Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 16:05
VIEWED: 185382
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The Cost of Chaos: This is Getting Scary
And it’s all on Donald Trump
By Paul Krugman | Apr 09, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-cost-of-chaos-this-is-getting
Herbert Hoover, move over.
The 31st president has long been the patron saint of bad economic management. But while Hoover responded badly to the coming of the Great Depression, he didn’t cause the slump. By contrast, it seems more and more likely that Donald Trump will single-handedly push the solid economy he inherited into crisis. This is, as Trump might say, disastrous policy like nobody has seen before.
How is he managing that feat? While the vast majority of economists think high tariffs are bad policy, they don’t normally associate them with recession. Many, perhaps most economists who’ve looked hard at the evidence don’t accept the popular story that the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 caused the Great Depression.
But this time looks and feels different. Why is a Trump Slump brought on by tariffs looking more probable by the day?
Like many others, I’ve been talking a lot about the huge uncertainty Trump is creating. Ignore the desperate efforts to retcon Trump’s trade policy, to pretend that it comes out of some coherent economic doctrine. We’re clearly looking at tariffs driven by id, not ideology — Trump’s biggest motivation seems to be the desire to see other countries grovel. Because there’s no clear policy objective, nobody knows what Trump will do tomorrow, let alone over the next few years. Did you have 104 percent tariffs on China and 34 percent tariffs on Canadian softwood lumber on your dance card? (Are 2x4s the industry of the future?)
As I wrote a few days ago,
Permanent tariffs are bad for the economy, but businesses can, for the most part, find a way to live with them. What business can’t deal with is a regime under which trade policy reflects the whims of a mad king, where nobody knows what tariffs will be next week, let alone over the next five years. Are these tariffs going to be permanent? Are they a negotiating ploy? The administration can’t even get its talking points straight, with top officials saying that tariffs aren’t up for negotiation only to be undercut by Trump a few hours later.
Under these conditions, how is a business supposed to make investments, or any kind of long-term commitment? Everyone is going to sit on their hands, waiting for clarity that may never come.
But wait, there’s more. There are growing signs that we’re at risk of a tariff-induced financial crisis.
There are multiple indicators of that risk. Bear with me while I give a somewhat wonkish explanation of one indicator that really caught my eye.
Back in the good old days, that is, two weeks ago, the main concern about Trump’s tariffs was that they would cause sustained inflation. We knew that they would produce at least a temporary bump in consumer prices, but the big question — crucial for Federal Reserve policy — was whether this bump would lead to a sustained rise in expected inflation, and become entrenched in the economy.
That’s what happened in the 1970s and is the reason getting inflation down in the 1980s required years of high unemployment. It didn’t happen during the Biden years, which is why this time we were able to get inflation way down without a recession.
So everyone has been watching measures of expected inflation for clues. And the news from consumer surveys has been very worrying. Here’s long-term expected inflation from the widely cited Michigan Consumer Surveys:
Source: University of Michigan
Whoa. But consumers don’t set prices. Furthermore, the last few years have shown that what consumers say they believe about the economy isn’t a good predictor of their behavior. So you’d want some confirmation from other measures.
Late last month Austan Goolsbee, president of th
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Bill Ackman, a hedge-fund billionaire who has been one of Trump’s most vocal supporters, suddenly turned on his champion, declaring on X that . . .
“by placing massive and disproportionate tariffs on our friends and our enemies alike and thereby launching a global economic war against the whole world at once, we are in the process of destroying confidence in our country as a trading partner, as a place to do business, and as a market to invest capital.“
But Ackman refused to take any responsibility for enabling the destruction:
“I don’t think this was foreseeable. I assumed economic rationality would be paramount. My bad.“
Indeed. Who could have foreseen that the self-proclaimed Tariff Man, who posts crazy stuff on Truth Social every day, would impose destructive tariffs?
