sp3ctr4l

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That means that even if all the tariffs were rescinded, Trump croaked and somehow JD Vance took a 'be at least somewhat more competent and less stupid' pill, and never reinstated them...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

Reminds me of:

collapsed inline media

(real gamers can hear this image rofl)

Ah yes, 1950, when America was the only massively industrialized nation in the world that hadn't been bombed into fucking oblivion during WW2, and therefore dominated the global economy by default.

They made the economy bad by spending too much money toward Ukraine.

... or something.

Anyway, time to occupy Gaza, invade Panama, buyout Greenland, maybe invade Canada, ramp up strikes on the Houthis, and leak the group chat planning said strikes...

oh, and goad China into an an unprecedented trade war, as they are doing full scale drills/mock invasions of Taiwan.

But its fine because Trump will end the Ukraine war on day one and is therefore the peace candidate.

... I swear to god I'd have to be beaten in the head with hammers and develop CTE to be operating on the same mental wavelength as Trump scrotum suckers.

... yeah.

Shits gonna get real bad.

Like Great Depression 2.0 bad, but this time shanty towns are all classed as illegal homeless encampments and Trump has publicly stated multiple times his plan for the homeless is literally concentration camps in the middle of nowhere or outskirts of cities, that kind of bad.

Unless I'm missing something, China is doing a lot of trade with Russia in goods that help the Russians build their own military gear...

whereas, under Biden, the US was doing that with Ukraine, and basically also just directly sending them something like half our mothball reserve military equipment, lots of ammo and arty shells, and a good deal of fancy newer stuff (HIMARS), and also very actively leveraging our intelligence assets/network to directly assist in operational planning.

In fact, Trump has about faced so extremely hard that the EU could potentially make a trade deal with China that includes the EU buying a whole lot of shit they had been selling to Russia, so that the EU can better supply its now increasingly levels of / plans for its own military production while choking off Russia's ability to do the same.

I am autistic and do not find that offensive at all rofl.

I often wish I could live somewhere that was some kind of safe haven, a zion for autistic people.

We can be extremely productive and creative when our boundaries are respected, but uh, when they aren't, we either shut down or freak out.

I guess my only quibble would be... I do not 'suffer' from autism any more than a gay or lesbian or trans person 'suffers' from ... being innately different from the social norm in a way they cannot fundamentally change.

Queer folk 'hide in the closet', autists 'mask'.

It is society that causes us to suffer by generally consistently refusing to listen to us, respect and understand our differences, and instead pathologizes and patronizes us as 'sick' or 'ill' in some way.

If they start trying to 'cure' us, that'll be basically a kind of genocide.

Autism does not have any known cause.

Genetically, there are some clusters of genes that seem to be present more often than not in Autistic people...

But it is very, very far from being any kind of conclusive 'we found the autism genes.'

... And if you look into a whole lot of pharmacology/psychiatric research, you'll find that a common practice is to give mice who are gestating chemicals that cause literal brain lesions and other physiological abnormalities and deformities, and this causes the brain fried mice to be less social, so they call that a good proxy of autism, and then test their drugs on these 'autistic' mice.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28472621/

This model is still common in modern studies and drug development because back in the 70s, a good number of pregnant women who took valproic acid (depakote) during pregnancy, gave birth to babies who were... well, to put it bluntly, retarded, seriously mentally impaired, as well as having mutations.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Valproate

But hey thats basically the same thing as autism right?

So yeah, many current psychiatric explorations 'with the potential to develop a drug that treats the symptoms of autism'... are literally just retardifying mice with massive brain damage inducing chemicals,.pretending that is autism, and then testing their drugs on the retarded mice to see if it changes something.

... And thats all without RFK Jr in charge.

... Meanwhile, the bond markets are continuing to freak the fuck out, and the yield curve has now inverted and univerted three times before an actual 'official' recession has begun.

For those that don't know, a yield curve inversion is when short term bonds offer a higher yield (interest rate) than long term bonds.

That... it not how that is supposed to work.

Generally speaking, a longer term bond should be riskier due to the amount of things that can possibly go wrong in that longer amount of time, as compared to a shorter term bond that pays itself back in less time, with less time for unforseen nonsense to happen.

Every single US official recession in the last ... 50, 100 years? has occured after first, the yield curve inverts, then it uninverts, and then an 'official' recession follows quite rapidly.

....Except fucking now.

Now we are in a situation where the yield curve has inverted then uninverted three fucking times without an 'official' recession actually starting.

This is unprecedented.

As of right now, the 6 month T Bill and the 5 year T Bond have roughly the same yield, and everything in between has a lower yield, the lowest point being the 2 yr.

... Its supposed to be basically a line going upward on the y axis of yields, as you move rightward on the x axis from shorter to longer term debt/bonds.

The bond market right now is more or less saying we are gonna be in for 2 years minimum of economic decline.