Australian (ASX) Stock Market Forum

Trump Era 2025-2029 : Stock and Economic Comment

Probably this is much the same as how the majority of people are feeling in Australia right now too

Yet where is the Albanese derangement syndrome?

The truth is is that whatever has
happened in the last three months isn't why this person is under pressure. She/he/whatever is feeling the pressure of policies enacted over the last few years.

Indeed, the result of the actions of the present administration won't overall be felt for some time. It could be a massive win or a massive lose, or somewhere in between, we will just have to see.

Give it 2 or 3 or 4 years to see how it plays out with the many moving parts; the actions of the US, EU, Chyyyna, etc, plus the actions of the respective Central Banks.

Chaos theory, lots of moving parts that none of us can predict accurately, much less any of the administrations involved.

Trade/invest accordingly and never go off your pills.
Just renewed the necessary pill supply this morning at Chemis W.........house, should be right for another couple of months.
 
Probably this is much the same as how the majority of people are feeling in Australia right now too

Yet where is the Albanese derangement syndrome?

The truth is is that whatever has
happened in the last three months isn't why this person is under pressure. She/he/whatever is feeling the pressure of policies enacted over the last few years.

Indeed, the result of the actions of the present administration won't overall be felt for some time. It could be a massive win or a massive lose, or somewhere in between, we will just have to see.

Give it 2 or 3 or 4 years to see how it plays out with the many moving parts; the actions of the US, EU, Chyyyna, etc, plus the actions of the respective Central Banks.

Chaos theory, lots of moving parts that none of us can predict accurately, much less any of the administrations involved.

Trade/invest accordingly and never go off your pills.
If workloads are diminishing now, imagine what it will be like in 4 years time, the transfer of manufacturing to the US within 4 years is just a dream.

It cost well over 1 million dollars AUD in 2007 just for the labour content of a job to dismantle an electro-whining plant (about 8 months work for a 70 man crew), and pack it into 40 and 60 foot containers, with no transport costs to the final destination included or crane hire and no reassembly at the other end.

That company underpaid everyone as well. So, imagine what the end costs would be for all the other work to be done to make the plant operational again. That's a lot of work to recoup the costs of moving or making new plants themselves before they hit profits.

I dare say most of the jobs will be going to automated processes, just like here in Australia. So goodbye to more jobs.
Trump's got to drive down labour costs to make it viable, otherwise it will never work.
 
If workloads are diminishing now, imagine what it will be like in 4 years time, the transfer of manufacturing to the US within 4 years is just a dream.

It cost well over 1 million dollars AUD in 2007 just for the labour content of a job to dismantle an electro-whining plant (about 8 months work for a 70 man crew), and pack it into 40 and 60 foot containers, with no transport costs to the final destination included or crane hire and no reassembly at the other end.

That company underpaid everyone as well. So, imagine what the end costs would be for all the other work to be done to make the plant operational again. That's a lot of work to recoup the costs of moving or making new plants themselves before they hit profits.

I dare say most of the jobs will be going to automated processes, just like here in Australia. So goodbye to more jobs.
Trump's got to drive labour costs to make it viable, otherwise it will never work.
This goes to my previous post about the fact that billions of dollars on factories and entire supply lines and so forth are not going to be built in response to a 4 year 25% tariff or whatever.

It is only when a multi-decade full on paradigm shift has become apparent (certain) that we'll start to see the kind of big deal entire-industry movements that we're talking about here.

The offshoring of the manufacturing industry took decades. The onshoring/reversal of this process is not going to take one election cycle, ffs...
 
This goes to my previous post about the fact that billions of dollars on factories and entire supply lines and so forth are not going to be built in response to a 4 year 25% tariff or whatever.

It is only when a multi-decade full on paradigm shift has become apparent (certain) that we'll start to see the kind of big deal entire-industry movements that we're talking about here.

The offshoring of the manufacturing industry took decades. The onshoring/reversal of this process is not going to take one election cycle, ffs...
Decades is my estimate also, governments change over the years so who really knows how this will end for them.

Between now and then, that's a lot of pain coming their way.
 
Alas for Mr Xi, internal fortitude is not the only deciding factor in China’s contest with America. Two big disadvantages are sure to weigh on China’s dealings with the wider world. The first involves the party’s rigidity. The second handicap involves an unhelpful flipside of Chinese strength: it frightens others. China is seeking to recruit neighbours and trade partners into a Trump-resisting coalition. But its leaders’ warm words are undercut by the dread their country inspires as a manufacturing juggernaut, and by its taste for economic and military coercion.
China’s system is “too slow” to handle Mr Trump’s “messy” style of statecraft, laments a well-travelled Chinese scholar. It was wrongfooted, early on, by a public invitation for Mr Xi to attend Mr Trump’s inauguration in January.

