Yeah!!! Sue them!!! We should get in under the wire according to my tax people.
How many 100 lawsuits are out there against Trump and his administrations crazy plans anyway?
It is all becoming interesting in a decidedly train wrecky way. The singular pursuit of US interests may not be in the US interests. Who’d thunk that? All them home roosting chickens getting a bit crowded up there on that pedestal, no?
When periodically we discuss here that agro-corporate welfare boondoggle of the US Farm Bill and the Export Enhancement Program, local inherents will cite food security as a key justification. A US food shortage being defined as consumers having only three flavours of Pop Tarts to select from on the breakfast menu.
Now, due to the wondrous US trade policy, and the thuggish bullying of allies and trading partners, a humongous mountain of soy will now be acquired via a tax payer funded bailout. This will provide the US with a near endless supply of TVP up to the next ice age.
Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together?
What is TVP in this context?
“Texturized Vegetable Protein” – soy protein used as a meat replacement.
(I used to have the massive ag processor ADM as a client; I learned all about TVP back in those days.)
IIRC back in the 1970s grocery stores sold ground beef that was extended with TVP.
Given the price of beef today and the popularity of “Impossible” beef-like products, I wouldn’t be surprised if such products became available again.
Speaking of food, Trump has decreed that America should buy beef from Argentina, in a nod to rising prices (why is it with that country? Trump’s already giving them $40 billion in bailouts)
Nothing runs quite as smoothly as a centrally managed economy.
My guess is that he will directly profit in some way, the same way he’s doing this military partnership with Qatar after he opened a golf course in that country and they gave him a plane.
ETA: Just a WAG, but both he and his wife released crytpo memecoins with the same outfit responsible for the $Libra coin scandal in Argentina.
So, I’m going with some kind of back door crypto scheme of some kind.
I think it’s just ideological affinity with the shit-person in the Casa Rosada, but knowing this bunch all the other options are likely too.
One notes that Trump’s whole deal with cutting foreign aid was that foreign aid is bad. Obviously, that’s no longer true.
US cattle ranchers are not pleased.
Oh course, most of them would probably still vote for Trump if a new election was held tomorrow, but they aren’t pleased.
There’s some of that – apparently the shit-person went all in for MAGA-style populism and harsh conservatism? I’m sure you know better than I do.
But, when shit-person did that, American hedge funds, thinking that the hard-right turn will work some kind of miracle, went big into Argentina. Now, they’re screwed and getting Trump and Bessent to bail them out. At least according to Krugman.
Also according to Krugman, we may already have been in a recession if not for the big spending on data centers. Now, of course, we don’t know where we are economy-wise because the shutdown is stopping employment and inflation data from being released.
Someone else could say they knew exactly what was likely to happen but the bailout was set up on the DL all along. Secured from risk but if chainsaw economics somehow worked then they’d get bragging rights on top of it.
What is “DL” in this context?
“on the Down Low” — hidden quietly off the record
Some day it will be taught as a perfect (of course) textbook example of moral hazard. People will write PhDs about it.
Maybe. Pretty risky strategy, and it’s not clear they will actually gain from the bailout, just not lose as much. I think they were true believers that the far right economic programs would be miraculous, even though they always seem to fail.
It has happened at least 3 times in my lifetime.
- A new right wing president gets into the Rosada.
- Promises a new era of economic liberty and austerity reforms
- Pegs the peso to the dollar
- Gets money from risk investors due to the skewed exchange rate.
- The real (non-financial) economy goes down because the overvalued dollar destroys the export sector and the cheap imports destroy local industries.
- This gets the right wing president in electoral trouble and the markets get spooked.
- Said president gets a huge loan from the IMF (in this case from both the IMF some time ago and now from Trump) ostensibly to “stabilize” the currency but in fact to keep the dollar down until his investor buddies get all their pesos back into dollars and take them out of the country.
- Economic trouble and replacement of the right wing administration.
- The new administration finds itself saddled with even more debt, debt that was not used for infrastructure or anything useful, only to give enough dollars to the investors to convert their pesos to.
- Debt crisis! “Why is Argentina always asking for money and then failing to pay it back?” ask the first-worlders whose governments enthusiastically supported the right-wing administration that took the debt.
Yeah, that’s essentially the sequence that Krugman walks through, too. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on you. Fool me n times, shame on you…
If you check my thread about the shit-person taking power:
Specially here:
You’ll see that we non-shit-person-voters already strongly suspected that it was going to happen again, and in fact we firmly knew it was going to happen for about a year now.
What was a surprise was the Northern shit-person intervention, if it wasn’t for that we would be in step 8 already.
Not sure about the numbers but I think the forty billion going to Argentina is roughly the entire US AID budget. So all of that good work canceled but instead we’re subsidizing Argentina.