The US drift into Adam Curtis' broad thesis in hypernormalisation(a) continues apace I see. Great to see J Pow putting up a fight but I fear this is all going one way.
(a) >We live in a world where the powerful deceive us. We know they lie. They know we know they lie. They don't care. We say we care but do nothing.
That belief isn't the consequence of the situation, but the cause. There is ample ability to change events, but people must believe they can act and act together, as they have for centuries of democracy and for all human history. They do it in Iran. The Republicans and MAGA movement have made changes that would have been unbelievable ten years ago.
> There is ample ability to change events, but people must believe they can act and act together, as they have for centuries of democracy and for all human history.
This is the political will of a plurality of American voters. They certainly can't claim they didn't know what they would get, and they seem unconcerned by any of these actions that many of us find terrifying.
It is difficult to see how we can democracy our way out of this situation.
> This is the political will of a plurality of American voters.
This fallacy gets repeated over and over, but it's obviously false.
Have you really never voted for a candidate who went on to do things you didn't agree with? It's a quintessential fact of politics that voting for a candidate is not equivalent to an endorsement of everything that candidate does in the future. It's a premise that is obviously false when we consider our own votes, but it feels cathartic to force the claim on to the other side.
This administration's net approval rating flipped net negative very quickly after his election and has been trending downward. It's just navel-gazing to pretend like what he's doing has high approval.
If food keeps going up, it might get there but in the affluent west we run on our stomachs and as long as most of the middle class can still afford bread there won't be enough of a mass mobilization to affect any meaningful change.
Stated differently, if things really are so bad (and I would be the first to agree that things are pretty bad), then why are so many comfortable people (like me) not out on the street every day?
There are a lot of reasons for that, of course, but the bottom line is that when things get bad enough -- much worse than they are today -- then more people will take to the street, along with whatever sacrifice that entails. We're just not there yet, because for many, there is far too much to lose.
People are (and have been) taking to the streets. Americans tend to think that a protest must involve everyone otherwise it’s pointless. They don’t realize that protests typically involve a tiny fraction of the population. The more, the better of course, but stop sitting around waiting for it to get big. Either get out there now or find other ways to contribute. There’s plenty to be done.
People are taking to the streets. People are getting beaten, their property destroyed, their homes invaded and even murdered in Minneapolis as a result. The problem is that the US is massive; most people don't live in an active ICE zone where agents are going door to door kicking it in and pulling people out.
But even then, people are getting angrier. The injustices in Minneapolis triggered waves of protests here in Seattle. Eventually these things compound and more people become aware that we're living in the Great American Collapse.
You can't, because everytime that happens, a group comes out of the woodworks that says X, Y, and Z need to be done before a general strike can even be considered.
X, Y, and Z usually involve community building, mutual aid, strike funds, housing security, and other precarity reducing actions.
If protests worked better than the alternatives then that's what megacorps and multinational corporations would be doing instead of bribes and lobbying. 'The people' still dont understand they're playing an entirely different sport.
> Not sure being out in the street really does much.
I agree; this phrase was just a stand in for doing something -- anything -- about the state of affairs I don't like. Other than things I can do from my couch like commenting on HN.
>then why are so many comfortable people (like me) not out on the street every day?
because a lot of people have a kind of built-in main character syndrome and believe they're the protagonists of the world and things can't really go bad. They haven't internalized that there isn't some god behind the curtain that saves them. Same reason a lot of people ignore health issues.
That's how it goes in every country that ends up in the dirt, they all thought they were special, they all thought "surely we're not there yet" and you can pick their remains out of the rubble.
When I first watched a bunch of Adam Curtis stuff I thought it a long winded way of stating bad things have happened and have resulted in these bigger, overarching, bad things.
Thinking about it now 10 years later it feels alot different. The pervasiveness of tolerance of lies and fakeness has gone so far past anything I could have imagined being a big contributor to that.
Hasn't this always been the case, what is different right now is that the tech enables to do this at scale, at much higher frequency that makes them more audacious, since no regular person can keep up with it. The over saturation of lies/fake news has lead to numbness and the hyper-normalisation. So, unless something directly is affecting us currently, we won't care
No. The modern Republicans want you to believe that because it’s an easy path to despair and inaction, which means they win, but the magnitude and degree have varied significantly in the past. Where we are now is something living Americans don’t have experience with unless they escaped somewhere like the Balkans in the 90s.
I think the real test will be, not whatever this administration does, but how much of that survives into the next one - how much is the new normal versus how much is a temporary aberration.
That’s true even if the next administration is Republican (Vance or whoever), but especially true if the next administration ends up being Democratic instead-which while not certain, has decent odds-the more Trump defies norms, the more voters who will wish to go back to a “normal” Presidency
One thing I think is sometimes forgotten about shifting the overton window is that it sort of doesnt matter what political leaning has their hands on the lever. When it serves a purpose, which is not always a public first purpose, people in power will leverage any lever possible. Shifts in the overton window, just add more levers and it comes down to benevolence or luck that those levers aren't used incorrectly
> I think the real test will be, not whatever this administration does, but how much of that survives into the next one - how much is the new normal versus how much is a temporary aberration.
A reminder that this is the second time that Trump has been elected.
(People were saying what you're now saying after he was kicked out—an event that he says was rigged—the first time.)
Exactly: there was a brief moment when it looked like Republicans were willing to hold him accountable after the January 6th insurrection but that faltered and they circled ranks, especially when Roberts signaled that Trump had the support of the Supreme Court to the extent that they were willing to concoct a new constitutional doctrine to shield him.
A lot of people were hoping he’d just go away without them having to do anything difficult, but it’s clear that the next government has to reestablish the United States as a constitutional republic with the rule of law, even if it means hard things like trials for officials who abused their power. This kind of slide into authoritarianism isn’t an accident, and without consequences the people pushing it will keep trying.
A lot of us are really, really hoping that there is something unique about Trump that cannot be easily reproduced by the next MAGA leader. That the movement will fragment into irrelevancy as the usual elites regain control.
It may be that I'm a naive optimist, but I agree with him. When I look at who the hard core believers envision as the next torch-bearer, none of them have what it takes. Not Vance, not Rubio (Rubio! Suddenly he is 'strong'?? When was that ever a widely held opinion??), not the Trump kids. Trump has a way of defying political gravity and repeatedly escaping the consequences that take down every other politician. In this case the liberal consensus that it's a cult may not be that far from the truth -- maybe that's a loaded term, but how else do you describe a group of supporters whose faith is so strong that their ideology changes by the day to match whatever their leader currently says, even if it is diametrically opposed to what they said last week?
I think the test beyond that is how willing the next government will be to codify meaningful changes into law. After Trump’s first time it’s as if there was a big sigh of relief and a notion of “well, we just won’t do that again”.
It’s very clear now that we need a lot more regulation of what presidents can and cannot do. Not to mention judicial reform. But if you’re a democrat theoretically getting power in 2028 you’re going to have immense pressure to move forwards, focus on kitchen table issues, yadda yadda.
And extremely severe punishment as a deterrent against future efforts. Instead of a bunch of slow-rolled court cases and deferral back to the political process.
Some things, it just doesn't matter what the next administration does. The people of the US may, at any time, elect an administration that continues the course of breaking norms. The fact is that businesses, industries, banks, and nations have to guard against that possibility more than they need to cooperate with the next administration.
I think it's a bit fanciful to think you can take all the policies back to normal and have, Europe for instance, say "Oh good! Everything's back to normal!" I could be wrong, but I think that ship has sailed. Europe will work towards a new normal that looks to their own interests. And no action the next administration can take will change Europe's determination in this regard.
I think this will be as true of actors in the financial and industrial spheres as it will be of Europe in the security sphere.
"Political hobbyism" is things like commenting on the internet, as distinct from going out and convincing people to vote differently or running for offfice.
Sure, there are more and less effective ways to engage in politics. But given that people spend nearly every waking moment now staring at information-on-screen-piped-through-internet, it's frankly ridiculous to keep up this "Internet isn't real life" charade.
It's called 'kitchen table politics' (we used to just do it around the kitchen table) and is kinda a core Americanism. Welcome to this cultural insight about us.
This is... just crazy. One of those mostly boring bits of plumbing that has been left to professionals throughout the entire 50 years of my life - and they're trying to wreck it.
> One of those mostly boring bits of plumbing that has been left to professionals throughout the entire 50 years of my life - and they're trying to wreck it.
There is even a more boring and obscure bit of plumbing, the Treasury payment system, that they/DOGE went after last year:
There hasn't been a single point in my shorter life so far where things have been this out of control. The fed is supposed to be as non-political as possible. I know politics and the economy are intertwined, but tell me how this won't end up a disaster please. How do we get back to the USA we had even 10 years ago?
It never was non-political if you look at the individual votes of the board members. Perhaps it was non-political in aggregate, but never at an individual level.
It's also completely in character with Trump's behaviour. He is a dictator who wants what he wants and can't abide anyone standing in his way. He wants absolute authority to do as he wishes. This extends to removing foreign heads of state so he can access their countries resources and also threatening 'allies' so he can take their territory. We're watching him systematically destroy any good will or moral authority that the USA held.
It goes back before Donald was in charge of the Trump real estate business. It started with a really really shitty father who desired a “killer” business instinct in his children (read: cruelty) above all else.
Reading some of Mary Trump’s books will give some insight on the family that Donald grew up in. No love, all cruelty.
Donald is just a rich kid who inherited a big business and learned nothing but cruelty from his daddy.
It's also for very stupid reasons: The fed dropping rates to the degree that would satisfy Donald Trump would greatly accelerate inflation which in turn would further upset voters, who would in turn blame Donald Trump (just like they did Biden before).
Is it just a cynical view that enough voters can be convinced it's the other side at fault?
Someone who supports trump, please let me know the logic on this. Genuinely. I'm trying to read other places about these charges but they're just so slanted that they're not really trustworthy. Is there anything to this, or is it really just to pressure the federal reserve?
Exactly. He thinks he knows better than the experts. He thinks lower interest rates are good and people saying they should be higher are just trying to make him look bad. Nothing he does is a clever gambit.
I implore you to stop being credulous before it's too late. Trump supporters deeply believe, and are not shy about saying, that anyone who stops Trump from achieving his political goals should be imprisoned or murdered.
I know many. They’re good people. But they’re willing to be indifferent to violence if the perpetrators are not on their team. Everyone does this to some degree, but their tendency to align on messaging is much higher than e.g. folks going at each other about their pet war.
They put a great deal of effort into talking about political violence and implying that Democrats are a source of rioting and terrorism. The indifference is only to their own violence.
If citing the behavior of the most rabbid supporters is allowed (because that's who shows up to campaign rallies), then it's not hard to find an equivalent on the left. /r/all is full of people wanting various people in the epstein files, including trump, to be locked up on spurious associations.
Locking people up for crimes is different from locking them up because they are your political opponents. I don't think I've seen people on the left yelling about locking Mitch McConnell up, for instance, even if he bears much responsibility for all of this.
I think that's the point. None could name a crime, and that didn't matter.
Meanwhile, 34 actual felony convictions, court finding misuse of millions in charity funds, an attempted coup, being found liable for sexual assault, SCOTUS having to formally place the president above the law to avoid prosecution... none of it even moved the needle for those same folks.
>I think that's the point. None could name a crime, and that didn't matter.
From a 10s skim on wikipedia:
>Some experts, officials, and members of Congress contended that Clinton's use of a private email system and a private server violated federal law, specifically 18 U.S. Code § 1924, regarding the unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or materials, as well as State Department protocols and procedures, and regulations governing recordkeeping.
I'm not saying those allegations are true, but to claim "none could name a crime" suggests you didn't even try.
