Krugman has this to say about it:
For those not familiar with how financial markets work, US Treasuries are the ultimate safe asset, used as collateral for everything. Even a hint that some Treasuries might not be honored could bring everything to a screeching halt
Musk and Trump are both in the habit of stiffing people they owe money. If markets even suspect that this habit will extend to Treasuries, God help us
2nd week in a row he has tried to crash the market over the weekend for Monday morning.
I’m guessing all his hedge fund asshole/twat stain friends already purchased their puts and agent orange is providing the catalyst.
I think the “freeze all federal spending” from a couple weeks ago could also qualify.
What was the previous attempt? I’m falling behind in this gish gallop.
Tariffs
Last weekend it was the Mexico/Canada “25% tariffs” that he pussied out on and reversed his decision on both countries by Monday morning.
Just as a note Tariffs are back on (but only for steel/aluminum).
Why betting on stocks to fail is allowed in the US and elsewhere is beyond me, it always leads to this type of rich people trying to game the system to get even richer at the cost of everyone else around them. It’s a sign that the wealth-concentration and inequality is out of control + captured the mechanisms that should be regulating and preventing this from happening altogether.
Hello. English new just learning for me. Please, what is twat stain?
Twat is slang for a woman’s vagina.
Assuming he doesn’t talk that back really fucking quick that’ll literally implode the bond market.
My guess is that this is just him leading up to trying to refuse payment. A few days is hardly enough time to make any real assessment of the debts the treasury services, but all he has to do is say words and the rest of the idiots fall in line.
And the Democrats present a New Deal in 2028
Too bad they had Manchin piss away all their credibility for them.
Green new deal was like 2016 or 2018…
Or start a war.
A lot of countries have defaulted without doing that. I’m a lot more concerned that it’ll cause an interest rate spike, with associated stock market crash, and bring on a sharp cut in business investment and employment.
Countries are already looking for alternatives to trading with America, the felon is speedrunning Brexit along with everything else.
This breaks the economy.
If the US defaults on its loans, its creditability drops, which will probably destabilize the global value of the US$. China and Russia will benefit most. Every nation with financial ties to the US will suffer for it.
When trying to understand why certain decisions are made, follow the money. Donald Trump is a foreign asset.
If you mean he is working for them… nah. He wouldn’t do what they ask, or would screw it up. They get smarter people to manipulate him into doing things in thier favor. I suppose that could be called a foriegn asset to. Not sure though.
Russia has already defaulted on some loans. China’s second biggest trade partner is USA (EU is first but trade is more balanced between the two than USA), so this would hurt China greatly as well.
Seems to me EU would benefit the most.
Something most people don’t get is that China holding a significant portion of our debt gives them an incentive to protect USD. By defaulting, there is no reason for them not to do everything in their power to destroy USD. This is literally the only meaningful economic tool the US has and he wants to devalue it.
Only usa can have total control no other currencies could ever replace it because they are not as good at being world leaders? Or something like that? All wealth would just move, probably half china half eu, and even then, it may already have happened mostly because this isn’t news to anyone with a brain
… Trump seems to be basing this on some analysis from the DOGE boys. This appears to have been one of the DOGE boys’ main goals at Treasury, getting access to details about what kinds of payments Treasury makes, the answer being close to everything the U.S. government does outside of the Pentagon and some of the Pentagon stuff too. The Treasury also services the U.S. debt, which is what we’re talking about here. I’m less clear on what access to which part of the Treasury Department these guys could have gotten to get information about how the Treasury Department sells and services Treasury notes. But all that detail aside, imagine thinking that by downloading a ton of data and having a few days to analyze it you could make the determination that a significant amount of the U.S. national debt wasn’t real and didn’t have to be paid. It’s hardly the craziest thing we’ve seen over recent days. But it’s still worth noting how nuts that is.
I’m lost for words.
I disagree with that author, this is definitely one of the craziest things seen in recent days. This is on par with going to war with Canada as one of the quickest ways to speed run the demise of the US… It probably would be quicker. Debt can be downgraded overnight, war takes time.
Betting Putin told trump to just take whatever and he’d back trump…if trump lets Putin take Ukraine and the rest of NATO down with it.
He’s trying to crash the dollar for cryptobros. Or Putin.
