"The most profound, harmful and unnecessary economic error in the modern era."

[babylonsister]

https://digbysblog.net/2025/04/04/qotd-the-economist-magazine/


QOTD: The Economist Magazine
Published by digby on April 4, 2025

IF YOU failed to spot America being “looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far” or it being cruelly denied a “turn to prosper”, then congratulations: you have a firmer grip on reality than the president of the United States. It’s hard to know which is more unsettling: that the leader of the free world could spout complete drivel about its most successful and admired economy. Or the fact that on April 2nd, spurred on by his delusions, Donald Trump announced the biggest break in America’s trade policy in over a century—and committed the most profound, harmful and unnecessary economic error in the modern era.

“The most profound, harmful and unnecessary economic error in the modern era.”

[Blues Heron]

1. I really doubt it's an error, these rough beasts know what they are doing and why.

It’s just that the economist can’t very well say that Skum, Putin and Trump are destroying our country, or peeps might panic

[markodochartaigh]

6. "rough beasts"

Yeats

The Second Coming


Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

[Iggo]

2. It's not an error. It's an on-purpose.

[relayerbob]

4. Exactly this

Yes, they are incompetent. But that only results in their being unable to hide their evil.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

3. America's astonishing act of self-harm

America's astonishing act of self-harm - Financial Times

1 day ago
If it endures, Donald Trump's decision on April 2 2025 to enact sweeping "reciprocal" tariffs on US trade partners will go down as one of the greatest acts of self-harm in American economic ...

[FirstLight]

5. dismantling the economy and everything else...

I'm trying to look on the light side and think that "it nooeds to be re-built better, so they are doing us a favor by breaking it all down"

but it still sucks and so many regular people are losing their livlihoods and savings

[xuplate]

7. It wasn't a error

It was a FRAUD

[oasis]

8. Telling it like it is.

Bravo Economist!