He's just looking for another scapegoat period. It's not me messing up the economy, it's Powell! Deflect and BS is all he does, luckily he's really stupid. I wouldn't mind Powell quitting so things get worse but then he'd just blame something/somebody else so I hope he can't get rid of him.

Hmm, I think we disagree quite a bit on all that.
I think the extreme pessimism is highly warranted and appropriate now and for the next 3 years, 9 months, if he manages to hold the office to term.
We're only three months in and he's already managed to bring markets and economies to the brink of destruction. And he now had Powell in his cross-hairs in an attempt to save his insane fiscal policies.
With all than, AND having endured his 1.0 act, IMO, we are effectively sitting on a ticking time bomb.
capecod, former major league bond trader, CEF savant, and one of the most legendary investment forum posters of all-time, also has a different take. Though he would likely never invest in a CD, he always has regarded (paraphrasing) "meaningful diversification as investment in anything that guarantees a positive total return."
If I scope all taxable bond OEFs available at Fido, I find there are 1802 splattered over 19 pages. If I sort them by "Worst to Best" performance for example 5 years, I find there are 12.5/19 pages that have TRs of LESS than the APY of my 5-yr CD ladder. 3 years, 15.5/19 pages with TRs LESS than.
That ain't "meaningful diversification" to me.
So, to an investor like me, who regards bonds pretty much as a 4-letter word and at one time, a necessary evil, I decided to AVOID dedicated bond funds after their last great crash, except for some small toeholds in 3 low risk finds that I recently bought with stock sale proceeds.
So basically in the past coupla years I exchanged our dedicated bond fund allocation for a 5-yr CD ladder.
I don't have to "hope" (as, IMO, most average bond fund investor do, yourself of course excluded) for annual TRs of 4%-5% from that sleeve. I don't have to "hope' the bond funds I select will be in the minority of dedicated bond funds that outperform my CD ladder. I get 5+% guaranteed, FDIC'd, with Rolex-clocklike interest payments, and full return of my principal at maturity.
And if history at least rhymes, our CD ladder will outperform over time, over 50% of all bond funds available at Fido. Meanwhile, we will, as always, continue to make our real investment money in stocks.
Maybe I misunderstood you, but if not, how is this strategy NOT investing? By definition, we're committing money to earn a financial return.

And at that level, one would think he has to be wondering,
"Does he mean my level or my friends?"

His huge ego will save him. Clearly, I must have been referring to his "friends" that ran off (escaped?).
You can always trust BS1000. Pearls of wisdom from MAGA-land.

@Crash, thanks for the very informative data. I know Japan and China are #1 and #2, respective largest UST holders. Where is Canada rank?
I have to spend more time to learn from the Canadians.
BTW, we have had great time visiting British Columbia province. Beautiful landscape, friendly folks, and great cuisines (very divers from all former British colonies around the world).
Edit: don’t know when we visit Canada again. We are now the ugly Americans.

Disclaimer: These are OPINIONS being expressed here so the is no right or wrong.
That said...
___________________________
On your first point, McCarthy was used as an analogy of the dominance that one Red Party elected official had over the party. It's hard to argue that the analogy is NOT appropriate as McCarthy is widely regarded as one of the most powerful US Senators of all-time and his initiatives gripped the party and nation for years!
But it's the internet so...
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/18/1046648461/decades-before-trumps-election-lies-mccarthys-anti-communist-fever-gripped-the-g
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On your 2nd point, agreed that it will take time to recover. Disagree that we will at best only recover to be a 2nd tier nation.
There are a LOT of country tier designations, everything from rugby to advertising to economics.
If you are talking about the economic tiers, C'mon Man!
https://evadav.com/blog/tier-1-2-3-countries-list#:~:text=Tier 2: Developing or Emerging Economies&text=Tier 2 countries, such as,landscapes and growing purchasing powers.
____________________________
And on a personal note, I feel bad for anyone who has lost hope in the country, especially retirees/senior citizens like me and the missus.

