Wall Street stocks tumble as investors fret over US economic slowdown

Yeah, land… you know US CRE is on the precipice of disaster, Chinese RE had some huge disasters. And the best opportunity for RE came and went in 2009. Meanwhile the top S&P500 stocks were not the top in 2009, even Apple had already released the iPhone back then. I understand you are making a colorful comment. But “real estate tycoon” isn’t the antagonist for many people.

That's if they're allowed to force the liquidity hose to stay open. An alternative future is one where everyone's bets get called in (as should happen during a downturn). The richest are far more underwater in an asset bubble pop environment than the rest of us are. Remember who bailed out who in 2008.

Force them to close their existing obligations. People will be able to keep their land (albeit worth phenomenally less).

These people are breaking things that cannot be fixed quite so easily. Things like the trust of other nations. Scientific research. There are a lot of things that will take a generation or more to repair, if ever.

To be fair, the sub-prime lending crisis had its roots firmly in Clinton-era repeal of Glass-Steagal, so it’s not all so easy.

No particular love for the Republican Party, but it’s a problem created by the Democrats, which they then patched with the inferior Frank-Dodd. Plenty of stupidity to go around, I would say.

Hopefully there's still a free and fair election in 4 years. That might be contingent on how well Democrats do in next year's election. We need Congress back.

Or look somewhere else.

I'm not sure i want to stick money in a country that could implode every four years.

The standard relationship with the US is gone, though. I've been moving everything out and it won't be coming back regardless of what happens in 4 years time.

> The only thing more absurd is the fact that some people didn't see this coming. He signalled everything that he's doing now during his campaign, over and over.

Right, I think it's less that they "didn't see it coming" and more so a basic lack of understanding around how anything works and a complete trust in perceived wealth and authority.

The vast majority of people I know that fell into the camp of voting this into power follow a basic equational logic of "he is a (presumably) wealthy businessman he must know about how to manage money, therefore he can fix the economy" that's literally the entire depth to which they go. There's zero investigation into the validity of the premises, no question of the (ridiculous) assumption that governance must be exactly like running a business, no concern over the kind of business the person has background in... etc.

I'm sure there are exceptions to this, but I'd also be confident conjecturing that, for a huge number of people, this basic, shallow, completely flawed argument is precisely why they made the choice that they made. That and a pervasive inability to recall what things were like a mere four or so years prior.

You're not wrong. And yet he's polling well. And as long as people poll surface level questions like "do you like that he's cutting things?" he gets general support.

Drill into specific topics item by item and it's a bleaker picture however. But that's how these things always go, like the ACA for instance.

This analysis is lacking. People didn't vote for Trump because they analyzed his proposed economic policies and decided they would improve their situation. Almost nobody votes like that. There's general financial anxiety in the US, and he promised to fix it. What methods he proposed using are almost irrelevant, it's the rhetoric around them that sways voters.

The narrative is now one of temporary hardship to excise the supposed rot of the system that is the root cause of the aforementioned anxiety. Pointing out that inflation is bad has no persuasive power over someone bought in on that narrative.

The only way to sway general support away from this self-destructive administration is to offer another path towards alleviating the problems that voters face in their lives. The time when you could run on promises of competent administration alone has passed.

Not to derail here, but yeah, TSLA needed to get out of meme stock territory for a long time now. Its been hurting the underlying business.

Now, the big question is if the meme is gone, or just turned sour. Either way, I'm not seeing people going back to TSLA with Elon's antics.

My guess is that his supporters are so entrenched in their position that they won't care. Trump channelled their anger at how broken the American Dream has become, and they're probably OK getting personally singed if it means the whole thing burns down.

However, it will likely be a rude awakening on the other side for them, especially if they find that some of their entitlements were cut (just as they come to need them most), and meanwhile yet again the rich and powerful not only are fine but the gap continues to widen at an even faster rate.

Even then, I doubt his supporters will turn on him.

Remember, even Hitler had support from the average Germans after the end of the war (at least before the holocaust and other atrocities came to light to them). I'm not saying Trump is Hitler, just showing how you can lose everything and still not accept that your cherished leader wasn't such a smart or great guy...

Be careful taking people seriously when they claim to have voted a given way for a given reason; especially a specific reason. They’re usually false claims.

