Trump's tariffs will bankrupt thousands of American businesses and millions will be unemployed as a result

 So says Ryan Petersen, founder and CEO of Flexport, in The Wall Street Journal, here:

... If the tariffs on Chinese goods continue at this rate, he says, thousands of American companies will fail and millions of employees will lose their jobs. ...

When the pandemic clogged up supply chains, he rented a boat so he could tour the Port of Long Beach, Calif., and see the bottlenecks for himself.

When he’s not cruising around ports for information, he’s getting it directly from his company’s 13,000 customers. They are companies that sell electronics, furniture, clothing, toys, diapers, pet feeders—basically everything. He makes it a priority to talk with as many of them as he possibly can. ...

This past week, he traveled from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., where he spent two days meeting with government officials to make the case that tariffs pose an existential threat to his customers. ...

Did you notice how not one word was said in last night's Trump-Harris debate about Kamala Harris' price controls proposal to combat inflation?

ABC's debate moderators made sure NOT to go there, no sir. And they completely avoided making Harris defend her inflation record as Biden's VP and instead joined the attack on Trump, fact-checking him multiple times but not her. Trump had to debate three people.

It was a disgraceful spectacle which he should have known better than to join.

At least Trump called her a Marxist at one point, that was good.

Harris for her part continued to push for the gimmicks which WaPo previously called out: $25k down-payment assistance which will only increase housing prices by $25k; $50k tax credits for starting a business, which is notably a lot more than for the everyday folks Democrats say they care about most (how many of those will later declare bankruptcy and pocket the cash?); $6k child tax credit, an idea stolen from J. D. Vance and bid-up just like student-loan forgiveness in order to buy votes.

It's all just marginal stuff which treats the symptoms and not the causes.

She is not a serious candidate.

 

Stephen L. Miller doesn't have the faintest idea about how Republicanism lost its way

 

Guy who says Mitt Romney was decent man says get fucked you fuckers

Decent man says Paris Olympics opening ceremony mocking Christianity was great!

Decent man says government mandates, fines, and taxes are not worth getting angry about

Decent man says let autoworkers eat rust

Decent man was NeverTrump because he is NeverFight

Decent man inflames rioters and looters who go on to cause $2 billion in damage

Decent man says Antifa "No USA at all" is morally superior to Robert E. Lee admirers

Decent man says sodomy must be mainstreamed in America

Decent man can't define "assault weapons" but says they have to go

Scouting America for new victims

 

Boy Scouts victims begin receiving settlement payouts as appeals continue

Reuters, September 19, 2023

The Boy Scouts of America’s $2.46 billion settlement trust has begun sending payments to men who were abused as children by troop leaders, under a bankruptcy settlement still facing appeals from a minority group of abuse survivors.

The initial payments are being sent to 7,000 claimants who chose a "quick pay" option under the Boy Scouts of America's bankruptcy plan, with the first 70 claimants paid on Tuesday. Those claimants will receive $3,500 without going through the lengthier evaluation process that awaits 75,000 others who filed claims.

 

Ford lost $132k on each EV: Joe Biden mandating electric vehicles will simply bankrupt the car companies and require huge future bailouts

 

Ford’s electric vehicle unit reported that losses soared in the first quarter to $1.3 billion, or $132,000 for each of the 10,000 vehicles it sold in the first three months of the year, helping to drag down earnings for the company overall.

Ford, like most automakers, has announced plans to shift from traditional gas-powered vehicles to EVs in coming years. But it is the only traditional automaker to break out results of its retail EV sales. And the results it reported Wednesday show another sign of the profit pressures on the EV business at Ford and other automakers. ... And that means this is not the end of the losses in the unit - Ford said it expects Model e will have EBIT losses of $5 billion for the full year.

More. 

Ford really, really, really doesn't want to go down that path lol, or that other one.

I mean, who wants to be the butt of every truck joke when electric ones literally can't pull their weight, giving new meaning to Found On Road Dead?

WeWork, which once pretended to be worth $47 billion, files for bankruptcy protection

 From the story here:

WeWork has struggled in a commercial real estate market that has been rocked by the rising cost of borrowing money, as well as a shifting dynamic for millions of office workers now checking into their offices remotely.

 

Bankruptcy estate of FTX sues Barbara Fried, Stanford Law ethics expert, for encouraging son to skirt disclosure rules

 

Very amusing.

