I know this is a hot-button political issue, but I do think there were a lot of major hints from Trump's 1st term about how this would go.
Tariffs were very much not a bluff during his first term. They were very real. And they started pushing prices upwards in 2019 - then COVID hit and we forgot all about that.
Secondly, the USMCA (NAFTA's successor) was fairly unremarkable from the US perspective beyond some concessions made by Canada around agriculture (specifically its Dairy industry). The US dairy industry is only $110B, roughly 1/30th the size of Apple. It mostly just modernized NAFTA.
I mention this because I do not think the Trump administration has much acumen for cutting deals.
Donald Trump is one of, if not the, most known and understood candidate for POTUS in a long time. Nothing that he's doing is surprising, first of all because we have his first term and second of all he told us what he would do!
It is truly astounding how many people voted for the man and now sit back dumbfounded as Trump does exactly what he said he would do.
However, he is at his core a salesman (conman if you wish) and he has said so many other things that he never intended or even had the capability to do.
For example, lock her up. Did he even try? He rung that bell so loudly to get all the votes of those who hated Clinton. Then once in office, nothing. Just bluster to get attention.
Part of his success is that he just says what people want to hear. You need to have a deeper understanding of him than most voters care to learn to figure out what he is actually planning.
Yeah, this. He said a lot of stuff. Some of what he said, he's doing. Some of what he said, he's not doing. Some of what he said he wasn't going to do (Project 2025), he's actually doing anyway.
Project 2025 wasn’t even his. That’s his evangelical base’s run book.
Trump is too lazy to actually want to do anything so ambitious. This time around he ceeded power to those who have that ambition, mostly to keep himself out of prison.
Trump makes two kinds of statements about what he will do: that he will take an action, and that he will achieve an objective. He mostly takes the actions, but mostly does not achieve the objectives. Some exceptions of course, but mostly.
The things people seem upset about are mostly objectives that he has not achieved. Which, duh, his promised actions had zero chance of achieving those. But that's what I'm seeing.
I'm sorry but I can't take Paul Krugman seriously anymore. His level of discourse was kept somewhat in check by a NYT editor, but now that he's gone on substack, the histrionics about everything was just amped up to about an 11.
Earlier this year he had an article: "Donald Trump Wants You to Die"
No nuance, debate about policies and tradeoffs you would expect from an economist. Just childish screaming into the abyss.
I have learned over the past decade to ignore any articles like this.
If you believed the press, the Muller Report was going to be a smoking gun, destined to reshape the political landscape for a generation and there was nothing Trump could do to stop it.
It’s 2025 now and I’m only going to trust what I read in a sworn deposition, and even then I need to see who took the oath.
Try reading the article instead of just the headline. He is calm and rational as always, explain what's going to happen. I can't see anything wrong with his logic. If someone gave me this article and didn't say who wrote it, I would still say it was spot on. His prediction here is a shocking attack on HHS and the civil service. Are you saying that's not happening? He is saying that Trump will outlaw DEI. Are you saying that's not happening? You seem to be saying that Krugman is shrill and childish, but everything he predicted in this article IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW.
But where do we go from here? Unlike the British parliamentary system, the U.S. has no break-the-glass off switch that lets us get rid of a deeply unpopular and delusional leader. Impeachment won’t happen, because this isn’t the Nixon era: Trump’s party is too corrupt to help save the country.
So we must begin to ask ourselves: in the 1364 days left of the Trump administration, how much damage can he do? And what can those of us who want to save the country do to minimize the damage?
And as a result Fox News was created to ensure that their base would never turn on them again. They certainly seem to have done a good job of inoculating their viewers against pesky things like reality.
Nixon wasn't impeached. Had he not been pardoned the last 50 years would have been much different, probably better. Instead his goons moved into Reagan's WH.
And it was well on the way to falling out of the news until a plane crash that killed a sitting Congressman. And in the wreckage, they find the wife of one of the conspirators with $10k in cash in her purse. He eventually has a breakdown worrying about what happens to his kids if he goes to prison for a long time, and asks for a plea deal.
I know I’m not alone, because I regularly see pure quotes downvoted. If you want to make a point or ask a question, state it. Merely quoting something is lazy and doesn’t add to the discussion. It also appears to assume that the readers haven’t read the article yet. It’s annoying to get a seemingly random quote from an article one just read, without any insight given on why the commenter is posting the particular quote. Imagine if everyone would only post quotes of the parts that caught their fancy, without further comment.
Just chiming in to reinforce this take. It's not clear to me what it brings to the discussion to copy and paste an arbitrary portion of the text I just read.
Why did you pick that particular passage? Do you agree with it, or disagree with it (why)? What makes it particularly relevant or important to emphasize? Etc.
I mean, you could, but you'd be wrong, if you're assuming I'm the same person as the other commenter. I only chimed in because of the "no one else complained".
I'm not sure why "could you contribute your own thoughts on the matter" is so controversial to provoke such anger
Ugh. Paul Krugman is SOOOO clever. Ha Ha. I hate this.
