I've been thinking about this same thing. Trying to figure out what the endgame is with all of this. I can only come to one meaningful conclusion. Preparing for a future war with China. In that context, everything starts to make sense. The whole point of these tariffs is two pronged. One, make the rest of the world pick a side. And two, attempt to disconnect global dependence on China.
Making America "stand on its own two feet" would give it a lot of freedom in making choices that are at odds with future super powerful China that is no longer benevolent.
> Making America "stand on its own two feet" would give it a lot of freedom in making choices that are at odds with future super powerful China that is no longer benevolent.
The idea that relationships reduce your independence is almost childish, like a 18 year old who things they tie you down and they'll go it alone in life. It's through relationships that people - and nations - have power. The US by itself can't afford to do much. Now the, again, vast network of US allies - including in that theater Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, to an extent India - share the burden.
> freedom in making choices that are at odds with future super powerful China that is no longer benevolent.
The US has disconnected itself from China for years now. China has little influence politically in the US.
What happened was China became extremely nationalistic, threatened and abused everyone, and the US moved in and allied with all its new enemies.
However, as the US becomes extremely nationalistic, threatening and abusing everyone, China is now moving in and building relationships. It's their own back yard, so it is hard to compete if you act like just another nationalistic dicatatorship.
> In that context, everything starts to make sense.
In that context, a lot of it does not make sense. Why the threats about annexing Canada or Greenland? Why the tariffs and extremely hostile rhetoric towards all allies? If you are preparing for a war, the stupidest thing you could do is to alienate your allies and push them toward your adversary. China is already approaching the EU, and I am sure they are negotiating with other key players too. China even agreed on a joint response to the tariffs with Japan and South Korea. Let that sink in - China, together with Japan and South Korea!
> One, make the rest of the world pick a side. And two, attempt to disconnect global dependence on China.
Logically this may well push many to greater trade with China.
China has a growing middle consumer class already greater in number than the total population of the USofA. China already has global scale manufacturing in place, now looking for fresh markets as US markets lower demand due to tariffs.
Smaller countries, say Australia, can trade their wagyu beef to China now that the US has tariff'd the US demand down towards zero .. in a number of ways the US has removed itself from global trade which will continue on with or without it.
But even if this works. How is the best outcome achieved for the USA? Take phones for example. Today, Apple design phones in the USA and has them manufactured outside the USA by low wage workers. If the phone costs $1000. That price is the sum of production costs and profits (and other things, but those are negligible for this discussion).
If the production cost portion increases, because of tariffs, then Apple either has to take less profit (shareholders unhappy) or increase the cost of the phone (shareholders happy).
If the tariffs are increased enough, Apple could be forced to move production to the USA. But this only happens if the workers in the USA are willing to work the same wages as external production. If USA workers cost more than external production, then again, Apple loses profit or raises prices.
Am I missing something? Unless USA workers are willing to work for wages as external production (give or take the tariff amount), then this simply doesn't work.
There’s one scenario: if there’s room for more automation, manufacturers might have fewer high-wage workers at a more automated plant. The problem with that theory is that it doesn’t work if the task can’t be cheaply automated (much textile manufacturing falls into this category) or if it’s already being automated. I would be surprised if Apple has that much untapped room for automation but other companies might be able to match costs that way.
My read on the situation is that Zelensky is willing to make any deal for lasting peace. Meaning, if a deal is made and Russia ignores the ceasefire or continues its invasion in a month or year, what will happen to them? This is literally what he asked because Russia has violated all of the previous agreements in the same way.
What Trump was offering was to take a chunk of their resources for another temporary peace offer. Which as noted above, will almost certainly be violated in the near term by Russia again. So Ukraine is not only back where they started, but also lost a chunk of their resources. Why would Zelensky agree to that?
Yes I agree with you. There is no way to get lasting peace, really, because the US isn't currently willing to start a direct war with Russia but Russia is willing to test the waters.
US and Russia thought Ukraine was running out of steam, I suppose.
Zelensky refusing this offer is an interesting move. It could, of course, just be for show until next week when he does sign a modified deal.