We’re law experts, see. This is how you get around the law.

From the story,

FTX sues Sam Bankman-Fried’s parents, aims to claw back some of the $26 million in gifts and property :

The filing characterizes the correspondence as Bankman lobbying his son to “massively increase his own salary.” Within two weeks, the suit claims that Bankman-Fried had collectively gifted his parents $10 million in funds coming from Alameda, and within three months, the couple was deeded the $16.4 million property in The Bahamas.

According to the partially-redacted filing, Bankman-Fried’s parents also “pushed for tens of millions of dollars in political and charitable contributions, including to Stanford University, which were seemingly designed to boost Bankman’s and Fried’s professional and social status.” Fried is also accused of encouraging her son and others within the company to avoid, if not violate, federal campaign finance disclosure rules by “engaging in straw donations or otherwise concealing the FTX Group as the source of the contributions.”

Bankman-Fried’s parents are legal scholars who taught at Stanford Law School. His mother is an expert on ethics, while his father specializes in taxes.

Besides their bad character, what do Trump and Obama have in common in 2009 and 2020?

 Trump and Obama signed off on the two most fiscally irresponsible periods in post-war history, and Biden two years in looks set to join them.

The Executive is supposed to be a check on irresponsible spending. But both Trump and Obama went right along with it instead of vetoing the outrageous spending of the periods.

What else do they have in common?

Two crises, both of which plunged the country into hysteria.

The Great Financial Crisis did not begin to end until March 2009 when the FASB signaled its intent to suspend mark-to-market rules. The stock market bottomed almost immediately, but as with all cases of mass hysteria it took time for the panic to pass as other sectors recovered "one by one". 

The Pandemic Crisis gripped the country in March 2020, sending millions home from work, stocks plunging, toilet paper into shortage, businesses into bankruptcy, and on and on. With just about everyone vaccinated who was going to be by the end of 2021, the country gradually started to come out of it in 2022, eschewing jabs, masks, and social distancing as it became clear that the Omicron variant was infecting tens of millions despite all those measures.

2020 was the single most fiscally irresponsible year in the post-war since 1953. Federal expenditures, bloated by panicked bailouts, outpaced tax revenues by a whopping 216%.

Only 2009 comes close, at 210%, the second worst year on record.

Third, not shown, was 2010 at 196%, and fourth, not shown, was 2021 at 176%, each a part of the respective crisis periods.

Do you know what else those two years share in common?

Spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives.

In 2009 and 2020 its Speaker just happened to be the same person, as she was in 2010 and 2021.

Nancy Pelosi owns the four most fiscally irresponsible years in the entire history of the post-war. Her two speakerships literally busted out all over. 

Sunday morning comedy from CNBC

 

There are only 4 U.S. cities where the average American can afford a starter home

 

Detroit, Tulsa, Memphis, and Oklahoma City

 

Pack the bags, honey! We're moving! 

Adam Tooze: Central bankers' hands were forced in 2010, the poor dears, they aren't the lords of easy money, no, they're its slaves, just like us

 Here, for The New York Times:

If you are worried about wealth inequality in the United States, then the solution is not to tighten monetary policy but to make structural changes to the country’s financial system, starting with the undergrowth of shadow banking. Serious taxation of wealth and capital gains would also push in the right direction.

It would no doubt help if onetime central bankers, rather than cycling in and out of private finance, spoke out seriously in favor of reform. They would be doing the public a service if they spelled out the way that their hands were forced by the current incestuous intertwining of public debt markets with hedge funds and the like. Ultimately, however, it is politics that must grasp the nettle of change.

In the current dispensation, it may be flattering for central bankers to be cast as maestros, but in practice they are less the lords of easy money than its functionaries.     

 

 

Central bankers cycle in and out of private finance raking in millions, Adam.

 

If anyone were serious about restructuring the country's financial system, the place to start would be by restoring the key missing feature of capitalism without which it doesn't really exist. It's called bankruptcy. 

Has anyone on the right discussed how Trump and his Fed chair are destroying free market capitalism?

Of course not. When the right does it, it's OK, see. When the left does it, it's socialism or some damn thing. These suck ups say nothing except, "China, baaaaaaaad! America, goooooooood!"

The Fed is now buying EVERYTHING in sight in order to backstop EVERYONE. Today we learned it would buy in the municipal bond market, the commercial mortgage backed securities market, the might as well be junk bond market, and CLOs. That's not free market capitalism.