OK, Ackman was fooled, but he wasn’t alone in getting Trump all wrong. Many wealthy people imagined that Trump II would be like Trump I, mostly a standard right-winger with a bit of a protectionist hobby. They thought he would cut their taxes, eliminate financial and environmental regulations and promote crypto, making them even wealthier. They expected him to back off his tariff obsession if the stock market started to fall. If he ripped up the social safety net, well, they don’t depend on food stamps or Medicaid.
If Trump II really had been like Trump I, America’s oligarchs would be very happy right now. (I’m happy with a regime where my income taxes probably won’t be audited because Trump closed down the part of the IRS that audits complex tax returns. The Winds of Change are Blowing, 6ixStringJack!)
https://angrybearblog.com/2025/04/clueless-and-rich
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Bill Ackman, a hedge-fund billionaire who has been one of Trump’s most vocal supporters, suddenly turned on his champion, declaring on X that . . .
“by placing massive and disproportionate tariffs on our friends and our enemies alike and thereby launching a global economic war against the whole world at once, we are in the process of destroying confidence in our country as a trading partner, as a place to do business, and as a market to invest capital.“
But Ackman refused to take any responsibility for enabling the destruction:
“I don’t think this was foreseeable. I assumed economic rationality would be paramount. My bad.“
Indeed. Who could have foreseen that the self-proclaimed Tariff Man, who posts crazy stuff on Truth Social every day, would impose destructive tariffs?
OK, Ackman was fooled, but he wasn’t alone in getting Trump all wrong. Many wealthy people imagined that Trump II would be like Trump I, mostly a standard right-winger with a bit of a protectionist hobby. They thought he would cut their taxes, eliminate financial and environmental regulations and promote crypto, making them even wealthier. They expected him to back off his tariff obsession if the stock market started to fall. If he ripped up the social safety net, well, they don’t depend on food stamps or Medicaid.
If Trump II really had been like Trump I, America’s oligarchs would be very happy right now. (I’m happy with a regime where my income taxes probably won’t be audited because Trump closed down the part of the IRS that audits complex tax returns. The Winds of Change are Blowing, 6ixStringJack!)
https://angrybearblog.com/2025/04/clueless-and-rich
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
You should be happy. You know how many billionaires he fucked.
You Democrats have no core values.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The end of IRS enforcement
Joel Eissenberg | April 8, 2025 5:14 pm
https://angrybearblog.com/2025/04/the-end-of-irs-enforcement
Don’t like income taxes? Next year, don’t pay ‘em. Who’s gonna force you to?
You Democrats just keep saying the dumbest shit.
Go ahead and try it. See what happens.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:The Trumptards at work
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Vance’s whopper on alleged Social Security fraud
The vice president falsely claims 40 percent of calls to a retirement program involve fraud.
Nothing false about it. At least not anything presented in this article. He stated what he stated above. You're boy Glenn is trying to frame it as if Vance said that 40 percent of people getting social security involve fraud.
You are an idiot.
Anybody can say whatever they want. It doesn't mean that it's true. Especially when there was zero oversight.
I trust Vance a lot more than I trust anybody working inside the government circa 2022 who were saying anything that would reflect positive on Joe Biden*'s shitshow of a presidency that you inflicted upon the world.
Nobody is interested in reading fake stories about your fake business.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:6ixStringJack, somebody needs to shoot tranquilizing darts into both you and Trump to calm your senseless talk. That is the primary weakness with all Trumptards. They run their mouths without using their brains. In 90 days, or sooner, Trump will be giving more crazy/contradictory orders about tariffs:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nobody is interested in reading fake stories about your fake business.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Stocks surged Wednesday after President Donald Trump announced a pause in some of the ‘reciprocal’ tariffs, causing a market that’s been under extreme pressure for the last week to explode higher.
