Does anyone else feel seriously... demotivated(?) by these reckless games with the economy? Like, it's really getting to me. It's a new quality of helplessness seeing these shenanigans in my books. More tangible, raw, direct. Much more insulting. My job, the financial security I've been working for hard, honest struggle, if a handful of people can at will gamble with all of that like it means nothing at all, then why the fuck bother? Why should I get my ass up, if some entitled rich fuck can wipe away years of work and sacrifice for some blatant inside trades with their homies? I mean, for them it's just funny numbers, for me it's life changing money and existential security. I don't know, man. I feel like a fucking peasant.
Also contributing is the utter lack of opposition leadership. The current president can marshal his goons to invade and defile the Capitol. What leadership is in opposition? The guy that stands up and gives a 25 hour speech? Props for the feat of endurance; but then what? Or Obama, giving a hyper-intellectual abstract, detached talk? It’s a complete vacuum. For the opposition party it’s business-as-usual, as if you can do your regular Senate stuff and get something done.
> The guy that stands up and gives a 25 hour speech?
Who isn’t even the top house democrat. The opposition party’s actual leaders were going around saying the best strategy was to lay low… feels like some kind of bad joke.
The opposition party has no power in the US, as designed explicitly.
If you wanted Democrats to have more power, you should have voted for them more.
If you DID vote for democrats, understand that the Constitution largely says they have no power. They can't do anything without swaying Republican politicians. By design.
Republicans are not willing to do anything to help them, because their party committing literal blatant crimes has never hurt their election chances, but since 2000, bipartisanship makes it very unlikely to get re-elected.
Unfortunately, lots of stupid people did not vote for democrats, and are now complaining that democrats aren't saving them.
Democrats cannot save anyone right now. By Design.
> The opposition party has no power in the US, as designed explicitly.
This seems to be in direct contradiction to the other story we’re told repeatedly by DNC leaders that the reason they can’t get anything done when they are the majority is because of those “obstructionist” republicans. One has to wonder how the GOP is so successful in obstructing the DNC but the reverse is not possible.
The minority parties may be less powerful, but the US government was set up to make “tyranny of the majority” hard to accomplish. So what has gone wrong?
Because holding together the GOP coalition is (comparatively) easier.
> set up to make “tyranny of the majority” hard to accomplish
As you note, USA has always had minority rule, by design.
What's different today is one faction has a lock on power. Just like how conservative Democrats had single party rule in the southern states, up until the Civil Rights Era.
What's old is new again.
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The correct answer is majoritarian rule. There's no shortage of ideas for reform to get us there. The John Lewis Voting Right Act would be a good start.
Just know that any movement will have to arrise from outside of the two party system. The Democratic Party, such as it is, will not and cannot fix this problem. That's just not what political parties do. The parties get candidates elected. They (eg DNC) don't do policy, don't build movements.
You might enjoy Joshua Citarella's Doomscroll podcast.
Repeating myself: Very few people within a system will work to reform that system. Why? System justification theory? Pulling the ladder up after oneself? Mr Smith Goes to Washington? I honestly have no clue.
For example: public financing of campaigns. The painfully obvious correct solution. Initially, I naively thought every politician would be onboard. Fund raising sucks. All the players complain about it. So of course it'd be an easy sell.
(I worked on adjacent issues. Us ragtag groups would support each other's causes as able. These activist communities are very small. eg fairvote.org)
Now 20 years later, how many jurisdictions have public financing? And in the places which did adopt it, it's under constant siege.
Ditto ranked choice voting.
--
I support building a Climate Cabinet style PAC for every issue. Laser focused. Money ball for campaigns, matching contributors with select candidates. So an org fairvote.org would strategically support candidates committed to RCV. (Of course, it'd have to be new org. Because it's super hard to rewire an existing org to function differently.)
I have no clue about building movements. My pathetic attempts failed utterly. I'm wide open for ideas and input.
Not even remotely the same. Democrats haven't had both chambers of Congress and the presidency since the first half Obama's first term, and even then, he didn't have the courts. The best they could do was pass Dodd-Frank to prevent the next financial crisis and ACA, which the courts promptly watered down. Obama's threat of a public option in the ACA had so much money against it that the Democrats lost the legislature in the midterm election. Trump has both chambers of Congress and the courts on his side.
If you want to fix things, you need to educate voters. There are no procedures that can help you if all three branches of the government are against you.
> The best they could do was pass Dodd-Frank to prevent the next financial crisis and ACA, which the courts promptly watered down.
Why the heck are we ok with an entire wing of US politicians that even when they have total control over the government can only give us "watered down" "the best they could do" effort? And why are we ok with not holding them at least partially responsible for anything that happens when they don't have control over all parts of the government? Why do we have any faith at all that these objectively ineffectual and cowardly children are going to do anything to save us from would be dictators and mad men? If they're just going to lie back and watch the country slide into oblivion with only the mildest of protests, shouldn't we just fire them and at least save the tax money their salaries are costing us?
I've long felt the DNC's fatal flaw was that a lot of the really important issues that they're strong on are also hyper local issues that just don't connect broadly. That is, gun control might be extremely relevant and important to the NYC "high crime is killing our children" contingent, and so far down the list for the Rocky Mountain "pollution is ruining my wildlife preserves" contingent that actually gathering and holding support at a national level on those positions is extremely difficult. Combine that with a messaging and broad set of policies that despite lip service to being about "unity" is continually asking us to divide ourselves into special interest groups (and sometime even be at odds with each other). That would explain why states that are "red" on the national elections often have "blue" state level governments.
But I'm starting to wonder if the reality is no one actually believes they're capable of getting anything done at all. After all, if even their most ardent supporters believe that they can't get anything done without full control of the government, how is anyone else supposed to believe it? It's not just that the minority party is strongly disadvantaged, it's that the DNC is actually a terrible and ineffectual minority party and barely better as a majority party. God help us all if these are the people we need to rely on to fix things.