>Meanwhile, 34 actual felony convictions, court finding misuse of millions in charity funds, an attempted coup, being found liable for sexual assault, SCOTUS having to formally place the president above the law to avoid prosecution... none of it even moved the needle for those same folks.
Is there some well of non-rabid Trump supporters that I'm not aware of? I'm always open to the idea that I'm in a bubble, but my experience is that even the least rabid Trump supporters are completely unwilling to criticize him or oppose something he wants. Did any Trump supporters, for example, criticize the prosecution of James Comey?
>Is there some well of non-rabid Trump supporters that I'm not aware of? I'm always open to the idea that I'm in a bubble, but my experience is that even the least rabid Trump supporters are completely unwilling to criticize him or oppose something he wants.
In the context of the previous comment, the "non-rabbid" (and probably median) supporter would be someone voting Trump because they think they trust him more on the economy/immigration or whatever. They might be indifferent to his claims that he'll lock up his political opponents, or think that they're actually guilty of something, but that's not the same as being "rabbid" (ie. showing up to rallies and chanting "lock her up").
There's a difference between supporters and "the people who, in a single election, voted for him". The former tend to be pretty rabid and unmovable. Some portion of the voters are less firm in their support.
Right! With a non-fascist politician, what you're describing would be extremely abnormal; the median Biden supporter, Obama supporter, or Bush supporter would routinely take positions their guy didn't agree with even though they supported him overall. But the range of Trump supporter opinions stretches only from "politely support everything he wants to do" to "be performatively mean about everything he wants to do".
>But the range of Trump supporter opinions stretches only from "politely support everything he wants to do" to "be performatively mean about everything he wants to do".
You're basing this off... what? You're missing the options of "I'm indifferent about this", or "I don't agree with him on this but still think he's better as a whole than the alternative".
I'm missing "I don't agree with him on this" because I don't hear Trump supporters say that. Trump doesn't allow them to - he thinks it's wrong for anyone to disagree with him and illegal for anyone to try and stop him from doing something he wants to do. Again, the whole context here is that Trump is trying to jail one of his own appointees for failing to enact his preferred monetary policy.
> It is. What's more, such support is roughly the same across both parties, but both parties vastly overestimate the other side's support.
The difference between the two parties is that one elected a leader that agrees with that minority. This 2012 scene from The Newsroom outlines the difference:
I don't think this addresses the main point of my question, though. Do you know any prominent Democrats, e.g., representatives, senators, or presidents, who have called for a Republican to be killed?
On a purely pedantic point, whatever he's advocating for isn't "political violence" any more than calling for the death penalty isn't "political violence". Yes, the death penalty plausibly could count as "violence", and the process of instituting it is political, but if you look at the questions in the first source, it's clear they're talking about stuff like politicians/activists getting killed, not the state doling "violence" as some sort of punishment.
Moving on to the actual video, if the implication is that someone says [absurd thing] on national TV, it must mean that the party (or its electorate) as a whole must support [absurd thing], then:
The guy end up apologizing, so what's the issue? I guess the expectation is that he should be canceled/fired or whatever? What about similarly absurd stuff from the left? It's not hard to find stuff like "racism = power + oppression" that's casually mentioned on npr or whatever without major pushback, even though most democrats don't believe in this type of stuff. Or is talking about killing people a special case? If so, what does that mean about discussions on the death penalty?
This response is funny to me, because there’s been a massive drop in rightwing violence in the US since Trump was elected… but that’s because state-sponsored violence isn’t counted towards the statistics.
Pretty funny how there aren’t any more Proud Boy marches, yeah? Couldn’t be that they’re all getting paid six figure salaries to round up brown people at Kavanaugh stops…
But yes. Most left wing thought leaders count state-sponsored violence as political violence, and that often includes the death penalty.
>This response is funny to me, because there’s been a massive drop in rightwing violence in the US since Trump was elected… but that’s because state-sponsored violence isn’t counted towards the statistics.
>Pretty funny how there aren’t any more Proud Boy marches, yeah? Couldn’t be that they’re all getting paid six figure salaries to round up brown people at Kavanaugh stops…
Yes, that's how protests typically work. If things are going your way, you stop protesting. Nobody is protesting for gay marriage in California because they already won.
I don’t want to assume your politics, but saying that the group of people calling for racial purity and ethnic cleansing don’t find it necessary to protest anymore because things are going their way is very much not a good sign.
Fucking wild. You can't get more mainstream opinion than this guy. Trump regularly has phone calls on air with this person, he's isn't a random someone on TV. He is one of the administrations goto mouthpieces for communicating this administration's policy on the largest news station. They are workshoping/normalizing MURDERING UNDESIRABLES on their MAINSTREAM MEDIA by hosts that the president ROUTINELY USE TO BROADCAST HIS MESSAGE. My point is THEY ARE OK WITH KILLING PEOPLE THEY DON'T WANT. A meak 'my bad' doesn't mean shit.
And you waive it away. 'Bro said my bad dude, what more do you want? You think he shouldn't be an administration mouthpiece just because he wants extra-judicial killing? Cancel culture'. You are literally Martin Niemöller:
"First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist"
...
He was literally you. He justified their calls for 'only killing Communists and only because they are bad and want to do bad things....' just like you.
I consider January 6 to have falsified all research along these grounds. I acknowledge, sure, that virtually nobody wants to see gun battles in the street. But if you can talk yourself into believing that a mob sent to overturn the election and install the loser doesn't count as partisan violence, you can talk yourself into believing all kinds of catastrophes don't count.
>But if you can talk yourself into believing that a mob sent to overturn the election and install the loser doesn't count as partisan violence, you can talk yourself into believing all kinds of catastrophes don't count.
How's this different than say...
>polls show 99% (or whatever) of people are against crime
>voters elect a soft-on-crime politician, crime goes up
>"I consider the fact that the soft-on-crime politicians got elected to have falsified all research that people are against crime"
It's not different. If my city elected a mayor whose buddies committed a robbery 4 years ago, and his first act in office was to parole the robbers, I would be incandescently furious and definitely say that anyone who supports him is pro-crime.
If you genuinely believe that, then I have some hope that the very toxic messages I see daily in political social media, saying exactly what's being alleged here, aren't deeply held beliefs but a tiny fringe.
Fox News, a major American media company, had one of their main personalities say that homeless people should just be killed by lethal injection on air. The desire for killing for random reasons is so mainstream to them that their media is comfortable stating out loud people they don't want/are undesirable should just be killed. Their media organs are workshopping/normalizing killing undesirables.
All of the Trump supporters I knew in meatspace reassured me that he would never do his insane tariffs, and then when he did insisted that it was a good idea and they never thought otherwise. So I no longer trust that they're telling me the truth about what they want or what they would support.
Maybe eight years ago. But in my experience, Trump supporters today have no line he can cross which will cause them to stop supporting him. They might claim to, but time after time, they just find a way to justify and double down.
I continue to be surprised by people who have seen things unfold as they have over less than a year of this administration and still somehow believe we'll continue to have "free and fair" elections anytime in the near future.
We have over, and over again seeing virtually all of the "checks and balances" we learned about as kids being overridden without consequence.
This community of all other should be aware of how easy it is to exert total control of information (I'm still surprised this article is on the home page). Everyone consumes almost all of their information through digital, corporate controlled means. Even people getting together a organically socializing in bars, something that was common 30 years ago, has been replaced with online interactions. Trump does not need mandate from the people to continue to rule the country.
> Trump Regrets Not Seizing Voting Machines After 2020 Election: In an interview, the president said he should have ordered the National Guard to take the machines
We've had a number of free and fair elections in the past year, including some where the Trump-supported candidate lost. That doesn't mean we're out of the woods, but Trump has not historically been willing to go out of his way to protect the electoral fortunes of people who aren't himself, and at least some of his allies are well aware that the peace and security we presently enjoy is not guaranteed in a post-democratic US.
Im not convinced Trump cares anymore. For whatever reason that may be, he has decided there is nothing that can stop him at this point. There is no congress or court that will hold him accountable. His supporters are unwavering and drunk on unchecked power right now.
The MAGA crowd and their lickspittles/enablers are so far removed from reality that they only believe their leader.
And many others will vote for system-wreckers (broadly: conservatives) again, because the democrats cannot fix much of the damage done within the next legislative periods, let alone just one... even if the miracle of a trifecta happens and SCOTUS loses its majority on top of it. Rinse, repeat.
These are the very people who would help him rewrite history that yes he indeed did earn the Nobel Peace Prize as it is obviously and prominently displayed in his office, the words and records of the Nobel committee be damned.
blame Donald Trump (just like they did Biden before)
Respectfully disagree. Republican presidents get a lot more economic leeway than Dem presidents, especially from the media. This has puzzled me my entire adult life. Inflation will bother media and public, but not to the same extent it did 2021-22.
And it's pitiful that he has to be a Republican for people to credit him with sincerity. I think as much as partisanship itself, poisoning discourse by labeling appeals to evidence or procedural integrity as "partisan" proves too much and gets rid of objective reality entirely, creating space for bad faith actors.
I always appreciate when people make comments like this. It helps identify the trolls or people so completely outside of reality you can mark them as untrustworthy and ignore whatever they say.
So I'm sitting here as a Canadian wondering what the American people are going to do? I understand a lot of what the President of The United States says - I even agree with some of it, the problem is I don't feel like we're engaging with the American people anymore. I really wonder where you guys are headed and what it means for the rest of us, I spent 15 years in the states, built a public company there, I really like the Americans, but I don't want annexation. I wonder where you guys are headed.
You need to know only two facts about America to guess that:
* Fifty three percent of Americans now read below the sixth grade level.
* As (ostensibly) a representative Democracy America's fate is dictated by the majority of it's citizens.
Our future is to become a broken nation governed by middle-school student level thinking. The only way to build a better America is to build a better populace, and that would be contrary to the interests of the angry, spoiled, children who seem to hold all the power now.
I think it’s also important to talk about what it means to “read at a 6th grade level” when this is mentioned, because a lot of people (myself included) might assume that just means they could finish and understand a book intended for 6th graders.
But there’s actually meaningful criteria that sheds some light on the critical thinking capabilities of people who can or can’t read at certain levels, especially as it pertains to propaganda. Below a certain level, people are not well-educated enough to critically assess a text against the motivations of its authors (somewhere around 9th grade). Americans are prone to conspiratorial thinking so you might think that that’s alright because they’re often skeptical of any text, but it just seems like it causes them to dig even deeper into the propaganda that’s targeted to them.
It’s kind of like learning that some people don’t have an inner monologue, or that they aren’t capable of imagining shapes or objects abstractly in their mind. Except it’s a lot more serious as it deals with critical thinking directly: these people don’t understand that what they’re reading was written for a purpose.
> No one has the power to save America from itself.
Wrong!! Please don’t say that! We all have power inside the US. Congress had the opportunity in 2021 to correct the wrong, but Republicans kowtowed and they are still doing so. That was the easy way. Now for the hard way, American people will have to do something about it.
The current situation is bad, but this is just doomerism.
The current administration will end. Trump can't live forever. His approval rating is already low and falling.
We're in for a bumpy ride, but then it's going to start reverting toward the mean. Not necessarily back to the way things were, but periods of extreme like this are followed by a reversion to the mean more often than not.
They way the current administration act, I start to think that their plan A is to stay for a long long time. There is so much open corruption that half of them would land in prison really quickly and they don't seem particularly bothered by that fact.
Always amusing. So sure. I like to imagine the conversations at the begining of the late bronze age collapse, or perhaps aristocrats of the western roman empire living in Gaul.
"To say anything that challenges the current trajectory is doomerism. We're in for a bumpy ride for sure, but this will all correct itself. _it has to_."