“I have authorized a 90 day PAUSE, and a substantially lowered Reciprocal Tariff during this period, of 10%, also effective immediately,” Trump posted on his Truth Social. Trump, in the same post, said he was raising the tariff on China higher again to 125%. (Trump should have said a thousand percent because that is fewer syllables and just as mindlessly excessive. Makes the tariff calculation simple by adding a zero to the price of everything. Even Trump can do that multiplication in his head.)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/08/stock-market-today-live-updates-.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ixStringJack, somebody needs to shoot tranquilizing darts into both you and Trump to calm your senseless talk.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nobody is interested in reading fake stories about your fake business.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
I'm not the one losing my mind everyday.
I'm quite happy with the way things are going now.
Have fun being miserable. You earned it.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:6ix, for entertainment Trump can say that he is about to bomb Ottawa because Canada won't peacefully joint the United States. Then he changes his mind.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ixStringJack, somebody needs to shoot tranquilizing darts into both you and Trump to calm your senseless talk.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nobody is interested in reading fake stories about your fake business.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
I'm not the one losing my mind everyday.
I'm quite happy with the way things are going now.
Have fun being miserable. You earned it.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Next, Trump swears he will bomb Copenhagen because Denmark won't peacefully allow Greenland to become an American property. Then he changes his mind.
Next, he says he will drop bombs in Mexico because . . . whatever reason pops into his head. Then he changes his mind.
Trump needs to be shot with a tranquilizer gun. Or maybe shot in head with a lead bullet to make sure he doesn't nuke the world whenever he feels the need.
Or Trump can return to his old routine of raising tariffs because, you know, he feels the need to finish what he started.
Trump is as mental unstable as the typical Trumptard, which is the main reason Trumptards have so many problems staying sober and holding on to jobs and marriages, and maintaining financial solvency and a healthy weight to height ratio. Trump sure is getting fatter and fatter.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, for entertainment Trump can say that he is about to bomb Ottawa because Canada won't peacefully joint the United States. Then he changes his mind.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ixStringJack, somebody needs to shoot tranquilizing darts into both you and Trump to calm your senseless talk.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Nobody is interested in reading fake stories about your fake business.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
I'm not the one losing my mind everyday.
I'm quite happy with the way things are going now.
Have fun being miserable. You earned it.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Next, Trump swears he will bomb Copenhagen because Denmark won't peacefully allow Greenland to become an American property. Then he changes his mind.
Next, he says he will drop bombs in Mexico because . . . whatever reason pops into his head. Then he changes his mind.
Trump needs to be shot with a tranquilizer gun. Or maybe shot in head with a lead bullet to make sure he doesn't nuke the world whenever he feels the need.
Or Trump can return to his old routine of raising tariffs because, you know, he feels the need to finish what he started.
Trump is as mental unstable as the typical Trumptard, which is the main reason Trumptards have so many problems staying sober and holding on to jobs and marriages, and maintaining financial solvency and a healthy weight to height ratio. Trump sure is getting fatter and fatter.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
I think he's just 10 times as smart as you, and you dummies are playing checkers.
He's outsmarted all of the dipshits that you voted for, time and time and time again. And he's made them all, along with the entire legacy media, eat crow for dinner for almost a decade now.
You keep cheerleading and praying for the downfall of America.
Because at this point, outside of finally shutting the fuck up, that's all your failed and dead Party has left for you to do.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:I am absolutely certain that if millions of the most loyal to Trump Trumptards killed themselves they would be Making America Great Again. I pray that you fucking Trumptards, even the minor ones such as 6ix, stop being lazy, aimless and worthless before we have to kill you, but killing you is the the quickest, cheapest and most straightforward way to handle Trumptards, Confederate slave-owners, Nazis, bandits, racists, tax-cheaters, rapists, Taliban, Russian infantry, etc. rather than rehabilitation or incarceration.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I think he's just 10 times as smart as you, and you dummies are playing checkers.
He's outsmarted all of the dipshits that you voted for, time and time and time again. And he's made them all, along with the entire legacy media, eat crow for dinner for almost a decade now.
You keep cheerleading and praying for the downfall of America.
Because at this point, outside of finally shutting the fuck up, that's all your failed and dead Party has left for you to do.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
That is Trump on the floor of the Oval Office. The soldiers are there for his therapy session.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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