And my point is somehow the GOP managed to advance their agenda time and time again even when they didn't have total control. So why is the GOP an effective minority party and capable of disrupting the DNCs efforts even when they lack total control of the government, but the DNC is apparently incapable of the same?
They didn't advance their agenda. They simply blocked the Democrats' agenda. They could do that because the Democrats didn't have total control.
Your actual point before you moved the goalposts was that the Republicans were able to block the Democrats, so why can't the Democrats block the Republicans? I explained that in my previous two comments.
I feel like you aren't being given a good answer on this, but I think I can explain.
When Democrats wanted, say, the ACA, they followed the rules. Legislation was introduced, and Republicans used the rules of the legislation to fillabust. This could only happen because the party in power followed the rules that allow a party out of power to retain a semblance of representation.
With the roles reversed, things have changed. Republicans, quite skilled at the former, do not want their own game used against them. They have done a few things differently, but there is one key one:
Congress did not make the tariffs.
Instead of following the rules of law, they have abdicated responsibility to Trump through inaction. Trump is, unconstitutionally, declaring national emergencies on topics and using emergency powers to put out edicts. Legislation has effectively stopped their required oversight so the minority party cannot participate.
The minority party cannot force legislation or votes through, only the majority chairs can determine the schedule. The minority party cannot do anything to stand against votes for legislation that does not exist. Ergo, this time they are powerless.
Republicans aren't playing by the rules, they have installed what is effectively a single-branch government (a monarchy of all things) as a loophole to the checks against their power.
Notice that pretty much all opposition is now federal judges? That's by Republican design. All that can be done are raising lawsuits post-facto and hoping for an injunction. And that's why Republicans are now rallying behind ignoring or even firing federal judges. And the highest court is, essentially, owned by Trump himself now.
My issue is we're still talking about the GOP as it is behaving now. My question is how were we allowed to get to this point? Trump is declaring national emergencies and using emergency powers, but where did he get those powers from? Why did the DNC allow the executive branch to obtain those powers in the first place? When Trump lost to Biden why didn't the congress spend the next 4 years stripping the executive branch of all the scary powers they had been abdicating over the last century? And sure you might argue that they didn't control both houses, but the reality is they didn't even try. No one will look back on the Biden presidency as a time period under which the DNC fought valiantly to reign in the clear loop holes and abusive potential of the executive branch but were stymied despite their best efforts by obstructionist GOP opponents. For that matter, they didn't even spend the time trying to expand the capabilities of the minority party to better reign in an abusive majority.
Let's take your example on the tariffs here. Either this was a power granted before the Trump presidency and one that the DNC should have worked to revoke sometime in the last 4 years if it was so easily abused, or it was a power congress granted this session, in which case why didn't they use that all powerful fillabuster to hold it back? This is what I mean when I ask why we should believe the DNC is even capable of defending this democracy. We are where we are because the DNC apparently found it more convenient to be complicit in the abdication of governmental power to the executive branch on the mistaken belief that those powers would never be abused. Then when Trump was elected for the first time, they didn't take that as a wakeup call and spend the next 8 years fighting tooth and nail "all hand s on deck" to reign in the powers of the executive branch. It's not like Trump wasn't talking up tariff and trade wars before, but apparently the DNC couldn't envision actually losing to him again? Which is another strike against their ability to effectively govern. Twice now (Bush II and Trump) they have supposedly lost the presidency to electoral shenanigans and then managed to lose to the same candidate a second time and that second time lose unequivocally. How? How is this party so inept as to lose a second time by a worse margin to a candidate that they managed to effectively tie the first time?
Yes, why didn't Democrats change our system and model of governance that was working fine, anticipating the Republicans. It's a shame they didn't stop them in... check 1789. 39 years before their party was founded.
It's a shame they didn't overwrite the constitution (2/3 majority and state ratification) to be parliamentary. To bad they didn't prevent the head of their executive (ergo military) from having time-limited war time powers meant for emergencies and requiring their review... Right after two world wars, two proxy wars, the threat of cold war, or during a war in the Middle East. Or the use of time-limited emergency powers to direct funds used in organizations like FEMA.
Blame, blame, blame. It's always the DNC's fault. They have to know of all threats and be totally unified and work around every obstacle. It's not at all up to, I don't know, the American public not to elect a convicted felon that attempted to overthrow the government, who were found guilty of raping women,who are deplorable, disgusting slobs in every way, and that threaten to go to war with allies. Why didn't the DNC protect us from ourselves? Did you send them letters or calls demanding these actions?
It's a democracy. We got what we asked for and what we deserved.
> Yes, why didn't Democrats change our system and model of governance that was working fine, anticipating the Republicans. It's a shame they didn't stop them in... check 1789. 39 years before their party was founded.
Was it working fine? Was there really no possible way anyone could have seen the potential for all of this unchecked executive power to be abused before 2024? No warnings about presidential overreach until 2024? No signs at all that perhaps the right wing was getting a little off their rocker and maybe thinking about the consequences and precedents set by the actions we take might be in order?
I'm pretty sure the DNC has been complaining about the GOP "not following the rules" since at least Bush II. Certainly they felt that the election at that time had been stolen, so it should have been clear that it was entirely possible for an unsavory and even unwanted person to ascend to the highest office in the land. And then of course they lost the second time, meaning it was also possible for said unsavory and unwanted person to win a subsequent election. But I guess for the DNC, none of that was a sufficient warning about the dangers of consolidating large amounts of unchecked and uncheckable power in the majority party and the executive branch.