Xi Jinping’s Trump-sized puzzle

For all its strength and swagger, China is struggling to handle an impulsive America​

20250419_IRD000.jpg

If toughness alone decided great-power contests, China could afford to feel cocky about its confrontation with America. Though Chinese exporters have been winded by President Donald Trump’s tariffs, they have yet to suffer a knockout blow. Communist Party bosses have worked to build an economy that can take American-inflicted pain, whether that involves ordering China’s technology sector to become more “self-reliant” and less dependent on foreign inputs, or expanding its dealings with Russia and other countries that oppose Western trade and financial sanctions. The same economy stands ready to impose pain on foreign rivals, for instance by curbing exports of rare-earth minerals, the supply of which China dominates.

Personal toughness matters, too. The party’s supreme leader, Xi Jinping, was a hard man when Mr Trump was merely playing one on reality television. As a youth, Mr Xi was exiled to a dirt-walled rural cave, jailed three times and threatened with execution when his family fell foul of Mao-era purges. Those years left him with a bleak view of politics. While still a provincial official, a quarter-century ago, Mr Xi told an interviewer: “What I see is not just the superficial things: the power, the flowers, the glory, the applause. I see the bullpens [a reference to Mao-era detention sites] and how people can blow hot and cold.”

Alas for Mr Xi, internal fortitude is not the only deciding factor in China’s contest with America. Two big disadvantages are sure to weigh on China’s dealings with the wider world. The first involves the party’s rigidity. The second handicap involves an unhelpful flipside of Chinese strength: it frightens others. China is seeking to recruit neighbours and trade partners into a Trump-resisting coalition. But its leaders’ warm words are undercut by the dread their country inspires as a manufacturing juggernaut, and by its taste for economic and military coercion.

China’s system is “too slow” to handle Mr Trump’s “messy” style of statecraft, laments a well-travelled Chinese scholar. It was wrongfooted, early on, by a public invitation for Mr Xi to attend Mr Trump’s inauguration in January. That was an impossible request. Mr Xi is presented to his people as a ruler for the ages: a worthy successor to China’s greatest emperors. He does not attend barbarian ceremonies where he would merely be one of several vips. More quietly, Trump aides proposed that Mr Xi send in his stead Cai Qi, his right-hand man in the Politburo’s Standing Committee. Trump aides spurned offers to manage relations via the party’s foreign-policy chief, Wang Yi, who was China’s principal channel to Joe Biden’s administration. But Mr Cai, an austere Xi loyalist and enforcer of his leader’s will, “is not the right person in our system”, explains the scholar. In the end, China sent a largely powerless figurehead, its vice-president, Han Zheng.

Inside Trumpworld senior figures insist that the current trade war is not intended to burn bridges with Mr Xi. Their boss remains open to exploring a grand bargain with his Chinese counterpart, thrashed out leader-to-leader, they say. Yet Mr Xi is not about to pick up the telephone to haggle with an American president on the fly. Chinese officials are even less keen on suggesting that he meet Mr Trump in person for unscripted negotiations. Memories of the Oval Office scolding of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenesky, are too fresh and painful for that. More simply, China’s system cannot send Mr Xi into an open-ended, high-risk summit. Mr Xi may have jailed or toppled rivals and amassed vast power. But he is presented by propaganda chiefs as a sort of supremely wise technocrat-in-chief, guiding a party apparatus that weighs and crafts policies, then enacts them with absolute obedience to the leader. Dignity and authority are at the core of Mr Xi’s brand.

Mr Trump’s breezy style has long disconcerted China’s leaders. In the spring of 2017 he called Mr Xi so often to ask for help with North Korea that Chinese envoys eventually delivered a discreet message to American contacts. Mr Xi is “not our North Korean desk officer”, they pleaded: let underlings handle most of this.

In this second term, Chinese officials are aghast as Mr Trump’s cabinet secretaries offer contradictory justifications for tariffs in duelling television appearances. Amid this chaos, China does not know whom to speak to. It also fears that American interlocutors will leak to the press “and embarrass the top leader here in China”, says the scholar. Nor, reportedly, can Chinese authorities agree whether to link trade talks to the most sensitive dossiers, including curbing sales of Chinese chemicals used to make fentanyl sold to American drug abusers, or the fate of Taiwan. China can be expected to observe factional fights raging in Washington, to see who emerges on top in three or six months. “Then the Chinese side will feel a little bit safer,” the scholar predicts.

