Comment by WhyNotHugo
1 day ago
The outstanding thing about these sanctions is that there's no due process: the accuser is the jury and judge. You don't need to be found guilty, or even charged to be sanction. The impact is deep, and global.
Each of these sanctions is sending a really strong signal to the world: "stop relying on anything US".
That's just American culture no? Americans hate discussions, meetings and deliberations. They want a strong leader telling everyone what to do and then everyone jumps up to do it.
The US technically has a parliament but it's function is largely ceremonial.
.. people do not "rely" on US, people are afraid of US.. the big dimwit with a club
> Each of these sanctions is sending a really strong signal to the world: "stop relying on anything US".
Funny that this thing happened _only_ after Trump came to power. US has been doing such things from some time but nobody noticed it. Nowadays it is even exporting this.
One of the things that becomes apparent if you look at GDP relative to political upheaval in various countries is that stability matters more than any given political direction for the economy. That's not to say specific policies do not matter, but they matter much less than I wish they did.
I don't know if the upheaval Trump is causing is sufficient in scale that it will be visible in US growth rates.
But the point is that business will adapt to pretty much any regime to various degrees if it is predictable. The US used to be predictable. Now it's increasingly looking unpredictable, and that could potentially become a much bigger problem than any specific policy Trump puts in place.
(For an extreme example, compare China under Mao and under Deng: Both periods saw lots of year on year growth, but under Mao there were cataclysmic resets whenever there were political upheaval before rapid growth eventually resumed and those resets massively harmed the long term growth average; more than Deng's economic reforms, the biggest change was a long period of predictability)
> I don't know if the upheaval Trump is causing is sufficient in scale that it will be visible in US growth rates.
The problem is the lag. It allows for the responsible party to escape ownership of creating the problem. And of course the responsible party’s party will just finger point at the other party and say “they did this to you!!”
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