It's not always the DNC's fault. That is of course ridiculous. Trump decides for himself to abuse the powers he's been given. The choice to abuse the power isn't on the DNC. But the DNC's complicit behaviors, both in granting those powers in the first place and strengthening them or doing nothing to roll them back, is absolutely on them. Everyone is all up in arms that Trump decides he's just not going to enforce a law. And yet, a headline feature of the Obama administration was the executive decision to not enforce federal laws on marijuana. Rather than actually use the legislature to solve the problem, we just decided that yes indeed, the president does have the authority to pick and choose the laws they will enforce. Of course the GOP made plenty of hay at the time since "tough on drugs" plays well to their base, and then has subsequently abused that same authority for their own ends. But that's my point. Either the DNC wants to grant people like Trump these powers, or they are so blindingly stupid as to believe that someone like Trump could never hold office, despite decades of evidence to the contrary.
> Did you send them letters or calls demanding these actions?
Yes, yes I have because I actually am legitimately angry about this shit and have been for decades.
May I add; the Democrats In Name Only(DINOs) of Manchin, Synema, and others? destroying the slight majorities Democrats seem to put together when ostensibly "in power"... They need to exert more control over the membership, as the Rs do. But I get the impression that the Ds take as many as they can't get, but only to get screwed over later.
The Constitution doesn't actually say that the party with a majority share of seats in the house or senate gets all the power. It's a practical matter of the rules that the members choose to implement.
So for instance, groups that were nominally from 2 different parties could elect leadership that planned to work with the groups, rather than whichever party had the nominal majority.
This is kind of an abstract point, but it's useful for reasoning about things. The so called "centrist" members of a given party are actually aligning themselves with the most extreme members, not some 'center'.
> opposition party has no power in the US, as designed explicitly
The Republicans have shown this to be superbly untrue when they were in the opposition.
The Senate should be hellbent on delaying and disrupting. The House should be constantly throwing a spanner in everything.
Governors? Arrest the DOGE kids for breaking state law. Arrest the ICE agents defying court orders. They’ll be released, eventually. But you’ll buy time until the midterms. Ban Tesla FSD and promise to pardon people who non-violently cross the line. Ban the law firms who struck deals with Trump from state business for 20 years. Fight like the Republicans do; laws and republics don’t survive if the side defending them lays down its arms.
This unfortunatey highlights an assymetry between the two parties. The Republicans want to delay and disrupt, the Democrats want to keep things running. Shutting down the government works for Red team because that's their goal. If Dems start to throw spanners into the works, that will just add to all the spanners the Republicans are already throwing into the works.
> If Dems start to throw spanners into the works, that will just add to all the spanners the Republicans are already throwing into the works
“A treatment known as the Milwaukee protocol, which involves putting people with rabies symptoms into a chemically induced coma and using antiviral medications in an attempt to protect their brain until their body has had time to produce rabies antibodies, has been occasionally used” [1].
I’m not advocating for shutdown, mind you. Just delay, distraction and disruption.
What opposition? The recklessness of Trumps political agenda is benefitting the rich elite and despite appearances both parties leadership consist of those in the rich elite. America doesn’t have a party representing the workers because anyone getting any traction in politics almost immediately leaves the working class. That’s why the level of political opposition is currently at “let’s all wear matching ties to show our disapproval of this political development that will absolutely make us tons and tons of money but which we need to look like we oppose”
> That’s why the level of political opposition is currently at “let’s all wear matching ties to show our disapproval of this political development that will absolutely make us tons and tons of money but which we need to look like we oppose”
Don't forget the "let's all hold little signs up and make frowny faces" strategy from actual elected Democrat Congresspeople. What a joke!
I'd say it's very much by design because it's a common feature of places America's rulers love - Hungary, Russia etc. One of the many ways in which uppity PMCs get put in their place is by the rulers flaunting their lawlessness and gaslighting the PMCs, while of course making PMCs submit to the rules and work with reality.
So here's we have blatantly illegal behavior by the party that constantly sings about "law and order" and the grating helplessness you feel is what they want you to feel, because they are your masters and want to yo always be aware of this.
Inflation is gonna eat the cash. Now, if you think you are smart and invest, they pull the rug on all of it.
Honestly, where are the incentives to save up, to build something for yourself? I mean, the outlook wasn't that great even without this bullshit. It's all so damn bleak.
A lot of people maybe don’t realise how important treasury rates are to their everyday life. You might be thinking “why do I care? I’m not going to go an buy treasuries. I don’t hold treasuries. So if they go up, go down, fall off a cliff it doesn’t matter to me. whoop de doo”.
To which I say hold on there a second. Firstly you probably do own some treasuries. If you have any kind of pension it will have some treasuries in it. Also if you buy something like a stock etf they will hold their cash in treasuries probably or use treasuries as collateral when they need to do margin trades. Also your credit card, mortgage, car loan anything like that if you hold it is priced at a spread above treasuries. The spread is to take into account how much more risky you are than the US govt.
Also say you’re a founder and you’re doing some kind of investment round. Well the investors are going to price your business using a discounted cash flow model as part of their decision-making process. The discount is an interest rate that is calculated using treasuries. Basically you look at the future cash flows and you deduct interest that you could get on such an asset to get an idea of the value of that future cash today.
When someone wants to ship a containerload of goods and they accept a bill of trade or whatever that includes a counterparty credit spread which is a spread over treasuries. You heard a lot about the LIBOR scandal a few years back well interbank rates are derived from a credit curve that is bootstrapped using treasury rates. So any kind of cross-currency transaction or thing with fixed or floating interest (even if it’s not in dollars) is likely to be affected by US treasuries.
Literally every financial asset is tied in some way to treasuries because a “risk free rate” is at the basis of option pricing, discounting, lending and borrowing, margin, counterparty credit adjustment etc etc.
Is that one I’m remembering where my variable interest rate student loan was over 9% while the only job I could get right out of the Great Recession after college was part time at Walmart and the banks fine was less than the profit they made off of manipulating the rate?
They have so many of these scandals it’s a little hard to narrow it down
It will affect anything which comes due in 10 years. So say you want to take out a 20 years mortgage, the payments that are going to happen 10 years plus will have their rate influenced by the 10yr. OR say you’re trying sell a business. When they look at the future earnings of that business, a higher rate on the 10 year will mean they give you less for that business, because the money in 10 years time is worth less today.
