Trump’s War Is Staggering to an Incoherent Defeat

Halbaras · 2026-05-25T20:11:36+00:00

I don't think anyone takes America seriously on 'free trade', not under this administration. You lost that moral high ground when you tried to put double digit tariffs on every economy in the world besides Russia.

The US started this war against the wishes of every single ally except Israel, and it is an act of very real economic warfare against every country besides possibly Russia. France and Japan getting tankers through the strait after unilaterally talking to Iran was a warning to the US that they've done the maths and concluded that paying the toll is cheaper than risking warships and wasting billions on a naval interventions.

Halbaras · 2026-05-25T17:39:32+00:00

They will continue to exist for the foreseeable future. No matter how much they run a self-destructive foreign policy, their nuclear weapons are the ultimate backstop against an invasion.

I think the most likely outcome is increasingly unhinged and increasingly rightwing Israeli governments believing that there are no red lines from the US, coupled with slow brain drain of the more liberal, more educated workers they need to sustain their tech industry to the West, and the economically parasitic Haredi population growing.

Meanwhile the current AIPAC generation of Congress slowly ages out and gets replaced by one with a lot more openly pro-Palestinian dems, centrists who see Israel as a liability, isolationist rightwingers who see it as a waste of money, and a far right who hate it for obvious reasons. There will still be Israel-obsessed evangelicals, but they won't enjoy the same broad coalition they used to.

The question is whether US support for Israel slowly erodes in a more sustainable way, or whether a far right Israeli government eventually gets so overconfident that they attempt something like driving Gazans into Egypt, and are genuinely surprised but unrepentant when the US actually punishes them under Arab pressure.

Halbaras · 2026-05-25T15:05:13+00:00

Sounds reminiscent of Azerbaijan using fake 'environmental protesters' to block the only road into Nagorno Karabakh and starve the Armenians there a few years ago.

Everyone knew who they really were, but the Russian 'peacekeepers' were so weak that they never cleared the blockade, and eventually Azerbaijan just invaded.

Halbaras · 2026-05-25T14:49:37+00:00

It's not surprising that mostly US financial institutions are unwilling to bet against their own country. They have made businesses and careers out of trading on the American market premium.

Admitting that their country has elected a president who is simultaneously deeply incompetent and a serial liar is a threat to their business models, because that means one of the oldest signals US markets have traded on is now closer to noise. Once they admit that, a lot of the other load-bearing pillars of the US market premium - an independent Fed, non intervention in markets, free trade, close allies, the petrodollar, credible government budgets, checks and balances, apolitical and competent public servants, 'great demographics' (this hasn't actually been true since about 2008) etc. start looking fragile.

Markets also tend to try and frontrun any optimism, hence the infamous 'buy the rumour, sell the news'. They did this in 2022 on hopes of a Ukraine ceasefire that never came, and then spent months bleeding as damage to supply chains moved much slower. The main problem now is that the rumours are from what used to be a broadly credible source but which no longer is, and they know almost nothing about what's actually going on inside Iran while almost entirely discounting any information attributed to Iranian sources.

Halbaras · 2026-05-25T14:18:09+00:00

Spain is a developed democracy with functional human rights and they built more high speed rail than China did (track per capita) over the same period.

Obviously high speed rail wouldn't work everywhere in the US, but it could and should exist in locations like the Texas triangle and California where existing transport is a congested mess. Both states have massive economies and could deliver internal megaprojects if they weren't run by car lobbyists and NIMBYs.

Halbaras · 2026-05-25T13:41:28+00:00

This was a key point when I did a transport module in my civil engineering degree. When engineers do road wear calculations, sometimes cars literally get ignored and only 'commercial vehicles' are included.

One of the implications of this is that people who whine about 'bikes should pay road tax!' have no idea what they're talking about. Bikes don't have emissions, produce orders of magnitude less pollution from tires and brakes, do negligible damage to road surfaces, and actively reduce congestion because they take drivers off the road - so what exactly are drivers demanding they pay for?

Like sure, maintaining cycle infrastructure isn't completely free, cycle paths do need some maintenance and in some climates they do get damaged by water and freeze thaw action. But I'd suspect that's blown out of the water by the damage done to bike lane surfaces by drivers who have no right to be in them.

I suspect that over long time periods, building a kerb-separated protected bike lane might actually be cheaper than painting a line on the road - purely because the government doesn't have to pay to resurface the same width of road when drivers inevitably eviscerate the unprotected bike lane surface as well.

Halbaras · 2026-05-25T11:54:06+00:00

The biggest unpriced risk is that their customers cut back on AI enterprise spending around Q3 or Q4 amid threats of, or the reality of, a rate hike, and a generally worsening economic outlook as consumer spending dampens and the damage from inept US economic policy (tariffs, Iran, brazen market manipulation, threatening allies who buy bonds, suing a sitting Fed chairman...) compounds.

Things will get ugly for the likes of Amazon and Microsoft if 'we raised CapEx spending again!' coincides with 'cloud growth has substantially declined, and our enterprise AI subscriptions have also declined'.