Trump is not the problem, he’s a symptom. The problem is the roughly one third of Americans who think he’s great, and to a lesser extent the roughly one third who don’t care.
After all that’s happened, his approval rating is still above 40%. Those people aren’t going away or changing their minds any time soon.
There's basically nothing the American people can do short term.
The US government is entirely non-responsive and only nominally representative.
Barring a wave of Republican retirements in the House, the absolute soonest there are any guardrails are after the 2026 midterms when a new congress is seated in 2027.
Gerrymandering, infinite lobbying corruption, and manufactured consent are supposed to keep the populace doing and thinking what the 1% want, and cheating to help them. They can't even do those properly anymore with vast resources. Perhaps billionaires and failed celebrity reality stars don't make the best public administrators.
Nothing? Trump is playing freeway chicken with Powell, he's driving a Pontiac Fiero and Powell is driving a bulldozer. The Supreme Court has already signaled that they're not on board fucking with the Fed. This will potentially cost Trump his next Fed nomination for awhile, because GOP Senators are putting a hold on his nominations until the legal stuff resolves.
We vote. That’s all we can do. 50.5% of the people voted for this insanity in 2024. We can only hope they see how this is going and vote differently in 2026 and beyond.
Complain to our representatives who will do absolutely nothing because the system is ripe for abuse and we’ve put people who actively want to abuse and exploit it into office.
I keep telling everyone and have been for a year, it’s not just our problem, due to global US positioning it’s now a world problem. Just ask Venezuela. Regardless of what you think about the end result the ends did not justify the means.
I for one will be collecting my (completely legal) hunting rifles and weapons I’ve had in storage since I was a kid, have them professionally serviced and grab some ammunition, on the terrible case I need to defend myself which I thought I’d never ever have to consider and I’d just sell them some day. But alas we have a lot of really really stupid as well as downright toxic voters in this country.
Remember early in his first term when he tested waters but the governmental system pushed back and kept him in check? It feels like an out of body experience to look at this and contemplate how much he’s changed about how the U.S. government conducts itself.
In his first term, he probably didn't yet understand how much power the office truly holds and how to wield it and just how far you can go with that. Because the main restriction on all of that power has always been convention rather than any actually robust guard rails. But no one, not even someone like Nixon, has ever dared to truly test that out.
He knew how much power he had back then. The difference was that the government bureaucracy worked hard to counter his agenda throughout his term. It’s why The Heritage Foundation came up with Project 2025: an organizated and cohesive plan to dismantle the bureaucracy and consolidate power. And it is working.
The first term laid a lot of the groundwork for this term as well - had he not appointed three SC Justices, things would look very different. This court has said basically that all executive actions including pretextual investigations via the DOJ are legal and that there is no such thing as agency independence, even when written into the laws that created the agencies.
> He knew how much power he had back then. The difference was that the government bureaucracy worked hard to counter his agenda throughout his term.
He did not know. He was also not expecting to win, and so had to scramble to get people appointed.
He asked around and got people who were experts in their respective fields. The problem is that those experts (a) knew his ideas were bad, and (b) had integrity. It was, by and large, Trump's appointees that worked hard to counter his agent and not the government bureaucracy.
Trump did not make the same 'mistake' this time around: he appointed folks not for their competence but for their loyalty to him. That was and is the only criteria for serving under Trump.
I hate to assign him so much agency. The man seems a complete buffoon who lacks the ability to plan anything beyond real estate fraud. Instead, I look to all of the people in his orbit who can orchestrate long term goals. Sure, he will self sabotage many schemes, but will directionally go where the handlers want. Vance, Miller, Heritage Foundation, etc are the ones guiding most policy decisions.
That tariffs have been so absolutely scattershot, says Trump actually is the one calling the shots there.
His orbiters/handlers are totally throwing all kinds of stuff at him to see what sticks to his cooked brain. It's clear he's barely aware what's happening anymore. The only coherent things he can focus on are things from the 80s and 90s heydays and old and recent grudges.
It’s clear that he’s very easily persuaded on many topics that he already has a slight bias towards, but that he also has his pet projects that his handlers don’t want to mess with because that would jeopardize their political capital (ball room).
Quick heuristic I have is: vanity project = Trump; neocon pet project = Heritage Foundation; anything related to racial purity = Stephen Miller; quackery = RFK and other grifters.
The tariffs are partially his bias, but also Navarro who lost his mind somewhere around 2015 and became an economics pariah.
They really didn't. It was a dog and pony show under the belief that he would not make his way back into power. The dems/reps did not want to set a precedent of holding a president to account for doing terribly illegal things. They didn't intend to actually do anything to prevent this.
The GOP in Congress abdicating its role and deferring to the executive, as well as SCOTUS continually using the “shadow docket” to rule in his favor with little to no explanation provided.
Congress: anyone falling out of line will lose his support in midterms.
Judiciary: appointments and ideological alignment with some of the Supreme Court. Thomas and Alito are fully controlled, Kavanaugh just loves a powerful executive, the rest aren't controlled but often in agreement.
Then there's his use of executive power to punish his adversaries, e.g. Perkins Coie.
The question is through what mechanism are other branches curtailing his power? It seems to be limited to strongly worded letters and speeches, indignant comments and scathing news reports but nothing real.
The execution of the Unitary Executive theory, a clear ideological descendant of Carl Schmitt’s Decisionism. Carl also had some beautiful prose describing the weaknesses of liberal democracy and how to exploit them that are very relevant to today as well.
Through the flawed primary system. Relatively few people vote in the primaries, which means they skew towards extremists. Trump can motivate MAGAns to vote in Republican primaries, which makes MAGA essentially a gatekeeper to Republican seats even in districts where the electorate at large is Republican rather than MAGAn.
He's not directly controlling the judiciary yet, but he has appointed wildly extremist judges and threatened judges who rule against him with impeachment, so he's certainly making an effort.
He's also appreciably more senile now, and a common manifestation of that is lowered inhibitions. I'm not saying that Trump was great at 70, but now that he's 80 he's considerably less in control of himself.
(If you doubt this, go watch some clips and compare how he talks now to how he talked during his first administration. If you were concerned about Biden's state in 2024, you should be concerned about Trump now.)
I came in to say the same thing -- major, major respect to Powell.
I am not a big fan of his earlier policies (or of Greenspan's and anyone after him for that matter). His "unlearn the importance of M2" did not age well. He made the tail end of the ZIRP more painful than it needed to be. But those were honest mistakes from a public servant who did his best and believed in what he is doing.
And standing up for what he believes is right, against this insanity from the president is the gold standard of what we need from public servants. My 2c.
I have bad things to say about him. But they're firmly on pause. What Trump wants for the Federal Reserve is far worse.
And anyone who is a hard-currency quantity-theory-of-money conservative, should also be appalled by it.
Trump is way worse than what the harshest critics of the Federal Reserve think about it. Nobody right or left should support it. Only the billionaires will profit off the monetary disorder.
By design, kiss the ring. It’s a natural progression of the kind of grifting that has been occurring through 2025: shitcoin rugpulls, tariff announcements, etc.
Shots fired. Even the republicans will not be able to ignore this and they know that if Powell caves in the American economy will likely collapse. So who will speak up in his defense?
My working theory is that the ai bubble is caused by trump. People are too uncertain to want to invest in most industries, but they have to put their money somewhere, so they put it in ai stocks. Since the supreme court is likely to rule trump's tariffs illegal in a week or so, this may lead to a stock market crash. As people reallocate their portfolios, they will sell their ai stocks, which will pop the bubble and cause a crash. Something to watch out for.
Yes, but for now the USD has more or less survived. If Trump forcibly removes the FED chair on a pretext things could go downhill very fast. You can probably kiss the USD as a reserve currency goodbye overnight and China is going to have a real problem given the amount of debt they hold. This could easily knock the last pillar that holds it all up away.
Best of luck JPow - that was a perfect statement from the Fed.
It seems like theres a bit of an inflection point right now in the US. I wonder how much entropy the system can handle it has to be near a breaking point.
Fundamentally, people don't like situations with no good answer. I see it again and again, present a problem with no good answer and most people will resort to the answer that aligns with their political leanings even when faced with clear evidence they are wrong.
Look how quickly big business rolled over for The Felon--because they saw what mot people have been denying since the election.
> Some countries that have prosecuted or threatened to prosecute central bankers for the purpose of political intimidation or punishment for monetary policy decisions: Argentina, Russia, Turkey, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.
> If there were any remaining doubt whether advisers within the Trump Administration are actively pushing to end the independence of the Federal Reserve, there should now be none. It is now the independence and credibility of the Department of Justice that are in question.
> I will oppose the confirmation of any nominee for the Fed—including the upcoming Fed Chair vacancy—until this legal matter is fully resolved.
America has reached the inter-departmental warfare stage of failed states it seems. As an appreciator of all sorts of banana republics, kleptocracy and military juntas, this is a very familiar pattern of behavior.
I dislike the existence of the Fed, but I dislike the idea of the executive branch being in control of monetary policy even more. I'll be tuning in to see how the case progresses.
You can dislike a solution but admit that you can't think of a better solution, or specify that it is better than an even worse solution.
I can see why someone would have a issues with "a bunch of rich bankers appointed by politicians" controlling American monetary policy. But I can't really see a better way at least, until we can achieve a post-scarcity economy or something.
Bernanke had a strictly academic career before going into public service (and was/is probably one of the foremost experts on the Great Depression, something that was handy in 2008/9):
I think people over-estimate how many "rich bankers" are in the Fed, especially at the FOMC.
Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast with some Fed members in recent years, especially the more obscure regional ones, about their work, and how they often go out and talk to local businesses about what's happening 'on the ground'.
I’m not denying that, but that’s not how I read the comment. That comment comes across as a relief that the Fed is under attack, but is more upset that the source of attack is the executive branch.
I dislike the Fed because it has (since 1913) held an unnecessarily powerful control of our nation's (and world's) money supply.
JFK was likely assassinated for attempting to retain the species backing of silver; less than a decade later Nixon would take us off the gold-backed dollar "temporarily" (i.e. 1971 - present) — the dollar's plummet since 1913 (and 1971 specifically) has been monumental.
The Fed simply has too much power to destroy the dollar savings of Americans (which is why cash and low interest bonds are so detrimental for long-term wealth preservation).
----
But I am glad the the Fed Chairman's brass-gilded balls are so big, in this struggle against our absolutely out-of-control unified executive theory President.
Personally, bitcoin and gold/silver make up the majority of my savings. Have been slowly DCA-ing out of stocks and primarily into those, these past few years... accelerated since learning the majority of stock trades in 2025 occurred in dark pools (i.e. no price discovery via public markets).
The libertarian view is that interest rates should be decided by the free market and not a central bank. Mainly due to what we're seeing now (the executive trying to take it over) and that a small board of people can make bad decisions that have reaching effects.
This is actually quite correct. The Fed Funds policy interest rate is a clumsy instrument because it involves chasing the ever-shifting balancing point of an inherently unstable system. You "cut" rates to increase money creation, which actually pushes your long-term rates higher due to expected inflation and leads to even more money creation for a constant policy rate, and vice versa. This can all be fixed very simply by changing the instrument to a crawling exchange rate peg, which has an inherently stabilizing effect, as seen from the effectiveness of currency board systems - that system doesn't shift against you if you stick to a bad peg, whereas it very much does if you stick to a bad policy rate.
The long term policy goal (stability in the path of nominal incomes (prices + real activity) in the very short run, and prices in the medium-to-long run) would be unaffected, but the whole operational aspect would be simplified quite a bit.
> The Fed Funds policy interest rate is a clumsy instrument because it involves chasing the ever-shifting balancing point of an inherently unstable system.