Also if you’re going to retire in 10+ years sucks to be you, your 401k just became a lot less valuable and the income you can expect in retirement will be lower.
Now because nothing happens in a vacuum, the 10yr spiking will affect other yields too.
It means that they are not being bought. Normally, if the stock goes down, treasury yields go down because investors use them as safe havens for their money, so there's higher demand for them and hence the yield goes down.
So why isn't this happening now? There's probably a bunch of reasons. It seems there's a liquidity problem in the markets, which is also weird because stocks are being sold, so there should be enough liquidity, but it seems people are rather holding on to their cash and not invest in anything. However, it seems still treasuries are being sold like crazy. For a while, even gold went down, which is also highly unusual during a market crisis. One reason that is frequently cited now and also in this article is because some hedge funds have specialized on the so called "basis trade", which I never heard of before. It basically means buying large amount of treasuries and speculating on their futures. In itself, this does not bring much money, but it seems this is done on a huge scale, and it's currently going very wrong. Now they are getting margin-called and need to sell assets.
At some point, the FED would normally intervene and buy treasuries. However, the FED still has a ton of treasuries from the COVID crisis on its balance sheets and I think they will not intervene until the market has gone quite a bit lower, so I'm still invested very much bearish, although I lost quite a bit from that when Trump announced the delay, but two days later and we're already close to being back where we started and I could kick myself why I even reacted, but you can't win in this game when it's so distorted, so I'm mostly staying out now and just leave my few remaining PUTs open, and I guess many do the same. The US economy is now fully dependent on the whims of a corrupt president, whose friends currently surely make a ton of money on insider knowledge, so there's zero trust in anything anymore.
How can you be bullish after all of that? Tariffs are still on for China, and the administration has been caught manipulating the market. You're either in cash or holding the bag while they tank the market.
>It seems there's a liquidity problem in the markets, which is also weird because stocks are being sold, so there should be liquidity.
This is a normal relationship. The financial system has leverage. When liquidity dries up and sellers dominate, volatility rises which feeds back into valuable risk metrics and realize portfolio volatility. That causes participants to downsize their exposure to keep the same risk. In these cases the participants don't necessarily have extra liquidity to deploy until after volatility and uncertainty settles.
>For a while, even gold went down, which is also highly unusual during a market crisis.
During a true crisis this is actually not that uncommon. In the trading space, you saw what you can during these events. In extreme circumstances where correlations all go to one even the safe havens get sold off to raise cash. The gold liquidation was a sign of pressured margin metrics and very high stress. You can see how quickly gold recovered after the peak stress, confirming that situation.
>One reason that is frequently cited now and also in this article is because some hedge funds have specialized on the so called "basis trade", which I never heard of before. It basically means buying large amount of treasuries and speculating on their futures.
The basis trade is more of an arbitrage than a speculation. The global eurodollar system (not currency, global offshore dollars) is about 20 trillion dollars in size. The basis trade is essentially a method in which regulated US financial markets are exported to The world at large to be used in the global, emergent financial system. Instead of buying a treasury directly, one can use the futures/eurodollar market, and the basis traders will arbitrage the difference and keep everything in line.
>At some point, the FED would normally intervene and buy treasuries.
The issue that the FED is facing isn't so much their balance sheet capacity but the tariff-driven inflation outlook and how it interacts with their mandate. That said, they did clearly communicate today that they would be willing to step in if there were severe signs of systemic instability. The reality is... if tariffs really do cause an inflation wave, yields at 5% may be relatively low...
> A particular worry in the Treasury market is that a doom loop could arise from the “basis trade”. This is popular with hedge funds and has minted fortunes at some of America’s largest. It attempts to profit from the difference in price between Treasury bonds and Treasury futures contracts, caused by high demand for the futures from asset managers. Traders exploit this by buying Treasuries and selling futures contracts. To amplify the returns, they borrow using the Treasuries they have bought as collateral, then recycle the cash into even more Treasuries. Thanks to this procedure, hedge funds are short some $1trn-worth of Treasury futures.
Every few years some dumb shit like this blows up and then the "experts" hem and haw about why reform actually can never be done and "we MUST keep gambling with instruments you see!" it's just so transparently stupid at this point.
> then the "experts" hem and haw about why reform actually can never be done
The reforms were done. Glass-Steagall, for instance [1]. They’re then undone [2]. Idiots just keep voting the guys who caused the problem into office [3].
>And it would be reckless to assume the shocks are over, or that foreign investors’ faith in American assets, now shaken, can be magically restored. How much more can the system take before something really does break?
I think the biggest issue is that you have to put the assets somewhere and usually that meant a relationship to US currency. China has to go further with a proposal for how it is going to do a US proof global system. Telling the EU to stand up in unity will only work when the proposal makes the same kind of sense to the EU in the longterm as whatever the US is doing makes sense to the Republicans.
> China has to go further with a proposal for how it is going to do a US proof global system
Commit to selling half of their $800mm of Treasuries [1] and replacing them with Eurobonds as part of a free-trade agreement. That, in turn, funds Europe’s defence detachment from the U.S. [2].
Does anyone else feel seriously... demotivated(?) by these reckless games with the economy? Like, it's really getting to me. It's a new quality of helplessness seeing these shenanigans in my books. More tangible, raw, direct. Much more insulting. My job, the financial security I've been working for hard, honest struggle, if a handful of people can at will gamble with all of that like it means nothing at all, then why the fuck bother? Why should I get my ass up, if some entitled rich fuck can wipe away years of work and sacrifice for some blatant inside trades with their homies? I mean, for them it's just funny numbers, for me it's life changing money and existential security. I don't know, man. I feel like a fucking peasant.
