Political rants

If you were gone for a 2 week long vacation this April, you would have missed one of the largest stock market crashes in history, as well as one of the biggest stock market recoveries in history. You would have missed a recession level bear market and the opportunity to be 25% up on no matter what stock you bought during the crash. Not only that, Trump told everyone on his truth social to go out an buy stocks before he changed all his policies to reverse the stock market. If you had bought a few thousand dollar option calls one week out, you would have 100 thousand dollars instantly. Millionaires and billionaires were made because they did this after the Trump post to buy stocks. Trump literally made his political enemies sell all their stocks through fear and chaos, post publicly for everyone who believes in him to buy stocks, and then reverse all policies to completely erase the crash in a single day. Liberals were selling during the crash and republicans were just doubling down. This is literally Game of Thrones level shit going on here. Even for you guys not familiar with the stock market, I just want to re-iterate how absolutely absurd and mind-blowingly insane the last 2 weeks on the stock market was.

That is interesting. Could that be considered a form of insider trading? If Trump is manipulating the stock market directly while telling people what to buy or sell I would think that should be insider trading on a grand scale. Martha Stewart has to be doing backflips with envy.

@gabriel_true I don't think they can get him for insider trading because he blasted out to the public to buy stocks, but his tariff stance change was probably already planned by his team. I had a feeling the whole tariff on everybody thing was just a ploy to get leverage before the actual tariffs were to go off and China was the true target. An argument can be made that people inside his team who are "in the know" have an advantage over everyone else but that's always been the case in the stock market. Take for example friday. Apple stock went up like crazy for no reason, and then a day later they announced apple stuff was not going to be tariffed. Hedge funds and the rich know roughly a day earlier than everyone else and that's always been the case.

Right which is illegal. If you are directly manipulating the market and telling people what to buy you are participating in inside trading. Just because it's convenient for those in power doesn't make it less against the law. Saying they 'always' break the law therefore it's ok is baffling. Why is it ok to let people get away with blatant crimes and then back up that response with, 'it's always been the law of convenience so just accept it.' Why are we imposing anything or changing government policy at all if we are all on the same page no one actually cares? It's a free for all and the law is just whatever you want it to be in the moment.

@arc Lets just say a lot of "Trump" signs in the upper end of town are getting replaced by "For Sale" signs. He hit the middle class hard with that one. And his new voter suppression bill that just passed isn't going to make it easy for them to retaliate. This isn't game of Thrones. This is what banana republic dictators do.

I know they are pushing a bill to ban people in congress to ban them from trading stocks but nobody is ever going to vote to pass it because they make too much money off of it. I asked ChatGPT to run a simulation of the US cutting off China and vice versa. This will assume that America will lift tariffs on other countries (which I think will happen within weeks). At China's current rate they are due to surpass the US in about 10 years. I assume the intention of this trade war is to prevent that from happening. As history has shown in the 1930s, being a net exporter in a trade war is economically devastating. I agree that the middle class in America will be SLAMMED. They make too much to be subsidized by the government, but make too little to live comfortable. The cost of a pair of jeans in 5 years will be roughly 75% more expensive than it is today. This might also cause China to become a complete nationalistic authoritarian regime once the millions of young unemployed workers hit the streets. They can forget about ever invading Taiwan.