One of the weirdest views of Democrats is thinking that because the market has dropped 2% then individual voters are out there with their head in their hands thinking the world has ended.

If you go back a few years and the government (largely the Fed) was destroying the economy, you never saw this type of comment. It seems to be that Democrats specifically cannot think of politics in any terms other than personal, or (indeed) of government function as anything other than a thing that bestows personal benefit. There is no discussion of content, it is just pure personal vitriol constantly.

You see the same thing with left-wing voters in other countries too. Unsurprisingly, this has led to a situation where government spending is massive, most of that spending is handouts, and actual government function has collapsed. Milton Friedman wins again.

To be fair, as a Canadian, I think starting a business anywhere else is better than in Canada, except maybe Germany? (Apologies to our dear Germans; my sense of humor isn’t the best.)

The US makes startups easier due to easy access to capital from investors. OTOH, I'd be wary of starting a lifestyle business in the US due to the poor social safety net.

Red tape is also a concern, but it depends on what European country you're talking of, some are better than others, and red tape is awful in the US as well, depending on the state.

Those are basically the only considerations, everything else (like culture) is BS.

Be thankful you're not in New Zealand. Our current government claims to be business oriented, but they appear to desire to screw our economy. Partly because of trying to appeal to voters that are generally socialist here (a strong preference to hobble greedy business owners and often little sympathy for anyone who exports something to bring a USD into the country). Short sighted policy goals aiming to sell off anything to overseas "investors". When everything is for sale, we all lose. Eventually there will be fewer productive export businesses left to pay for our free healthcare, our retiree's superannuation or our other welfare benefits. Lose lose. Our socialist policies are good and humane, but they are hard to balance against economic growth.

We lack economic balance over here even though we have MMP voting. Swinging leftwards and less leftwards (NZ is mostly lefty) seems to be the only way we achieve a modicum of compromise over the years.

The US idolises successful business owners (even the notorious are validated).

NZ does have a couple of successful tech companies that list in Australia (e.g. Xero) or moved to the US (e.g. RocketLab). They often keep engineering in NZ because staff are skilled and cheap.

If the economy crashes I hope we can put a stake through the heart of the obsession with founders.

Doubt anyone would think it’s a joke.

At this point the Oval Office may as well be redecorated in Soviet red

Ruble exchange rate is propaganda. It was not possible to freely convert it for a long time. And black market rate was always very different from the official one.

They're going to completely remove sanctions on Russia before long, so that's not terribly surprising.

Trump says he wants to start Nord Stream pipeline which means Europe will buy less American natural gas and replace it with Russian natural gas.

Yeah, this has read to me as another double win for the Disaster Capitalist class. I'm sure we'll be seeing record profits for the s & p 500 by year's end no matter the outcome for the rest of us.

also a long-time China hawk (like on the far end of hawkism)

The fact that Canada, Mexico, China and the EU haven’t banned Tesla imports yet is remarkable. I’d expect that plus additional registration charges on premium vehicles, especially Cybertrucks, within a year if this continues.

But he continues doing what he started. Considering the fact that he is very smart and definitely hungry for absolute power, you can think about his true goal. If he is ready to risk that much of his worth, it means that the potential win for him will bring so much more.

> Musk's political antics are affecting his businesses.

The scary part is that he doesn't care. Money is no longer his motive.

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-2?

I see DOGE/Musk fanbois frequent Hacker News.

We’ve been waiting for Congress to respond for weeks. I wouldn’t hold your breath.

It's commonly said Presidents get 100 days in office to enact the bulk of their platform. It's an approximation, of course, but it's about then that the new-to-office approval rating bump starts to wane and Congress starts gearing up for midterms. We're about half way there.

If the economy is in bad shape in May, I would not be surprised if Congress intervenes on tariffs. The fear of being primaried by MAGA loyalists will become smaller than the fear of losing to the other party very rapidly if a tariff-induced bad economy is the result.

The constitution gives Congress the power, but they've delegated it to the President, which means they can take it back. They will if losing elections seems likely.

Why? Congress is majority republican, who have been under selection pressure to be party faithful. If that fails, they are getting death threats to stay in line.

The Republican strategy is to punish bi-partisan efforts.

From a Dem standpoint, its simpler to point out the fact that they have no real power, and let the Republicans take the heat.

What can Congress do?

So far the Republicans haven't been willing to do anything except go along. They are inert.