Also contributing is the utter lack of opposition leadership. The current president can marshal his goons to invade and defile the Capitol. What leadership is in opposition? The guy that stands up and gives a 25 hour speech? Props for the feat of endurance; but then what? Or Obama, giving a hyper-intellectual abstract, detached talk? It’s a complete vacuum. For the opposition party it’s business-as-usual, as if you can do your regular Senate stuff and get something done.
> The guy that stands up and gives a 25 hour speech?
Who isn’t even the top house democrat. The opposition party’s actual leaders were going around saying the best strategy was to lay low… feels like some kind of bad joke.
The opposition party has no power in the US, as designed explicitly.
If you wanted Democrats to have more power, you should have voted for them more.
If you DID vote for democrats, understand that the Constitution largely says they have no power. They can't do anything without swaying Republican politicians. By design.
Republicans are not willing to do anything to help them, because their party committing literal blatant crimes has never hurt their election chances, but since 2000, bipartisanship makes it very unlikely to get re-elected.
Unfortunately, lots of stupid people did not vote for democrats, and are now complaining that democrats aren't saving them.
Democrats cannot save anyone right now. By Design.
> The opposition party has no power in the US, as designed explicitly.
This seems to be in direct contradiction to the other story we’re told repeatedly by DNC leaders that the reason they can’t get anything done when they are the majority is because of those “obstructionist” republicans. One has to wonder how the GOP is so successful in obstructing the DNC but the reverse is not possible.
The minority parties may be less powerful, but the US government was set up to make “tyranny of the majority” hard to accomplish. So what has gone wrong?
> because of those “obstructionist”
aka Vetocracy (h/t Francis Fukuyama).
> but the reverse is not possible.
Because holding together the GOP coalition is (comparatively) easier.
> set up to make “tyranny of the majority” hard to accomplish
As you note, USA has always had minority rule, by design.
What's different today is one faction has a lock on power. Just like how conservative Democrats had single party rule in the southern states, up until the Civil Rights Era.
What's old is new again.
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The correct answer is majoritarian rule. There's no shortage of ideas for reform to get us there. The John Lewis Voting Right Act would be a good start.
Just know that any movement will have to arrise from outside of the two party system. The Democratic Party, such as it is, will not and cannot fix this problem. That's just not what political parties do. The parties get candidates elected. They (eg DNC) don't do policy, don't build movements.
> holding together the GOP coalition is (comparatively) easier
So pick a better coalition. Ditch the identity-politics leftists in deep-blue cities and win back workers in swing states.
From your keyboard to god's inbox.
You might enjoy Joshua Citarella's Doomscroll podcast.
Repeating myself: Very few people within a system will work to reform that system. Why? System justification theory? Pulling the ladder up after oneself? Mr Smith Goes to Washington? I honestly have no clue.
For example: public financing of campaigns. The painfully obvious correct solution. Initially, I naively thought every politician would be onboard. Fund raising sucks. All the players complain about it. So of course it'd be an easy sell.
(I worked on adjacent issues. Us ragtag groups would support each other's causes as able. These activist communities are very small. eg fairvote.org)
Now 20 years later, how many jurisdictions have public financing? And in the places which did adopt it, it's under constant siege.
Ditto ranked choice voting.
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I support building a Climate Cabinet style PAC for every issue. Laser focused. Money ball for campaigns, matching contributors with select candidates. So an org fairvote.org would strategically support candidates committed to RCV. (Of course, it'd have to be new org. Because it's super hard to rewire an existing org to function differently.)
I have no clue about building movements. My pathetic attempts failed utterly. I'm wide open for ideas and input.
Not even remotely the same. Democrats haven't had both chambers of Congress and the presidency since the first half Obama's first term, and even then, he didn't have the courts. The best they could do was pass Dodd-Frank to prevent the next financial crisis and ACA, which the courts promptly watered down. Obama's threat of a public option in the ACA had so much money against it that the Democrats lost the legislature in the midterm election. Trump has both chambers of Congress and the courts on his side.
If you want to fix things, you need to educate voters. There are no procedures that can help you if all three branches of the government are against you.
> The best they could do was pass Dodd-Frank to prevent the next financial crisis and ACA, which the courts promptly watered down.
Why the heck are we ok with an entire wing of US politicians that even when they have total control over the government can only give us "watered down" "the best they could do" effort? And why are we ok with not holding them at least partially responsible for anything that happens when they don't have control over all parts of the government? Why do we have any faith at all that these objectively ineffectual and cowardly children are going to do anything to save us from would be dictators and mad men? If they're just going to lie back and watch the country slide into oblivion with only the mildest of protests, shouldn't we just fire them and at least save the tax money their salaries are costing us?
I've long felt the DNC's fatal flaw was that a lot of the really important issues that they're strong on are also hyper local issues that just don't connect broadly. That is, gun control might be extremely relevant and important to the NYC "high crime is killing our children" contingent, and so far down the list for the Rocky Mountain "pollution is ruining my wildlife preserves" contingent that actually gathering and holding support at a national level on those positions is extremely difficult. Combine that with a messaging and broad set of policies that despite lip service to being about "unity" is continually asking us to divide ourselves into special interest groups (and sometime even be at odds with each other). That would explain why states that are "red" on the national elections often have "blue" state level governments.
But I'm starting to wonder if the reality is no one actually believes they're capable of getting anything done at all. After all, if even their most ardent supporters believe that they can't get anything done without full control of the government, how is anyone else supposed to believe it? It's not just that the minority party is strongly disadvantaged, it's that the DNC is actually a terrible and ineffectual minority party and barely better as a majority party. God help us all if these are the people we need to rely on to fix things.
> Why the heck are we ok with an entire wing of US politicians that even when they have total control over the government
They didn't have total control. That was the entire point of the GP post.
And my point is somehow the GOP managed to advance their agenda time and time again even when they didn't have total control. So why is the GOP an effective minority party and capable of disrupting the DNCs efforts even when they lack total control of the government, but the DNC is apparently incapable of the same?