China, the bully that talks of friendship​

That caution is matched among China’s neighbours, including three South-East Asian countries that are threatened with steep Trump tariffs, and were due to host Mr Xi from April 14th. The Chinese leader talked of jointly defending free trade and resisting “unilateral bullying”. His hosts, Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia, could be forgiven some scepticism. All three profit from trade with China but resent how one-sided such commerce can be, as investors bring their own Chinese supply chains and even workers. Some regional governments mutter about imposing defensive tariffs on Chinese goods. Conceivably, Mr Trump may give them political cover to do just that, blaming American arm-twisting.

Few neighbours believe China’s talk of “win-win” outcomes, even if they loathe Mr Trump’s approach: “We win, you lose.” America is rapidly squandering trust built up over many years. But China never enjoyed much trust to begin with. In these friendless times, Chinese toughness is both a strength and a vulnerability.
 
I would also point out, should the prevailing global hegemon simply roll over and allow another hegemon (a hostile one at that) to take over via economic surrender?

The left may desire that for their own bizarre and self flagellatory reasons, but not this little black duck. I would posit that many are with me on that score.

China particularly are holding a massive historic grudge against the West - perhaps warranted, perhaps not.

However, we allow this at our peril. They will destroy us for their own ideological and economic benefit.

In my view, if we facilitate this for our short term portfolio balance, we deserve to be destroyed.

Once again, not this little black duck.
 
I would also point out, should the prevailing global hegemon simply roll over and allow another hegemon (a hostile one at that) to take over via economic surrender?

The left may desire that for their own bizarre and self flagellatory reasons, but not this little black duck. I would posit that many are with me on that score.

China particularly are holding a massive historic grudge against the West - perhaps warranted, perhaps not.

However, we allow this at our peril. They will destroy us for their own ideological and economic benefit.

In my view, if we facilitate this for our short term portfolio balance, we deserve to be destroyed.

Once again, not this little black duck.
am carefully buying ( and adding ) and reducing , i am looking ( hoping ) for those good prices i missed in 2012

i mostly avoided the US as they were a mature ( and tired ) economy , and China because they needed to pause and consolidate ( and streamline/upgrade ) and the EU because the fortress EU admin had basically lost the plot well and truly before 2022

that still leaves about 25% of the globe as potential investments ( especially after i relaxed my strong bias against Africa )

there aren't many gems ( where the risk v. reward is adequate ) out there but there are some in overgrown and dusty niches ( often because the big funds can't play there without moving the market against themselves )
 
Alas for Mr Xi, internal fortitude is not the only deciding factor in China’s contest with America. Two big disadvantages are sure to weigh on China’s dealings with the wider world. The first involves the party’s rigidity. The second handicap involves an unhelpful flipside of Chinese strength: it frightens others. China is seeking to recruit neighbours and trade partners into a Trump-resisting coalition. But its leaders’ warm words are undercut by the dread their country inspires as a manufacturing juggernaut, and by its taste for economic and military coercion.
China’s system is “too slow” to handle Mr Trump’s “messy” style of statecraft, laments a well-travelled Chinese scholar. It was wrongfooted, early on, by a public invitation for Mr Xi to attend Mr Trump’s inauguration in January.
China is still playing for strategic positions , it still has the option of 'playing the man ' ( exploiting Trumps character anomalies )

China will stay slow to react , until there is a defining moment
 
Is the recession already here?


The impact of the diminished freight container traffic to North America will be significant for many links in the economy and supply chain, including the ports and logistics companies moving the freight. If each sailing was carrying 8,000 to 10,000 TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units), that would equal a decline in freight traffic of between 640,000-800,000 containers, and lead to decreased crane operations at the ports, lower fees that could be collected, and declines in container pick-ups and transports by trucks, rails, and to warehouses for storage.
Will this not be made up for in shorter trips, with less containers and smaller ships. I'm really over the size of some of these ships with the concentration of ownership in the US, Netherlands and UK under foreign flags.

