General Milley was his first term appointee for Chair of the Joint Chiefs, and one of the first things Trump did in his second term was to strip Milley of his security clearance, security detail, and even his placement of his portrait with the other former chairs.
Jerome Powell was Trump’s pick for Chair of the Federal Reserve, replacing Yellen (the first time that a Fed chair had not gotten a second term, and Trump has been clamoring for the power to fire him.
Jan. 6 “rally”? Uhhhh
He’s fired a bunch of lower level officials.
His pick for acting US Attorney for SDNY (basically Manhattan) was fired a few weeks later for refusing to drop charges against Eric Adams.
The acting IRS commissioner has changed over 5 times in the 90 days of this current presidency, including the most recent firing of a guy that was too close to Elon (in some kind of Bessent-Musk feud), just a few days after his appointment. The previous acting commissioner was fired for refusing to illegally share IRS data with DHS to help with immigration enforcement.
And the current turmoil in the Pentagon is the firings of people he appointed to these positions. It’s a mess.
This is how politics works under an authoritarian: senior officials throwing other officials under the bus by appeal to the authoritarian’s ego.
I keep pushing back on this sentiment because I think it’s wrong.
Even if it is inevitable that he will win in court, it’s still worth fighting every step of the way:
I’m not going to comply in advance. I’m fighting every step of the way, because even if he beats me every time, his unforced errors as he does so will still jeopardize his power.
No, even if tuition and books are free, financial aid still needs to help full time students have food to eat and have a place to live and ordinary day to day expenses. In many places, the aid on room and board is much more money than aid on tuition and fees.
And community colleges tend not to have their own dorms or anything like that, so it comes in the form of a monthly payment that helps the student pay their rent. That’s an incentive for fraud.
They got a lawful order from a court to turn around flights and just didn’t. The order doesn’t need to be at the end of an appeal to the Supreme Court before it has effect.
I know. That was on a collision course for a constitutional crisis then, and then the Supreme Court bailed out Trump by saying the order was invalid, right before the judge was going to hold contempt hearings.
Now we’re gonna see possible contempt hearings on disobeying an order that was affirmed by the Supreme Court.
No, this is probably the first one.
The previous one where they disobeyed a court order (turning around planes to El Salvador, stopping new planes from taking off) they successfully appealed that court order to where the Supreme Court declared that order void.
This one (facilitate the return of a wrongfully deported man) is the first one where they’ve just outright refused, and are pretending they can’t comply.
This is a big deal, and it’s unprecedented, even for Trump. This is the red line, and we’re going to see a full blown constitutional crisis this week if it doesn’t get resolved.
Yeah, investing in a company is investing in the whole company and all of its projects. Lies about your company are only fraud when the lies rise to the level of making a material difference to how a typical investor would value that company. If the lies are about a very minor percentage of revenue or profit, then it’s not gonna rise to the level of securities fraud.
You serious? Your own examples aren’t even isolated to Boomers. Beanie babies was primarily a Millennial and Gen X phenomenon (which made sense because it was a toy trend amplified through the rise of the internet as mainstream, and took off among those early adopters of dial-up), and was one of many consumerist toy trends of the 80’s and 90’s, like pogs or Cabbage Patch Kids or Magic: The Gathering cards.
Satanic panic was driven as much by Silent Generation as it was the boomers, and is unfortunately part of a long line of religious othering that traces back to the dawn of human history. Mike Warnke’s The Satan Seller hit bestseller lists in 1972, and Silent Generation authors like Lauren Stratford and Lawrence Pazder ran away with their made up stories (and made a killing on book sales). By the time that panic hit its peak in the early 80’s, most parents of young children were boomers, but the collective messaging was still driven by older people in publishing and news.
Meanwhile, the basic idea of fads or trends are universal. The people mimicking TikTok dances or YouTube pranks transcend any one generation. More seriously, people are falling for conspiracy theories en masse, of all generations. Is anti-vax, or anti-seed-oil, or 9/11 truthers, or QAnon believers confined to a specific generation? This shit is everywhere, and believing that these things will die off with the boomers is going to result in a lot of surprise and disappointment that these things will always be with us.
That’s not unique to any one generation. Herd behavior is, like, part of the human condition.
Your link is wholesale prices of white non-organic caged eggs, updated daily. It also excludes the eggs sold on long term contracts.
