Investing General Discussion

03:33 KRE TTN Research Alert: A plumbing problem is back on Wall Street, and this time it is landing squarely on the regional banks; Markets are watching a slow-motion rerun of 2019 via a creeping liquidity recession - Source TradeTheNews.com

The full KRE Alert

Kithani said:

If you want to lock in profit I’d sell whatever can be taxed at capital gains rate and move on. If it’s all short term profits then I guess you can get fancy

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It's all long term. I sold enough to cover my original investment plus a tiny bit of profit.

No one is taking captain TACO serious anymore.

11:53(CN) US Pres Trump: Potential 155% tariffs on China will come on Nov 1st, unless we make a deal; - Source TradeTheNews.com

Cad said:

I was in court all day, I look at the stocks app and up 1.2%? I mean I like it, but why?

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Apple up 4% does a lot of heavy lifting.
Supposedly good initial numbers on iPhone sales. I’m still dubious this quarter. Their Q3/4product releases have been a complete snooze fest. Their M5 MacBook Pros are pushed out and delayed to Q1 ‘26, which will likely have poor sales as the completely new gen revamped MacBook Pro is slated for Q4 ‘26 that everyone is waiting for.
Their AI has been entirely nonexistent and have had a ton of their senior AI team being poached by competition. Siri revamp has been continuously delayed and even this week the early internal feedback is that it’s completely lacking.

But hey, a bit of reporting hype on a boring iPhone iteration can juice your stock for exit liquidity, the market is going to run with it.

Haus said:

Could be irrational exuberance, could be the world realizing Trump isn't going to pull the trigger on 155% tariffs on China because of.. .well... Advanced TACO theory.

Stranger thing I'm trying to find the explanation for is how stocks are banging up against all time highs and gold is still just also banging up against all time highs...

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I don't remember who keeps saying it, but it's debasement of the USD. That's all this runup is, the dollar losing value. You'll come out ahead by being in the market, but it should also be a massive red flag for all of us because this isn't sustainable for normal people. They'll eventually hit their breaking point where their money is worthless.

Part of that can be solved if we onshore everything and you don't have to worry about any currency outside of the USD. But that seems unlikely.

Gravel said:

I don't remember who keeps saying it, but it's debasement of the USD. That's all this runup is, the dollar losing value. You'll come out ahead by being in the market, but it should also be a massive red flag for all of us because this isn't sustainable for normal people. They'll eventually hit their breaking point where their money is worthless.

Part of that can be solved if we onshore everything and you don't have to worry about any currency outside of the USD. But that seems unlikely.

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Back when everyone was first talking about the whole "onshoring" idea, I liked the concept until I read a few articles about what it would take and how it would actually work out.

The takeaway was that it's literally impossible as things stand now. Our entire society is so fundamentally dependent on a complex global trade network that something like 90% of the things we buy regularly would immediately become unavailable or totally unaffordable if they were made/sourced entirely within the US.

Trying to change that would take decades and probably require a revolution and a war or two. We'd all be dead or pretty old before anything like that actually came to fruition.

Imo it's easier to just invest in a currency that can't be debased.

TomServo said:

Sources?

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Obama

TomServo said:

Sources?

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Basic understanding of logistics and manufacturing/production environments?

The U.S. basically spent the last 40 years dismantling its own manufacturing base. We didn't just ship out factory jobs, we shipped out entire supply chains. The tooling, the labor, the small specialty suppliers, all of it. You can't just flip a switch and bring that back. You'd have to rebuild the infrastructure, retrain entire generations of workers, and reestablish industries that literally don't exist here anymore.

Even if you built the factories tomorrow, you'd run into a massive labor gap. We don't have enough people trained in machining, fabrication, or advanced manufacturing right now. That kind of talent pipeline takes years of investment and cultural shift to rebuild.

