Hacker News

Except the person doing the pooping doesn't drink from the same well as he's got his own private reserve supply.

We can’t afford healthcare because they revoked the subsidies but at least we now also can’t afford gasoline too!

But unlike in the old days, US wins from higher prices. Even consumers wins (because they make more money on average, and their imported goods are cheaper because balance of payments shifts in US favour because of oil exports).

Voters are furious because of psychological factor of gas prices (purely psychological, it has nothing to do with economy or people's purchasing power). It bites politician's asses real hard.

So, Trump undermined himself by launching that war - but others are fine.

The way this administration works is that anyone in a decision making position has been swapped for a self-serving yes-man who will do whatever Trump wants. Anyone they can't replace who won't deliver is briefed against or investigated until they quit or can be fired. Facts that might influence the decision play no part in the process.

The easy acceptance of this authoritarian governing style has been one of the most damaging to the idea of democracy. America's democratic institutions have great marketing but many of us outside the country and not subjected daily to that marketing have long known it is an particularly weak form of democracy and open to corruption, demagoguery and populism. Americans have a susceptibility to authority and hierarchical normalisation, has left them open to this.

The administrations choices are fairly binary now.

Inflate away the $40Trillion+ debt they can never pay back

Or

Hard default on the debt, and be the one holding the hot potato as the union breaks up.

Fed is trying to thread the needle between the two and keep the music playing as long as possible.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

The yield curve has always been controlled by the Fed, and this remains the case. No one has lost control. The yield curve is the time path of short run rates, adjusted by risk. So, for example, if the market thinks inflation will rise -- for example because of a foolish war against Iran -- then they will sell the long dated bonds because they know the fed will hike rates in the future, making the long dated bonds less valuable, and they want to get ahead of that. If, on the other hand, they think inflation will be too low, they will bid up the longer dated bonds because they expect the Fed to lower rates in the future, making the long dated bonds more valuable. The entire bond market is fixated on trying to guess what the Fed will do next, so that is why they peer at the economic data and try to guess in which direction the Fed will move and when. That is the opposite of "losing control" of the yield curve.

The problem is Bessent trying to control something that he has never had any control over, by jawboning the market and doing silly things like trying to intervene. Bessent is the Treasury secretary. Treasury does not, and never has, controlled the yield curve. Whatever games he plays buy buying and selling bonds has only a short term psychological effect on the market, and soon people brush it off.

The Fed controls the yield curve, not Treasury.

Bessent is a hedge fund guy that is really not well suited to the role he is playing. Now, they want to put Bessent in charge of economic sanctions against Iran, when we shouldn't even have any sanctions against Iran. The US is sanctioning the world's top oil producers, and then complaining about oil shortages.

well thats one way to get out of having to pay back your loans :-|

There appears to be more and more people throwing back against Trump; after the courts recently again said no to his need to plaster his name on the Kennedy Centre, he went a wailin' to his supposedly in pocket Kennedy Centre board:

  But even that is not providing him comfort these days. Representative Joyce Beatty (D-OH), an ex-officio member of the Kennedy Center board and the member who sued over his takeover of the center, explained to Symone Sanders-Townsend of MS NOW that Trump called into the board meeting after the court decision and “went into a tantrum.”

  While most people appear to have refused to confront Trump to his face—Maine governor Janet Mills’s “We’ll see you in court” was so rare it made headlines—Beatty took him on. She recounted: “It was the most unprofessional thing that I’ve ever witnessed or been a part of it.” But after he called her “an obstructionist” and “dumb” and said he thought she was “incompetent,” she retorted: “I know you’re incompetent.” Beatty appealed to the chair to stop Trump’s unprofessional behavior, but when he continued to berate her, claiming it would be her fault if someone were killed at the center, she responded: “You’re already killing people, we’re at war.” And when he talked about what a great developer he was, she “reminded him that he had more bankruptcies than anybody in the room.”

  “I mean, it really went there,” Beatty told Sanders-Townsend. “I was not going to let him bully me, intimidate me. And the facts stand for themselves.”

  Indeed, these days, facts across the board are challenging Trump’s image of himself.

At this point, people don't even care about his rants.

This is one thing that gives me a sliver of hope for our future relations as European, please keep 'civil disobedience' up to these unhinged oligarchs for better future of us all.

There are a lot of SKUs to regulate. The cost of the bureaucrats checking the requests for basic "my price is going up because my inputs went up" price rises would be staggering. Also it would disincentives any price drops being passed on.