I don't know about "inherently unstable system", given that as central bank independence has grown so has, generally speaking, monetary stability:
Great Moderation basically involved the adoption of price stability as a long-term policy target, as opposed to trying to keep long-term fixed exchange rates. There's no reason to change the policy target, the issue is wrt. the policy mechanism/instrument.
Markets don't always seek equilibrium. Some aspects of the economy tend to be governed by vicious and virtuous feedback cycles. Always leaving everything to markets feels like more of a religion than a reasonable policy position.
No it did not. I don't know why people repeat this so often but it is very frustrating. Nixon unilaterally ended the gold standard because the US was printing money to pay for Vietnam and the rest of the world called the US on its bullshit. The end of the gold standard is relatively recent in history and the verdict is still out on the impact.
I think your observation assumes that inflating the value of gold relative to the rest of economy is a problem - if you do not care about that I'm not sure it matters.
In any case gold served as a strong check on monetary policy even if it had problems. Certainly it is possible to have a "sound" monetary policy without gold. I'm just not convinced in societies ability to affect sound governance of monetary policy without some "stronger" guard rails. Especially not in today's climate.
You asked about which piece "of the dual mandate", but the OP said "operates as" which I am going to reply to.
Does the Fed can any data from labor sources or unions? I am asking in honest because the few reports from them that I have looked into(mostly around unemployment) all seem to be polls solely sourced from investor class assets like companies.
If they are only sourcing from one biased source for their data, they wouldn't have to have a bad mandate or manipulate it, to operate like it was for the benefit of the data source, right?
I can't say I'm the biggest fan of the financial apparatus in general but it is more than a little heartening to see someone in the federal government with a spine for once.
AI is a bubble; well, the stock market as a whole is, being led by an AI boom. At the end of a bubble (and it's not clear if we're there yet) markets find ways to self-finance. A crash means not just that the value is lower, but that the leveraged bets are now due, and those have to be paid by selling more.
When it crashes (and it's not clear when that will be), it will crash back to a cash-value baseline. And, sigh, it's not clear where that is. But it won't magically start going back up. The cyclic reinvestment engine needs to be reinvented every time.
What an unhinged moment in time. At some point, they'll need to be courageous people with the ability and funds to speak up and say enough. But will they? It does not appear so.
Guarantee there are dozens if not more in the admin insider trading like they have on so many announcements. Market manipulation right out in the open.
The slimiest swampiest criminals, they need to be put on trial.
The titanic amount of generational neglect that has allowed even a fraction of voters to look at Trump for more than a second and find him qualified for any public office is truly fantastic.
This is one of the clear examples that Trump is seeing Putin's Russia as a model for his vision for the USA.
From an institutional engineering POV (warning- I am a grouchy old former political scientist), it would be interesting to come up with institutional solutions for some of the problems America is facing right now. Specifically I think I'd remove the Attorney General role from the President's authority and give it to Senate, to nominate & confirm exclusively. Let's say 51 votes to confirm and 55 votes to impeach. Even among presidential systems, the US cabinet is unusually presidential-centric. I'm not a big LatAm expert, but I think they typically separate the public prosecutor from the president's nomination capacity.
Of course I would strongly prefer to not be a presidential system at all. But if we're discussing post-Trump constitutional reforms that could plausibly pass, I think removing the Attorney General/DOJ from the president's purview and also placing some checks on the pardon power seem doable
>Of course I would strongly prefer to not be a presidential system at all.
Having grown up in the US and having blinders on, I always thought all those parliamentary systems seemed unstable and sometimes comical. But now I see the value in it. Once a leader has demonstrated he is not up to the task, has grown out-of-touch, or has descended into madness, he can be replaced by his party, and if that didn't happen, a no-confidence vote could trigger an election. No guarantee either of those things would happen, but the option exists. The fixed four-year term idea now seems artificial and inflexible.
I suspect the current US leader and maybe even the previous US leader (maybe in his 4th year) would have suddenly found himself a back-bencher.
As a side note, is there a compelling reason why interest rates aren't set algorithmically? I assume human intuition isn't really a factor in setting them. This would eliminate concerns about political motivation.
Economic models are complex and far from perfect, and we're still waiting for Hari Seldon's psychohistory models to be created to tie together macroeconomics and macropsychology.
But who sets the algorithm? Whichever department of branch of govt was in charge of that would become have the enormous power, and political motivation would then fall to that.
Equally the same for data that goes into the algorithm - if you can control that you control interest rates.
There's some slippery feedback loops involved, even if the models were very good, the reflexive nature of doing something like this would be very hard to get around
> is there a compelling reason why interest rates aren't set algorithmically?
Can’t believe you are saying that!! Then anyone can manipulate it like they manipulate stocks by writing hit pieces one day and gushing articles a few days after,
I’m a little shocked to see the quality of some comments here - I would expect a more grounded discussion. This is like Reddit / YouTube comment history. Someone please tell me this is a Wendy’s.
Sure the Fed isn’t perfect. But we don’t really have a better solution as of now because our financial systems are extremely powerful and anyone in office would love to abuse it if they can.
Sure, the renovations are ridiculous. But it’s not like this administration is austere in the slightest, so that’s a bit rich. Not to mention the cronyism prevalent across the cabinet.
There's also little genuine conversation to be had. The situation is bad, has been bad, and seems to only be getting worse. That's the only interpretation any rational person can hold. And, when everyone has the same opinion and that opinion is drastic, that creates a circle jerk.
Not the renovations themselves but the cost is supposedly at 2.5B. Personally I don’t really mind but I also don’t think government buildings need to be all that fancy with marble flooring.
It was budgeted at 1.9B (in 2019). Most of the cost overruns are from unexpected site issues like asbestos (more than thought) and water table problems. The buildings are historic, they already had marble. The marble was taken down and saved, this marble will be re-used. Some pieces are damaged, those will be new marble. These buildings are near 100 years old. I also don't think they have marble floors, but facades and other stonework.
"The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the President."
Thank you, Mr. Powell. We really want interest rates set to serve the people, not the whims of the President.
why? asset holders in this country have a free fed put, wage earners get smashed in the face. you can make a solid case this institution is more harmful and free banking is much better for wealth equality.
You had a comment to explain the poor take and instead do the equivalent of point and laugh. Can you help but wonder as onlookers question what your point might have been? People undoubtedly think this way, and to discount wholesale their line of thinking without engagement does not win hearts and minds.
The defense is that the status quo has become archaic and self-serving instead of serving the public so the current operations people doing some house cleaning and tossing a few rooms to see what’s going on in there is overdue, changes need to happen and power structures need to be shaken out a bit to make sure they are not getting in the way of the people they were created to act on behalf of, and scatter the ones who are “helping themselves” to the public coffers.
This just needs to happen every across all government, it’s like brushing your teeth to kick out the bacteria, but each individual institution needs a different kind of “floss” depending on the nature of the ways they have strayed from their original purposes.
That sounds nice, but I don't think there is much evidence that the above is actually what the current administration is doing, or even attempting to do.
Having blatantly political messages blasted across websites for national parks and on airport security video screens during the shutdown, for example, doesn't seem like a move towards "serving the public", but rather a move towards consolidation of direct control to the politicians at the top of the executive branch.
Threats like the ones Powell's receiving would be the end of any other presidency. Why tech elites continue to align themselves with this clownshow will be a source of incredible shame that I'll hold onto forever.
I think a lot of largest tech companies feel that they'll face retribution from the current administration for not being supportive enough but would not from future admins.
For many of the smaller players I think there's unfortunately a lot of people who realized there's significant money to be made in grifting. Many of the largest crypto proponents have pivoted into endeavors, whether crypto or otherwise, that profit off of being rewarded for being part of the 'correct' tribe.
> I think a lot of largest tech companies feel that they'll face retribution from the current administration for not being supportive enough but would not from future admins.
The Democrats should play hardball but the geriatrics can barely take a swing.
They don’t know where the plate is, what the game is, or what day it is. They’re just hoping for ice cream when the nurse comes around with the meds. Meanwhile they are retelling stories from the 1960s for the hundredth time.
This is exactly it and parallels what happened with the end of the Wiemar Republic. There was an asymmetry in response between the Nazis and the government. You can see that in the limited prosecution and light sentences of the Beer Hall Putsch perpetrators.
The tech titans like Thiel see the Trump administration as a "big bet" a startup investment. They can "shoot for the moon" and try to realize the network state. If they fail, they figure they'll just toss the Democrats some campaign contributions and all will be good.
I find myself seeking out non-doomer people to read, since the doom and gloom doesn't really help, it's just demotivating. "Look for the helpers" and all that.
It's a particular and kind of peculiar attitude, because objectively "things ain't great" and it's really easy to dwell on that. But we also need some hope.
Lots of respected limits and lines on government power are just being casually broken, so I don't think you're wrong. Whatever's going to happen next it probably won't have the stability of the past.
Thank you for pointing this out. It is really interesting, the difference between Trump 45 and Trump 47.
I would like to add one quote to be logged on this website:
> "I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler," he wrote privately to an associate on Facebook in 2016. [0]
- Trump's future Vice President, JD Vance
If we survive the fall of Pax Americana in the next few years, and journalists and historians are again allowed to exist in a free environment, I really hope that they get to the core of how we got from 45 to 47.
"Has been set," not "will be set". We've been operating under the new scheme for months. Despite Powell's protestations, there was no evidence for cutting rates, and lots of evidence for doing the opposite. Unfortunately he gave in to Trump... but that obviously wasn't enough.
The only reasonable conclusion at this point is that the fascists in the white house see their deep unpopularity, obvious loss of power in the near future (they have lost nearly every election in the past year by a landslide), and the Epstein files closing in. The obvious outcome will be at minimum jail and ridicule due to their continuous and obvious corruption, high crimes and misdemeanors like invading Venezuela, trying to invade Greenland, and sexual crimes against children. So they have to accelerate chaos to try and destroy law and order before it catches up with them and destroys them.
Its time to put up or get put down by masked goons.
I hope I turn out to be wrong, but the most convincing explanation I've seen for the "why" is that the 1945-2000 period was an anomaly, and now we're reverting to the mean: despotic governments, frequent wars for territory, and massive wealth inequality leading to powerful oligarchies as the only other important political players aside from the despot. This was the norm for the overwhelming majority of human history and perhaps it was massively hubristic to think we had escaped it for good.
It's quite impressive how scared everybody is of this administration. News outlets, international leaders even in face of threats, big tech, including the delusional Musk who thought he could've handled the president's rage.
Hell even his own party is scared of speaking up, you either fall in line or you risk falling victim of the most vicious direct attacks, even if you've been a huge and core voice for the president, see senator Marjorie Green.
From Russia, to Belarus, from the Philippines to Argentina, from Hungary to Poland it's crystal clear what a failure of democracy it is to have a presidential republic.
The turning point may have been when the Supreme Court decided a president couldn't be criminally liable for anything done in office. Having no fear of consequences is quite an enabler.
Venezuela, Greenland, and this. Anyone notice how these extreme events all happened around the same time of the Epstein files getting released with highly publicized questions about all the redactions? It certainly seems like a distraction game.
I'm not arguing against QE I am saying there was too much of it and we could have had recovered just fine without the severe inflation that landed us in the current predicament.
The most-unamerican thing you can do right now is HOLD bitcoin/gold/silver.
If you still want fiat — and they're available — Swiss Francs are deflating least-quickly.
Otherwise, as a fellow pleb, my best advice is to get enough bullets for occassional hunting (and other tax-free methods of living) and protection.
If you're of a draftable age/gender, I'd either get extremely fit or extremely disabled. If you're a lard-ass, I'd get to a state where you can live without medicines.
Far too many people decide to occupy the us vs. them part of their brain with National politics as opposed to sports.