And that's just the "assembly" side of things. That doesn't even include all the other industries we'd have to onshore for things like semiconductors, rare earths, specialized chemicals, etc. Which means mining, refining, and heavy industry on a scale most people wouldn't politically tolerate. You'd have to recreate and find labor for all those industries too, which is an even bigger lift.

So while "impossible" might be a bit of hyperbole, the amount of political and cultural will it would take would be so massive it may as well be impossible. It's easily a multi-decade project at a minimum.

On the one hand, sure. On the other, the idea that this is impossible to accomplish in less than 2-3 generations is crazy to me. Because we somehow were perfectly capable of building that infrastructure and finding labor abroad to do it.

It's can't be both too complicated to train a new workforce to do it in the US, while also being so comically easy that we trained people with 80 IQs to do it.

Yeah, I get what you're saying, but it's not really an apples-to-apples comparison.

When we offshored manufacturing, we didn't build everything from scratch overseas. We moved into countries that already had or were rapidly developing industrial capacity, often with heavy government coordination, cheap labor, and minimal regulation. The global supply network was expanding at the time - tons of investment money, cheap shipping, new trade agreements, etc. It was a wave the U.S. was able to ride.

Trying to reverse that process isn't the same as doing it the first time, because now everything is optimized for the global system. The costs, logistics, and incentives are completely different. You're talking about unwinding a 40-year dependency on globalized efficiency, not just building factories, but rebuilding entire support ecosystems that were hollowed out.

But sure, it's possible. But not quickly, and not without enormous cost and disruption. We could do it if we had the political will and were okay eating 10+ years of inflation and scarcity. But pretending it's just a matter of "training people" oversimplifies how deep the structural rot really is and is a fundamental misunderstanding of how all these systems intertwine.

Furry said:

it'd probably take around 5-10 years for us to return to having most things made in country

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It could take 5 years just for the permits to build some of this shit, let alone entire industries that would have to be rebuilt.

Kirun said:

Yeah, I get what you're saying, but it's not really an apples-to-apples comparison.

When we offshored manufacturing, we didn't build everything from scratch overseas. We moved into countries that already had or were rapidly developing industrial capacity, often with heavy government coordination, cheap labor, and minimal regulation. The global supply network was expanding at the time - tons of investment money, cheap shipping, new trade agreements, etc. It was a wave the U.S. was able to ride.

Trying to reverse that process isn't the same as doing it the first time, because now everything is optimized for the global system. The costs, logistics, and incentives are completely different. You're talking about unwinding a 40-year dependency on globalized efficiency, not just building factories, but rebuilding entire support ecosystems that were hollowed out.

But sure, it's possible. But not quickly, and not without enormous cost and disruption. We could do it if we had the political will and were okay eating 10+ years of inflation and scarcity. But pretending it's just a matter of "training people" oversimplifies how deep the structural rot really is and is a fundamental misunderstanding of how all these systems intertwine.

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Political will is another huge problem. We are perpetually at disaster's door with liberals, and one election away from being flooded with street shitters and Juans. We are in a constant cycle of build, destroy, rebuild whereas our primary competitor has a stable conservative government that isn't going to go away, and has been in a building spree in their own country for decades and across the entire planet. USA's global efforts simply results in everything we touch turning to shit or outright ruin.

China builds cities that go unused, and spends billions on high speed rail to the middle of nowhere just for Shits & Giggles. We can't make modern rail at all, and can't even make affordable housing. Here, it takes 6+ months to install a single roundabout, and China builds entire freeways in the same amount of time. We can't maintain old infrastructure much less build new infrastructure at any scale.

Further, China passes out capital like it's nothing. Here? Good luck getting money to do anything unless you are a megacorp...in which case that money isn't needed. And if you do manage to build something, China will steal it and sell it on Amazon for 1/4 price of yours just to drive you out of business. Add to that, China has a massive workforce that will work for basically free, and USA has only a tiny productive workforce, and a large number of people who are content with not working at all or are barely productive when they do work.