[blackrock]

There are those that dreamed of this happening.

Those that wanted the massive decoupling between the United States and China.

Those that wanted to see China suffer, fail, collapse, and devolve into another destructive civil war; while the United States remains ascendant.

Well, their dreams might be about to come true.

This coronavirus was the perfect economic weapon that was dropped in the heart of China. And not even a bullet was fired.

The economic backlash from this virus is going to be monstrous. But the reality might be even worse than they imagined, where even they themselves cannot escape the fallout, and that they would reminisce of better days.

But there will also be opportunities. Companies will fail, but others will succeed.

The Fed had better keep on printing that money, because the bubble in a lot of sectors will pop, especially Real Estate. Then automotive. Then aerospace. Then tourism. This house of cards is going to come crashing down.

The moment of the black swan event is about to arrive.

Time to place your bets.

[Accujack]

You know what I find really interesting?

If Trump screws up the response to this virus (like by cutting the CDC's budget in the middle of a crisis) then the people most vulnerable are the same demographic as Trump's supporters.

[blackrock]

The interesting thing is that the Trump supporters benefited the most, but they just didn’t realize it.

They blamed China for taking their jobs, and Trump capitalized on it. A foreign country with people that don’t look like yourself, or even speak the same language, and with a different political system was an easy target to scapegoat.

What they failed to realize was the impact that technology and automation had on their lives.

Do you see people working inside the heart of a car manufacturing factory anymore? No, it’s all robotic. What used to take hundreds of men, is now streamlined into an assembly line of 10 robots.

First, in the 80s and 90s, Walmart came and killed off the small businesses, but at least they provided some minimum wage jobs in their stores. Then, Amazon came and killed off the remaining smaller retailers, and tried to kill off Walmart. No more minimum wage cashier jobs, but more jobs for delivery people and warehouse workers.

Then, the software and hardware got better, that it started to replace those minimum wage cashiers jobs. Then robots got better, that they even started replacing the warehouse jobs.

But the United States had the benefit of creating technology over the past 70 years, and massively benefiting from the royalties that followed. Qualcomm doesn’t physically make any phones or computer chips, but 50% of their revenue comes from China.

Other jobs in technology like software, engineering, design, QA, project management, etc., were created in relation to technology, but these are not celebrated. Microsoft spawned a lot of software companies. Apple spawned a lot of smaller software businesses vying for space in their app market. But it seems none of these are celebrated in the world of Trump supporters.

Meanwhile, the Trump supporters benefited handsomely in one area: farming. Massive windfalls were made in selling grains and soy to China, who eagerly bought it all. The industrialized farms were literally printing money. And they thought they deserved that business, as if it was a god given right to them.

Maybe they got greedy, but more likely, they fell for the charm of a charlatan, and voted Trump into office, to take on the China problem. You know, the exact foreign customer that was buying up all their farm products. This baffles the mind on how they couldn’t make this connection.

Then in one fell swoop, Trump took that all away. Farm bankruptcies went higher and higher under Trump. He came in and demonized the very customer that was buying their products.

And now we have the coronavirus, and those dreams of decoupling the two economies of China and the United States, are about to come true.

The question is: are those Trump supporters ready for the ensuing fallout?

[Accujack]

I won't address the content of your post here - there's too much to go through and too little time.

But, I will say that Trump's supporters are both ready and unready for the fallout.

Ready because they're essentially decoupled from actual facts and information and fed entirely on the "truth" from him and his allies, so they won't ever blame him for anything.

Unready because they're not capable of handling reality, and regardless of who they are told is the reason for their problems, they have to live with it.