Both are basically useless as it relates to your personal quality of life but at least with the latter you can see nice geometric combinations between players on a pitch and some incredible athleticism in between
If your life can be impacted more than 5% by [ insert name of the person residing in the White House] then you are either a politician or someone not doing a proper job at navigating through life and hedge your bets (financial or otherwise)
If Trump does try to politicize the fed he is going to do the one thing that the American political system will not tolerate - messing with the money of the most powerful capital class in the world. Normally, the incentives of this class are most aligned with grinding the rest of us into a fine powder suitable for lubrication of the engines of commerce, but hopefully just this once they'll come to the rescue. My only fear is that the short term quarterly obsessions that we've built might actually lead to some business supporting this decision out of a suicidal drive for short term gains.
If Trump does try to politicize the fed he is going to do the one thing that the American political system will not tolerate
I've lost track of the number of times I, and others, have said that.
Turns out there really are no brakes on the Trump Train. In the parlance of the metallic-headgear fans, any other POTUS would have been treated to a nice convertible ride through downtown Dallas by now.
Terrible. Trump was even the person who nominated Powell in 2017, and now he’s being squeezed for doing the job of Federal Reserve Chair instead of bending to demands.
(Boring, important thing that holds civilization together.)
Dunning-Kruger effect billionaire: We don't need that. What's it even for anyhow? I'm not paying for it. All these naysaying wimps and freeloaders say we can't live without out. I will use my unelected government position and bling chainsaw to cut fraud, waste, and abuse to eliminate red tape and unnecessary big government regulation. And I demand a negative tax rate, subsidies, and lucrative government contracts! Rawr!
They're already pursuing a case against another Fed board member, and now this? I have a feeling these two cases are going to suffer the same fate as the Letita James and James Comey cases: thrown out due to incompetence and/or malfeasance. It's a disgusting, clear weaponization of the DOJ.
MAGA, of course, tried to accuse Biden of weaponizing them during his term so that they could justify the Trump 2.0 revenge tour. Now we're here.
So this is the bar for the next country to surpass the US as the world's economic super-power, if this continues it's most likely going to be China to surpass the US.
An opportunity for the EU to stop its bureaucracy and cleanup its act. If it cannot convince anyone that they are next, then one can argue that democracy is completely finished.
If this nonsense continues it will be the UAE + Saudi Arabia + China, cutting off the west and that's that.
What about another nice dinner with all the Silicon Valley CEOs paying their respect to the orange dictator? I'm sure that will appease him.
What a bunch of spineless puppets.
The point is better (and stands on its own) without treading into personal attacks. Don't let a throwaway account bait you into turning it into a battle of name calling instead of sticking to readily available facts as you link at the end, it's what they often want and if they were sincere it severely diminishes the chances they'll believe your links were in good faith anyways.
Facts matter, as does telling people it is on them to understand them. Otherwise, we will spin in perpetuity refuting people who are not discussing in good faith. I stand by my assertions. I do not believe it is impolite to call out a potential lack of education, or ignoring of facts and reality. Without shared facts and reality, discussion and debate is impossible.
This is every part I agree with, with none of falling for the trap of looking bad for doing so. They've already edited the comment and posted a new one. Now the insults stand rather than just what you've said here, which was perfectly even keeled and factual.
If you're going to put the energy into refuting something, why bother wasting it by using personal insults to kick it off instead? Uneducated is at least borderline, if a bit blunt, but unsophisticated just drains any value.
I appreciate you deeply for standing up to it, I just don't want to see doing so made to look bad when the facts presented were so solid and good.
I don’t believe asserting that someone is uneducated or unsophisticated is an insult (if true); it is simply a fact and description, and stands regardless of the content of the post. Where you see malice, I see honesty and truth. “If this, then that.”
There are educated people, uneducated people, sophisticated people, and unsophisticated people (and overlap amongst). You will need to tailor your approach accordingly when dealing with each persona.
Hmm, I suppose people can see words in very different ways. If you're mother asked why the printer never works for her would you tell her she's uneducated and unsophisticated for not knowing before sending a link to the manual? It sounds like perhaps you would, but I wonder how many would really agree that's a neutrally worded approach.
Not for me to decide alone any more than anyone else alone I suppose. Thanks for sharing your perspective on it.
Yes, and she would understand why, but that is certainly different than a throwaway account making antagonistic, inflammatory political statements without citations and ignoring facts, no? Context, intent, and nuance, like facts, matter (imho).
It seems likely she would, and we are often similar to our kin I guess, but I still wonder if that's what the average person would consider neutral. I have no good way to answer that absolutely more than the next person though.
I tend to think that's because it doesn't matter who it is, it's always most productive to reply in a way which focuses on substance alone when one can't otherwise be positive. Particularly in pure text, it's so easy for things to come off worse than intended (something which has hit me quite well in the past as much as any). I've always assumed that's why the comment guidelines are so universally worded, mentioning what throwaways should be used for but with no mention of how they should be exempted from the usual approach. I.e. it's very easy for two people to feel like they are being neutral in text as the conversation escalates.
I've got to hop off for to get ready for work tomorrow. Thanks again for both taking the time to share your perspective as well as taking the time to respond to mal-intended throwaways with solid facts - it matters (thumbs up).
“Trump appointees to the US Commission of Fine Arts, however, required the project use more white marble to align with a proposed presidential mandate from the president that all new federal buildings be neoclassical in style. This luxury white marble comes from Georgia and has been used extensively in the construction of national landmarks including the U.S. Capitol. Aside from Georgia marble, the materials used throughout the Fed’s renovation are required to be sourced domestically.
“And to match the original marble facades and detailed interiors, the Fed is required to use specialized processes more costly than those allowed in Washington buildings without historical significance or not on the National Mall.”
Do you know anything about how data science works? The algorithm is to be tuned over historical data to optimize for an unchanging reward function. The problem isn't that complicated if you think about it.
> The algorithm is to be tuned over historical data
So you’re saying that historical data can’t have biases? Data cannot be collected and shared (or not collected a la jobs report) to manipulate the output? Seems a bit of a naïve take if you ask me.
If data is not collected, it is missing. A decent algorithm will be robust to missing data.
How on earth do you think the Fed sets the rate? Each board member probably has a simple spreadsheet, although they use their gut feeling in the end. It's markedly less objective and completely un-transparent.
People here are funny in that when I preach for transparency and objectivity, they preach for obscurity and individual board member bias. Their skepticism of data science shows how uneducated they are about defining and optimizing an objective function.
I’m not saying I’m against an algorithm. I’m saying that I’m against _only_ an algorithm. And we do want transparency and objectivity - nobody is denying this. I’ve worked with enough data to know that there are implicit biases, and just because data exists doesn’t mean it’s good. Let’s just say I’m skeptical that an algorithm alone can replace the Fed.
> although they use their gut feeling in the end.
That gut feeling check is pretty crucial, I think. Why not just work to make the Fed a more transparent org? And let’s say it is by an algorithm - will it be open sourced so it can be vetted?
Edit: also more crucially, who’s responsible when the algorithm fucks up?
That's just something they say to scare the children.
In any event, the point of a decent algorithm is that if the result isn't complying with the action, upcoming updates to the weights will fix it. Moreover, changes to the weight would be such that they optimize for maximum learning.
It is so weird seeing people preach for an obscure entity to do something so basic, and being shut down when asking for transparency. Today's AIs could write good model-development algorithms for tasks that are a hundred times more complicated.
Oops, the unaccountable algorithm eased when it should have tightened and Volcker Shocked when it should have eased. No prob, the weights will get tweaked and all will be well. Once the economic crisis blows over, anyway . . .
> That's just something they say to scare the children.
Is that really your response to “past results aren’t indicative of future performance”? Honestly at that point why not just let ChatGPT run loose and set guidance? Please, I implore you to think about the issue a bit deeper.
Criminal investigations in this administration are just a means of pressure and harassment, they have zero bearing on any suspicion of criminal activity. I predict that within a few days Powell will be the recipient of death threats. That's the second part of the pattern.
But it’s an investigation? Charges may not come out of it.
And think about the logic of your argument. Should this administration NEVER conduct any criminal investigations because they are all just “pressure and harassment”?
Building is much cheaper than renovation which is much cheaper than preservation. Ambitious project goals preserving unique historical assets make this project inherently expensive.
> ... complete overhaul and modernization that preserves two historic buildings that have not been comprehensively renovated since their construction in the 1930s ...
Without the Fed, how would you advise the nation deal with events like the Great Depression, the Great Recession, or COVID? Would you disagree that the Feds actions shortened these events and thus helped the public in the process?
Yes, I would disagree that the Fed has any positive influence whatsoever. It should be abolished and we should solve our problems with policy that relates to them and not pro-capital financial manipulation.
Have you read up on the wildcat banking era? The Fed, although far from perfect, was created to solve systemic problems with the decentralized American financial sector of its time. Chesterson’s fence is vital to discussions like these.
Doesn't the Fed do exactly that though? And without political influence? What would a different pro-labor system look like that could deal with national monetary crises?
I would argue that the Fed manipulating our financial system causes monetary crisis. The Fed is under the influence of capital which doesn't have the benefit of being even nominally checked by democracy. Were we (speaking as an American) to invest in our country and people we would have a healthier society and the means to deal with actual crisis.
> I would argue that the Fed manipulating our financial system causes monetary crisis.
Well, get ready because you aint seen nothin yet if you thought the Fed was manipulating our financial system. Do you honestly think a partisan system would be better?
As opposed to unhealthy unemployment which means the system collapses. Zero unemployment is not going to happen in any normally functioning society, though in the former USSR it existed. That included a lot of busywork (changing traffic lights, for instance, and requiring three cashiers to buy a bread).
Trump is, of course, wrong. But the independence of the Fed being at stake is a myth. Since the bursting of the dot com bubble, the Fed has operated as if the well being of the investor class is their number one priority.
I am surprised by the negative comments, the low interest rates = better thesis has always been somewhat popular on HN , now just because Trump is saying it (and operating to get there) it becomes an issue or something not to be aligned with.
There are countless comments and discussions on this board about how:
1) interest rates should be zero,
2) interest rates being non-zero create a misallocation of capital where there is a return on an investment without any ingenuity or creation behind
3) Banks are too risk averse to lending and their risk averse behavior is due to the risk free rate they enjoy when they park money at the Fed and when they buy T-bills
No matter how little ingenuity or creation is required to keep afloat a zombie company or a dubious startup, for sure it's a notch higher than what happens when that money is parked at the Fed or invested in t-bills...
Even if one disagrees with Fed policy, the way Trump is having the DoJ criminally prosecute Powell under unrelated pretexts is disgraceful and undermines the Fed’s independence.
Do you think that criminal prosecution for Jerome Powell for maybe doing something wrong with some building renovations under timing that just happens to coincide with the President’s personal and public vendetta against this person is worth steelmanning?
At some point it stops being steelmanning and starts becoming an invitation for some propaganda to distract from the obvious.
The more obvious something seems the more valuable steelmanning becomes, precisely because if the only steelman arguments you get (if any) are propaganda at best (instead of reasons you just hadn't considered) then you can be that much more confident your outrage is based in reason rather than feelings. My guess is there won't be many coming up with steelman arguments for this one though anyways.
Inviting propaganda is good, let the obviously weak arguments come front and center to be logically considered and ridiculed rather than put in small private group chats where they seem to grow and grow. This only works, in any way, if people stop saying things aren't worth having consideration about because it's obvious to them.
I understand the theory of steelmanning, but in cases like this it's just an high-brow version of the "both sides" style of journalism where you pretend like both sides are similarly plausible and deserve equal consideration. At the extremes, the steelmanning can turn into a game of giving the other side more consideration.
> Inviting propaganda is good, let the obviously weak arguments come front and center to be logically considered and ridiculed
That's literally what I'm doing: Ridiculing the obviously weak arguments.
