Jump to content

U.S. Politics: A Wolff In Sheep's Clothing


Martell Spy

Recommended Posts

Is there some kind of White House fax machine or automatic message service that goes out to all Republican media people with talking points? Every damn Republican I've seen starts talking about "this is not about racism or a racist comment, this is about economics". All of them.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, Inigima said:

Every time I think he's hit bottom. Disgusting. I'm ashamed.

He pretty much has to keep topping his previous statements somehow or people will stop paying attention. I wonder to what extent he is alienating the people who still support him and to what extent he is moving the Overton window.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This headline made me lol, since I was thinking the same thing, after hearing the latest dumbass Trump remarks about immigrants from shithole countries and how he preferred  more immigrants from countries like Norway.

 

People On Twitter Tell Trump No One In Norway Wants To Come To His ‘Shithole Country’

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-shithole-countries-norway_us_5a58199ce4b0720dc4c5b6dc?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 minutes ago, Sword of Doom said:

According to Republicans, bragging about sexually assaulting women is locker room talk, and saying racist shit is just how friends talk at a bar.

"Well, yeah, we did both launch a few nukes, but c'mon, this was really just a squabble.  Somewhere between a friendly competition among rivals and some light-hearted chest thumping.  Boys will be boys!"

Link to comment
Share on other sites

42 minutes ago, Sword of Doom said:

According to Republicans, bragging about sexually assaulting women is locker room talk, and saying racist shit is just how friends talk at a bar.

No

Just no

You made it real

You MADE IT REAL! 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

In lighter fare, Trump bragged about delivering a fictional Call of Duty fighter jet to Norway.

Quote

President Donald Trump announced a delivery of F-52 fighter jets to Norway as a gesture to bolster defense in Northern Europe. There’s only one problem: the F-52 is a fictional plane from Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.

President Trump made the announcement on Wednesday during a conference with Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg, claiming that the United States started delivering the fictional aircraft, along with the very real Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II, to Norway last November.

“In November we started delivering the first F-52s and F-35 fighter jets,” Trump said. “We have a total of 52 and they’ve delivered a number of them already a little ahead of schedule.”

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, dmc515 said:

In lighter fare, Trump bragged about delivering a fictional Call of Duty fighter jet to Norway.

 

Finally! Somebody else to play with! 

Any chance this could be the MeToo effect? Maybe it just reached a breaking point and public opinion will begin to calcify against being a piece of shit racist. 

One thing I'll say as the morning news is finally starting, some fantastic appeals to the better nature of American ideals. Really passionate stuff on display. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

25 minutes ago, WinterFox said:

Any chance this could be the MeToo effect? Maybe it just reached a breaking point and public opinion will begin to calcify against being a piece of shit racist.

I think the American public has already been calcified between those that are deeply ashamed and appalled by the piece of shit racist, and those that - at the very least - don't mind the fact that he's a piece of shit racist.

27 minutes ago, WinterFox said:

One thing I'll say as the morning news is finally starting, some fantastic appeals to the better nature of American ideals. Really passionate stuff on display. 

Ya know, I used to roll my eyes at the tendency for news - especially morning cable news shows where they have to fill three hours - to get up on their soapbox for every little thing.  One year in, and that soapbox is already worn out, and with entirely good reason.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think that the "shithole countries" thing is 100% on brand for Trump. 

- He gets to dominate the new cycle (good)

- He forces the news media to attack him (good)

- He can claim he speaks truth to power, because he doesn't use PC-talk (good)

- Undecided and anti-Trump people will have more evidence that he's racist (bad)

And the only bad one is minimized, since the anti-Trump people already hated him, and there are virtually no undecided Americans.  This "scandal" is not going to hurt him, and might end up helping him.  Just FYI, his net approval on 538 right after the tax cut passed was -21, and it's already up to -15. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Is it just me, or were Trump’s remarks about Kim Jong-Un more problematic than his racist slur of Haiti and Africa? It leaves me wondering if Trump and Kim have been having a fake wrestling feud in public while privately being friendly. The implications of that seem far worse.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Is it just me, or were Trump’s remarks about Kim Jong-Un more problematic than his racist slur of Haiti and Africa? It leaves me wondering if Trump and Kim have been having a fake wrestling feud in public while privately being friendly. The implications of that seem far worse.

I think it's more likely that he and Trump had a private conversation and Trump felt like Kim was nice or polite to him and for Trump that means they are friends.  At least until the next time Kim says something mean.  Repeat cycle.

My money is on someone from Kim's staff having read Fire and Fury and so learned how easy it would be for Kim to manipulate him. 

Somewhat related, the South Korean president is also manipulating Trump by declaring the lack of nuclear attack from NK to be all Trump's doing.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

32 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Is it just me, or were Trump’s remarks about Kim Jong-Un more problematic than his racist slur of Haiti and Africa? It leaves me wondering if Trump and Kim have been having a fake wrestling feud in public while privately being friendly. The implications of that seem far worse.

 

22 minutes ago, Dr. Pepper said:

I think it's more likely that he and Trump had a private conversation and Trump felt like Kim was nice or polite to him and for Trump that means they are friends.  At least until the next time Kim says something mean.  Repeat cycle.

My money is on someone from Kim's staff having read Fire and Fury and so learned how easy it would be for Kim to manipulate him. 

Somewhat related, the South Korean president is also manipulating Trump by declaring the lack of nuclear attack from NK to be all Trump's doing.