The Fed balance sheet is already past $6 trillion this week. Remember when it wasn't even a trillion back in 2007? Of course you don't. Remember when Bernanke promised to "normalize" it when the last crisis was over? Of course you don't. Guess who is promising the same thing again? Same Fed chair, different name. Jerry Powell. 

Fed Is Seizing Control of the Entire U.S. Bond Market

It's bad enough the Fed has been long buying agency mortgage backed securities and Treasury securities.

Eventually it will buy stocks, too, now that it is buying anything and everything in the bond markets.

This is all bullshit. If you believe in capitalism, then you believe in bankruptcy. Nobody believes in that anymore, least of all Donald Trump. Otherwise he'd do something about it.

So America declares itself officially dead today, as it literally dies from a virus it willingly invited in.

How fitting. 

Liberalism's mental disorder gets its death wish.

Gramps, born in 1926, says this is worse than 2008

Dad will be 94 this year if the coronavirus doesn't get him first.

He's been through a lot, seen it all. Darmouth graduate. Served in the US Navy from World War II to Vietnam, retired as a captain.

He was just a little kid during the Great Depression, didn't really know any better. But he's watched America become a lot better since then, and now it suddenly isn't.

Things may end for Dad the way they began, with Great Depression II.

Long war on terror, coronavirus, economic meltdown.

We've had war, plague and depression before in this country, sometimes in rapid succession. WWI ended with a whimper as the Spanish Flu pandemic killed tens of millions, followed quickly by the depression of 1920. That one was very deep and severe, but ended quickly because the government . . . did nothing.

Free market economies, if left to be free, quickly recover from catastrophes because debt overhangs are allowed to clear through bankruptcy. Bankruptcy is the cure.

But we can't stomach that, same as we haven't been able to say No to our children. Self-esteem and all that.

So, expect the suffering and disorder to continue.

Sad. 

Obamacare bankrupts the state of New York less than 10 years after Democrats shoved it down America's throat

10 years after Santelli's rant against Obama's proposed bailout of your neighbor's mortgage, National Review pretends it was about deficit spending

You will search in vain in this article for the word "mortgage".

If the Tea Party had been about any one thing, it was about the moral hazard of bailouts. A sizeable minority of the American people perceived that bailouts made them chumps, dutifully following the rules and accepting their obligations while bankrupt businesses and bankrupt homeowners did neither. 

By Brian Riedl, long-time research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the article illustrates better than anything how the interests of establishment conservatism co-opted the Tea Party movement in 2011, just as establishment Republicanism co-opted Trumpism in 2017.

"Let's steal this energy and make it about something else".

Every. Damn. Time. 

New Budget Deal Puts Final Nail in the Tea-Party Coffin:

Horrified by Washington spenders, CNBC’s Rick Santelli stood on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on February 19, 2009, and called for a “tea party” to end the bailouts, stimulus payments, and red ink. Grassroots tea-party groups formed — further enraged by the later enactment of an expensive new Obamacare entitlement — and helped Republicans capture the House in 2010 with a stunning 63-seat pickup and also pick up seven Senate seats.

Wow, WaPo's Glenn Kessler almost becomes Rush Limbaugh, doubts Bernie's $1 trillion bailout claim

If anything, Bernie underestimates the scope of the secret loans during the financial crisis ten years ago. The Freedom of Information Act inquiry which brought them to light went all the way to the Supreme Court. Ben Bernanke only relented at the last second.

Discount Window lending behind the scenes during the crisis period soared into the multi-trillions of dollars by the time it ended in 2010 while everyone was fixated on the shiny object known as TARP ($700 billion, about a tenth the size of the generally accepted figure of $7.7 trillion). That's probably why TARP was undertaken to be honest: Oh look! A deer!

The DW loans were made to all kinds of entities for whom normal lending had disappeared. In too many cases very questionable collateral was put up. The loans were ultra-cheap, at rates unavailable to homeowners defaulting on their comparatively much more expensive mortgages because they had lost their jobs. Many of the loans rolled over and over and over again for protracted periods to keep the entities from going under, while Bush & Co. and then Obama & Co. did nothing for Joe Six-pack. Many millions lost their homes while businesses which should have gone bankrupt did not.

