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    1. NoMathematician9564 on

      CREDIT CARDS

      The United States has another ace up its sleeve – its payment giants, including credit card companies Visa (V.N), opens new tab and Mastercard (MA.N), opens new tab.
      While Japan and China have to varying degrees developed their own electronic means of payment, the two U.S. firms process two-thirds of card payments made in 20-nation euro zone.
      Mobile phone app payments, dominated by U.S. firms such as Apple and Google make up almost one-tenth of retail payments.
      This shift has put Europeans on the back foot in a vast market, worth more than 113 trillion euros ($124.7 trillion dollars) in the first six months of last year.
      Were Visa and Mastercard to be pressured into pulling the plug on services, as they did in Russia shortly after it invaded Ukraine, Europeans would have to use cash or cumbersome bank transfers to shop instead.
      ////

      *my opinion below, completely unrelated to the news article. 

      The fact that this is even a possibility should make us take immediate actions. We need our own electronic means of payment.*

    2. Ritourne on

      At this point it’s just U.S declaring war to Europe, meaning it’s time to cut all atlantic and pacific cables, so we will no longer watch, hear, or read all this bullshit anymore, thank you gawd.

    3. Themetalin on

      Do Europeans need Visa/Mastercard to make payments in their own countries? Isn’t it only for making payments in other countries?

    4. Not_Cleaver on

      Ah, that’s the action of someone who wants to somehow speed run into a depression.

    5. Unfair_Run_170 on

      “While deploying these unconventional weapons would come at a large cost for the U.S. itself and may even backfire altogether, observers say such doomsday scenarios should not be discarded.”

      We should prepare to drop the US dollar as reserve currency! Than we can make sure it fails for sure!

    6. Hot_Cheesecake_905 on

      If this happens, then the US dollar and the US financing system is toast.

    7. Weird_Rooster_4307 on

      Weapons finance? That’s the stupidest plans even because countries will just call in their loans to the US and devastate it.

    8. Jmsjss2912 on

      Let’s talk about the tariffs and the effects it has on the manufacturers of this country.

      Assume for a minute that you wanted to bring back some manufacturing to the USA, which of course is a huge assumption compared to manufacturing outside the country like we do as a company.

      Which I will get to in just a moment.
      This week alone the stock market lost over US$9 trillion which means every single manufacturer that has a US corporation is part of that loss. Which goes to show you that Trump‘s logic is about as efficient as his spray tan.

      If these companies even had a thought of coming back to the United States, all of their cash has now evaporated because of the loss in the stock market so who’s going to finance these new manufacturing plants that Trump keeps talking about, that are going to come back here make the economy great?

      Now goods have gone up in price in some cases doubled already this week which means the consumers are going to be buying less. Companies are going to begin layoffs, because they’ve lost a huge portion of their cash reserves. Their businesses are going to be diminished some because of the lower purchasing rate and the higher pricing.

      Bringing manufacturing back to the United States at this point with this approach has been almost completely eliminated.

      All you have to do is go back and look at what happened during the depression when they tried to institute tariffs causing the depression to take even a further nose dive and adding years into the depressive point. It’s such a joke that they used it in the movie Ferris Bueller‘s Day off where the teacher was talking about how bad tariffs are and how they caused the depression to go down, which goes to show you that if they use it as a punchline, then it obviously cannot work.

      With our business, we were building some manufacturing plants in the United States and now have had to put it on hold because of the tariffs. As an example, each of our production lines has a manufacturing cost of a little under US$5 million, we did try to price it in the United States but we found quotes anywhere from $12-$16 million for the same exact production line that we are having made in China. So we couldn’t make the equipment in the United States, but we were going to import it and set up manufacturing plants.

      One of them was in Arkansas where the state is somewhat depressed. Now we have put that project on hold with approximately 1800 people we were going to hire.

      The reason for that is not just the tariffs, from the equipment if you think about it a piece of equipment that cost me $5 million is now going to cost me about $9 million. Each production line generates about US$35 million of revenue so it’s not just a tariff in my situation it’s the fact that for $9 million I can have practically two production lines generating $70 million of income compared to the same $9 million generating $35 million worth of income, with a much lower profit margin because of the labor cost in the United States along with all the taxes and liability issues that you carry because of the litigious nature of the United States operating.

      So tariffs do not work, they hurt the economy. The only thing that they do on the surface is generate more tax dollars for the US government, but they diminish and wipe out the middle and lower class.

      Do you want to bring manufacturing back to the United States?

      You’ve got to do something about all of the litigious actions, you have to lower healthcare cost, lower pharmaceutical cost, have to educate more so that children can grow up and learn trades.

      You have to find ways to lower the cost of living and once you start doing that then laboring jobs will become available again.

      The next problem is the taxation situation is off-balance. We have structured our tax code so that the wealthy and the publicly traded companies that offer stock options instead of salaries, which is taxable make it almost impossible to collect tax.

      Take Musk for an example from Tesla.

      They talk about his $300 billion worth but it’s all in stock and that’s unrealized gains paying no taxes. What he does is he goes to the bank and he borrows money against that stock portfolio, borrowed money is non-taxable income and then he uses that money to live and buy things like he bought Twitter for $44 billion with borrowed money, no taxes paid at all.

      And then what he does from there to pay off those loans is he borrows against other portfolios and he just keeps borrowing deferring the taxes.

      $300 billion and no taxes paid whereas the employees that work for all those companies have taxes taken out of each paycheck.

      Just look salaries up of the top executives around the country and you look at their income, you’ll see that their salaries are generally between one hundred and two hundred thousand US dollars but they earned anywhere from ten to a hundred million dollars a year all in stock options and then they keep those options in stock and then borrow against them so their tax base is almost nothing.

      you want to fix the economy. You have to find a way to tax the rich, you’re not going to make them poor, you’re just going to make them help to strengthen the economy.

    9. missionarymechanic on

      How to forever scuttle your country’s most important resource and export: money…

    10. It would be fun if we in Europe just switched to JCB the Japanese credit cards.

    11. DancingWithAWhiteHat on

      Allies, penguins, our own military bases……..

    12. xibeno9261 on

      So far, the only country that has actually retaliated against the tariffs is China, which is America’s enemy. Europe, Japan, Korea, Australia, and other American allies, have not retaliated at all. There are only a bunch of big talk, but which American ally has retaliated with actual counter-tariffs that hurt America?

      If the Europeans are unwilling to retaliate, that is just going to embolden the Trump administration to continue as they are.

    13. No_Coyote_557 on

      Trump’s tariffs are not real, they are a negotiation strategy. Now you have the tariffs, you have to offer him something in return for dropping/lowering them. His ultimate aim is to get countries around the world to agree to peg to the $ so he can devalue but still retain reserve currency status. It will work for vulnerable countries (eg Vietnam) but I think he has greatly overestimated the current power of the US.

    14. DvD_Anarchist on

      For the last 15 years or so, the US has been weaponizing economic sanctions. They have been weakening the dollar as the reserve currency and created the need for alternative systems, because right now 1/3 of all countries suffer some type of economic sanction from the US. This would be the final nail in the coffin, and I’m here for it. The American Empire needs to fall.

    15. eldenpotato on

      Trump’s bullshit is stressing me out. He is trying to fuck the global economy over imaginary numbers

    16. PriorityMuted8024 on

      And the Republican senators and members of Congress are assisting with this nonsense behavior. I just hope that the voters will punish them.

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