gg
 
Will this not be made up for in shorter trips, with less containers and smaller ships. I'm really over the size of some of these ships with the concentration of ownership in the US, Netherlands and UK under foreign flags.
yes , but it will come at efficiency costs ( even assuming imports from China stop completely

for example Samsung thought it could replace China by having stuff manufactured in Vietnam ( where wages are much less for the same task ) however the total costs and time delays still made China more than competitive .. now sure the playing field between the two manufacturing hubs will level out , but that will take time and by then China will no longer be tolerant of Samsung

the other issue is NOBODY is building more freighters than China ( now sure many of them can be quickly converted in warships ) but that still leaves a big problem for competitors

remember Russia had the Iron Curtain and China had the Bamboo Curtain both are quite capable of severing all trade to the West in a short period ( and there was no BRICS back then )
 
I would also point out, should the prevailing global hegemon simply roll over and allow another hegemon (a hostile one at that) to take over via economic surrender?

The left may desire that for their own bizarre and self flagellatory reasons, but not this little black duck. I would posit that many are with me on that score.

China particularly are holding a massive historic grudge against the West - perhaps warranted, perhaps not.

However, we allow this at our peril. They will destroy us for their own ideological and economic benefit.

In my view, if we facilitate this for our short term portfolio balance, we deserve to be destroyed.

Once again, not this little black duck.
China is overcredited at approximately 4x what the west was just before the GFC with the single greatest baby bust in history now in full effect, along with an entire circle of neighbours that absolutely hate them.

With the rest of east asia suffering a similiar (or in the case of south korea, worse) baby bust the asian miracle of the last few decades is well and truly over the hill.

The wildcard is that when things are going to shite governments, dictators, tyrants etc all have a habit of throwing a decent war to essentially just distract the population/cover up the problems. You know, "well yeah of course things are bad, we're in a war!" kind of stuff.

There's really very little to stop the entire region just getting scrambled like nothing else. The west is simply doing all it can to move its industries (like microchips) back within our own borders in order to remain insulated from whatever mess might end up coming to pass.

This can be described as "deglobalisation" or a regression to the previous isolationism which the united states and most other countries enjoyed (unless you count things like being a part of the commonwealth).
 
This also means that we go back to another echo of the pre-ww2 era where a large amount of oil is exported from the united states across the pacific, meaning that the americans will have most of asia by the short & curly's unless an alternative source is found and secured.

Those alternative sources are a combination of russia (which would require many years' worth of buildout of some ridiculously large oil pipelines, which is actually already underway) and the persian gulf/arab world.

This means another echo of the security of trade from the persian gulf all the way around to east asia needing to be secured, but with india being the country dominating the not accidentally named indian ocean.

So it is in fact the united states and india that are going to have basically all of asia's nuts in their respective vices in the future, not china just taking over the entire world like the media would have you believe.

When the world runs on oil, the further you are from your oil supply the more precarious your position.
 
This also means that we go back to another echo of the pre-ww2 era where a large amount of oil is exported from the united states across the pacific, meaning that the americans will have most of asia by the short & curly's unless an alternative source is found and secured.

Those alternative sources are a combination of russia (which would require many years' worth of buildout of some ridiculously large oil pipelines, which is actually already underway) and the persian gulf/arab world.

This means another echo of the security of trade from the persian gulf all the way around to east asia needing to be secured, but with india being the country dominating the not accidentally named indian ocean.

So it is in fact the united states and india that are going to have basically all of asia's nuts in their respective vices in the future, not china just taking over the entire world like the media would have you believe.

When the world runs on oil, the further you are from your oil supply the more precarious your position.
Why do you think you think Japan has been developing hydrogen for years?
 
China is overcredited at approximately 4x what the west was just before the GFC with the single greatest baby bust in history now in full effect, along with an entire circle of neighbours that absolutely hate them.

With the rest of east asia suffering a similiar (or in the case of south korea, worse) baby bust the asian miracle of the last few decades is well and truly over the hill.

The wildcard is that when things are going to shite governments, dictators, tyrants etc all have a habit of throwing a decent war to essentially just distract the population/cover up the problems. You know, "well yeah of course things are bad, we're in a war!" kind of stuff.

There's really very little to stop the entire region just getting scrambled like nothing else. The west is simply doing all it can to move its industries (like microchips) back within our own borders in order to remain insulated from whatever mess might end up coming to pass.

This can be described as "deglobalisation" or a regression to the previous isolationism which the united states and most other countries enjoyed (unless you count things like being a part of the commonwealth).
am not so sure about the Commonwealth anymore , either sure Oz and NZ are likely to stay close , but the others , Africa seem to be going with the Africans , Canada will probably try to join the EU
 
Top