Summary
Trump’s team is considering abolishing key banking regulators, including the FDIC and OCC, with plans to consolidate their functions under the Treasury Department.
Critics warn this could undermine public trust in banking, weaken deposit insurance protections, and risk another financial crisis.
The FDIC, established during the Great Depression, played a crucial role in managing the 2023 banking crisis.
Trump allies, backed by financial industry donors, are also targeting other consumer protections, reflecting sweeping deregulatory ambitions tied to Project 2025’s proposals.
Experts fear these moves could destabilize the economy.
The question is, how do you bet against the US Economy and for whatever selfish fuckhead of a plan they have.
As the person said below, move your currency out of the US dollar into something like gold or buy a house with a 30-year mortgage because you are basically shorting the dollar for a hard, tangible asset.
This assumes that you will have an income of something worth more than the US dollar to pay the mortgage with. If your income continues at the same amount of US$ then your mortgage payment will still cost you the same amount of income, regardless of how the global valuation of the US$ changes.
But the asset of the house itself would go up in value. I guess you do have to worry about the sales extortion when you go to sell it though. Which would not help very much. So I guess you’d end up at break even.
Well look, I’m not advocating for this coming government nor am I an economic expert. But in a vacuum one could impose tariffs on imported goods, tank the cost of labor in your own country, and force manufacturing back here, right? And in the long run, would be beneficial for local manufacturing instead of being so dependent on China. If it weren’t for the local oligarchy here I’d say it’s even a tough but fair plan for the economy. Knowing what we know, things will only get harder with no observable benefit for the working class as whatever improvement we manage to make will be sucked away by the ruling class. But the plan isn’t horseshit in a vacuum. Someone please feel free to tell me why I’m completely wrong as I’m not really speaking with too much conviction tbh
…and…
Those tariffs would destroy our $1.95 trillion in exports from the USA because many of those are finished goods with input materials imported (and now tariffed to high heaven). source
Modern manufacturing doesn’t depend on hundreds of thousands of human bodies anymore. New manufacturing factories would be highly automated and only employ a tiny fraction of the now unemployed workforce to produce the same amount of goods as in years past.
“From 1960 to today, American steel mills have decreased from an average of 700,000 workers to just 83,000. And within the last 40 years, the productivity of labor has increased more than five times from approximately 10 man-hours per finished ton to under 2.” source
So we’re basically forfeiting a bunch of jobs related to and effected by procuring overseas input materials to gain a small fraction of manufacturing jobs? That just sounds like it will damage the economy and not bring it back up.
Exactly why everyone with a brain has been shouting that this is the worst possible idea.
Oh hell yeah, thats like 85% of things. I didnt know a brain was required to know that tbh with the sheer amount of visible foreign made items.
Unfortunately for us, my dude, most people are asleep at the wheel.
Overworked and underpaid, too exhausted and broke to pay attention to or influence politics.
I believe this is what Milei is selling in Argentina. I believe your assessment is correct. They’re telling us that it will be hard in the short term, but it will be worth it in the long term. The thing is, they mean worth it for the owner class. Working class people will take the brunt of it and it will just stay awful.
In my home country (we all know the economy is gonna keep getting worse so we bet against it by default) we buy foreign currency (including ironically USD), gold, electronics or other tangible assets that hold their value.
Those hold value?
At least in my country sort of (besides new models of course), because they’re all imported. It might be different in the US.
What country is that? As far as I know, anything electronic here in the U.S. tends to drop like a rock in value pretty much right at purchase time (just like cars - driving it off the lot usually results in a huge depreciation). With maybe a few exceptions, like when people are snapping up a bunch of some new item that is in short supply and reselling it for more than MSRP.
Egypt. Electronics here are tarriffed to high hell if that matters.
Edit: Okay I should probably explain a bit more. In Egypt, because we import a lot of things (you can thank government mismanagement for this), the price of the Egyptian pound against foreign currency in general and the USD specifically controls the price of a lot of goods directly and literally everything indirectly. Therefore it’s usually a good idea to solidify your money in an asset whose price will rise with the USD. Usually you wanna buy USD, but that becomes less available day by day so some people bet on goods whose price will rise with the USD, like electronics (we have no domestic electronics makers) and gold. Rising foreign currency prices (well really falling EGP prices) are the driving force of inflation here so the fact that the USD itself will fall in value because of inflation doesn’t have much effect on the final calculation.
Ah, thanks for explaining more. I’m just so used to things like consumer electronics and cars depreciating in value (with rare exceptions) nearly immediately. In some cases, I hang onto things for a long time and it’s almost like I cannot even give them away if it’s been long enough. For instance, I have some old GPUs that I can still mine (very slowly) with or use for things like Ollama and protein folding, but newer card(s) would probably be both faster and more efficient when it comes to power use. But trying to sell the old ones will probably take a while, even if I try to sell at like half the current going used price…
I used to have lots and lots of towers throughout the house - I’d build computers, then use them to learn things like networking and Linux/BSD. Over time, I would get quite a few of them built up, and in some cases, they might be 5-6 years old. I ended up giving many away on freecycle.org…
Move your currency out of USD.
Probably crypto, unfortunately.
Buy Euros. Keep them in a European Bank.