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Dave's avatar

What if their (Trump, Musk and his oligarchic sycophants) actual goal , rather than "Making America Great Again", is to literally crash US and global markets? Then, like vulture capitalists swooping in and buying up troubled corporations to sell them off for scrap, or resurrect them to higher values, they can capture those entities on the cheap. The gyre of billionaires around this administration likely have trillions of disposable cash at hand.

But like the old cartoon depicting two vultures on a wire waiting for some critter to die, one says, "screw it, I'm going to kill something...."

What a perfect opportunity for these gazillionaires to incite a major market crash, executing the greatest pump-and-dump scheme ever, scooping up what's left after the calamity for pennies on the dollar.

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Sophie Nusslé's avatar

European here. We aren’t in « worry and despair » at JD Vance, we’re angry. Not least because the little shit openly supports a German neo-Nazi in the forthcoming elections. But we knew this could happen from about last summer, and certainly after November. The Paris summit didn’t happen at the last minute. It’ll take time to put our defence ducks in a row (we trusted Biden and the Democrats: our bad), but if you look at the figures, many of us, UK included, have upped our defence spending since 2014, some massively, and those that haven’t (Spain, Italy, Belgium especially) are being put on the spot. Germany is openly talking about pivoting to increased industrial capacity underwritten by more flexible debt rules (and if you know the Germans on debt, you’ll understand how revolutionary that is). Sweden is going all out, industrially and in terms of defence, abandoning long-standing neutrality. Poland spends more than 4% of its GDP (and climbing) on defence and is building heavy capacity along its Eastern border. France, the only European country with independent nuclear deterrent, is advocating for more of it in Europe. French and UK armies have been training together for years. We have a good foundation if we can resist the Putin-Musk-Trump anti-law, anti-democracy propaganda.

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