Hard to believe this clueless so-called fact checker still has a job.

State capitalism means rewarding bankrupt Sears executives with $25 million in bonuses

Lesson of the Florida "bomber": They don't "x-ray" the mail at any point in the system to keep bombs out

Rush Limbaugh confidently misinformed millions of his listeners this week that the USPS scans suspicious packages in order to intercept them and keep them away from the public.

For his part, radio personality Michael Savage laughably spent most of the week wondering how all these "bombs" could be "hand-delivered" all over the place supposedly without entering the postal system, because he believed fake news to that effect. It must have been a conspiracy! The van was too clean after all that driving up and down the east coast and to California and back! The stickers on the windows were too recently affixed because they weren't yet faded!

What we learned once again, however, was that the USPS only isolates suspicious packages for scanning by outside authorities. The cost of installing such scanners in every postal sorting facility would cost billions of dollars the already bankrupt USPS doesn't have. In this instance, the USPS was alerted to the package M/O by the outside authorities after the fact, after some of the "bombs" had already been delivered. The USPS was told what to look for, not the other way around. 

This affair exposes the fact that the entire USPS system remains vulnerable to penetration by serious terrorists at any time, and that a person who really intended to harm others, say with bombs, could do so as long as the intended target isn't too famous. That's why the more serious threats are the poisoners, who can still reach their intended famous targets occasionally with letters, such as Vanessa Trump. The contents of mail are not "scanned", only the fronts and backs are imaged and the images stored. That's how the authorities, once alerted to the problem in Florida, "were reviewing mail streams in and out of Florida, attempting to pinpoint locations where the parcels may have originated", as reported in the USA Today story linked below.

A real bomber in this instance would have rigged his packages to blow up as they are opened by the designated target, as when a box lid lifted on its hinge triggers a circuit with a detonator. Of course, the difficulty of getting such a package into the actual hands of famous persons with staff protecting them from such an eventuality is a thought which cannot have escaped the mind of Cesar Sayoc.

A real bomber does not stuff active devices into padded envelope mailers as Sayoc did, where they could blow-up indiscriminately under normal, rough handling, including in his own hands. A real bomber does not leave finger prints behind on his mail bombs, especially if his fingerprints are already in the crime reporting system due to many prior arrests and convictions.

It's almost as if poor Cesar Sayoc, aged 56, suddenly homeless and forced to live in his van, intended to get caught so that he could finally escape all his problems and finally get a roof over his head and three square meals a day for the rest of his life after so many years of struggling with poverty.

CNN reported here:

Bomb suspect Cesar Sayoc had been kicked out by his parents, so he has living in the van that we have seen in pictures today, according to a law enforcement official. ... Sayoc was initially somewhat cooperative, the official said. He told investigators that the pipe bombs wouldn’t have hurt anyone and that he didn’t want to hurt anyone. 

USA Today reports here:

The total number of bombs reached at least 14 Friday after more suspicious packages were recovered: one in Florida addressed to New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, another in New York addressed to former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, a device recovered at Sen. Kamala Harris’ office in Sacramento, California, and another package that was intercepted at a mail facility in Burlingame, California, addressed to billionaire Tom Steyer.

Harris’ office says it was informed that the package was identified at a Sacramento mail facility. The FBI responded to the facility in a South Sacramento neighborhood that’s been blocked off by caution tape.

A package addressed to Clapper was recovered at a Manhattan postal facility. Like some of the previous packages, the one found in New York City on Friday had the office of Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz as the return address, a photo obtained by CBS News showed. ...

The suspicious package intended for Clapper was spotted by a postal worker at the Radio City Station facility at around 8:15 a.m. The employee contacted U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and they contacted the NYPD and FBI.

NYPD Bomb Squad officers scanned the package and saw what appeared to be a pipe bomb, NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence and Counterterrorism John Miller said at a Manhattan news conference.

Chief economist at Merrill Lynch when it went bankrupt ignores the first 130 years of US history, aptly proffers a figure of mere myth

The good old days: As late as 1971 16 states and the federal government considered rape a capital offense

That idiot Republican Judd Gregg of New Hampshire thinks Woodrow Wilson changed America for the better

He's also the idiot who wrote the TARP bailout.

And now he's the idiot who blames the Baby Boom for the programs bankrupting America: Social Security and Medicare, which pre-date it and were passed by spendthrift Democrats.

Here.