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REPOST: Radio War Nerd #517 [UNLOCKED] — Trump's Trade War, feat. Jeff Stein (Patreon)

Published:
2025-05-01 00:43:56
Imported:
2025-05
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Guest: Jeff Stein, Washington PostOriginally posted: April 25, 2025

We're reposting unlocked & free our episode with Jeff Stein of the Washington Post on Trump's trade wars and America's various economic wars on the rest of the world...

Would you like to know more? This unlocked repost of RWN Episode #517 comes to you courtesy of our Radio War Nerd subscribers, who make our podcast possible. Freedom isn't free, and neither is Radio War Nerd...Sign up here on the patreon page for the Radio War Nerd podcast, the newsletter, the RSS feed, and more...

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Comments

NYCM&AHole

Tariff button makes money printer go kaboom

Cade Jameson

I don’t know about “boiling” water, but a very hot shower helps me get to sleep when I’m covered with chigger bites. Triamcinilone Acetonide is what you can ask the doctor for.

Rod Miller

Stein invokes the scenario of the world selling US treasuries en masse as if that would be doomsday for the US. Question: why should it matter to the US one way or another?

George P

the sole reason the US can get away with their current massive deficit spending is that other countries currently buy huge amounts of US treasuries (effectively lending the US money at very low interest rates). if that stops happening then the US can no longer borrow money cheaply and would have to make large spending cuts at home, there would likely be a combination of austerity and inflation at the same time, it would be a complete disaster.

Rod Miller

Thanks for your reply. Why is buying bonds "effectively lending money"? The US doesn't need to look elsewhere to find money. In fact, the US government itself *issues* the dollar. Dollars are Not something that is somehow "out there" & Washington has to obtain them from either taxpayers or lenders. IT can issue as many as it wants. As the proverb goes, the federal government can no more run out of dollars than the score-keeper at the football stadium can "run out of" points. So, the US government has no *need* to borrow, or to tax, in order to have dollars. Yes, both borrowing & taxation can play 1001 different useful roles in the economy, but being a source of dollars is not one of them. All this reminds me of how for so long it was simply obvious that the Earth is flat. Everybody understood that -- everybody. But as Mark Twain said, "It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so." This "need" to source a sovereign currency issued by the government "needing" it just ain't so. Feel free to critique this response.

Jakob Stenfalk

The claim that people selling US bonds would cause necessarily cause the interest rate to move is a loanable funds fallacy. The US sets the interest rate on US bonds, in US dollars. If other people sell off US bonds, that will do nothing to the US dollar interest rate by itself, because the US dollar interest rate is set by the US central bank. Now, it is historically the case that, as a matter of policy preference, the US central bank likes to pretend that this is only true at the overnight maturity end of the yield curve. But there is no actual reason why that has to be the case. Anyone who wishes to satisfy themselves that the US central bank controls the US risk-free interest rate for *all* maturities, may observe for themselves that this was what the US central bank actually did with the program of Quantitative Easing. What *would* happen is that the USD would depreciate, possibly dramatically. And that would cause all manner of interesting things to maybe happen, because the international trade/tribute system is predicated on a "strong dollar," so-called. Ultimately, though, to the extent that the US can still set and enforce more or less arbitrary tribute targets on its colonies and clients, that is an extremely solveable problem for the US, simply by raising their vassals' nominal tribute targets to compensate for the depreciating terms of trade of the currency the tribute is denominated in. Can the US still do that? In raw military terms, yes, absolutely, no question. Are they *institutionally* capable of doing it? And are the able to finesse it in a manner that does not lead to a string of expensive to suppress revolts in the colonies? That is less certain, but by no means impossible.