They didn't advance their agenda. They simply blocked the Democrats' agenda. They could do that because the Democrats didn't have total control.
Your actual point before you moved the goalposts was that the Republicans were able to block the Democrats, so why can't the Democrats block the Republicans? I explained that in my previous two comments.
I feel like you aren't being given a good answer on this, but I think I can explain.
When Democrats wanted, say, the ACA, they followed the rules. Legislation was introduced, and Republicans used the rules of the legislation to fillabust. This could only happen because the party in power followed the rules that allow a party out of power to retain a semblance of representation.
With the roles reversed, things have changed. Republicans, quite skilled at the former, do not want their own game used against them. They have done a few things differently, but there is one key one:
Congress did not make the tariffs.
Instead of following the rules of law, they have abdicated responsibility to Trump through inaction. Trump is, unconstitutionally, declaring national emergencies on topics and using emergency powers to put out edicts. Legislation has effectively stopped their required oversight so the minority party cannot participate.
The minority party cannot force legislation or votes through, only the majority chairs can determine the schedule. The minority party cannot do anything to stand against votes for legislation that does not exist. Ergo, this time they are powerless.
Republicans aren't playing by the rules, they have installed what is effectively a single-branch government (a monarchy of all things) as a loophole to the checks against their power.
Notice that pretty much all opposition is now federal judges? That's by Republican design. All that can be done are raising lawsuits post-facto and hoping for an injunction. And that's why Republicans are now rallying behind ignoring or even firing federal judges. And the highest court is, essentially, owned by Trump himself now.
My issue is we're still talking about the GOP as it is behaving now. My question is how were we allowed to get to this point? Trump is declaring national emergencies and using emergency powers, but where did he get those powers from? Why did the DNC allow the executive branch to obtain those powers in the first place? When Trump lost to Biden why didn't the congress spend the next 4 years stripping the executive branch of all the scary powers they had been abdicating over the last century? And sure you might argue that they didn't control both houses, but the reality is they didn't even try. No one will look back on the Biden presidency as a time period under which the DNC fought valiantly to reign in the clear loop holes and abusive potential of the executive branch but were stymied despite their best efforts by obstructionist GOP opponents. For that matter, they didn't even spend the time trying to expand the capabilities of the minority party to better reign in an abusive majority.
Let's take your example on the tariffs here. Either this was a power granted before the Trump presidency and one that the DNC should have worked to revoke sometime in the last 4 years if it was so easily abused, or it was a power congress granted this session, in which case why didn't they use that all powerful fillabuster to hold it back? This is what I mean when I ask why we should believe the DNC is even capable of defending this democracy. We are where we are because the DNC apparently found it more convenient to be complicit in the abdication of governmental power to the executive branch on the mistaken belief that those powers would never be abused. Then when Trump was elected for the first time, they didn't take that as a wakeup call and spend the next 8 years fighting tooth and nail "all hand s on deck" to reign in the powers of the executive branch. It's not like Trump wasn't talking up tariff and trade wars before, but apparently the DNC couldn't envision actually losing to him again? Which is another strike against their ability to effectively govern. Twice now (Bush II and Trump) they have supposedly lost the presidency to electoral shenanigans and then managed to lose to the same candidate a second time and that second time lose unequivocally. How? How is this party so inept as to lose a second time by a worse margin to a candidate that they managed to effectively tie the first time?
I'm sorry, this is hard to take seriously.
Yes, why didn't Democrats change our system and model of governance that was working fine, anticipating the Republicans. It's a shame they didn't stop them in... check 1789. 39 years before their party was founded.
It's a shame they didn't overwrite the constitution (2/3 majority and state ratification) to be parliamentary. To bad they didn't prevent the head of their executive (ergo military) from having time-limited war time powers meant for emergencies and requiring their review... Right after two world wars, two proxy wars, the threat of cold war, or during a war in the Middle East. Or the use of time-limited emergency powers to direct funds used in organizations like FEMA.
Blame, blame, blame. It's always the DNC's fault. They have to know of all threats and be totally unified and work around every obstacle. It's not at all up to, I don't know, the American public not to elect a convicted felon that attempted to overthrow the government, who were found guilty of raping women,who are deplorable, disgusting slobs in every way, and that threaten to go to war with allies. Why didn't the DNC protect us from ourselves? Did you send them letters or calls demanding these actions?
It's a democracy. We got what we asked for and what we deserved.
> Yes, why didn't Democrats change our system and model of governance that was working fine, anticipating the Republicans. It's a shame they didn't stop them in... check 1789. 39 years before their party was founded.
Was it working fine? Was there really no possible way anyone could have seen the potential for all of this unchecked executive power to be abused before 2024? No warnings about presidential overreach until 2024? No signs at all that perhaps the right wing was getting a little off their rocker and maybe thinking about the consequences and precedents set by the actions we take might be in order?
I'm pretty sure the DNC has been complaining about the GOP "not following the rules" since at least Bush II. Certainly they felt that the election at that time had been stolen, so it should have been clear that it was entirely possible for an unsavory and even unwanted person to ascend to the highest office in the land. And then of course they lost the second time, meaning it was also possible for said unsavory and unwanted person to win a subsequent election. But I guess for the DNC, none of that was a sufficient warning about the dangers of consolidating large amounts of unchecked and uncheckable power in the majority party and the executive branch.
It's not always the DNC's fault. That is of course ridiculous. Trump decides for himself to abuse the powers he's been given. The choice to abuse the power isn't on the DNC. But the DNC's complicit behaviors, both in granting those powers in the first place and strengthening them or doing nothing to roll them back, is absolutely on them. Everyone is all up in arms that Trump decides he's just not going to enforce a law. And yet, a headline feature of the Obama administration was the executive decision to not enforce federal laws on marijuana. Rather than actually use the legislature to solve the problem, we just decided that yes indeed, the president does have the authority to pick and choose the laws they will enforce. Of course the GOP made plenty of hay at the time since "tough on drugs" plays well to their base, and then has subsequently abused that same authority for their own ends. But that's my point. Either the DNC wants to grant people like Trump these powers, or they are so blindingly stupid as to believe that someone like Trump could never hold office, despite decades of evidence to the contrary.
