BlackRock strikes deal to bring ports on both sides of Panama Canal under American control

Doubt it. Looks like the port owner was in it for the money and this offer suits his goal. I saw from China’s response this morning that they are not afraid of Trump… and they shouldn’t be. China is the manufacturing country and holds most of the cards in a tariff war. Trumps position is “if you don’t agree to some unspecified demand I’m making then I’ll force the US to pay more for your goods!”. And China was like “Sounds good to us”.

 

China shrugs and says it’ll have flying tankers in five years.

 

Americans getting wealthy enough to buy the US government is a national security risk. Their security concern is their money, not my well-being. The richer someone gets, the less anyone normal has in common with them, American or not.

 

Yeah, I’m pretty sure ownership of some port in Panama changing from a Hong Kong billionaire to an American Billionaire is not going to change anything.

 

Yeah, and at least a Hong Kong billionaire isnt going to lobby the government to tear up regulations so they can poison me or put more industrial waste in my hot dogs

 

Yep …. they already have the “balloon thing” down pretty good!

 

How? They didn’t buy control of the canal as that is solely vested in the Panama Canal Authority, a Panamanian government entity. Panama Canal Authority - Wikipedia

 

Not really. We're the largest buyer/customer. Their manufacturing prowess means dogshit if the product has no buyer. That said, Trump is a freakin' moron and is playing this all wrong. If anything, he's throwing China a lifeline by pushing a bunch of new customers (former allies) to China.

 

Man, someone has really drunk the Kool Aid here.

 

Oh, the one that provided us with more intel than we could gather in a decade? 4D Chess indeed!

 

You sure about that?

 

I never followed up on that. Was there some reporting as to what we found with that balloon?

 

I'm confident there are no good billionaires, only ones of more immediate threat to me due to proximity and national identity

 

We are their largest buyer for a reason…. We don’t make it here and they sell it cheap. Unless we are to start building competitively priced Walmart-grade manufacturing plants here again, or Americans are going to smile and enjoy their new 25% tax with no pushback, then I don’t see how China loses.

 

Apparently we just surveilled and tracked all its communications back to the actual servers/cpu it was talking to and got a ton of information from that. That's why we didn't just shoot it down in the beginning. If you dig into the details, the CCP really is a joke.

 

we don't need crappy widgets. Key things to target for domestic manufacturing are things like solar panels, low-end chips and things like that. They do nothing that can't be done somewhere else, and cheaper too. The issue is the trillions in existing sunk cost. For instance, Mexican workers are already better and cheaper. . . while right on our border.

Further, China has a bevy of major problems to deal with and may not be this manufacturing powerhouse that far into the future.

 

A broad-brush view I don't share.

 

I disagree. Buffett has been and is great. I’m sure there are plenty of others too (like McKenzie Scott). In this year’s shareholder letter Buffett was proud of the fact Berkshire paid more in corporate taxes than any company has ever done in the US’s history. He went on to hope they would remit even more taxes in the future and admonished the government to: “Spend it wisely. Take care of the many who, for not fault of their own, get the short straws in life.”

 

I think tariffs only make sense for products like you listed, where there is competitive America manufacturing and we are being protectionists. Trump will be under immediate pressure from his own base if all these red state Walmart shoppers hit the store next week and find that prices of all their non food merchandise from China and Mexico is up 25%. I think that’s the reason Trump keeps caving in his demands.

 

I mean if your two best examples are a 94 year old man on his way out and a woman who gained her billions from a divorce settlement with Jeff Bezos ...