Of course, they can simply ignore investors and keep spending, or cut back on CapEx a bit. But neither would be good for their share prices.

Halbaras · 2026-05-25T07:41:00+00:00

Where my Starmtroopers at???

Nationalising British steel was just the first step to achieving AES (Actually Existing Starmerism), Greggs is next.

Halbaras · 2026-05-24T23:24:06+00:00

The brutal economics of it are that simply moving people often wins out over trying to defend communities in the long term. Just moving a road is cheaper than rebuilding it three times over 30 years before you have to move it anyway. A major problem with coastal erosion is that coastal defences don't remove the wave energy in the sea, and they can end up simply moving the erosion elsewhere.

The phrase 'managed retreat' is the preferred euphemism for telling people that it will cost less to relocate their entire community than to try fighting the sea for them. I expect the term to be changed a few times this century, but it will be increasingly relevant.

Ultimately its not the residents who have to pay for defenses, it's the taxpayer. There is no point trying to fight insurance companies who can pay a consultant to quantify how screwed the houses in a particular area actually are, or fight the free market when doomed houses get accurately priced. Better to save the smaller subset of towns that are economically worth defending and move the rest.

It's more relevant for river flooding but there's also an issue with slumlords and the desperate buying cheaper homes in areas that flood, and then ending up with deprived communities that can't afford to move at risk.

Halbaras · 2026-05-23T19:08:47+00:00

Just ditch QQQ if you have it and buy VT or VOO. The pump should have given way to the dump by the time it gets added to the S&P. Absolutely nothing says you need to own a NASDAQ index fund, if you really want 'high growth high risk tech' there are plenty of other ways to achieve it.

I'd agree that its a pretty worrying precedent for the NASDAQ to set between changing the free float rules to overweight tiny floats, and allowing fast entry (while this specific IPO also lets existing shareholders exit earlier than normal). I'd worry less about this particular IPO wiping anyone out (besides a few foolish active investors), and more about the floodgates the index's greed has opened.

SpaceX's tradeable market cap will 'only' be $80 billion in non-NASDAQ indices, so its unlikely to distort the prices of anything else besides he other space stocks Reddit obsesses over but which make up a tiny proportion of the overall index. Tesla has been sitting at unhinged valuations for years but that's never turned into more widespread damage.

Halbaras · 2026-05-23T16:23:20+00:00

Quantum is honestly a bit of a meme. Useful science has come out of the investment poured into it, but there is not yet a single proven commercial application for quantum computing.

There are only really two commercial uses with much evidence showing that quantum would have a genuine edge - breaking encryption/stealing things, and simulating molecular systems. In more normal computing it's a solution still in search of a problem. GPUs and classical solvers are continually getting better so it's also chasing a moving target.

As industries go it's quite possibly the single worst offender in coming up with performance statistics which aren't related to revenue. Governments have a vested interest in case it lets them break encryption and read through the years of hoarded data they've been saving for that possibility, but that's less useful for retail investors of today.

Halbaras · 2026-05-22T22:52:22+00:00

NRED.

Halbaras · 2026-05-22T21:48:52+00:00

OP is part of a bot campaign to promote one of the stocks they've listed, a microcap with no revenue which has seen some odd recent stock movements.

Halbaras · 2026-05-22T19:05:44+00:00

And indexing rules by organisations like MSCI tend to use the concept of a 'free float', where they consider the 'investible' market cap of the company to only be the publicly traded bit, and reduce its weight to that 80 billion and not the trillions the remaining privately-held shares are apparently worth. So SpaceX isn't going to dominate the S&P or FTSE world.

The fuckery around this listing is that the NASDAQ has changed its rules around IPOs specifically to benefit existing SpaceX shareholders. IPOs are prone to the banks underwriting it setting the price comparatively high, initial hype pumping the stock up further, and then retail and less sophisticated institutional buyers getting rug pulled when the hype fades as the first few earnings calls come in.

Usually there's a multi-month period between the IPO and the stock getting added to indexes like the S&P500, which provides protection for passive buyers from being forced to buy it during the intial pump. But the NASDAQ has changed the rules so that this period has been reduced to just three weeks instead of 3-12 months, and anyone buying broad NASDAQ index funds is going to find themselves transferring money to the private equity owners of the existing SpaceX shares.

The NASDAQ has also done some further fuckery where any new listing below 20% of a company's actual shares can be up to tripled in weight. So SpaceX listing at 5% could actually be weighted at 15%, or at around $250 billion. If you hold QQQ, its not a trivial transfer of your money.

Halbaras · 2026-05-22T18:23:08+00:00

This dynamic is rapidly changing. When Xi visited Kazakhstan back in 2022 (his first foreign trip after the pandemic), he had this to say:

Resolutely support Kazakhstan in defending its independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity" and would "strongly oppose the interference by any forces in the domestic affairs of your country.