He either crashes the economy or putin releases the pee tape.
This could trigger a Minsky moment. And a world wide financial meltdown. Then he’ll just say haha just kidding. Once that genie is out of the bottle though, there’s no going back.
Elon won’t say anything until Minsky starts to screw him over
Why would he even say this? Usually there’s a pretty clear motivation to his lies but this one just seems suicidal
At this point I’m pretty sure destroying the country is the point. I would not be the slightest bit surprised to hear he has muskrat whispering in his ear about buying literally everything after the collapse.
Wouldn’t completely destroying the economy make their billions near worthless as well?
They’re high on their own supply. A lot of these techbros seriously believe they’ll be new monarchs after societal collapse.
Depends on how much money they have in assets other than $USD.
No, it’s just converting money into power. Same thing they’ve been doing for years
“I have reduced the US’s debt by X” claims are one potential option. It could also be any other number of things.
It’s yet another barganing chip he is trying to create. Somebody with these things doesn’t do what he wants, he just declares the ones they have are fake. Person, country… as others have pointed out, this will tank the value of them as well, and probably trigger inflation. Both of which in a way reduce the federal debt so he can claim he did that. It just also causes a lot of much bigger issues.
Sort of funny that as soon as the greatest generation died their children, who were too stupid to understand what they had built, destroyed their empire
Boomers have never once in their miserable little lives understood that their favorite Facebook meme calls them the weak men.
I picked a fine week to give up sniffing glue.
i’m going to guess that this is somehow related to making money on cryptocurrency
Anything that devalues the dollar makes crypto go up.
Yea he’s possibly trying to get more people to buy into his stupid cryptocoin
Weapons-grade stupid. Crash global economy any % speedrun.
Maybe making money something everybody has to believe in was a bad idea
Quick! Everybody clap your hands and say “I do believe in T Bills!”
It was part of how we got out of the Great Depression — it transferred money from the owning class to people who had debts. We don’t actually want to go back to gold (or any other non-inflationary currency) because it gets rid of the flexibility to do that, which part of how we prevent bad recessions from turning into deflationary recessions.
In any case, having fiat currency, or not, is a separate issue from whether the US will actually pay its debts as promised. And it’s the debt payment that Trump is putting in question.
I’m someone who thinks even the gold standard was bullshit because it relied on a nation to support it.
My point wasn’ the “money” but the “everybody.” There’s tons of different economic models that don’t rely on nations to exist. Maybe we try one of those.
My problems with the current economic system start way before the gold standard.
We are very very far from anything like the Star Trek prosperity society though. I’m not expecting changes to monetary policy to be able to get us there either; they’re a way to moderately improve peoples’ lot, and to shift the balance of power from capital to labor and tiny bit
I worry that by keeping our Ship of Theseus from sinking we’re missing out on something way better
We could be, but are also avoiding a lot of drownings that are likely if we try disassembling it while at sea
Yeah, grains have painted us into a corner
Well, you’re in luck. They’re actively scuttling the ship as we speak. Whether you’re going to like the new one remains to be seen. I have a feeling it will be much smaller and is already full.
Ha, if that were true, Monday markets will be such a blood bath those of us without publicly traded industry or non profits will be fucked too
The 14th Amendment clause about debt validity exists precisely because of this flavor of posturing oligarchs – now we’ve got bargain-bin John Galt cosplayers auditing T-bills between meme stocks. Trump’s “irregularities” schtick is just sovereign citizen logic scaled to national debt levels, complete with DOGE bros LARPing as forensic accountants.
Declaring chunks of debt illegitimate isn’t fiscal policy – it’s a wealth incinerator disguised as a spreadsheet error. Markets would implode if taken seriously, but the real damage is normalizing this circus as governance. Treasury raids morphing into TikTok challenges where the prize is collapsing the dollar’s reserve status.
Constitutional bedrock becomes optional when your economic advisors mainline 4chan threads. The only “irregularity” here is the cognitive dissonance required to bankrupt a superpower for clout.
It seems like Elon is controlling Trump even in this. Isn’t devaluing to swing markets an Elon move? He probably wants to sell a bunch of stock and simply trying to crash the EV market wasn’t enough if a wave for him to become the first trillionaire. Crashing the dollar it is I guess?
