Past behavior of this administration strongly predicts that your reward for kowtowing to its value-compromising demands... Is becoming the target of further value-compromising demands.
If they're willing to self-harm for the cause, then the optimal move is to grab the wheel and yank it yourself to change direction and stop the car from careening off the cliff.
One of the big questions is what happens to all the money Congress has allocated?
The budget keeps allocations the same, but now that for example Mark Rubio announced USAID is to be entirely eliminated, it's remaining 15% of programs moved into State Department, what happens to that money? https://apnews.com/article/trump-musk-rubio-usaid-foreign-ai...
Expectations are that it's just treated as a giant slush fund for whatever the executive feels like. Whether Dems do anything to curb DOGE's chainsawing act or whether they try to wrestle with what happens to these "savings" is something Dems have a chance right now to tangle with, and much less leverage in the future. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/will-dems-pick-up-their...
I’m sorry there is only one party which is consistently doesn’t compromise at all. It’s a party of bullies and it’s a party which brought us here (and will bring us somewhere much worse). I’m afraid by now the only option forward don’t compromise with them at all, they understand only power.
Nearly every market worldwide was dropping in 2020 due to the pandemic.
IIRC, the drops in 2022 correlated with federal interest rate hikes and other federal policies designed to help ease inflation, with the expectation that markets would rapidly cool but avoid a larger overall crash.
Simply put, a 10% drop isn't in itself concerning if correlated with shifting market conditions. It is when those in charge are foot-gunning the market with their policies, and then threatening to double down in the face of the 10% drop they caused.
> There were 5 such drops in 2020, 4 in 2022, and 1 in 2023. Somehow, the nation avoided ruin during those periods
Come on, look at your numbers. Recession in 2020 with 5 blips on the monitor. Last quarter we saw negative real GDP Q1 ‘22, 4 blips. 1 blip in ‘23 and none in ‘24 while the economy did so well prices overheated.
Now we’re seeing 1 blip in Q1. If we annualise that to 4 blips, it puts us back in the last year in which we had a single quarter with negative real GDP growth.
And what the numbers show is that a 10% drop happens on average every 1.2 years and is not something that needs Congress to get involved in every time it happens.
If you can't tolerate 10% drops on a regularly occurring basis, the answer is not to beg Congress for help, it is to invest in something safer with lower returns.
> If you can't tolerate 10% drops on a regularly occurring basis
The point is to look at data together. A 10% drop on its own isn’t much. A 10% drop alongside crashing ISM indices and the President being noncommittal on a coming recession is another.