And do you know what's happening? My ridicule and dismissiveness are being talked down, while you invite someone to "steelman" the argument instead. This pattern happens over and over again in spaces where steelmanning is held up as virtuous: It's supposed to be a tool for bringing weak arguments into the light so they can be dismissed, yet the people dismissing are told to shush so we can soak up the propaganda from the other side.
As a casual follower of economic news and completely ignorant of politics, my guess is that the administration believes the fed isn't acting according to mandate of stability and jobs. I have no clue how valid that is
Trump thinks lowering the interest rates means market goes up before election. That's all there is to it everyone knows it's not about stability and jobs
The interest rates? If you wanted to crash demand for dollar various things makes a bit more sense. Venezuela might be more about threatening BRICS if you squint at it. The EU–Mercosur agreement looks like it might pass - timing is kind of weird. There is maybe a kind of logic to it for exports but I think it lowers the standard of living for us plebs.
Puerile and uninformative, unfortunately. I respect that each of us has their world view, but if the last decade has shown anything at all, it is that when you are in the public square, you are asking for interlocution, not for escapism to be indulged. And the best thing is to do as you implicitly ask, and interlocute.
(a) >We live in a world where the powerful deceive us. We know they lie. They know we know they lie. They don't care. We say we care but do nothing.
That belief isn't the consequence of the situation, but the cause. There is ample ability to change events, but people must believe they can act and act together, as they have for centuries of democracy and for all human history. They do it in Iran. The Republicans and MAGA movement have made changes that would have been unbelievable ten years ago.
This is the political will of a plurality of American voters. They certainly can't claim they didn't know what they would get, and they seem unconcerned by any of these actions that many of us find terrifying.
It is difficult to see how we can democracy our way out of this situation.
This fallacy gets repeated over and over, but it's obviously false.
Have you really never voted for a candidate who went on to do things you didn't agree with? It's a quintessential fact of politics that voting for a candidate is not equivalent to an endorsement of everything that candidate does in the future. It's a premise that is obviously false when we consider our own votes, but it feels cathartic to force the claim on to the other side.
This administration's net approval rating flipped net negative very quickly after his election and has been trending downward. It's just navel-gazing to pretend like what he's doing has high approval.
There are a lot of reasons for that, of course, but the bottom line is that when things get bad enough -- much worse than they are today -- then more people will take to the street, along with whatever sacrifice that entails. We're just not there yet, because for many, there is far too much to lose.
But even then, people are getting angrier. The injustices in Minneapolis triggered waves of protests here in Seattle. Eventually these things compound and more people become aware that we're living in the Great American Collapse.
A general strike might have an effect, but I'm not sure how you organize such a thing.
X, Y, and Z usually involve community building, mutual aid, strike funds, housing security, and other precarity reducing actions.
I agree; this phrase was just a stand in for doing something -- anything -- about the state of affairs I don't like. Other than things I can do from my couch like commenting on HN.
because a lot of people have a kind of built-in main character syndrome and believe they're the protagonists of the world and things can't really go bad. They haven't internalized that there isn't some god behind the curtain that saves them. Same reason a lot of people ignore health issues.
That's how it goes in every country that ends up in the dirt, they all thought they were special, they all thought "surely we're not there yet" and you can pick their remains out of the rubble.
relevant piece from a few years ago: https://indi.ca/i-lived-through-collapse-america-is-already-...
Thinking about it now 10 years later it feels alot different. The pervasiveness of tolerance of lies and fakeness has gone so far past anything I could have imagined being a big contributor to that.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation>
Video, at BBC Online: <https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04b183c>
That’s true even if the next administration is Republican (Vance or whoever), but especially true if the next administration ends up being Democratic instead-which while not certain, has decent odds-the more Trump defies norms, the more voters who will wish to go back to a “normal” Presidency
A reminder that this is the second time that Trump has been elected.
(People were saying what you're now saying after he was kicked out—an event that he says was rigged—the first time.)
A lot of people were hoping he’d just go away without them having to do anything difficult, but it’s clear that the next government has to reestablish the United States as a constitutional republic with the rule of law, even if it means hard things like trials for officials who abused their power. This kind of slide into authoritarianism isn’t an accident, and without consequences the people pushing it will keep trying.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Wolff_(journalist)
He used the term suis generic in a (PBS?) interview to describe Trump:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sui_generis
It’s very clear now that we need a lot more regulation of what presidents can and cannot do. Not to mention judicial reform. But if you’re a democrat theoretically getting power in 2028 you’re going to have immense pressure to move forwards, focus on kitchen table issues, yadda yadda.
Some things, it just doesn't matter what the next administration does. The people of the US may, at any time, elect an administration that continues the course of breaking norms. The fact is that businesses, industries, banks, and nations have to guard against that possibility more than they need to cooperate with the next administration.
I think it's a bit fanciful to think you can take all the policies back to normal and have, Europe for instance, say "Oh good! Everything's back to normal!" I could be wrong, but I think that ship has sailed. Europe will work towards a new normal that looks to their own interests. And no action the next administration can take will change Europe's determination in this regard.
I think this will be as true of actors in the financial and industrial spheres as it will be of Europe in the security sphere.
You think the hordes of young men who put Trump into power were convinced by mass public demonstration? No: posts on the Internet.
I'm talking at expressing dissent. On that, internet achieves little.
This guy's book convinced me otherwise: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/political-...
"Political hobbyism" is things like commenting on the internet, as distinct from going out and convincing people to vote differently or running for offfice.
There is even a more boring and obscure bit of plumbing, the Treasury payment system, that they/DOGE went after last year:
* https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/musks-doge-clash...
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42904200
* https://hn.algolia.com/?q=treasury+payment+system
Every knee must (forced to) bend.
For decades he hasn’t had to tolerate “checks and balances”! Nobody could say “no” and retain their jobs under him.
The American public decided to put this type of person in charge.
The consequences were predicted.
Reading some of Mary Trump’s books will give some insight on the family that Donald grew up in. No love, all cruelty.
Donald is just a rich kid who inherited a big business and learned nothing but cruelty from his daddy.
Someone who supports trump, please let me know the logic on this. Genuinely. I'm trying to read other places about these charges but they're just so slanted that they're not really trustworthy. Is there anything to this, or is it really just to pressure the federal reserve?
It’s a kleptocracy. He doesn’t care. He just wants cheap money from the Fed as patronage.
I thought they were upset about her emails or whatever?
Meanwhile, 34 actual felony convictions, court finding misuse of millions in charity funds, an attempted coup, being found liable for sexual assault, SCOTUS having to formally place the president above the law to avoid prosecution... none of it even moved the needle for those same folks.
None of it is about law and order.
From a 10s skim on wikipedia:
>Some experts, officials, and members of Congress contended that Clinton's use of a private email system and a private server violated federal law, specifically 18 U.S. Code § 1924, regarding the unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or materials, as well as State Department protocols and procedures, and regulations governing recordkeeping.
I'm not saying those allegations are true, but to claim "none could name a crime" suggests you didn't even try.
>Meanwhile, 34 actual felony convictions, court finding misuse of millions in charity funds, an attempted coup, being found liable for sexual assault, SCOTUS having to formally place the president above the law to avoid prosecution... none of it even moved the needle for those same folks.
If you're talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecution_of_Donald_Trump_in..., that has the same air of credibility as him going after Fed governors for mortgage fraud.
In the context of the previous comment, the "non-rabbid" (and probably median) supporter would be someone voting Trump because they think they trust him more on the economy/immigration or whatever. They might be indifferent to his claims that he'll lock up his political opponents, or think that they're actually guilty of something, but that's not the same as being "rabbid" (ie. showing up to rallies and chanting "lock her up").
You're basing this off... what? You're missing the options of "I'm indifferent about this", or "I don't agree with him on this but still think he's better as a whole than the alternative".
It is. What's more, such support is roughly the same across both parties, but both parties vastly overestimate the other side's support.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116851119
https://x.com/JustinGrimmer/status/1966997411060215960
The difference between the two parties is that one elected a leader that agrees with that minority. This 2012 scene from The Newsroom outlines the difference:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGsLhyNJBh8
The GOP let (?) the inmates run the asylum.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phYOrM3SNV8
Moving on to the actual video, if the implication is that someone says [absurd thing] on national TV, it must mean that the party (or its electorate) as a whole must support [absurd thing], then:
The guy end up apologizing, so what's the issue? I guess the expectation is that he should be canceled/fired or whatever? What about similarly absurd stuff from the left? It's not hard to find stuff like "racism = power + oppression" that's casually mentioned on npr or whatever without major pushback, even though most democrats don't believe in this type of stuff. Or is talking about killing people a special case? If so, what does that mean about discussions on the death penalty?
Pretty funny how there aren’t any more Proud Boy marches, yeah? Couldn’t be that they’re all getting paid six figure salaries to round up brown people at Kavanaugh stops…
But yes. Most left wing thought leaders count state-sponsored violence as political violence, and that often includes the death penalty.
>Pretty funny how there aren’t any more Proud Boy marches, yeah? Couldn’t be that they’re all getting paid six figure salaries to round up brown people at Kavanaugh stops…
Yes, that's how protests typically work. If things are going your way, you stop protesting. Nobody is protesting for gay marriage in California because they already won.
And you waive it away. 'Bro said my bad dude, what more do you want? You think he shouldn't be an administration mouthpiece just because he wants extra-judicial killing? Cancel culture'. You are literally Martin Niemöller:
"First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist" ...
He was literally you. He justified their calls for 'only killing Communists and only because they are bad and want to do bad things....' just like you.
Edit: oh you are just being disingenuous got it. I'm not burning another comment on you and getting throttled so here: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=brian+kilmeade+...
Source? Maybe you should update his wikipedia page because it doesn't even mention his involvement with the second Trump administration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Kilmeade
How's this different than say...
>polls show 99% (or whatever) of people are against crime
>voters elect a soft-on-crime politician, crime goes up
>"I consider the fact that the soft-on-crime politicians got elected to have falsified all research that people are against crime"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phYOrM3SNV8
I continue to be surprised by people who have seen things unfold as they have over less than a year of this administration and still somehow believe we'll continue to have "free and fair" elections anytime in the near future.
We have over, and over again seeing virtually all of the "checks and balances" we learned about as kids being overridden without consequence.
This community of all other should be aware of how easy it is to exert total control of information (I'm still surprised this article is on the home page). Everyone consumes almost all of their information through digital, corporate controlled means. Even people getting together a organically socializing in bars, something that was common 30 years ago, has been replaced with online interactions. Trump does not need mandate from the people to continue to rule the country.
> Trump Regrets Not Seizing Voting Machines After 2020 Election: In an interview, the president said he should have ordered the National Guard to take the machines
And many others will vote for system-wreckers (broadly: conservatives) again, because the democrats cannot fix much of the damage done within the next legislative periods, let alone just one... even if the miracle of a trifecta happens and SCOTUS loses its majority on top of it. Rinse, repeat.
Respectfully disagree. Republican presidents get a lot more economic leeway than Dem presidents, especially from the media. This has puzzled me my entire adult life. Inflation will bother media and public, but not to the same extent it did 2021-22.
You are a fool who has blinded yourself.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/building-project-faqs.ht...
Could it have been cheaper? Possibly. But let’s be real here. It’s blatant intimidation.
Enough to know we shouldn't bother replying
You need to know only two facts about America to guess that:
* Fifty three percent of Americans now read below the sixth grade level.
* As (ostensibly) a representative Democracy America's fate is dictated by the majority of it's citizens.
Our future is to become a broken nation governed by middle-school student level thinking. The only way to build a better America is to build a better populace, and that would be contrary to the interests of the angry, spoiled, children who seem to hold all the power now.
