• 115 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • First of all, it is not that relevant anymore, but Trump makes for great news stories, which create a lot of clicks. We are probably at the point, that the US needs to invade Ukraine to end that war for Russia.

    Other then that the US still sanctions Russia, which is helpful. They also sell weapons to Europe and especially Ukraine, which are hard to replace(Patriot missiles for example). Also it is really useful to have the US at least pretend to want to defend Europe. Then you have the massive economic war going on and that actually hurts Europe.

    So Europe seems to kiss Trumps ass, while working pretty hard on alternatives. Part of that is financing Ukrainian drones to blow up tankers and other export facilities to replace sanctions. European weapons industry needs more capacity and some capabilities to US weapons, which is being worked on right now(for Patriot that is more Aster missiles for SMAP/T and Iris-t SLX for example). As for the tariff war, we currently see the massive trade deals with Mercosur and India to replace the US somewhat.









  • The bottom is the US having no internal opposition to Trump. One of the biggest differences between the Nazis and the Republicans is, that the Nazis very quickly and violently destroyed the opposition. Somebody like Mamdami would have never been elected under Hitler. The great thing about the US is, that it has centuries of election history. For the most part with some horrible discrimination of women and black people, but still a large part of the population was voting. That is really hard for the Republicans to destroy and that means that there might be somewhat midterms. Obviously the Republicans will make those deeply unfair. However there is a chance of it going the right way.

    Just to be clear, this is not going to be easy and the midterms if anything are only a first step.


  • Oil price is set by supply and demand. Demand is still unfortunatly slowly growing. So if you cut supply, by for example stopping Russian oil exports, you then increase the oil price. The bad part in that is that it probably leads to Russia being able to somehow export oil around those sanctions(like via land to China for example) and actually make more money with it then with sanctions applied. This is made worse by Europe being oil importers, so a high oil price hurts Europe.

    Right now a number of things come together. Trump caused a recession in the US(lower oil demand), EVs are growing in sales(lower oil demand), Venezuela Maduro stuff(higher oil supply), OPEC increases oil production(higher oil supply), Trump makes it easier to frack in the US(higher oil supply) and so forth. The only thing increasing the oil price right now, is a potential invasion of Iran. However even that does not seem that likely. In other words cutting off Russian oil supply, is currently possible.

    Then Trump seized a Russian tanker and nothing happened and Greenland happened. Therefore Europe knows the risk of doing it are lower then thought and they have to take risks to make sure they do not depend on the US, if Russia starts a war against the EU directly.

    Oh and Russia looks weak right now. The economy has some serious problems, so this is likely to really hurt.




  • 2/3 of global trade is done in US dollars. However a lot of that has currency risk, like say Chinese companies paying their Chinese workers in yuan. So if the dollar looses value compared to other currencies, the old contracts can lead to exporters selling their products for less then they are worth. That is not a good situation to be in for a lot of companies.

    In other words Northern Rock would be a joke compared to this.