TDS and the economics of Trump’s war on Iran

The Trumpenproletariat loves to point to those who disagree with Dear Leader as having Trump Derangement Syndrome. But like everything they accuse others of, it’s what they’re guilty of.

“A week ago I asked whether global energy markets have “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” I was being a bit arch because I didn’t mean in the sense that MAGA world means, which is being somehow obsessively, compulsively anti-Trump. I meant the opposite. Are the markets wedded to a kind of Trump magical thinking?”

In other words, those who blindly trust that Trump has a plan and knows what he’s doing are the ones deranged, particularly in light of his long and growing record of failure.

“To be clear, the best or most generous interpretation of this is TACO, a phrase that started on Wall Street: Trump Always Chickens Out. The idea being that whatever he says, Trump knows when one of his ideas is going seriously sideways and he moves quickly to pull the plug. And the tariff story does to a real degree follow that logic. But wars aren’t like tariffs. Trump’s tariffs were to an almost unique degree something out of the blue, 100% planned and promulgated out of the White House. And pretty much everyone in the world wanted them ended. So Trump, at least in a short-term sense, could pull the plug or at least wiggle the plug at any time he wanted to.

“Wars don’t work that way. Your enemy has a say in how things go, when things end. That’s especially the case when you’ve defined the war in terms of regime change. That means no risk is too great for your adversary.”

This war has already gone on far longer than the administration expected. And after it ends, it will take months, if not years, to undo the damage. So tell me, who’s deranged now?

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/how-magical-thinking-and-trump-love-drove-the-energy-markets-mad/sharetoken/cbe03881-d5b0-4253-8c9e-e3b5fec8f6f9

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Yes, the CDC can change its mind

The Nobel Laureate economist Paul Samuelson famously acknowledged in a Meet the Press interview: “Well when events change, I change my mind. What do you do?” This observation applies to the advice from medical authorities such as the CDC and WHO during the COVID pandemic. Some members of the public are fond of pillorying these agencies for having published different guidelines at different times, as though health officials are in the business of issuing ex cathedra dogma rather than responding to incomplete and ambiguous information. Science doesn’t deal in proof, it deals with the weight of evidence. A scientific hypothesis is one that is capable of being tested and falsified by experiment. I get it. I used to teach problem-based learning to first year medical students, and they often struggled with what to do with incomplete and ambiguous information, which is what physicians in clinics do every day. Sometimes, one cannot wait for all the tests to be completed and all the data analyz...
Read more

About that Trump lawsuit

So Trump is suing Rupert Murdoch for defamation because of the release of a salacious doodle. Nothing remarkable about Donald J. Trump weaponizing the legal system against his opponents, I know. But there are some things that do bear remark here: “ . . . he's suing Rupert Murdoch personally. But you know who he's not suing? Lachlan Murdoch, who's actually the chairperson of News Corp and Fox, who's actually the decision-maker. Rupert Murdoch has no official role there anymore. He's an adviser.   “So, I thought that was revealing in a lot of ways, because it isn't just about going after the entity. It's sort of this expansion spillover, trying to send as much of a message as you possibly can. He's sort of hitting every potential lever, not just against Murdoch and that empire, but then all the other media properties in the future. It's also about sending an example.” “HAYES: Yeah. That, to me, is the point here, is that these lawsuits are not lawsuits...
Read more

I agree with RFK Jr.

Though it feels weird to say it, RFK Jr and I agree on something: curtailing direct-to-consumer marketing of pharmaceuticals. “ The Trump administration is discussing policies that would make it harder and more expensive for pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to patients, in a move that could disrupt more than $10 billion in annual ad spending.   Although the US is the only place, besides New Zealand, where pharma companies can directly advertise, banning pharma ads outright could make the administration vulnerable to lawsuits, so it’s instead focusing on cutting down on the practice by adding legal and financial hurdles, according to people familiar with the plans who weren’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter.   “The two policies the administration has focused in on would be to require greater disclosures of side effects of a drug within each ad — likely making broadcast ads much longer and prohibitively expensive — or removing the industry’s ability to d...
Read more