But there’s actually meaningful criteria that sheds some light on the critical thinking capabilities of people who can or can’t read at certain levels, especially as it pertains to propaganda. Below a certain level, people are not well-educated enough to critically assess a text against the motivations of its authors (somewhere around 9th grade). Americans are prone to conspiratorial thinking so you might think that that’s alright because they’re often skeptical of any text, but it just seems like it causes them to dig even deeper into the propaganda that’s targeted to them.
It’s kind of like learning that some people don’t have an inner monologue, or that they aren’t capable of imagining shapes or objects abstractly in their mind. Except it’s a lot more serious as it deals with critical thinking directly: these people don’t understand that what they’re reading was written for a purpose.
The cavalry is not coming, and this fire is going to take its course.
One day, maybe we will rebuild from scratch.
Wrong!! Please don’t say that! We all have power inside the US. Congress had the opportunity in 2021 to correct the wrong, but Republicans kowtowed and they are still doing so. That was the easy way. Now for the hard way, American people will have to do something about it.
Edit: Grammar
The current situation is bad, but this is just doomerism.
The current administration will end. Trump can't live forever. His approval rating is already low and falling.
We're in for a bumpy ride, but then it's going to start reverting toward the mean. Not necessarily back to the way things were, but periods of extreme like this are followed by a reversion to the mean more often than not.
They way the current administration act, I start to think that their plan A is to stay for a long long time. There is so much open corruption that half of them would land in prison really quickly and they don't seem particularly bothered by that fact.
Cite evidence please.
"To say anything that challenges the current trajectory is doomerism. We're in for a bumpy ride for sure, but this will all correct itself. _it has to_."
After all that’s happened, his approval rating is still above 40%. Those people aren’t going away or changing their minds any time soon.
And from what I've seen, the rest of 'the west' has similarly sized undercurrents of similar sentiment.
Strangely, that 40% will be made up of, largely, people whose grandparents lived through WWII.
The US government is entirely non-responsive and only nominally representative.
Barring a wave of Republican retirements in the House, the absolute soonest there are any guardrails are after the 2026 midterms when a new congress is seated in 2027.
Just bought a new 5080 this week. Hoping I can hunker down in my cave for the next couple years and see what's left of the world in 2030.
Oh yea, beer, lots of beer.
I keep telling everyone and have been for a year, it’s not just our problem, due to global US positioning it’s now a world problem. Just ask Venezuela. Regardless of what you think about the end result the ends did not justify the means.
I for one will be collecting my (completely legal) hunting rifles and weapons I’ve had in storage since I was a kid, have them professionally serviced and grab some ammunition, on the terrible case I need to defend myself which I thought I’d never ever have to consider and I’d just sell them some day. But alas we have a lot of really really stupid as well as downright toxic voters in this country.
The outcome of this is all too predictable.
He did not know. He was also not expecting to win, and so had to scramble to get people appointed.
He asked around and got people who were experts in their respective fields. The problem is that those experts (a) knew his ideas were bad, and (b) had integrity. It was, by and large, Trump's appointees that worked hard to counter his agent and not the government bureaucracy.
Trump did not make the same 'mistake' this time around: he appointed folks not for their competence but for their loyalty to him. That was and is the only criteria for serving under Trump.
That tariffs have been so absolutely scattershot, says Trump actually is the one calling the shots there.
Quick heuristic I have is: vanity project = Trump; neocon pet project = Heritage Foundation; anything related to racial purity = Stephen Miller; quackery = RFK and other grifters.
The tariffs are partially his bias, but also Navarro who lost his mind somewhere around 2015 and became an economics pariah.
They really didn't. It was a dog and pony show under the belief that he would not make his way back into power. The dems/reps did not want to set a precedent of holding a president to account for doing terribly illegal things. They didn't intend to actually do anything to prevent this.
And so here we are.
Judiciary: appointments and ideological alignment with some of the Supreme Court. Thomas and Alito are fully controlled, Kavanaugh just loves a powerful executive, the rest aren't controlled but often in agreement.
Then there's his use of executive power to punish his adversaries, e.g. Perkins Coie.
He's not directly controlling the judiciary yet, but he has appointed wildly extremist judges and threatened judges who rule against him with impeachment, so he's certainly making an effort.
(If you doubt this, go watch some clips and compare how he talks now to how he talked during his first administration. If you were concerned about Biden's state in 2024, you should be concerned about Trump now.)
I am not a big fan of his earlier policies (or of Greenspan's and anyone after him for that matter). His "unlearn the importance of M2" did not age well. He made the tail end of the ZIRP more painful than it needed to be. But those were honest mistakes from a public servant who did his best and believed in what he is doing.
And standing up for what he believes is right, against this insanity from the president is the gold standard of what we need from public servants. My 2c.
His statement is firm and well articulated. I have nothing bad to say about the man right now
And anyone who is a hard-currency quantity-theory-of-money conservative, should also be appalled by it.
Trump is way worse than what the harshest critics of the Federal Reserve think about it. Nobody right or left should support it. Only the billionaires will profit off the monetary disorder.
Maybe not even them. Certainly not all of them.
Oh boy would I love to join you in whatever alternate dimension you live in.
GOP: "Hold my beer."
It seems like theres a bit of an inflection point right now in the US. I wonder how much entropy the system can handle it has to be near a breaking point.
Well doom is here. Congrats.
Look how quickly big business rolled over for The Felon--because they saw what mot people have been denying since the election.
Or labelled:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_derangement_syndrome
> Some countries that have prosecuted or threatened to prosecute central bankers for the purpose of political intimidation or punishment for monetary policy decisions: Argentina, Russia, Turkey, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.
* https://xcancel.com/jasonfurman/status/2010532384924442645#m
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Furman
And Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC)
> If there were any remaining doubt whether advisers within the Trump Administration are actively pushing to end the independence of the Federal Reserve, there should now be none. It is now the independence and credibility of the Department of Justice that are in question.
> I will oppose the confirmation of any nominee for the Fed—including the upcoming Fed Chair vacancy—until this legal matter is fully resolved.
* https://xcancel.com/SenThomTillis/status/2010514786467959269
who sits on the United States Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs (which oversees the Fed):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_Committee...
The "independence and credibility of the DoJ" line is quite something else.
Powell normally talks around the political pressure he's been subjected to. Funny to see him call it out right here.
I can see why someone would have a issues with "a bunch of rich bankers appointed by politicians" controlling American monetary policy. But I can't really see a better way at least, until we can achieve a post-scarcity economy or something.
Yellen had a long academic career before going into public service (with various roles at the Fed before becoming Fed chair):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Yellen
Bernanke had a strictly academic career before going into public service (and was/is probably one of the foremost experts on the Great Depression, something that was handy in 2008/9):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Bernanke#Academic_and_gove...
Greenspan was in the finance world pre-Fed. Volcker was in government for his entire career pre-Fed:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Volcker#Career
I think people over-estimate how many "rich bankers" are in the Fed, especially at the FOMC.
Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast with some Fed members in recent years, especially the more obscure regional ones, about their work, and how they often go out and talk to local businesses about what's happening 'on the ground'.
JFK was likely assassinated for attempting to retain the species backing of silver; less than a decade later Nixon would take us off the gold-backed dollar "temporarily" (i.e. 1971 - present) — the dollar's plummet since 1913 (and 1971 specifically) has been monumental.
The Fed simply has too much power to destroy the dollar savings of Americans (which is why cash and low interest bonds are so detrimental for long-term wealth preservation).
----
But I am glad the the Fed Chairman's brass-gilded balls are so big, in this struggle against our absolutely out-of-control unified executive theory President.
Personally, bitcoin and gold/silver make up the majority of my savings. Have been slowly DCA-ing out of stocks and primarily into those, these past few years... accelerated since learning the majority of stock trades in 2025 occurred in dark pools (i.e. no price discovery via public markets).
The long term policy goal (stability in the path of nominal incomes (prices + real activity) in the very short run, and prices in the medium-to-long run) would be unaffected, but the whole operational aspect would be simplified quite a bit.
I don't know about "inherently unstable system", given that as central bank independence has grown so has, generally speaking, monetary stability:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moderation
The Federal Reserve was not created “just because”. The US banking system was wildly unstable when run… largely as the libertarian view would have it.
Both the silver standard and bimetallism have been more common than the gold standard.
Tying complex multi faceted economies to the physical abundance of specific raw materials fails to capture the full value of activities and assets.
The true gold standard was a blip from the 1870s to the early 1920s.
In any case gold served as a strong check on monetary policy even if it had problems. Certainly it is possible to have a "sound" monetary policy without gold. I'm just not convinced in societies ability to affect sound governance of monetary policy without some "stronger" guard rails. Especially not in today's climate.
Does the Fed can any data from labor sources or unions? I am asking in honest because the few reports from them that I have looked into(mostly around unemployment) all seem to be polls solely sourced from investor class assets like companies.
If they are only sourcing from one biased source for their data, they wouldn't have to have a bad mandate or manipulate it, to operate like it was for the benefit of the data source, right?
The dual mandate says nothing about asset prices. The only prices it mentions are those involved in CPI calcs.
The investor class has capital, and America is capitalist. I’m not the biggest fan either but we gotta acknowledge the reality we live in.
Section 8: Congress shall have the power ... To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof ...
You probably don't them in control, either.
It encapsulates so much of how I want to describe things.
Selfish behavior - this adult is just a child who didn’t learn to share.
Mean and vindictive behavior - didn’t learn to empathize as a kid
Lying? You’re still a child. Grow up and then join the adults.
Adults push back on aggressors when necessary. Children cower behind the adults.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
When it crashes (and it's not clear when that will be), it will crash back to a cash-value baseline. And, sigh, it's not clear where that is. But it won't magically start going back up. The cyclic reinvestment engine needs to be reinvented every time.
Latest 2024 budget expenses, a fairly good percentage were chocked with no ID, no supervisor or delgated authority.
Better now, no ID, no money from Treasury.
The slimiest swampiest criminals, they need to be put on trial.
Powell corrects him in real-time. Worth watching given today's statement.
This is one of the clear examples that Trump is seeing Putin's Russia as a model for his vision for the USA.
Of course I would strongly prefer to not be a presidential system at all. But if we're discussing post-Trump constitutional reforms that could plausibly pass, I think removing the Attorney General/DOJ from the president's purview and also placing some checks on the pardon power seem doable
Having grown up in the US and having blinders on, I always thought all those parliamentary systems seemed unstable and sometimes comical. But now I see the value in it. Once a leader has demonstrated he is not up to the task, has grown out-of-touch, or has descended into madness, he can be replaced by his party, and if that didn't happen, a no-confidence vote could trigger an election. No guarantee either of those things would happen, but the option exists. The fixed four-year term idea now seems artificial and inflexible.
I suspect the current US leader and maybe even the previous US leader (maybe in his 4th year) would have suddenly found himself a back-bencher.
Equally the same for data that goes into the algorithm - if you can control that you control interest rates.
Can’t believe you are saying that!! Then anyone can manipulate it like they manipulate stocks by writing hit pieces one day and gushing articles a few days after,
Sure the Fed isn’t perfect. But we don’t really have a better solution as of now because our financial systems are extremely powerful and anyone in office would love to abuse it if they can.
Sure, the renovations are ridiculous. But it’s not like this administration is austere in the slightest, so that’s a bit rich. Not to mention the cronyism prevalent across the cabinet.
Thank you, Mr. Powell. We really want interest rates set to serve the people, not the whims of the President.
The biggest question for me now is how the usual defenders of this lawless administration will try to defend this or both sides it.
This just needs to happen every across all government, it’s like brushing your teeth to kick out the bacteria, but each individual institution needs a different kind of “floss” depending on the nature of the ways they have strayed from their original purposes.