Here is a X post from a Shay Boloor, a financial/investment podcaster, that is making the rounds:
MY OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT TRUMP The frustrating part is that I was on board for a reset. Truly. I’ve said it publicly. I’ve written about it in this very feed. I understood the need for a detox. For decades, the U.S. economy played the part of the rich guy at the table -- picking up the check for a global order that no longer worked in our favor. We hollowed out our industrial base. We enabled unfair trade imbalances under the illusion of diplomacy. We subsidized demand for cheap imports while outsourcing the hard questions about how our domestic workforce would adapt.
Eventually, that had to stop. It was unsustainable -- financially, politically, and morally. We couldn’t keep pretending that a consumption-led economy held together by zero-interest rates and global fragility was a long-term solution. I wanted a rebalancing. I welcomed the idea of a harder, smarter America-first policy that pushed for fair treatment, reciprocal agreements, and a real industrial strategy rooted in technological superiority, national security, and capital formation. That would’ve been leadership.
But that’s not what this is.
That you’ve rolled out isn’t detox -- it’s whiplash. This isn’t strategic decoupling. It’s scattershot retaliation dressed up as reform. There’s no roadmap. No operational playbook. No clear articulation of where this ends or what the metrics of success even are. It’s not an attempt to responsibly unwind America’s role as the global shock absorber -- it’s a brute-force attempt to disorder the existing system with no viable alternative in place.
You can’t replace a fragile supply chain with chaos and call it resilience. You can’t build American industry by torching the scaffolding that underpins capital flows, labor mobility, and global coordination -- especially when the U.S. itself no longer has the domestic capacity to meet its own industrial needs. You talk about bringing jobs home, but the U.S. doesn’t have the labor force, permitting structure, or wage flexibility to stand up full-scale manufacturing at speed. And now -- after years of deportation policies and underinvestment in vocational training -- you’ve made the labor gap even wider.
Capital isn’t going to rush to fill that void just because you raised tariffs. It’s going to wait. It’s going to sit on the sidelines and preserve optionality. Because right now, no CEO can confidently model a five-year capex plan. No board can greenlight supply chain onshoring when they don’t know whether a tariff rate will double next quarter based on your Twitter account or some arbitrary trade deficit formula.
That’s the issue. This wasn’t rolled out as part of a comprehensive American renewal strategy. It wasn’t coordinated with the Fed. It wasn’t communicated clearly to Treasury. It wasn’t backed by a labor reskilling program or any form of public-private manufacturing incentive beyond empty slogans. It was dropped like a bomb -- seemingly designed more to shock than to build.
And in the absence of credible structure, capital is retreating -- not realigning.
I was ready to endure the pain of a thoughtful, structured reset. Most long-term investors were. We’ve lived through tightening cycles. We understood that globalization, as it stood, had reached a breaking point. But this isn’t a correction of imbalances. This is a rupture without scaffolding.
What you’ve created isn’t reindustrialization. It’s an intentional sabotage of capital planning. No executive is going to build a factory with four-year political horizon risk, a floating tariff regime, and no labor certainty. No investor is going to fund expansion in a market where the basic cost of imports can change weekly based on what country has a current account surplus that week. The system you’ve launched isn’t designed for certainty. It’s designed for control.
