For those that don't know, one of the clauses is the ability to ignore IP Copyright.
this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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This has been making the rounds before, but I think it’s ridiculous to bring it up. There is a reason nobody is touching Russians assets in the West. Touching property is not something considered a political tool. It’s the foundation of the capitalist system. They are not going to blow it up because of some tariffs.
Start buying European weapons instead of US ones
Sigh... something in the pessimistic corner of my mind tells me that we will soon hear the orange man saying that the US needs to bring freedom back to europe...
something something global reserve currency
US has been running a trade balance deficit since 1976 and it upsets Trump. Pretty hard to avoid when you are the global reserve currency tho.
Yeah, so as I understand it, the US is able to have this huge trade imbalance because they can pay for their imports in currency they can print themselves, and other central banks will take the dollars because it's the reserve currency and because petrol products are traded in dollars. It is a rather delicate balance, that allows the US to consume with unlimited credit, that will work as long as others want dollars.
I understand how other economies would like to break this relationship and get in on the putting everything on the credit card, or to break it just so that the US doesn't have so much economic power over the world.
What I don't understand is how an American, much less the president himself, would want this balance upset. Even as a European, I believe it's in my economic interest that the Americans consume.
Do I have a better understanding of this than the American government??
being the reserve currency isn't that nice for citizens, though. Other countries and companies need your money, because all the big deals are made in it and you really want some on hand to protect against currency fluctuations (don't want your 50m € deal suddenly costing 100m€ because it's denominated in dollars and the exchange rate rose).
but if everyone wants your currency, in large amounts, your government at some point can't keep up with printing, otherwise inflation goes up too much.
now when you have lots of buyers for your currency, but too little supply, of course the exchange rate will go up. But those buyers also look for alternatives that are almost as good as just money.
well it's not actually money you hoard, but debts that can be exchanged for money. First government bonds, those are stable and can be exchanged for money easily. Those also have limited supply, so the next best thing, corporate loans. Less stable but better than nothing. Those dry up, etc. and you end up at subprime mortgages. Those suck, but hey, they are still dollars, kind of. So you have more and more financial instruments created that pretend to be actual money.
on the flip side, in the reserve currency country, borrowing becomes easy, Companies and people that should not get this much cash now can easily get it. You have lots of bad investment as no one knows what to do with all that money. Houses get built that shouldn't be. There's more and more risk in the system.
Until it fails and blows up. We know what that looks like.
being the reserve currency is first and foremost nice for the government in question. If it's nice for the people depends on how the government manages it and what it does with the money and how it controls it. And the longer it goes on, the more unsustainable it is. Countries getting too much investment often do worse than countries getting little
You have a better understanding than dumbass trump. He's surrounded himself with sycophants that will agree to his stupidest ideas so that they can get a greenlight for their pet projects.
also afaik that only takes goods into account and ignores services… from what i understand, as economies mature they transition to much more service-based economies (though this can’t continue to be true forever) so just by merit of being the worlds most “mature” economy you’d expect a goods defect and a “services surplus” (not that that’s a thing i think)
like gsuite, office365, etc… most web services are bought from US companies
And hard to avoid when you're the third country by size AND population, like no shit a country with ⅒ your population won't be able to buy as much as they sell to you...
If Canada had the same population as the USA it would probably go the other way.
No, I think the problem is that the US dollar is overvalued because it's also used as the global reserve currency. If the dollar went down then other places could afford to buy US made stuff and the US would import less. As it is US exports are mainly monopolies (Google, Facebook, AWS, Apple) and weapons that they can bully NATO members into buying (the US is supposed to buy for an equal amount from the countries that buys weapons from them but that isn't happening). There's also agricultural products but the labour used is illegal immigrants that are terribly underpaid.
is it because Macron touched him?