CarmineCatboy2

Making some assumptions about that Other vote, and also assuming the indigenous vote would still rather González over Noboa then maybe the center-left will win this time around?

We are certain. American economic collapse is orders of magnitude worse than a recession or a trade war. Like starkillerfish said, the entire world's economy is geared to supply american consumers and industry with cheap goods. However that doesn't describe collapse in its entirety. If the US economy were to collapse it would take the world's financial system with it. It would be as if the entire world was placed under Russia style sanctions all at once, necessitating a rapid and complete overhaul of, well, everything. Only most of the world is nowhere near as self sufficient as Russia.

It's not so much that there's no alternative. Of course there is. Its just that none of them are easier than the status quo. Much is written about how a country like China wouldn't want to take over the financial system. In part because that means becoming the new US, the new exporter of junk cash and therefore the new importer of cheap goods and exporter of jobs. In part because Chinese capitalists have their assets priced in dollars. The point is that China is doing what it is currently doing while it has options. An American collapse robs everyone of options.

I think the canadians drank the cool aid on this one.

This has nothing to do with drugs or whatever. Mexico is the USA's new sweatshop. Canada is the resource colony that supplies the US and Mexico. There's a pecking order there - because its all owned by american capital, it all serves to strengthen the US. But while import taxes would be mutually destructive to everyone involved one of the trio deals in manufactured goods. What is Canada gonna do? Build a pipeline to Europe?

Nobody here has the full set of data required to truly answer this question. The adage that economists are wrong 95% of the time is true because everyone who tries to predict the future is essentially making bets. Regardless of how or why.

Will these high import taxes on the american economy strengthen the dollar and drive up imports anyways? Will this (relative) closing of the american economy serve as a perfect excuse for inertial inflation / monopoly profits to rise regardless of the calculus involved? Will people and companies find novel ways around the import taxes? Will the import taxes mostly just eat into the profits of US importers? Will foreign export economies make up the shock by relying on new, growing markets around the world? Will the import taxes be mostly just a means of picking winners and losers in the US economy, so that imports still happen its just that profits are funneled to a narrower sector of the oligarchy? Will tariffs be used to just browbeat countries into submission, to be unceremoniously dropped as soon as certain oligarchs get whatever they want from, say, México?

I don't know. I don't think anybody really knows.

Last I checked Brazil is one of the few countries in the world that has a trade deficit against the US. Which didn't matter to Trump. He still put tariffs and minor sanctions against Brazil's industry even after diplomats pointed to him that Brazil's steel is made with American coal. But I think that's a red herring. The key issue will always be, I suppose, the fact that the US and Brazil are competitors when it comes to exporting agricultural goods to east asian markets.

Worst case scenario it will be like the last time around, when Bolsonaro's moronic sons were insanely racist towards chinese officials online, triggering a momentary freeze of soybean imports - meanwhile Trump 'forced' China to buy more american soy. Best case scenario Trump looks at the USA/BRA balance of trade and decides to mostly cook everybody else while scoring an aesthetic victory against Brazil by being tough on a made up issue.

The issue of reciprocity on the other hand really is a double edged sword. There's less trade between the two countries than you'd expect. Its mostly things like Brazil exporting a lot of crude and the US exporting a lot of refined petrol. Or plane components being made in both countries. You raise import taxes on both sides and nobody wins. You just have lower return on investment for american capital.

The really key aspect is how the tariff agenda is used to pick winners and losers. Trump seems personally obsessed with the notion that if your trade balance against someone is negative that means you are 'losing'. So its pure aesthetics there. In practice however you have what you always have in economies that have high import taxes. A mixture of protection and privilege. A company like Tesla, for an instance, might be given the effective monopoly of EV consumption in the US. After all you shut the Chinese out of the market. However that doesn't mean Tesla has no access to Chinese manufacturing: since Musk is now a part of the american government, his company might the the only EV manufacturer permitted to import cars or car parts from China.

That's why Tesla's stock jumped on election night. The markets were factoring in the obvious potential for corruption.

Add in Trump's personal perspective and something has to give. Some economic sector that is equally reliant on the global economy will have to go bankrupt to pay for Tesla's monopoly profits. So yeah its a farcical 'Nazi Privatization', in the sense that the US is a capitalist regime where corps that are close to the government get to triple their profits on the backs of a closed, monopolized economic model.

It doesn't even require an assumption that American companies have access to more powerful chips than their Chinese counterparts. If Deepseek and now Alibaba are that much more efficient than OpenAI's stuff, that just means you can run exponentially more AI services on more advanced hardware. So, yeah, if the underlying LLM industry is viable then Nvidia should still be raking in cash. Unless they no longer have access to Taiwan's fabs.

next-day emergency too

this is where bipartisanship comes in

From what I remember the princes of the yen docu gives off those feelings. You had a generation that built a system - fully cognizant of its strengths, weaknesses, contradictions and outright bluffs. Then two generations later you get true believers, who can't help but mismanage it down the drain.

So maybe food for thought.

i've made this joke before, but he can't settle for being anything less than the tony stark of videogame timewasters.

I felt the federal grants thing was weird enough to call everything else into question. Tariffs, greenland, attacking TSMC before chipmaking is up and running at home, etc. Ok I can find some reasoning for every one of these things. But copy-pasting a heritage foundation memo on blocking up to 3 trillion dollars in federal spending? What. There must be easier and more targetted ways to purge the government.