> Did you send them letters or calls demanding these actions?
Yes, yes I have because I actually am legitimately angry about this shit and have been for decades.
May I add; the Democrats In Name Only(DINOs) of Manchin, Synema, and others? destroying the slight majorities Democrats seem to put together when ostensibly "in power"... They need to exert more control over the membership, as the Rs do. But I get the impression that the Ds take as many as they can't get, but only to get screwed over later.
The Constitution doesn't actually say that the party with a majority share of seats in the house or senate gets all the power. It's a practical matter of the rules that the members choose to implement.
So for instance, groups that were nominally from 2 different parties could elect leadership that planned to work with the groups, rather than whichever party had the nominal majority.
This is kind of an abstract point, but it's useful for reasoning about things. The so called "centrist" members of a given party are actually aligning themselves with the most extreme members, not some 'center'.
> opposition party has no power in the US, as designed explicitly
The Republicans have shown this to be superbly untrue when they were in the opposition.
The Senate should be hellbent on delaying and disrupting. The House should be constantly throwing a spanner in everything.
Governors? Arrest the DOGE kids for breaking state law. Arrest the ICE agents defying court orders. They’ll be released, eventually. But you’ll buy time until the midterms. Ban Tesla FSD and promise to pardon people who non-violently cross the line. Ban the law firms who struck deals with Trump from state business for 20 years. Fight like the Republicans do; laws and republics don’t survive if the side defending them lays down its arms.
This unfortunatey highlights an assymetry between the two parties. The Republicans want to delay and disrupt, the Democrats want to keep things running. Shutting down the government works for Red team because that's their goal. If Dems start to throw spanners into the works, that will just add to all the spanners the Republicans are already throwing into the works.
> If Dems start to throw spanners into the works, that will just add to all the spanners the Republicans are already throwing into the works
“A treatment known as the Milwaukee protocol, which involves putting people with rabies symptoms into a chemically induced coma and using antiviral medications in an attempt to protect their brain until their body has had time to produce rabies antibodies, has been occasionally used” [1].
I’m not advocating for shutdown, mind you. Just delay, distraction and disruption.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabies
Leadership is not the same as institutional power.
What opposition? The recklessness of Trumps political agenda is benefitting the rich elite and despite appearances both parties leadership consist of those in the rich elite. America doesn’t have a party representing the workers because anyone getting any traction in politics almost immediately leaves the working class. That’s why the level of political opposition is currently at “let’s all wear matching ties to show our disapproval of this political development that will absolutely make us tons and tons of money but which we need to look like we oppose”
> That’s why the level of political opposition is currently at “let’s all wear matching ties to show our disapproval of this political development that will absolutely make us tons and tons of money but which we need to look like we oppose”
Don't forget the "let's all hold little signs up and make frowny faces" strategy from actual elected Democrat Congresspeople. What a joke!
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I'd say it's very much by design because it's a common feature of places America's rulers love - Hungary, Russia etc. One of the many ways in which uppity PMCs get put in their place is by the rulers flaunting their lawlessness and gaslighting the PMCs, while of course making PMCs submit to the rules and work with reality.
So here's we have blatantly illegal behavior by the party that constantly sings about "law and order" and the grating helplessness you feel is what they want you to feel, because they are your masters and want to yo always be aware of this.
What’s a PMC?
Private military contractor.
In this context, it’s referring to the professional-managerial class.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional%E2%80%93manageria...
We are all serfs
Yeah, but I preferred the theater of decency.
Inflation is gonna eat the cash. Now, if you think you are smart and invest, they pull the rug on all of it.
Honestly, where are the incentives to save up, to build something for yourself? I mean, the outlook wasn't that great even without this bullshit. It's all so damn bleak.
A lot of people maybe don’t realise how important treasury rates are to their everyday life. You might be thinking “why do I care? I’m not going to go an buy treasuries. I don’t hold treasuries. So if they go up, go down, fall off a cliff it doesn’t matter to me. whoop de doo”.
To which I say hold on there a second. Firstly you probably do own some treasuries. If you have any kind of pension it will have some treasuries in it. Also if you buy something like a stock etf they will hold their cash in treasuries probably or use treasuries as collateral when they need to do margin trades. Also your credit card, mortgage, car loan anything like that if you hold it is priced at a spread above treasuries. The spread is to take into account how much more risky you are than the US govt.
Also say you’re a founder and you’re doing some kind of investment round. Well the investors are going to price your business using a discounted cash flow model as part of their decision-making process. The discount is an interest rate that is calculated using treasuries. Basically you look at the future cash flows and you deduct interest that you could get on such an asset to get an idea of the value of that future cash today.
When someone wants to ship a containerload of goods and they accept a bill of trade or whatever that includes a counterparty credit spread which is a spread over treasuries. You heard a lot about the LIBOR scandal a few years back well interbank rates are derived from a credit curve that is bootstrapped using treasury rates. So any kind of cross-currency transaction or thing with fixed or floating interest (even if it’s not in dollars) is likely to be affected by US treasuries.
Literally every financial asset is tied in some way to treasuries because a “risk free rate” is at the basis of option pricing, discounting, lending and borrowing, margin, counterparty credit adjustment etc etc.
> You heard a lot about the LIBOR scandal
Is that one I’m remembering where my variable interest rate student loan was over 9% while the only job I could get right out of the Great Recession after college was part time at Walmart and the banks fine was less than the profit they made off of manipulating the rate?
They have so many of these scandals it’s a little hard to narrow it down
Can what you explain what the significance of the US 10 year yield going up is?