And the irony is -- we’re not even punishing bad actors. We’re punishing everyone. Allies. Poor countries. Longstanding partners. Israel gets slapped with 17% tariffs while dismantling their own to support American imports. Vietnam gets hit with 46% because it’s become too productive. Lesotho, one of the poorest countries on Earth, faces a 50% tariff because it doesn’t buy enough U.S. goods -- as if that were a sign of unfairness rather than poverty. It’s incoherent. It’s cruel. And it undermines any claim to moral high ground.
You say this is about protecting American workers. But no worker is helped by policy so erratic that no employer wants to hire. No consumer is helped when import costs rise and domestic capacity doesn’t exist to replace them. No investor is helped when the cost of capital spikes in the face of weaponized uncertainty.
This is not a plan to make America stronger. It’s a gamble that markets and allies will blink first. It’s brinkmanship with no floor.
And the most maddening part? There was a path. A real one. A version of this policy that could’ve worked -- not in headlines or soundbites, but in practice. A path that applied pressure with purpose, that aligned economic force with long-term national interest, that sent a clear message to adversaries and partners alike without destabilizing global commerce or blindsiding capital allocators.
You could’ve gone after China -- hard -- and had the backing of nearly every serious investor and strategist on the Street. Not just because of trade deficits or currency suppression, but because China has been actively undermining our economy and our people. I would’ve supported a four-year plan to end all dependence on Chinese manufacturing unless they stopped stealing American IP (DeepSeek). No more games. Make it explicit: if they don’t comply, we’ll back Taiwanese independence and bring the entire global semiconductor economy with us. No ambiguity. No half-threats. As I see it, China is at war with us -- and our policy should reflect that.
With the EU, you could’ve played it clean. Match auto tariffs percent-for-percent. That’s fair. And then leave the rest alone -- especially goods and services. We run a huge surplus on services with the EU. It props up some of our biggest competitive advantages -- enterprise software, consulting, cloud, defense tech, streaming, media IP. Tariffing the EU outside of autos would be like shooting your own foot for balance. We’re not in a trade war with Europe. We're in a competition for global enterprise dominance -- and right now, the U.S. is winning.
That’s what real strength would’ve looked like. That’s what an America-first trade doctrine could’ve achieved. You’d be rebuilding the system from the inside out -- not just throwing bricks through the windows and calling it a redesign.
Investors would’ve backed it. CEOs would’ve planned around it. Global partners would’ve respected it -- even if they didn’t like it. And capital would’ve flowed toward American resilience instead of retreating from American unpredictability.
But instead of that, you went with chaos. And now, confidence is shattered. Not because the numbers are bad -- but because no one knows what the numbers mean anymore.
That’s the cost of burning down the rules without building new ones. So no, this is not the detox we needed. It’s not strategic decoupling. It’s not a path to renewal. It’s a slow, loud dismantling of the very foundation that has allowed American capital, innovation, and enterprise to dominate for decades. And it didn’t have to be this way.
But now we’re here. And the market is reacting accordingly -- not to the fundamentals, but to the sense that the future may no longer be modelable. That’s not a trade. That’s an exit.
I don’t want this post to be hyper-political. This isn’t about red or blue. It’s not about the 2024 election cycle. It’s not about ideology. It’s about strategy. It’s about execution.
It’s about understanding that when you're the United States -- when you sit at the helm of the global economic engine -- every policy you roll out reverberates through capital markets, supply chains, boardrooms, and governments. Words become signals. Signals become pricing. Pricing becomes pain -- or progress.
And I hope -- for the sake of the markets, for the sake of businesses trying to plan, and for the future we’re all investing into -- that it’s not too late to recalibrate. Because we don’t need more noise.
We need a plan.