Having blatantly political messages blasted across websites for national parks and on airport security video screens during the shutdown, for example, doesn't seem like a move towards "serving the public", but rather a move towards consolidation of direct control to the politicians at the top of the executive branch.
For many of the smaller players I think there's unfortunately a lot of people who realized there's significant money to be made in grifting. Many of the largest crypto proponents have pivoted into endeavors, whether crypto or otherwise, that profit off of being rewarded for being part of the 'correct' tribe.
The Democrats should play hardball but the geriatrics can barely take a swing.
Even the young ones act like this.
The tech titans like Thiel see the Trump administration as a "big bet" a startup investment. They can "shoot for the moon" and try to realize the network state. If they fail, they figure they'll just toss the Democrats some campaign contributions and all will be good.
2025-10-03
"You Decide: What Does the Fed’s Rate Cut Mean?”: <https://cals.ncsu.edu/news/you-decide-what-does-the-feds-rat...>
2025-12-10
“A divided Federal Reserve cuts interest rates for a 3rd straight time”: <https://alaskapublic.org/news/national/2025-12-10/a-divided-...>
"‘Silent Dissents’ Reveal Growing Fed Resistance to Powell’s Cuts”: <https://archive.is/JDlB0#selection-1235.0-1235.64>
2025-12-30
"Fed Minutes Reveal Split on Interest Rates Headed Into 2026”: <https://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/articles/fed...>
"Deep Divide Inside Fed Raises Questions About Timing of Further Rate Cuts”: <https://archive.is/7XdPo>
"Trump says he will 'probably' sue Fed's Powell”: <https://www.aa.com.tr/en/americas/trump-says-he-will-probabl...>
HTH
So our monetary policy will be just set at the arbitrary whims of the president if this new scheme works.
Why does all of this feel like it's just sliding completely out of hand? Am I just being a doomer?
This outlet has some good things from time to time, like https://www.liberalcurrents.com/we-are-going-to-win/
That said, yeah this is really bad.
I thought this post was a good one on why doomerism is just a waste of time - featuring Ken Jennings of Jeopardy fame:
https://bsky.app/profile/goldengateblond.bsky.social/post/3m...
Some accounts at random that tend towards "this all sucks really bad - however!"
https://bsky.app/profile/olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social
https://bsky.app/profile/golikehellmachine.com
It's a particular and kind of peculiar attitude, because objectively "things ain't great" and it's really easy to dwell on that. But we also need some hope.
I’m applying to jobs in Europe.
Clearly, that is a problem that needs to be solved.
This move is public punishment for not falling in line.
I would like to add one quote to be logged on this website:
> "I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler," he wrote privately to an associate on Facebook in 2016. [0]
- Trump's future Vice President, JD Vance
If we survive the fall of Pax Americana in the next few years, and journalists and historians are again allowed to exist in a free environment, I really hope that they get to the core of how we got from 45 to 47.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/jd-vance-once-compared-trum...
Its time to put up or get put down by masked goons.
None of us understand the devastation that a WW incurs.
It's quite impressive how scared everybody is of this administration. News outlets, international leaders even in face of threats, big tech, including the delusional Musk who thought he could've handled the president's rage.
Hell even his own party is scared of speaking up, you either fall in line or you risk falling victim of the most vicious direct attacks, even if you've been a huge and core voice for the president, see senator Marjorie Green.
From Russia, to Belarus, from the Philippines to Argentina, from Hungary to Poland it's crystal clear what a failure of democracy it is to have a presidential republic.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/12/fed-jerome-powell-criminal-p...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/federal-reserve-chair-powe...
The Fed absolutely crushed it. Totally unambiguous.
1. Inflation
2. Comparing peer economies
3. Counterfactual timelines
If you still want fiat — and they're available — Swiss Francs are deflating least-quickly.
Otherwise, as a fellow pleb, my best advice is to get enough bullets for occassional hunting (and other tax-free methods of living) and protection.
If you're of a draftable age/gender, I'd either get extremely fit or extremely disabled. If you're a lard-ass, I'd get to a state where you can live without medicines.
—fellow blue collar american
A true free market isn’t at whims of any one person.
"No. Neither does anyone else. Adventures happen to other people. When it happens to you, it just looks like trouble."
- The Ballad Of Sir Dinadan, by Gerald Morris, quoted from memory
Politics is now consumed as entertainment, and ask any writer of books or screenplays and they will tell you _conflict_ makes for good entertainment.
Politics should be _boring_. The fact that we demand to be entertained by our political system is a big part of the problem.
Both are basically useless as it relates to your personal quality of life but at least with the latter you can see nice geometric combinations between players on a pitch and some incredible athleticism in between
If your life can be impacted more than 5% by [ insert name of the person residing in the White House] then you are either a politician or someone not doing a proper job at navigating through life and hedge your bets (financial or otherwise)
I've lost track of the number of times I, and others, have said that.
Turns out there really are no brakes on the Trump Train. In the parlance of the metallic-headgear fans, any other POTUS would have been treated to a nice convertible ride through downtown Dallas by now.
Dunning-Kruger effect billionaire: We don't need that. What's it even for anyhow? I'm not paying for it. All these naysaying wimps and freeloaders say we can't live without out. I will use my unelected government position and bling chainsaw to cut fraud, waste, and abuse to eliminate red tape and unnecessary big government regulation. And I demand a negative tax rate, subsidies, and lucrative government contracts! Rawr!
MAGA, of course, tried to accuse Biden of weaponizing them during his term so that they could justify the Trump 2.0 revenge tour. Now we're here.
An opportunity for the EU to stop its bureaucracy and cleanup its act. If it cannot convince anyone that they are next, then one can argue that democracy is completely finished.
If this nonsense continues it will be the UAE + Saudi Arabia + China, cutting off the west and that's that.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fed-renovation-budget-balloon...
https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/building-project-faqs.ht...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
If you're going to put the energy into refuting something, why bother wasting it by using personal insults to kick it off instead? Uneducated is at least borderline, if a bit blunt, but unsophisticated just drains any value.
I appreciate you deeply for standing up to it, I just don't want to see doing so made to look bad when the facts presented were so solid and good.
There are educated people, uneducated people, sophisticated people, and unsophisticated people (and overlap amongst). You will need to tailor your approach accordingly when dealing with each persona.
Not for me to decide alone any more than anyone else alone I suppose. Thanks for sharing your perspective on it.
I tend to think that's because it doesn't matter who it is, it's always most productive to reply in a way which focuses on substance alone when one can't otherwise be positive. Particularly in pure text, it's so easy for things to come off worse than intended (something which has hit me quite well in the past as much as any). I've always assumed that's why the comment guidelines are so universally worded, mentioning what throwaways should be used for but with no mention of how they should be exempted from the usual approach. I.e. it's very easy for two people to feel like they are being neutral in text as the conversation escalates.
I've got to hop off for to get ready for work tomorrow. Thanks again for both taking the time to share your perspective as well as taking the time to respond to mal-intended throwaways with solid facts - it matters (thumbs up).
“Trump appointees to the US Commission of Fine Arts, however, required the project use more white marble to align with a proposed presidential mandate from the president that all new federal buildings be neoclassical in style. This luxury white marble comes from Georgia and has been used extensively in the construction of national landmarks including the U.S. Capitol. Aside from Georgia marble, the materials used throughout the Fed’s renovation are required to be sourced domestically.
“And to match the original marble facades and detailed interiors, the Fed is required to use specialized processes more costly than those allowed in Washington buildings without historical significance or not on the National Mall.”
> The interest rate can be set via an algorithm.
Who writes this algorithm? Are algorithms without biases?
> The algorithm is to be tuned over historical data
So you’re saying that historical data can’t have biases? Data cannot be collected and shared (or not collected a la jobs report) to manipulate the output? Seems a bit of a naïve take if you ask me.
How on earth do you think the Fed sets the rate? Each board member probably has a simple spreadsheet, although they use their gut feeling in the end. It's markedly less objective and completely un-transparent.
People here are funny in that when I preach for transparency and objectivity, they preach for obscurity and individual board member bias. Their skepticism of data science shows how uneducated they are about defining and optimizing an objective function.
> although they use their gut feeling in the end.
That gut feeling check is pretty crucial, I think. Why not just work to make the Fed a more transparent org? And let’s say it is by an algorithm - will it be open sourced so it can be vetted?
Edit: also more crucially, who’s responsible when the algorithm fucks up?
Because as we all know, when it comes to financial markets, past performance guarantees future results. Oh wait . . .
In any event, the point of a decent algorithm is that if the result isn't complying with the action, upcoming updates to the weights will fix it. Moreover, changes to the weight would be such that they optimize for maximum learning.
It is so weird seeing people preach for an obscure entity to do something so basic, and being shut down when asking for transparency. Today's AIs could write good model-development algorithms for tasks that are a hundred times more complicated.
Oops, the unaccountable algorithm eased when it should have tightened and Volcker Shocked when it should have eased. No prob, the weights will get tweaked and all will be well. Once the economic crisis blows over, anyway . . .
Is that really your response to “past results aren’t indicative of future performance”? Honestly at that point why not just let ChatGPT run loose and set guidance? Please, I implore you to think about the issue a bit deeper.
Then you should have probably left it at that.
Criminal investigations in this administration are just a means of pressure and harassment, they have zero bearing on any suspicion of criminal activity. I predict that within a few days Powell will be the recipient of death threats. That's the second part of the pattern.
And think about the logic of your argument. Should this administration NEVER conduct any criminal investigations because they are all just “pressure and harassment”?
Don’t be silly
From https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/building-project-faqs.ht... which includes much more detail.
> ... complete overhaul and modernization that preserves two historic buildings that have not been comprehensively renovated since their construction in the 1930s ...
Well, get ready because you aint seen nothin yet if you thought the Fed was manipulating our financial system. Do you honestly think a partisan system would be better?
https://youtu.be/tU3rGFyN5uQ?si=0387L1blOdW2Ttpe
The country doesn't understand why but it elected an abuser, and voted to become poorer. And the country will be abused, and get what it voted for.
It will still not understand that it did this or why.
Perhaps once we're all gathered in the valley of despair we'll have a chance of understanding.
There are countless comments and discussions on this board about how:
1) interest rates should be zero,
2) interest rates being non-zero create a misallocation of capital where there is a return on an investment without any ingenuity or creation behind
3) Banks are too risk averse to lending and their risk averse behavior is due to the risk free rate they enjoy when they park money at the Fed and when they buy T-bills
No matter how little ingenuity or creation is required to keep afloat a zombie company or a dubious startup, for sure it's a notch higher than what happens when that money is parked at the Fed or invested in t-bills...
At some point it stops being steelmanning and starts becoming an invitation for some propaganda to distract from the obvious.
Inviting propaganda is good, let the obviously weak arguments come front and center to be logically considered and ridiculed rather than put in small private group chats where they seem to grow and grow. This only works, in any way, if people stop saying things aren't worth having consideration about because it's obvious to them.
> Inviting propaganda is good, let the obviously weak arguments come front and center to be logically considered and ridiculed
That's literally what I'm doing: Ridiculing the obviously weak arguments.
And do you know what's happening? My ridicule and dismissiveness are being talked down, while you invite someone to "steelman" the argument instead. This pattern happens over and over again in spaces where steelmanning is held up as virtuous: It's supposed to be a tool for bringing weak arguments into the light so they can be dismissed, yet the people dismissing are told to shush so we can soak up the propaganda from the other side.
If the admin is fighting with the Federal Reserve, it means they are not focused on figuring out how to further screw us over…
> If the admin is fighting with the Federal Reserve, it means they are not focused on figuring out how to further screw us over…
Messing with interest rates for short term political gain would screw us over.