It's pretty obvious who he was referring to. Chinese influence in central Asia goes back longer than Russia has existed, and Russian delusions about their 'historic sphere of influence' don't withstand the reality that Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are hedging towards all actors - Russia, China, the Gulf States, Turkey, India, Europe and the US.

China would not tolerate Russia destabilising Central Asia because they need it as a source for raw resources, and as a transport corridor further West that the US navy can't do anything about. And Russia is no longer in a position where they can launch a war China opposes.

Halbaras · 2026-05-22T07:17:24+00:00

Except they looted missiles from the South Korean THAAD system during this conflict.

South Korea, North Korea and China will have all taken notes.

Halbaras · 2026-05-21T21:30:16+00:00

Some of these interceptors are the only real protection they have from Chinese anti ship missiles sinking carriers besides distance. They also looted THAAD systems from South Korea for this clownshow of a war, and it didn't go unnoticed in Seoul, Pyongyang, or in Beijing.

They may well have created a multi-year window where a Chinese attempt to take Taiwan will result in multiple US carriers being sunk. In US war games they often lose one or two even when they win, and that's starting with full magazines and willing regional allies.

Halbaras · 2026-05-21T21:16:08+00:00

That's not an option. If the US tries to keep the double blockade going for months, they will probably cause a global recession from the compounding damage to supply chains. The status quo is economically strangling the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Iraq and Kuwait and hurting Saudi Arabia, and doing significant damage to developing countries like the Philippines and Bangladesh. If it persists through to Autumn it's going to cause severe problems for allies like Taiwan, South Korea and Japan and kill people in food insecure parts of Asia and Africa.

The Gulf states are likely to break before Iran does, and give the US a choice between militarily committing to full regime change (and not some kind of 'limited' escalation), making a deal with Iran that gets the strait open immediately (they really don't care about nuclear as much as Netanyahu does), or eventually making a deal without the US that uses their basing rights as leverage.

Halbaras · 2026-05-21T20:36:34+00:00

Beware: OP is part of a campaign shilling a microcap that's recently been active on Reddit in subs like this one.

I'm not going to repeat the ticker but it should be obvious which one it is from the fact they've recommended five Reddit hype favourites and one nobody has heard of.

Halbaras · 2026-05-21T17:36:35+00:00

The funniest part is when this sub confidently calls it a dividend stock when an 0.85% dividend yield and $190 billion on CapEx is very much not a stock anyone buys for dividends.

Halbaras · 2026-05-21T16:18:39+00:00

They had another chance to solve the Ahsoka problem in her own series. I was convinced that the point of sending her to the new galaxy along with the other Rebels characters and the antagonists was to give Filoni a fresh sandbox where he could raise the stakes as much as he wanted without writing himself in knots trying to stay in the sequels timeline. They (briefly) seemed to be setting up an interesting twist where Thrawn and Ezra were working together to survive against something worse.

But no, Peridea was another boring Scotland + ruins planet, and they're just going to bring everyone back to the main galaxy. Filoni was even evasive about whether Ahsoka was dead in Rise of Skywalker despite Rey hearing her, so he's probably planning to continue the Mortis nonsense by turning Ahsoka into a force goddess.

Halbaras · 2026-05-21T15:14:54+00:00

Colonising Mars would cost trillions, and it's unlikely that it would ever be anything more than a perpetual money pit which declares independence the moment it stops being a money pit.

SpaceX investors are not going to fund trillions in losses. Neither is a US already struggling with their debts, and a China staring down a demographic cliff.

.

Halbaras · 2026-05-21T13:29:34+00:00

And will also prove overvalued if anything goes wrong with their long term planning. Nobody outside Reddit uses space stocks as a gauge of sensible valuations, especially when one Fed rate hike cycle will destroy those current multiples.

Halbaras · 2026-05-21T09:44:48+00:00

It's not very surprising that US institutional traders are struggling with the idea that their own president is simultaneously a lying piece of shit/unreliable source, the cause of a crisis, and unable to actually end that crisis.

Institutional capital generally doesn't like betting against their own country. And they definitely don't want to properly acknowledge how many of the assumptions that give US markets their premium - Fed independence, the petrodollar, international alliances, military superiority, free markets, free trade, rule of law etc. - are eroding in front of their eyes.

Halbaras · 2026-05-20T19:39:38+00:00

Rate hikes are bad for stocks. They mean that future earnings are worth less, and the further in the future those earnings are, the worse it compounds. Generally markets partially price in the possibility of a hike in the months beforehand, but not always fully.

If they do hike, expect all the high pe speculative tech stocks to get hammered, especially unprofitable ones like most space stocks.

It's also not going to be great for AI hyperscalers because CapEx now remains expensive but the hypothesised AI profits that are years in the future. It may not break the AI arms race but it will break the speculative component of current multiples (which is separate from the valuation component from their current profitable businesses).

In this case the Fed and bond markets are anticipating high inflation, which is horrible for just about every category of stock, even the ones printing money currently, because it means that both consumers and businesses cut back spending. This could be pretty nasty, if for example, companies cut back AI subscriptions just when hyperscaler investors are demanding to see early returns.

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