I was wondering if he had just gotten confused about whom he was referring.   As in, I thought he might have meant he was pals with the South Korea president, Moon Jae In, but jackass he is, said Kim Jong Un by mistake, bc he doesn't really know who any of these people are.   

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 minutes ago, butterbumps! said:

 

I was wondering if he had just gotten confused about whom he was referring.   As in, I thought he might have meant he was pals with the South Korea president, Moon Jae In, but jackass he is, said Kim Jong Un by mistake, bc he doesn't really know who any of these people are.   

That's also a possibility. 

There was a quote in his WSJ interview about how he can all of a sudden be best friends with someone.  He doesn't really know how to do anything other than on/off.  

Also, anyone else wondering if Trump is going to react to Putin saying that Kim won this round?  

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I see that after all the Republicans have been running around saying that countries/towns are "shitholes" isn't racist, that Trump is now denying that he even saud it in the first place: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-42664173

Presumably meaning that everybody else is a liar for defending what he said / didn't say

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Maithanet said:

I think that the "shithole countries" thing is 100% on brand for Trump. 

- He gets to dominate the new cycle (good)

- He forces the news media to attack him (good)

- He can claim he speaks truth to power, because he doesn't use PC-talk (good)

- Undecided and anti-Trump people will have more evidence that he's racist (bad)

And the only bad one is minimized, since the anti-Trump people already hated him, and there are virtually no undecided Americans.  This "scandal" is not going to hurt him, and might end up helping him.  Just FYI, his net approval on 538 right after the tax cut passed was -21, and it's already up to -15. 

So apparently last night Trump was calling up his friends, asking what they were hearing about his comments and what they thought of the press coverage. And now this morning he's denying that he said them. I'm thinking he's not getting the reaction he had hoped for.

Trump clearly got a polling boost over the holidays, but it's unclear if its a potentially more permanent change (reaction to the tax bill from supporters) or if its a temporary boost caused by the fact that he stayed mostly out of the news for a couple weeks (over now of course) and people are often in a better mood from the holidays. Looking at the RCP average, it seems like the odds are it was a temporary boost that only hasn't totally gone away yet because Ras is having such relatively great numbers for him (up to only -7 today).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 minutes ago, Fez said:

So apparently last night Trump was calling up his friends, asking what they were hearing about his comments and what they thought of the press coverage. And now this morning he's denying that he said them. I'm thinking he's not getting the reaction he had hoped for.

I'm not at all sure it means that.  Trump's MO for years has been to dominate news cycles by saying something contraversial, and then if he likes the coverage, he issues either a denial, a half-denial, or a non-apology.  Regardless, it serves to help dominate the news cycle for another day.

There are several actually important things happening right now (FISA yesterday, DACA, Iran sanctions), and instead we're back to "Is Trump a racist?"  To me this looks 100% intentional.  If Trump ever wants to stage a coup, all he needs to do is drop the N-bomb on Kamala Harris the week before and the press will be too bamboozled to notice.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 1/10/2018 at 6:10 PM, OldGimletEye said:

p(t) = E_t[d(t+1)x(t+1)]

Which means the price of an asset today is the conditional expectation of the stochastic discount factor in the next period times the payoff x(t+1).

More on the E_t operator conservative sorts of people. It’s the conditional expectations operater. And we could write as

p(t) = E[d(t+1)x(t+1)| A bunch of stuff known at time t].

Where E[] is the unconditional expectations operator.

Now conservative sorts of people may ask, “well what is a Bunch of Stuff known at time t.” Well it could mean all the relevant information needed to forecast x(t+1) and d(t+1). Under this set up, actors know all the relevant variables. And they know the parameters are. So on average they correcting make forecast. This is known as “Rational Expectations”.

Of course,”A Bunch of Stuff known at time t” might mean economic actors don’t use all the relevant variables to make forecast of x(t+1) and d(t+1). Or maybe they don’t know the parameter values exactly and learn them over time. It’s possible that they over time they update the parameter values with new information, achieving something like Rational Expectations over time, and that’s when they wake up one day and say, “Holy Fuck! Holy Fuck! I think I spent way, way, to much money on Mortgage Backed Securities.”

AHHHHH!  Finance flashbacks.  Make them stop!  This was the class that made 80% of my graduate school MBAs become Marketing specialists.

Seriously, this is fundamental info that it is really important for people in this market - hell anyone in any market including the labor market - to understand.  It is especially important to understand the informational aspect of this equation,  It is the ability of those in power to manipulate the flow of information that causes you to incorrectly price an asset - even while you were being completely rational.

The other thing to understand in market distortion is kinda related to rational pricing, but not exactly.  Coercive market power by one party over another may mean that you can't follow rational pricing.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Big BBC report on the Trump thing. At least one person who was in the room has confirmed that the reports are 100% accurate and there was even a sharp exchange when his comments on Haiti were challenged.

The BBC are also reporting that multiple US ambassadors to African nations have been called in and reprimanded. The ambassador to Botswana was particularly excoriated with the government angrily demanding to know if the US President considered them to be a "shithole" as well.

Meanwhile, breaking news that the Ambassador to Panama is considering their position. Also a lot of anger in the US Embassy in London, with people pointing out that the decision to move the embassay was made by George Bush Jnr., not Barack Obama as Trump has inaccurately reported.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...