The AP article takes the CPI report of the consumer price of all eggs (white vs brown, organic vs non organic, caged versus cage free versus free range) in a weighted average of how much is sold, and averages over the entire month. Plus retailers simply can’t update prices daily, and prefer to price things at numbers that end in 9.
The bird flu issues seemed to affect caged non-organic producers harder, so that those prices moved a lot more than the free range organic stuff. That led to some unexpected flips of which was more expensive, as I’d seen some traditional eggs going for $8.99 (up from around $3 before) while the free range organic stuff was only slightly up to $7.99 (up from about $5 before), literally in the same store on the same shelves.
Taken all together, you’d expect the monthly CPI price of an average of all types of eggs to be much less volatile than the daily wholesale spot price of the cheapest type of grade A whole fresh eggs.
Anecdotally I’ve already seen egg prices drop this month. Lots more availability of the sub-$5 options when I was in the store earlier this week. I’d expect next month’s CPI report, about the current month, to reflect a drop in retail egg prices.
The Senate has already passed a bill that limits the President’s power to set tariff rates on Canada. The House probably won’t take that up.
Right now, there’s also a Senate Bill with 7 GOP senators signed on that would limit the President’s power to unilaterally set tariffs (requires 48 hours notice to Congress, can’t last more than 60 days without Congressional approval, gives Congress fast track procedures for voting down new tariffs). There are some serious constitutional flaws in it (most notably the legislative non-aggrandizement doctrine, but also an issue with tying to sidestep the bicameralism and presentment requirement), though, and I’m not sure it would hit the point where it could overcome a presidential veto.
So right now it’s not clear whether this GOP opposition would actually build into real legislation that could actually have an effect, or whether this is all showmanship trying to influence Trump himself to roll this back.
No. The 7% breaker went off 4 separate times in March 2020, though.
It’s a rule hard baked into the NYSE that trading is paused for at least 15 minutes if it drops 7% in a single day. It is paused again for at least 15 minutes if it drops 13%, and then trading is ended for the day if it drops 20%.
And the vastly wealthy will benefit, as they always do, by picking up those bargain basement stocks which will, eventually, become valuable again.
I don’t think that’s correct.
Imagine, if you will, an uptick in vandalism on Tesla Cybertrucks. Insurance companies notice and increase the price of insuring them. The used car market price for those vehicles goes down, with fewer people wanting to buy vehicles that are more expensive to insure and are more likely to be vandalized.
Is that price drop a dip that a savvy investor can take advantage of? Is there an investment case for buying used cybertrucks and then hoping that Elon’s stink fades? I don’t think so. The value of that thing has permanently decreased.
Look to American soybean farming. Trump put tariffs on China in 2018, and China retaliated with tariffs on soybeans, among other products. Brazil stepped in and started exporting a lot of soybeans to China, and maintained that market share even as the tariffs were canceled. Basically, American farmers never recovered. Buying up all that farmland for cheap wouldn’t have done anything because the new owners of that land can’t benefit from some kind of higher profits from that land.
Sometimes things drop in price because they just become less valuable. I think that’s what’s happening with American stocks right now, because the damage that is being done is hard to reverse.
Nope. This is more like The Oligarchs Who Came to Regret Supporting Hitler or, in The Dark Knight Rises, the billionaire who finds that funding Bane’s rise to power doesn’t actually give him any power, or another business dude learning that working with Bane doesn’t even save him from the movement itself.
The billionaires thought they could buy influence and just get the things they want, while stopping Trump from getting what he wants. For whatever reason, Trump is a true believer in tariffs, so that’s what giving him power will result in.
I’d argue that’s reversing cause and effect. A cratering economy on Main Street often gets reflected as a crash on Wall Street.
Sometimes the outcomes diverge. One common analogy in finance circles is that the stock market is like a hyperactive puppy on a long leash being walked by a slow owner whose gradual movements trend in a particular direction while the puppy erratically moves back and forth near that owner. Maybe it’s some kind of hype or panic moving markets in a way that’s uncorrelated with the underlying economic activity. Or it’s a specific play on a specific type of financial instrument that has become untethered from a thing it used to be tightly wound up with. Many financial panics happen when correlations between things break down, and all the financial engineering in a particular type of product relied on a bad assumption so that it spreads to other financial products.
But in many cases, they move together because the people buying and selling stocks feel sentiment driven by actual economic fundamentals.
They also know hurting themselves.