Economics Thread

acesfull86 said:
I’m aware that the only way to defend your position is to create an alternate reality where the laws of economics don’t exist
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Ah yes the fundamental laws of economics in the same vein as the laws of thermodynamics.

These are innate and indisputable.

The laws of economics etched centuries ago definitely foresaw modern technology and its impact on markets. New sciences are discovered as we progress as a species but dont' you dare question those immutable laws of ECONOMICS! Those are passed down directly from GOD!!!
 
acesfull86 said:
https://reason.com/2025/06/27/90-deals-in-90-days-trumps-trade-war-is-failing-on-its-own-terms/

"We're going to run 90 deals in 90 days," Peter Navarro, the White House's top trade advisor, told Fox Business on April 12, shortly after Trump paused those tariffs—ostensibly to allow negotiations to take place.

It's been 76 days since then, and there have not been 76 new trade deals. Not even close. The actual tally is two, and that's only if you count the "framework" deals with China and the United Kingdom—neither of which amounts to a full trade deal at the moment.

On Thursday, the Trump administration officially backed down from the "90 deals in 90 days" posturing. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the early July deadline for re-implementing those paused tariffs was "not critical.

...

What's becoming more certain is that Trump's second-term trade war has failed on its own terms. That's evidently not only in the lack of new trade deals that have been delivered, but also in two other data points that crystallized this week.

First, data from the Commerce Department showed that America's trade deficit—the gap between the value of all imports and all exports—widened to $96.6 billion in May. That's an 11 percent increase over April. The main culprit in the growing trade deficit was a decline in exports (which fell by $9.7 billion) even as imports stayed flat.

Shrinking the trade deficit has been one of Trump's obsessions since first taking office in 2017, and he has repeatedly claimed that higher tariffs would accomplish that task. What he forgets, however, is that declining exports are a major consequence of higher tariffs. This happens because American companies become less productive as tariffs disrupt their supply chains and foreign countries retaliate by raising their tariffs in response. The same thing happened during his first term: Higher tariffs caused exports to decline, and the trade deficit widened.

Second, a separate Commerce Department report showed that foreign investment into the United States also slowed during the first quarter of the year. While that's not a direct response to the "Liberation Day" tariffs imposed in early April, it likely reflects "high business uncertainty over President Donald Trump's tariff plans," as Reuters noted.

Remember that Trump imposed tariffs on goods from Canada, Mexico, and China in February and spent his first few months in office promising more tariffs in the near future. It's no wonder that businesses pulled back on investment plans in the U.S. while they waited to see how all that would shake out.

Again, this shows the failure of the trade war's fundamental premise. Rather than encouraging more investment and production in the United States, the higher costs and economic uncertainty created by tariffs (and the threat of tariffs) is reducing those very investments.

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I guess it turns out that decades of actual real world data on the impact of tariffs weren't invalidated because they happened to be collected before COVID and the existence of the CCP.
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Oh, do you mean evaluating a drastic change in policy needs more than a few months of runway.

Hows that trade deficit looking now?

This thread is going to be endless amounts of fun moving into next year.
 
acesfull86 said:
https://twitter.com/x/status/1952780127936340468

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/chart-crime-alert/

I’d like to nominate this post from Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent for Chart Crime of the Year

Like all great chart crimes, it starts with a goofy y-axis. The numbers decrease from bottom to top, and the origin is at –60 billion. The numbers also don’t match the title: The U.S. balance of trade is negative, which means the trade deficit is positive.

Next, let’s appreciate the x-axis. The chart begins most of the way through 2021, likely because if it actually began at the beginning of Biden’s term as president, it would show the trade deficit at basically the same level as it is today. (In the first quarter of 2021, the trade deficit was $64,705,000,000; the second quarter numbers that just came out show $64,033,000,000.)

The really funny parts of this chart, though, are the red and green lines. The “Biden” line begins in the summer of 2023, when Biden had already been president for more than two years. It ignores that the trade deficit was declining from 2022 to 2023, after having increased significantly in 2020 during the pandemic. The actual “trend seen under Biden” was U-shaped, and it had nothing to do with anything Biden did or didn’t do.

The “Trump” line is also hilarious because the spike in the trade deficit was caused by Trump. Businesses were stocking up on imported goods in the first quarter of this year because they knew Trump’s tariffs were coming. Then, once some of the tariffs began to take effect, they bought less — the expected effect of a tax increase.

Now, the trade deficit is . . . right back where it was in 2023. You can’t take credit for a “significant turnaround” when you were responsible for the turn in the first place.

This might be the greatest chart crime on Twitter since the DCCC thanked Joe Biden for a two-penny reduction in gas prices in 2021.
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Or Bessent and Trump knew where the economy was headed.

Just dumb luck though.
 
sturg33 said:
A trade deficit is a meaningless metric. It could mean we are exporting more, or it could mean we are buying much less
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And yet you tried to call me on it in several occasions as a barometer if the trade policies were working. Are you now saying that was all bullshit?

What about exports becoming more valuable. That’s kind of good right?

We are buying less crap from China and we are exporting more. Big time wins all around and no empty shelves!
 
thethe said:
And yet you tried to call me on it in several occasions as a barometer if the trade policies were working. Are you now saying that was all bullshit?

What about exports becoming more valuable. That’s kind of good right?

We are buying less crap from China and we are exporting more. Big time wins all around and no empty shelves!
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I have always said a trade deficit doesnt bother me at all. It means we are buying coffee frim Columbia and avocados from Mexico more than we are selling to them

I would love to buy less crap from China, and I guess our trade deficit with them is reducing bc we trading AI chips for soybeans
 
sturg33 said:
I have always said a trade deficit doesnt bother me at all. It means we are buying coffee frim Columbia and avocados from Mexico more than we are selling to them

I would love to buy less crap from China, and I guess our trade deficit with them is reducing bc we trading AI chips for soybeans
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Deficit is shrinking because it’s a strategic decoupling with China. There will be a manufacturing powerhouse across the western hemisphere that will source the future.

First we have to dispel all the communists that work for the ccp.
 
thethe said:
Deficit is shrinking because it’s a strategic decoupling with China. There will be a manufacturing powerhouse across the western hemisphere that will source the future.
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Then why are we sending them our best asset if we want to beat them ans decouple?

Please answer with a reason that makes sense, not "I dont agree with everything he does"
 
sturg33 said:
Then why are we sending them our best asset if we want to beat them ans decouple?

Please answer with a reason that makes sense, not "I dont agree with everything he does"
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They are chips they are effectively obsolete - stability has to remain for this decoupling. China is suffering internally.
 
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