not sure the Fed's balance sheet keeps shrinking.
( source https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WALCL )
Graph of the Fed's total assets, which jump during the financial crisis, continue to rise over years of QE, begin to decline but then jump sharply during COVID, peak at about $9T around 2022, and have been declining since.
this is what retribution looks like. against existence itself. against anything or anyone that might have or might yet annoy him.
@dpp that’s shockingly creepy.
If Trump remains obstinately on this course, a US recession (at the very least) is certain. Whether the recession is global depends whether rest-of-world big economies can get over either their austerity fetish or their unwillingness to seriously tax the very rich. 1/
(Traditionally, it's deficit spending that's considered stimulus. But taxing the very wealthy affects overall demand almost not at all, while government spending still stimulates demand. Investment spending is a function of anticipated consumer demand much more than rich-person wealth.) /fin
on March 31, I placed an order for a customized Mac laptop, trying to beat the tariffs. it was scheduled for delivery April 14. a payments glitch meant the order wasn't actually placed until April 1. the laptop was delivered to the local Apple Store April 4. I think they too were trying to beat the tariffs.
John Roberts' "entire project has been that of imposing strict limits on the remedial power of the courts… this has the effect of permitting the 'bad men' of American public life to make the law their perch and not their terror." #RobertBlack https://eveningconstitutional.net/john-roberts-counsels-despair/
The fact of the matter is the Biden Team did a pretty phenomenal job on jump-starting the reshoring of strategic industries, especially given the constraints imposed by an often bad-faith Congress.
As @ryanlcooper predicted, we are blowing that all up. https://prospect.org/economy/2025-03-14-donald-trump-destroy-american-manufacturing/
See also https://bsky.app/profile/triforcecap.bsky.social/post/3lmag5seab22j
basically everything's gonna become like prescription drugs, if you live near the Canadian border you do your shopping there, right? or are they gonna impose duties on the Walmart haul in the back of your SUV?
legalizing fraud hasn’t made crypto prices go 🚀. who woulda thunk.
do outcomes from the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket” constitute precedent binding upon lower courts?
@gooser3000 yes. of course they were. balancing unreciprocated trade with securities, usually debt, is almost automatically true, and baked into conventional accounting frameworks as an accounting identity.
that’s what makes this insight by silicon valley founders so very earth-shattering, novel, brilliant.
are any legislators proposing to amend the Alien Enemies Act to define less precarious review and relief, and place limits on to where “enemy aliens” can be removed?
i know nothing will pass unless and until the orange wall breaks. but you make change by pushing and failing before you push through.
via @scaggs, watch techbros cure the trade deficit by insisting surplus countries use the trade proceeds to… buy US debt.
“So basically… buy our stuff, or buy our debt. Either way, you're paying up.”
https://xcancel.com/seanheilweil/status/1909590601386930427
brilliant disruptive novel ideas from our tech sector.
“A trillion comments have been wasted accusing the wrong people of Trump derangement syndrome. The real TDS afflicts those who keep seeing a rational actor, or an economic chess game, where none exists.” @edwardluce https://www.ft.com/content/9f5189b0-4857-4b7f-a8c4-5b6d77ece5e3 ht @antoniofatas
yesterday: “i read the news today, oh boy.”
today: “i read the news today, oh boy.”
tomorrow: “i read the news today, oh boy.”
“Kennedy and his nonprofit sued to prevent the Covid vaccines from ever coming to market. Those vaccines saved 3 million lives. If Kennedy’s lawsuit had been successful — or if in 2020 he held the position he holds now — the additional death toll from Covid would have been larger than the population of Chicago. This is what’s at stake if another pandemic hits.” @radleybalko https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/profiles-in-poltroonery-senator-bill ht @marick
i feel like Roberts + Barrett know the Court is violating core values they pretend to share, but don’t want to actually thwart the insurrection. so they take turns ineffectually joining dissents (while the other helps plunge the knife). they can present themselves as one of the good ones, i tried!
miserable.
from Justice Jackson dissenting https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a931_2c83.pdf
Text: At least when the Court went off base in the past, it left a record so posterity could see how it went wrong. See, e.g., Korematsu v. United States, 323 U. S. 214 (1944). With more and more of our most significant rulings taking place in the shadows of our emergency docket, today's Court leaves less and less of a trace. But make no mistake: We are just as wrong now as we have been in the past, with similarly devastating consequences. It just seems we are now less willing to face it.
@landley yes. definitely. the whole long-term thought exercise here is conceding the probably false point MAGA-ists pretend to believe (that all this mayhem will lead to long-term gain) and showing that what's been done is still dumb. in reality, the likelihood of long-term gain from this is low, and hysteresis/scarring is yet another reason it is unlikely and likely to deflect downward our long-term path, even relative to more autarkic policy if it had been sanely implemented.
@landley yes, but unlike sales taxes tariffs are a discriminatory tax on consumption. so they upend patterns and plans much more than, say, imposing a universal VAT would have.