Even before this latest barrage, all the Canadians I know have canceled as many economic transactions with the US as they can.
Friends here on the Cape say their Canadian relatives have told them they will NEVER come to "Your A***ole Country again". Summer bookings here are down 10 to 15% as many Canadians have already canceled.
About 35% of Massachusetts voted for him but with the rise in electric rates, vacations canceled and layoffs at the VA, even the areas where you expect people to vote GOP people are becoming very angry.
The Vets in particular say he has stabbed them in the back with VA cuts

Nice post & link @WABC
“Globalization” was, I think, unjustly scapegoated as a cause of lower income workers’ distress in recent years. A lot of these swing voters felt they could help their situation with an administration that imposed heavy tariffs. Those people may have been wearing blinders, as some are beginning to realize that the “cure” for free-trade / globalization is going to be worse for them than the “blight” they railed against.

guaranteed jamie dimon gets lauded for trying to benefit his shareholders in the golden age of grift.
no problem, KYC scapegoats list is always ready.

We all know the answer to that. Maybe I should be angrier than I am with all the illegals: my wife had to wait two years to be admitted to the US legally. But you have how many people desperate to escape shit-hole countries to the south (and in Africa?) where the governments are all either totally inept or corrupt or owned by cartels? Wait.... That pretty much describes the current US Administration.... But seriously: there are parents threatened in those places with a desperate choice: let us recruit your 10-year old kid into our violent street gang with drugs and guns, or we will give you the privilege of watching us shoot your husband before your eyes. Years ago, I knew such a family, who fled to the USA and took sanctuary in Spokane. And then we'll just TAKE your son, anyhow.
There are putrid, scumbag people out there, all over the world, who will do ANYTHING to enrich themselves. I don't blame a great many illegals who risk everything to come here. Then, when they pay into SS, they are not even eligible to ever collect.
Now, when it comes to illegals who turn to criminal activity once they get HERE? Fuck 'em.

Businesses, shoppers brace for higher prices if tariffs on Mexico and Canada imports start Saturday
Following are edited excerpts from a current NPR report:

Businesses and shoppers in the U.S. are bracing for higher prices on everything from gasoline to guacamole, as President Trump renews his threat to impose steep tariffs this weekend on imports from two of the country's biggest trading partners.
Trump told reporters at the White House Thursday that he intends to follow through with his threat to slap a 25% tax on imports from Canada and Mexico starting Saturday, in response to what he called a flow of immigrants and drugs across the country's northern and southern borders.
General Motors told financial analysts on Tuesday that it could shift some pickup truck production out of Mexico and Canada if tariffs are imposed. But the automaker is reluctant to act while the trade landscape is still uncertain.
"We are prepared to mitigate near-term impacts," said CEO Mary Barra. "What we won't do is spend [a] large amount of capital without clarity." The auto industry in North America is highly integrated, relying on manufacturing in all three countries.
Mexico is a leading producer of flat-screen TVs.
Canada is also a major supplier of crude oil to U.S. refineries, especially in the Midwest. "Increasing expenses by 25% is going to lead to higher costs at the pump for U.S. consumers and higher input costs for businesses around the country," said Matthew Martdin of Oxford Economics.
Mexico and Canada would likely respond to any tariffs by imposing taxes of their own on U.S. exports.

@Old_Joe, I first came across it on Apple News that I subscribe to. It explains the bond world in details with relevant graphs on each points. The rise of long treasuries (10 years treasury for example) since last October to near 5% today has negatively impacted the equities and bonds. It also presented the “ excess CAPE yield” at historical high, suggesting below average future returns on stock market in an already rich valuation environment.
Our local library subscribers to many newspapers. Generally searching by the title would find it.

I always forget about my library card.
Tip of the cap to @Observant1 for finding the MSN link.

@Old_Joe, I first came across it on Apple News that I subscribe to. It explains the bond world in details with relevant graphs on each points. The rise of long treasuries (10 years treasury for example) since last October to near 5% today has negatively impacted the equities and bonds. It also presented the “ excess CAPE yield” at historical high, suggesting below average future returns on stock market in an already rich valuation environment.
Our local library subscribers to many newspapers. Generally searching by the title would find it.

I thought I knew a lot about investing until opening a brokerage account at Fido 4-5 years ago. Much wider landscape to work with than just having investments at a few different houses. So am still learning. But I do know my 2022 (bear market) return was better by 2 or 3 points then it would have been if stuck in the previous fund houses. From my (broad) family experience of 70+ years the real issue is convincing someone to save during their working years, Without having something to invest, all the coaching in the world can’t help you in retirement.
I’ll vote for better financial education: ”Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.”
Great discussion. Thanks @stillers for the lengthy comment.

I guess then I was wasting money on collision and comprehensive for at least 10 yrs. I generally do not over insure but this escaped my attention.

