Sure… I’m just wondering if the debates over his policies will be enough to tank the markets, or if the implementations will be the cause… hence before or after…
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However, it’s also possible for economic policies to be bad for the economy in general, and ordinary people in particular, while “the markets” do absolutely fine, if the overall harm is accompanied by a greater shift of wealth to profits and away from Labour, and it’s accompanied by tax breaks for the stock-owning classes.
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I think it will depend on how much of his desired economic policy he’s actually able to implement. If he really manages to push through these insane tariffs, I think a market crash is possible. I think it could even trigger not just a recession, but a depression. It has happened before. Tariffs were a factor in the worsening of the Great Depression. That’s what’s so insane about this. We know these are bad ideas. Economists know these are bad ideas. Democrats and Republicans know these are bad ideas. But they may just go along with it because … shit I don’t even know why.
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This is my surprised face.
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Tariffs were so directly tied to the Great Depression (and Republican leadership for putting them in place) that they were specifically excluded from the GOP policy book for nearly 100 years. Until an Amazon-published author told Trump they were a good idea (they weren’t) and now the GOP is once again embracing them. History is pretty clear what happens after.
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That’s just kicking the can down the road for one earnings quarter, though. As soon as big companies report a precipitous drop in revenue as middle-class consumers stop spending, the markets will crash. Look at the COVID crash. Billionaires were making more bank than ever, but the DJIA dropped bigger and faster than what kicked off the Great Depression.
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Correct - it’s a mood ring for wealthy people!
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I heard a lot about the GD. My mom was born in 1926 to a family that was already poor by the time Black Friday came around; same for my dad, who was born in 1923. Not so much about the causes but about the effects it had on them and their families. And it wasn’t something that was delivered as a lecture, I wanted to know.
I’m glad I asked.
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I had to cook a “Depression meal” every week so that we would ‘never forget’ how hard those times were.
Looking back, it was the easiest cooking I’ve ever had to do, before or since. And relatively healthy (cheap veggies cooked in water to make a soup).
And I still keep every rubber band, screw, etc. ‘just in case’.
Some Boomers got the advantages of being born during the booming times (for white people) after WWII, but some of us were raised by parents who were even more affected by the Depression that came before.
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Depression that came before? Or children of folks who had gone through the GD and went on to become parents themselves were affected by their parents way of dealing with it, and they carry that on to the children they bear?
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Same difference.
Boomers’ parents were products of the Great Depression and WWII. How we were raised as a result has of course affected how we’ve raised our kids.
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Thanks for the clarification. My mind was blown for a few minutes there, lol! Also, I’d just had my therapy telesession today, and the GD and my parents were a part of the discussion.
Who remembers the 1973 Energy Crisis? I do, but since I was nine years old and my parents were starting to go emotionally apart, I had other things on my mind. I don’t remember any long lines at gas stations in my area, but I saw them on the news, and noticed pictures of them in the papers. OH yeah, the speed limit going down to 55 mph, I think I actually witnessed Nixon’s announcement of it on TV in 1974.
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Then there are the meals I whip up from the dried stuff that we are still finishing from the COVID stash. I basically made sure the kids would be good for 6 weeks if we got a wave of illness in the house. Sadly, family emergencies meant that it was just my daughter and I for about 5 months during the peak of the lockdowns, when I tried to avoid shopping for 3 or 4 weeks at a time.
A big instant pot full of beans goes a looooong way if it’s just two people.
The kids call it “bomb-shelter cuisine”. 
Makes for a low cost feed, though, and canned veg is supposed to be better for you these days than it was in days of yore.
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Same here. Odd and even gas days. We had a second car, a beater with an opposite-numbered plate. My Dad used to switch them to keep from running out. It was also a serious belt-tightening phase. As kids some of the treats we were used to vanished from our diets.
My grandparents were still living in the '70s, and we heard a lot of stories about how bad the Depression was in the Black community. Struggling for work and to hang onto what they had gained during the Great Migration formed the lessons they passed on to my parents. Those strategies for making do with less is what helped my parents and grandparents navigate stagflation, too.
I’m not sure we had to. Whenever we had a large family gathering, those stories got repeated. Maybe having a big meal with a lot of variety tends to remind people of the times when they were living on soup or beans. Still, my Dad is bummed to see the cycle of one step forward and two steps back hitting my generation and affecting my nephew. 
At least he knows we know how to get through it - again.
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I didn’t find out until recently that my dad and his younger brother were put in foster care at one point during the GD; he wasn’t much to talk about stuff that traumatized him (like WWII, only the funny stories or the positive ones). And that his dad got arrested for stealing food and was put in Jackson State Prison. I didn’t get to know my grandparents very well, as they were three gens. ahead of me.
Poverty-induced trauma is hard to get over in a capitalist society. I know that from personal experience, and that’s why I’m a Socialist now.
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A report on how proposed tariffs might hit average Americans:
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There are two, and often only two, sources of groceries in a dozen states in the western united states: Kroger (aka QFC, Fred Meyer…) and Albertsons (aka Safeway). These two have been seeking corporate merger for a few years now so that many locations would have at most a single source of food. This (in my humble opinion) would result in price fixing, food deserts, and limitation of product options.
(map estimating where stores would be sold/lost as a result of such a merger)
Today some apparent good news, a court in Washington state and another in Oregon have blocked the merger in those jurisdictions. There remains some solid hope for serving society in the judiciary ‘below’ that of the supreme court.
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