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#10 | Posted by dutch46 at 2025-03-31 12:07 PM
As I read the headline, the image of a snake devouring it's own tail instantly came to mind.
Ouroboros. Interesting visual, but analogy is not incongruous, especially in financial engineering.
As I've said here before, Musk's purchase of "X/Twitter" entity was never planned to be stand-alone, but rather a leveraged stage 1 for merger with another platform, most likely with financial or sales component - trying to emulate the Chinese all-in-one apps/ecosystems like Tencent or Alibaba.
X/Twitter was never going to go public, but xAI most likely will, at high enough valuation (Musk "proposed" the combo of xAI and X is now worth ~$80B) - not bad for a glorified search engine chatbot, trained on X-"wisdom" and disinformation. For comparison, OpenAI just closed a round of investment at valuation of $300B.
Guess what happens when xAI goes public - all personal debt Elon assumed with the purchase of Twitter will become debt of public company shareholders, allowing Musk to participate in public company riches while "sharing" the huge debt with people buying the common stock.
This is EXACTLY, only on much larger scale, the scam Donald Trump pulled when he used his [father's] name and reputation for ~$1B in personal loans for 2 casinos that he was certainly going to default on, then folded one into DJT / Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts public company, then did the same with another one... and poof, his personal debt disappeared and became "property" of the unsuspecting suckers aka DJT shareholders.
www.congress.gov - As its stock collapsed, Trump's firm gave him huge bonuses and paid for his jet - WaPo, June 12, 2016 [PDF, 5 pgs]
|------- It was promoted as the chance of a lifetime: Mom-and-pop investors could buy shares in celebrity businessman Donald Trump's first public company, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts. Their investments were quickly depleted. The company known by Trump's initials, DJT, crumbled into a penny stock and filed for bankruptcy after less than a decade, costing shareholders millions of dollars, even as other casino companies soared.
In its short life, Trump the company greatly enriched Trump the businessman, paying to have his personal jet piloted and buying heaps of Trump-brand merchandise. Despite losing money every year under Trump's leadership, the company paid Trump handsomely, including a $5 million bonus in the year the company's stock plummeted 70 percent.
Many of those who lost money were Main Street shareholders who believed in the Trump brand, such as Sebastian Pignatello, a retired private investor in Queens. By the time of the 2004 bankruptcy, Pignatello's 150,000 shares were worth pennies on the dollar. ...
Trump said he "made a lot of money in Atlantic City," adding, "I make great deals for myself." ... -------|
This is also what current DJT Media and Technology stock is - worthless vessel to "make deals" and transfer money into Donald's pockets, not to mention his family "legitimate" crypto ventures and meme coins to "create" and launder money.
The scam is repeatable. Ouroboros indeed.
Money for nothing and kicks for free
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#10 | Posted by chiligordo at 2025-05-03 06:20 PM
Short term pain for long term gain.
Pain is obvious. What makes you think it's only short term? Because we'll get used to it, so won't feel it as much?
1. What exactly would constitute "long term gain" (even if achievable by businesses-killing, inflationary tariffs) because Trump has not defined it.
2. Expect about as much "long term gain" from Trump as was promised by his numerous failed businesses, including first DJT public company.
The trade deficits and resulting debt must be addressed or else Americans will end up picking cotton on Chinese-owned plantations.
This is nonsense - "[national] trade deficits" don't result in fiscal deficits and debt - you're conflating different things: real, government fiscal / budget deficits (government spending and having to borrow more money than it brings in from various sources) with purely statistical "[national] trade deficits / surpluses" (balance of trade, i.e., buying and selling goods and services by people and businesses who happen to live in "other" countries, mostly unencumbered by protectionist tariffs) - that's just parroting our seriously economically illiterate Influencer-in-Chief.
In fact, "[national] trade deficits" actually allowed / subsidized disinflationary expansion of our economic growth and helped finance fiscal budget deficits, and firmed up USD as world's "reserve currency" through non-inflationary growth of US money supply. Trade "deficits" is a non-issue, a "fake problem":
drudge.com - Bipartisan Bill to Give Congress More Power over Tariffs
drudge.com - Fact Check: Trump's False Claims About Tariffs
drudge.com - Is Trump Trying to Engineer a Recession?
scholar.harvard.edu - Truth About Trade Deficits / "Fake Problem" - [PDF, 3 pgs] - October 7, 2018
www.cato.org - Ignore the Politicians: Trade Deficits Don't Really Matter - Aug 29, 2024
"This is a fallacious claim because trade deficits don't really matter - not between countries and not between you and your local grocery store."
Trump's weird obsession / bizarre "idee fixe" with "trade deficits" is just a distraction from US budget deficits and his family self-dealing with crypto (including using his position and US Treasury to increase and pump his crime family's holdings) which also stands to benefit from destruction of USD as "reserve currency" from his policies - "Trump crypto-fascism" gets a literal meaning.
www.latimes.com - What will Trump's tariffs 'liberate' us from? - LAT, 2025-03-31
www.latimes.com - Democrats decry the 'chaos' of Trump's trade war but are OK with some tariffs - LAT, 2025-04-13
Even Trump's two main tariffs hawks, besides being wrong on substance and long-term consequences, can't agree on reasons for them:
blog.irvingjimenez.com - Trade Differences in the Approaches of Navarro and Miran - 2025-04-21
Shows how much bullcrap all these "strategies" are.
1970s - "Back to the future"
Play stupid games - win stupid prizes
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