[magicloop]

I'd like to expand out why I hold this belief.

The political cohort behind the president is roughly in two halves. The first half are the original MAGA crowd (looking out for the working class, pro-liberty, anti-woke, etc.). The second half are the billionaire crowd.

The second group are active on pod casts, on Twitter/X, and are partly represented in government (directly or as advisors). An easy way to follow up on these people is to watch the All In Podcast or their related social media connections.

What these folks have said for a long time is that if USA stay on the same path, the USA goes broke after 10 years. So if you have long term investment in the USA, you lose your fortune in 10+ years.

This is the key motivation for their involvement in the current executive branch of government. This is why the DOGE program is so well supported by them.

If you lose the battle to reduce the 10-year Treasury yield, you lose the billionaires because they stand to make meaningful losses on a 10 year horizon.

I recognize the plight of the common citizen here; they are the plurality. But the big political levers come from these billionaires (absent a grass roots supported leader in the wings).

[zopa]

If the goal to drive the yield on T-notes down, then cut spending and raise taxes. Get the budget into something like balance and the Fed will cut rates, and borrowing costs will fall. You don't need some 3D chess with a manufactured financial crisis.

When your rational explanation involves people shooting themselves in the head to cure a headache, something's off. There's nothing to explain here besides a weak and incompetent leader with a deep need for attention, surrounded by lots of enablers.

[rat87]

I think only thing likely to make US go broke is Trump's actions.

DOGE doesn't save any money. Not only because it's created many legal messes that will take forever to work out in court but because most of those jobs are important and will eventually need to be replaced at great cost and with worse results. Also some of those jobs are for auditing inefficiency and prosecuting corruption resulting in more money spent. And on top of it all they'll be using these non existent savings to justify much larger tax cuts for the rich.

The reason it looks stupid is because it is. It's not that Trump is purely dumb he's just intellectually lazy and doesn't care about policy. He long ago decided he likes tarrifs on instinct so he put massive tarrifs despite the warnings that they would be disastrous

[jjgreen]

I wonder who of those will prevail, a second Röhm purge maybe?

[notahacker]

This belief seems to disregard the fact that the billionaire crowd hates markets being spooked far more than it cares about 10 year Treasury yields (which in any case went up precisely because markets were spooked; if you wanted to do something about reducing long term bond yields, committing to just about any other economic policy would be more credible). Even some of the most sycophantic billionaires were evidently furious about the tariff policy.

Also, Trump has been obsessed with the idea of tariffs since the 1980s.

[magicloop]

My listening to such billionaires explains a different attitude.

Small investors, and medium investors hate market turbulence for sure. But when you are a billionaire, you can easily profit from short term uncertainty. For example, Chamath recently disclosed a (potentially large) Credit Default Swap position (meaning he makes huge upside if USA debt position deteriorates). But he was the same person deeply concerned about USA long term debt. He is a well connected person to the executive branch.

The reason is that if you are a billionaire (tied to the USA financial system) then you can't escape the system when the entire system falls due to (God forbid) a collapse of the USA financial system in 10 years time. It is like they are the dinosaurs worried about a Meteor strike, but not worried about tigers and snakes (that can't hurt them).

[notahacker]

If the billionaires were genuinely concerned about a complete collapse of the USA financial system in 10 years, they wouldn't have bet on a president with a track record of expanding debt to pump the stock market in the first place, and it would be hard to imagine anything less likely to stave off a crash than launching a trade war or threatening to annex your neighburs. Frankly the only only credible cause of the US economy completely collapsing within a decade is called Donald.

Getting a short term interest rate cut makes very little difference to the robustness of the US economy in a decade's time, and even if it did, there are many ways of getting a short term interest rate cut that don't involve massive economic disruption and permanently sabotaging US trading relationships (most obviously, the president nominates the chair of the Fed...). You could see what the likes of Ackman and Elon actually thought about the tariffs from them breaking ranks to moan about them.

The billionaires who backed Trump like standard right wing stuff like tax cuts, deregulation and/or racism, or figured he was going to win anyway so they might as well get credit for being seen as his ally. Some of them might actually be well informed enough to place shorts (and hey, the ones who own trading shops rather than manufacturing and services companies might be able to win more than they lose in equity value that way) but that's a completely separate issue from the idea that chaos now could have positive effects in a decade's time, which only one billionaire in the world is dumb enough to believe...

[twixfel]

They could just raise taxes. Detonating a bomb under the global financial system just to avoid raising taxes is still stupid. Trump is stupid.