It will affect anything which comes due in 10 years. So say you want to take out a 20 years mortgage, the payments that are going to happen 10 years plus will have their rate influenced by the 10yr. OR say you’re trying sell a business. When they look at the future earnings of that business, a higher rate on the 10 year will mean they give you less for that business, because the money in 10 years time is worth less today.
Also if you’re going to retire in 10+ years sucks to be you, your 401k just became a lot less valuable and the income you can expect in retirement will be lower.
Now because nothing happens in a vacuum, the 10yr spiking will affect other yields too.
It means that they are not being bought. Normally, if the stock goes down, treasury yields go down because investors use them as safe havens for their money, so there's higher demand for them and hence the yield goes down.
So why isn't this happening now? There's probably a bunch of reasons. It seems there's a liquidity problem in the markets, which is also weird because stocks are being sold, so there should be enough liquidity, but it seems people are rather holding on to their cash and not invest in anything. However, it seems still treasuries are being sold like crazy. For a while, even gold went down, which is also highly unusual during a market crisis. One reason that is frequently cited now and also in this article is because some hedge funds have specialized on the so called "basis trade", which I never heard of before. It basically means buying large amount of treasuries and speculating on their futures. In itself, this does not bring much money, but it seems this is done on a huge scale, and it's currently going very wrong. Now they are getting margin-called and need to sell assets.
At some point, the FED would normally intervene and buy treasuries. However, the FED still has a ton of treasuries from the COVID crisis on its balance sheets and I think they will not intervene until the market has gone quite a bit lower, so I'm still invested very much bearish, although I lost quite a bit from that when Trump announced the delay, but two days later and we're already close to being back where we started and I could kick myself why I even reacted, but you can't win in this game when it's so distorted, so I'm mostly staying out now and just leave my few remaining PUTs open, and I guess many do the same. The US economy is now fully dependent on the whims of a corrupt president, whose friends currently surely make a ton of money on insider knowledge, so there's zero trust in anything anymore.
How can you be bullish after all of that? Tariffs are still on for China, and the administration has been caught manipulating the market. You're either in cash or holding the bag while they tank the market.
Sorry, I meant bearish, I edited my article... :-)
>It seems there's a liquidity problem in the markets, which is also weird because stocks are being sold, so there should be liquidity.
This is a normal relationship. The financial system has leverage. When liquidity dries up and sellers dominate, volatility rises which feeds back into valuable risk metrics and realize portfolio volatility. That causes participants to downsize their exposure to keep the same risk. In these cases the participants don't necessarily have extra liquidity to deploy until after volatility and uncertainty settles.
>For a while, even gold went down, which is also highly unusual during a market crisis.
During a true crisis this is actually not that uncommon. In the trading space, you saw what you can during these events. In extreme circumstances where correlations all go to one even the safe havens get sold off to raise cash. The gold liquidation was a sign of pressured margin metrics and very high stress. You can see how quickly gold recovered after the peak stress, confirming that situation.
>One reason that is frequently cited now and also in this article is because some hedge funds have specialized on the so called "basis trade", which I never heard of before. It basically means buying large amount of treasuries and speculating on their futures.
The basis trade is more of an arbitrage than a speculation. The global eurodollar system (not currency, global offshore dollars) is about 20 trillion dollars in size. The basis trade is essentially a method in which regulated US financial markets are exported to The world at large to be used in the global, emergent financial system. Instead of buying a treasury directly, one can use the futures/eurodollar market, and the basis traders will arbitrage the difference and keep everything in line.
>At some point, the FED would normally intervene and buy treasuries.
The issue that the FED is facing isn't so much their balance sheet capacity but the tariff-driven inflation outlook and how it interacts with their mandate. That said, they did clearly communicate today that they would be willing to step in if there were severe signs of systemic instability. The reality is... if tariffs really do cause an inflation wave, yields at 5% may be relatively low...
Thank you for these insights, I appreciate it.
I heard a rumor that China has been dumping some of their dollar-denominated assets as a sort of "bad dog" reaction to the current state of affairs.
it mean it's harder for the us gov selling bonds
> A particular worry in the Treasury market is that a doom loop could arise from the “basis trade”. This is popular with hedge funds and has minted fortunes at some of America’s largest. It attempts to profit from the difference in price between Treasury bonds and Treasury futures contracts, caused by high demand for the futures from asset managers. Traders exploit this by buying Treasuries and selling futures contracts. To amplify the returns, they borrow using the Treasuries they have bought as collateral, then recycle the cash into even more Treasuries. Thanks to this procedure, hedge funds are short some $1trn-worth of Treasury futures.
Every few years some dumb shit like this blows up and then the "experts" hem and haw about why reform actually can never be done and "we MUST keep gambling with instruments you see!" it's just so transparently stupid at this point.
> then the "experts" hem and haw about why reform actually can never be done
The reforms were done. Glass-Steagall, for instance [1]. They’re then undone [2]. Idiots just keep voting the guys who caused the problem into office [3].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_legis...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm%E2%80%93Leach%E2%80%93...
[3] https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-stability-globa...
>And it would be reckless to assume the shocks are over, or that foreign investors’ faith in American assets, now shaken, can be magically restored. How much more can the system take before something really does break?
I think the biggest issue is that you have to put the assets somewhere and usually that meant a relationship to US currency. China has to go further with a proposal for how it is going to do a US proof global system. Telling the EU to stand up in unity will only work when the proposal makes the same kind of sense to the EU in the longterm as whatever the US is doing makes sense to the Republicans.
> China has to go further with a proposal for how it is going to do a US proof global system
Commit to selling half of their $800mm of Treasuries [1] and replacing them with Eurobonds as part of a free-trade agreement. That, in turn, funds Europe’s defence detachment from the U.S. [2].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-exchange_reserves_of...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/europes-plans-pay-surge...
Worth noting the 10 year are spiking again today and are currently at a higher level than Wednesday: https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/bond/tmubmusd10y?count...
(though they have started recovering some since I posted this originally)
https://archive.is/YqV82
It's already back on the brink.