> My read on the situation is that Zelensky is willing to make any deal for lasting peace.
Yep, but Zelensky/Ukraine needs guarantees that the US will enforce the deal. It's also bs that Trump and crew are putting the lack of peace on Ukraine - literally Russian propaganda talking points.
To add to your list, Federal Spending represents 23% of GDP. If you cut Federal Spending you cut GDP. And if you take just a sliver of any of that spending and think about it critically, you can imagine the ripple effects it will cause.
Cutting funding for biotech results in loss of jobs and loss of patent filing. Loss of patent filing means loss of people needed for filing patents. On and on. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this out (some pun intended).
Not really since their plan is to cut taxes too. It shifts spending to individuals rather than cutting GDP, though there are always costs associated with such a transition.
Those tax cuts will heavily favor the wealthy. So I guess it depends on your belief in whether trickle down economics works.
Additionally, the Federal Government is the largest employer in the country. If you both lay off a significant portion of that workforce and cut things like unemployment and other social programs, you are going to have significant increase in unemployment unless there is somehow new jobs for everyone. Add inflation to the mix due to tariffs and a perfect storm of economic despair is on the horizon.
One thing to keep in mind that Federal Spending represented 23.4% of GDP in 2024. Around 12% of that is defense spending. I have yet to see any way these cuts do not result is massive decreases in GDP. Even if all of it is redirected to defense.
There are a lot of hurdles. I'm not exactly sure why an end-user would even want to use ISO20022. Some end-user system may use ISO20022 behind the scenes, but the UI's are very simplified. ISO20022 as far as I have used it (20+ years in finance) is for payment networks. And a random person can't just send messages on any payment networks that I'm aware of. These payment networks generally exist as message queues that are interconnected and they use ISO20022 as the data format.
Not to mention that the flows of ISO20022 messages are full duplex. If you send a message you need to be ready to handle a response (acceptance or rejection of a credit/debit for example).
As of early next year, the Fed (US) will not accept anything other than ISO20022 messages on their networks. So any banks that are using Fed networks are required to use ISO20022.
I work for a large financial institution and we've been migrating our Fed network processing to ISO20022. All financial institutions we work with, and vendors who process payments for fraud and such, are also doing so. I'm highly skeptical of the date, but it is going to happen.
I am currently implementing an ISO20022 integration at a large financial institution. The way these generally work is that whatever network you're connecting with will require a certain standard number of an ISO20022 message. When you send the generated messages, they must be valid as per the specific schema in question. If not, they will be rejected. I'm speaking specifically about payment networks, not consumer level payments.
Generating classes from the XSD's is fairly trivial in most languages. The hard part is being able to read the XSD's and then being able to create the ISO20022 message with all of the required elements (given all the possible combinations of valid elements).
I guess creating a code-time library where it was not possible to create an ISO20022 message that invalid would be interesting. But being able to create invalid ISO20022 is fairly easy to do for free.
Hi Svapnil,
Sorry to bother in between but yeah logicalmind is right in this regards.
@logicalmind you can use my solution which do all which is required for ISO20022 to create and validate.
https://pixelbyaj.com/iso20022/#iso20022_about and for DEMO https://pixelbyaj.com/iso20022/demo/#/. I have all the required tools in the for the same.
Reminds me of my experience in Copper Canyon in Mexico. You can rent small cottages in one particular location and dogs roam the area. When tourists arrive, the a dog tends to stick to each particular group. The dog walks with you on hikes and sleeps on your porch while you're there. In exchange for snacks and water, but it doesn't beg.
The dogs are as loyal as I've ever seen while you're there. When you leave, they move onto the next group. The area is great, and the dog friend I made, just added to the experience.
my ex is Tarahumara and had a similar experience. It's also true of the dogs of Buenos Aires. (in fairness though: I am not a fan of the lack of spaying/neutering that predominates in Latin and Mediterranean countries).
Making America "stand on its own two feet" would give it a lot of freedom in making choices that are at odds with future super powerful China that is no longer benevolent.