Back paddling on the tariffs without any concessions is more damaging the tariffs themselves. It shows the leadership is uninformed and the economy is very weak. Way to flash your weak hand in the first round.
Like, that's the part that annoys me about him more than anything else, how he's convinced a lot of people that he's "good at business". He's not; if he had just dumped the money his father left him into basically any index fund between the 1970's until 2016, he would have made more money than he had in 2016.
Any idiot can basically match the S&P500, just buy VOO or SPY or something, so I don't consider you a "good" businessman if you don't beat the S&P.
So it doesn't surprise me that he is uninformed and doesn't know how to negotiate.
The Apprentice was the OG reality distortion field and it's crazy people have trouble seeing through it all.
EDIT: Just fact checking this, it's the latter, 6 entities went bankrupt. It looks like the trump organization has 500 entities, so 1.2% bankruptcy rate.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_and_business_legal_af...
Some investors actually spend money in addition to investing it.
If you earn a high return on your investments every year and then go out and spend the returns on things like a $100 million private jet and a $25 million helicopter instead of reinvesting them, you don't beat the S&P. Does that mean you are a "bad" businessman? To me, to determine if someone is a good businessman, you need to look at what they took out and spent along with what they ended up with.
Not every rich investor is someone like Charlie Munger, who weeks before his death at the age of 99 was upset that if he had worked harder, he "might have had multiple trillions instead of multiple billions". Some people make money to spend money.
How the fuck would that even work? Would he just tell all the Americans holding treasury bills that they're only going to get half of their money back? I think that would completely erode any confidence in the US economy, both domestically and internationally.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/07/us/politics/donald-trumps...
The US can try to renegotiate or not pay, but that's an overt signal to investors that the US is not reliable and will result in the 10-year Treasury bond rate soaring, probably permanently, which will decimate our country's credit and is an own goal that we probably wouldn't be able to come back from economically.
The 10 year rate is not a force of nature. It is set at auction by investors who believe US t-bonds are a safer resting place than those of the economies that were destroyed by the nukes.
I would really hope that Trump doesn't start nuking the US.
Presumably the latter would be a wash. Then of the domestic holdings, a big chunk is state and city holdings. Institutional investors would be mad. Citizens with saving bonds and/or money tied up in t-bills thanks to reddit are a tiny fraction.
It's a racist dog whistle.
In reality, most of the US debt is owned by Americans and American businesses.
Renegotiating the US debt would basically rob Americans of money.