencies, we wouldn't be able to import anywhere near as much, and US international debt payments as a percentage of the yearly budget would climb fast.

... And then that could spiral into both massive austerity at home, and/or 'lol we are defaulting on our international debt' either by formal declaration, or... basically hyperinflation.

If ya'll want another layer of irony to all this:

George Soros initially rose to general public fame/infamy with large bets against British Pound in 1992, that effectively defeated the Bank of England's attempts to stabilize the currency, resulting in its devaluation, and something like a billion $ profit for Soros.

Fast forward to now, and Trump supporters have spent the last 5 or 10 years acting like Soros is secretly the most underhanded and influential 'world controller' bogey man that exists, and they blame everything they don't like on being funded by him... despite pretty much all of his charities and funds and causes he donates to being publically available knowledge... and despite Soros being a fairly small fish in the modern ocean of much, much more wealthy and infuential corporations and individuals.

... So, now, Trump very well may have done basically the same thing as what Soros did 3 decades ago: force the devaluation of the USD and cause economic mayhem, but... at a much, much larger scale than Soros did.

The Trump supporters have utterly and entirely lost their own plot, that they themselves mostly fabricated.

I am very annoyed that this use of 'freak' and further corruption of the term 'black swan event' have just gotten completely common place.

A black swan event is supoosed to be something completely impossible to have been predicted before hand because you didn't have enough knowledge to even understand there was a kind of risk you were not accounting for.

An 'unknown unknown', to use the only useful idea Donald Rumsfeld ever came up with.

... This bond sell off is utterly predictable, unless you are completely brainwashed into a delusional level of normalcy bias and complacency.

All you have to do is realize the US is acting like an unstable dictatorship... which it very obviously is... and this is an easily predictable outcome for anyone with a decent knowledge of macroecon theory/history.