The farmers should blame their Government for not providing alternative employment. If the oranges and grapes are strategically/culturally important, the Gov can again buy it a floor price and sell for cheap. Either way, farmers will lose out on some of the rents, but hey, everyone else benefits from cheaper fruit from abroad in this scenario.

Btw, the West has done this with their ag sector to the third world. Displacing exports of global south with their own which have greater productivity (lower price) and subsidized on top. Except, global south countries have little policy space to counter the impact on local output and employment thanks to IMF/self-imposed neoliberal rules.

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Yea if they buy Chinese goods instead there is no significant strain on US resources at all. Chinese labor and resources will be used and Americans will be unaffected.

Real repearations are paid in real goods like how Weimar Germany was forced to pay up in gold which it didn’t have, forcing the Government to bid up prices by dumping local currency to markets which no one wanted resulting in hyperinflation.

The US is not at all in such a position.

Ah, piles, very briish.

I don’t understand how any American family would be helped if Iran didn’t get $300b.

Will Congress appropriate $300b as stimmy checks if Iran didn’t get $300b in private funds?

Congress can do so anyway regardless of whether Iran gets money or not, it is the very act of appropriation that creates Government money.

Also, export lovers should love Iran getting dollars to buy American goods. It’s “good for jobs”.

Money isn’t a thing. Is Iran going to buy us goods and services using these funds? If so, Iran gains real stuff, US loses real stuff. The idiotic Americans would see it as a win because it reduces trade deficits even though Real flow is in favor of Iran.

Also note Iran lost access to foreign resources due to sanctions imposed by the US. This is only reversing part of it.

Basic understanding of politics will tell anyone the US Prez doesn’t have the power to give Iran $300b from public funds as its not appropriated by the Congress.

Its funds are provided by gulf and other countries’ private sector.

Regardless, it doesn’t matter. Israel gets hundreds of billions EACH YEAR from BOTH US public and private sector. Unfortunately, the socdems and even many on the left only focus on the public sector part of it when most of the $ Israel receives are from private sector.

he only way they will be able to reverse that is through crushing austerity against the working class.

will not work. the only way to re-industrialize is using state capacity. that isn’t possible given ‘sound’ finance so all they can do is shit on China.

Countries that are sanctioned by the U.S. don’t have much to lose fighting the U.S. It’s why most global south leaders (socdem, right, liberal) don’t want to upset the U.S. too much. Ofc, the right wing regimes do outright glaze unlike the socdem ones which at least posture against U.S. actions.

Iran had nothing much to lose by attacking the U.S, Israel and the Gulf. If its forex reserves are unblocked, it’ll have more to worry about wrt upsetting the U.S. I hope they know better to not throw Lebanon under the bus for a bit of one-off foreign exchange.

at least it’s a 'stable’coin

The UFC said some fighters will receive bonuses in World Liberty Financial crypto called “stablecoins”, whose value is pegged to the US dollar. World Liberty named the currency “USD1”.

They’ll probably be able to find enough liquidity to get actual $ for it.

Next they’ll pay in shitcoins you have no chance of hedging with thin liquidity.

It’s very unfortunate that some leftists are comparing Elon Musk’s trillion dollar “net worth” to GDP of entire countries. The comparison is very sloppy:

1. Spacex free float ie shares that are being actively traded and not hoarded by people like Musk is mere 5%, and the supposed trillion dollar net worth is inferred from this number.

2. GDP is a flow measure, its measure of mostly real things (services makes it complicated) a country produces in a year. Net Worth is a stock measure and for individuals, it includes “market value” of financial claims.

3. A better comparison would be capital stock of a country. But again, Elon Musk net worth is mostly fictitious capital.

Eg. Taiwan/ROC’s capital stock is roughly $7 trillion. This is the value of all monetized assets of a country. It includes all the chip fabs, all the real stuff a country has.

Much of a country isn’t monetized, how do you put a $ value on a mountain or a forest? It’s not traded on the market at all.

Elon Musk net worth far exceeds the book value of assets held by his companies plus any possible cash flows for the foreseeable future.

4. My point is not to say Elon Musk being a trillionaire is good, it’s not. He shouldn’t exist. But comparing whole countries to someone who has lots of illiquid financial claims is ridiculous.

5. Elon Musk basically issued magic tokens he himself created, with no future obligations like with bonds, got people to buy only a small supply of it (5%) and now claims to be a trillionaire. That’s close to what Sam Bankman Fried did with the FTT token.

Full employment, detaching financial and real and planning according to real constraints.

Still don’t see the point of gold here other than may be sanctions evasion. The exporting nations have to accumulate Dollars first to buy gold.

And central banks buy gold off budget unlike most spending which has to be debated and appropriated by the legislature.

Central banks hoard it and pump up the price. If a central bank bought up real estate and didn’t even rent it out, it’ll raise questions from the public on why cb is hoarding homes. Yet no one cares when it’s gold. People even call gold hoarding to be prudent.

Heck, even copper buying by a central bank using its infinite local currency capacity or using limited foreign currency reserves would be scrutinised heavily. Yet gold is fine. Palladium has similar properties to gold, why not hoard palladium?

China will accept palladium as collateral and give you Yuan for it. You ultimately pay in Yuan or similar currencies if you are a sanctioned country.

And gold itself is marked in $ terms in the books so the more gold CBs lock up the higher the % due to valuation effect even though nothing was created.

Yea it’s very clear Israel isn’t reliant on US public funds directly. It has a large export surplus with the US, and embedding themselves more directly will raise dependence.

In fact the aid is probably hurting their export competitiveness. This way they can get their currency weaker and make others dependent on them.

Most of the dollars Israel receives is private sector financial wealth.

For all the handwringing from the West abt Chinese “overcapacity”, it is Israel that’s pursuing a neo-mercantilist policy.

Bad economics using loanable funds nonsense. It comes from the

Savings - Investment = Current Account Balance

Identity. The savings in this case isn’t household savings. Current account includes trade btw.

It is in fact the rest of the world’s willingness to accept Chinese imports (treatlerites for instance), and China’s willingness to accept certain currencies and financial assets that results in the trade surplus.

I think there is a legitimate argument to be had whether the world deserves Chinese labor and resources embodied in the goods they export considering continuous trade deficits in own currency (eg USD) is closer to aid than trade. But it has nothing to do with household savings.

Kimi K2, Deepseek 4, Qwen have been pretty good and very cheap.

While Claude may be somewhat better, it’s not worth it.

Fell for “sound finance” neoliberalism conflating real and financial award.

Good article

they’re enshittifying index funds now 😭

Hitman and Watch Dogs 2. I replay same games over and over

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