(I presume things like the Chevron decision, activist pro-business conservative courts, and an incoming 'president' who will sling arbitrary EO's around like playing cards are the force behind this.)
Due to evolving legal landscape & changes in the framework of administrative law, Federal Reserve Board will soon seek public comment on significant changes to improve transparency of bank stress tests & reduce volatility of resulting capital requirements....
https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/bcreg20241223a.htm

Japan Govt debt may be 150% of GDP but what counts is how much of it is owned by the Japanese, especially its own central bank.
I thought the following was interesting:
“OTHER VOICES. Jenny JOHNSON, President & CEO of Franklin Templeton. AI hype will come to an end and a period of pessimism will follow. Such up and down cycles are normal for new technologies. Early and fast adopters may not be the eventual leaders. The profitless AI capex has to be digested. Look for AI beneficiaries in enterprise software, data analytics, customer service, finance, healthcare, collaborative work, picks and shovels (chipmakers, cloud hosts, data centers).”
How did Franklin growth or value funds perform during 2023 and 2024, the current AI boom period. Just checking if her comments were colored by the performance of her funds.
I used to think business leaders are intellectually honest (I know I was naive). The latest one that killed my optimism about that breed is Howard Lutnick. He had his strategists parade for two years telling us how the economy is going to be bad and that the stock market was about to crash / correct. It turned out he was a Trump bum licker and massively politically biased. I feel sorry for all the opportunity cost he caused for investors who listened to him and his minions who of course will benefit either way.

If you ever felt Howard Lutnick’s qualifications were deficient to become Commerce Sec, you were missing this piece of info -
https://www.ft.com/content/73ef7b34-3969-4466-993e-0d1d24ef434a

for those that want some idea of what your own PAID professionals think :
https://klementoninvesting.substack.com/p/how-big-is-the-equity-risk-premium
e.g., vanguard is ~4th most pessimistic asset manager regarding their own forecasts on the u.s. equity premium.
i personally avoid indexing, and prefer alternatives to CAPE (like hussman's) when comparing historical valuations betwixt\between nations.

Japan Govt debt may be 150% of GDP but what counts is how much of it is owned by the Japanese, especially its own central bank.
I thought the following was interesting:
“OTHER VOICES. Jenny JOHNSON, President & CEO of Franklin Templeton. AI hype will come to an end and a period of pessimism will follow. Such up and down cycles are normal for new technologies. Early and fast adopters may not be the eventual leaders. The profitless AI capex has to be digested. Look for AI beneficiaries in enterprise software, data analytics, customer service, finance, healthcare, collaborative work, picks and shovels (chipmakers, cloud hosts, data centers).”
How did Franklin growth or value funds perform during 2023 and 2024, the current AI boom period. Just checking if her comments were colored by the performance of her funds.
I used to think business leaders are intellectually honest (I know I was naive). The latest one that killed my optimism about that breed is Howard Lutnick. He had his strategists parade for two years telling us how the economy is going to be bad and that the stock market was about to crash / correct. It turned out he was a Trump bum licker and massively politically biased. I feel sorry for all the opportunity cost he caused for investors who listened to him and his minions who of course will benefit either way.

@YBB, tyvm for that info --- not surprising, don't know why I didn't think of it or investigate. One of my kids works in that space.
Sila obviously give much attention to service and professionalism and prompt responsiveness and transparency, it is really something. Reassuring confidence. Precision prep and cleanup.
We do have other local plumber groups which somehow have seemed iffier the times I have had to use them, although as I say I rely on my local regular for most things. (He has a boat and a place on the Cape, as well as residence down the road. Everyone knows the joke where the plumber fixes the neurosurgeon's undersink emergency and after 23 hard minutes says 'All set, that'll be $1841.' The neurosurgeon says 'Man, I don't think I can make $1841 in 23 minutes.' And the plumber replies, 'Neither could I when I was a neurosurgeon.')
Sila employees are on staff and the four I have talked to by now, senior and junior, have been with the outfit for many years, 5-9 iirc. Big rigs deployed that they park at home and are fully monitored and insured and so on by the company.
Backbreaking work some plumbing is.
Backyard excavation starts next week.
@Derf, septic tank and cesspool and leachout were and are fine, thanks, and did not even need the $440 inspection and pumping that Sila insisted on.
I feel fortunate as always to be able to afford any of this, though it shoots savings and treat setasides for this and much of next year. Whatever. Not like there was a choice.