> Ler [sic] me be clear: Trump hitting the wall this early is a good thing for the survival of U.S. democracy. Consolidation of one-party rule looks a lot less likely today than it did a few weeks ago.
This misplaced smarmy confidences of the neoliberal middle and upper class are one of the reasons we are where we are right now. This resting on laurels while our entire government is being torn apart and reshaped by people who hate people and love money is not something that will just go away because some of those people are... dumb or something? Why can't we accept that the Daily Show/Twitter-style "dunk politics" do not work to the favor of the majority of Americans?
Is Paul Krugman ever correct about predictions? The only two I know from him are his famous prediction about the internet, that "by 2005, it would become clear that the Internet's effect on the economy is no greater than the fax machine's" and his child-like theory that two countries with McDonald's wouldn't go to war with one another.
Is there any value in listening to a man who is consistently wrong? Did he get something profoundly correct that I just never learned of?
This is an ad hominem attack in the sense that PK has laid out the logic underlying his statement here. He is not asking that you are to trust his point based solely on his say-so.
The right approach is: "This argument is dubious / incorrect / however you might want to refer to 'wrong' because X" where X could be "there's this and that proof that there -are- deals being made" or "Here is proof the Japanese DID drop bowling balls" or even a more esoteric "I don't think grousing about one-party rule and the death of US democracy is reasonable; these concerns are overblown", which feels more like a slugfest between 2 'vibes' which seems kinda silly, but, by all means, share your opinion here.
But, "Paul Krugman said it therefore what the fuck who cares?" is a logical fallacy and it should have no place here on HN.
Famous according to who? I would judge his record as probably mixed, like most predictions ("predictions are hard, especially about the future."*) Otherwise picking stocks would do better than random chance.
One could be wrong despite the right reasoning or right for the wrong reasons.
And yet, at some level, I agree with you. It's natural to weight what other people say by perception of their prior predictions. I have a similar reaction to Larry Kudlow or Jim Cramer: if one of them told me the sky was blue, I would have to go outside and double check.
Thinking about it some more, I think I can reconcile the difference by looking at the reasoning versus looking at the result. Like poker: you can make the right move and still lose, or make the wrong move and still win.
To bring that back to the current topic: Trump may yet escape causing a recession, but the reasoning for "this tariff war is a terrible idea" has thus far struck me as a lot more coherent than the reasoning for "this tariff war will lead to prosperity"
* funny enough, after writing this whole spiel, I looked it up to see if I got the Yogi Berra quote right (I didn't), but what did I find? An article about this exact topic (Krugman's predictions): https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/12/predict...
You can do that: Life is too short to do a whole bunch of research just to check anything you hear, so you have to judge statements using known imprecise and dangerously oversimplified mechanisms such as 'well, this guy has been wrong so often, lets just assume also wrong here'. But _if_ you do that, you should know you're using really bad guidelines, and you should definitely NOT spread that around and start using it as a logical argument. You, personally, aren't going to bother checking the truth of a statement if it comes from a source you consider exceedingly dubious. Fine. But don't tell others it's a load of horsepuckey because X said it. At best, state that X's personal assurances it is true aren't worth anything.
The right move would be to not click it on HN and not comment on it. If you care enough to comment, why not just check the statements or argue based on them?
He was consistently right during the Great Financial Crisis. That the "grownups" who cut their teeth in the 70s, a supply side recession, were applying the wrong lessons to the GFC, a demand side recession. Europe kept trying and failing to austerity its way to growth. The Republicans shrieked the same, and cost us a perfect opportunity to improve infrastructure basically "for free" as investors paid for safety, i.e. borrowing money was free (recall that in Switzerland rates not only went zero but negative).
Also Hungary's Fidesz basically spelling the end of their democracy.
Also that the euro is a straitjacket: tying together monetary policy in the absence of shared responsibility is a bad thing. Germany didn't want to bail out profligate Greece, Portugal, etc. Meanwhile it had benefited from the euro being weaker than it would have been without them (making German exports more attractive). In fact, shades of today (with respect to the tariff circus): Germany said, basically, "well everyone should be responsible enough to have a trade surplus", which is of course mathematically impossible because, and this is another one that stuck with me, my spending is your income and your spending is my income.
Incidentally this is why businessmen's experience is of little value to being president. Laying off a division doesn't solve anything in macroeconomic-land.
You are referring to a different Times columnist, writing 4 years before Krugman worked for the Times.
"In 1996, columnist Thomas Friedman came up with what is known as the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention, the notion that no two countries with McDonald's franchises have ever gone to war with each other. "
"So I've had this thesis for a long time and came here to Hamburger University at McDonald's headquarters to finally test it out. The thesis is this: No two countries that both have a McDonald's have ever fought a war against each other."
Krugman is a Nobel-prize winning economist. You're referencing Thomas Friedman, who was a reasonably successful journalist before breaking into the opinion game and laying down some infamous stinkers.
He was predicting the Biden post covid economic policy was sensible and inflation would come down without there being a recession when a lot of others, especially Republicans were saying it would be a disaster in various ways.
Because in a couple of months a historically epic amount of shit is gonna hit the fucking fan.