Because nothing matters. Just wait out the outrage cycle. In a week or two the general public will have moved on. Signalgate, the president being convicted of numerous felonies, etc being a few examples that pop into my head. None of this should be status quo but we live in interesting times as they say.
Vanguard's lifecycle funds (picking them because they get promoted a lot as a good choice, courtesy of good marketing and lower fees and generally good returns). Their 2030 fund, the one that people are recommended to select if they're retiring around 2028-2032, is down 4.54% YTD, and down 1.42% for the last year. The current market effects have wiped out over a year in gains for a relatively conservative fund.
And that's all from the last two trading days, it was slightly up YTD on Wednesday. And all of this is before the effects of the tariffs come into play. We haven't actually seen the effect of higher import costs hitting companies and consumers yet.
So people approaching retirement are getting hit and hit hard, but it's not quite 20% for them unless they selected an aggressive investment strategy for some reason.
The worst for the Vanguard funds are down about 8% YTD (and likely to get worse) for anyone 25 years or more away from retirement.
Nobody should be planning on steady stock market gains for their retirement income. The stock market goes up and it goes down. In both the dot com crash and the 2008 financial crisis the market fell significantly more. Even in Covid it fell more. So you should plan for many of these events to happen within your retirement. If you're more conservative (pun?) you should plan for great depression style events within your retirement.
EDIT: I don't usually respond to downvotes but it's really important to understand the stock market is a volatile investment. You shouldn't have money you're planning to use in the short or medium term in the stock market. It's a longer term (10 years+) investment.
> Nobody should be planning on steady stock market gains for their retirement income.
At least in the Nordic countries, utterly uncontroversial conventional wisdom says something like:
* In your youth save almost-only in stocks; via some index fund, if you don't feel like being an active investor, following the market every day;
* Start with (funds that specialise in) high-growth (= high-risk) stocks; then, as you near middle age, slowly move over to lower-risk (= lower-growth) stocks (or funds specialised therein);
* In middle age, move over to having some part in state bonds;
* As you near retirement age, eliminate high-growth/risk stocks/funds altogether, and draw down the proportion of stocks/funds as a whole, going to an increasing proportion state bonds.
* As you retire, possibly move all-out of stocks / stock index funds and all-in on bonds... Except put some in an ordinary old bank account.
As much as HN posters like to pretend they're above them, it's not an exaggeration to say that this site is now about as political as Reddit or Bluesky and votes like them. Depending on the thread, your comments will be downgraded for lack of left-wing partisanship, not because you're wrong or because your post is low-quality. For the record, my vote seems to have removed the low-opacity threshold on your post. I have no doubt that countless intelligent posts have been hidden solely because they do not align with leftist consensus, and comment sections are full of entirely delusional subthreads that fail to comprehend just about anything about politics, economics, or ethics, but are promoted because they align with a simplistic radical framework of "good guys smart, bad guys dumb".
It's starting to matter. Trump's downfall will be his base seeing him as anything but a successful, smart businessman. He's struggling to control the narrative with how many gaffs and scandals have occurred, and it's starting to hit his base and his brand:
I cannot stand to watch, but I am curious how Fox News is presenting the latest events. Without that propaganda piece supporting the administration, how long can support be maintained.
That’s maybe doable as long as the major impact is just the stock market. Most people do not pay much attention to the stock markets, at least not day by day. However, within weeks, price increases from the US tariffs and demand decreases from the Chinese tariffs will start to hit, and those will likely be more difficult to paper over.
A cult problem. But cult problems can be solved too.
Trumpism might be cult-lite but it’s not something people cannot be led to see as harmful. Find what hooked them. Show that the outcome isn’t as Trump implied. Frame the failure as intentional rather than unintentional — Trumps usual approach to avoiding responsibility. Allow them to save face.
Respectfully, it's hard to see Trump himself as compelling. My money is on Eric: behind every great man is a great woman. Lara Trump is pretty dang ambitious.
I do agree that saving face would help but his people are still ready revere him while still being angry at Musk or any fallout from a Trump decree.
His cult sees him as he was presented on The Apprentice -- rich, powerful, rich, and wise, and rich. Rich is good and if he's rich he's double plus good.
I think the only end to his cult is his shuffling off this mortal coil.
There’s a deeply rooted assumption that both sides are equivalent. This allows one of the sides to do whatever without its validity being disqualified, because any doubt is simply overridden by the assumption.
"Lighten up and have fun," he says at the end. For what will we actually hold him accountable? It's a smoking gun that he's a bullshitter, but it's not a crime to be a racist.
1) Back then, racists were elected everywhere else too. America didn't much stand out just because of that.
2) Back then, America a) wasn't led by a moroniac[§], and b) didn't intentionally alienate itself from the rest of the world.
And I'm afraid it's really goodbye this time. I mean, 2016-20 was weird enough, but then we thought normalcy had returned... But then you -- or they? -- went and re-elected him. There's just no way of knowing where America will go; looks like a total basket-case.
Seems quite a lot of Americans agree with me on that, BTW. Didn't they ever know America either?
___
[§]: Maniacal moron, or moronic maniac? Can't make up my mind.
Right, but it is in large part because of Navarro that Trump thinks universal tarifss are a great idea, since Navarro advocated for them and created credibility for his theories by inventing this fictional "expert".
It gave Trump plausible deniability, he can claim he's just doing what great experts from the academia are advocating. And it gave us the market-crash and global trade-war. It's easy for billionaires to lighten up and have fun, but not for most other people.
Tariffs are a sales-tax, which means poor people have to relinguish a larger proportion of their income to the government, than rich people. It is great wealth transfer from ordinary people to the rich. And one can only conjecture that THAT is why Trump and Navarro advocate for it.
Three members from of the cabinet have one or more sexual assault or rape accusations and the president can no longer claim he did not rape Jean in public without committing defamation. And Trump got re elected and only a token handful of GOP senators voted against any of those cabinet nominees. Consequences only matter if one is not in the clique.
I'm unfamiliar with Polish politics, and a quote like that does not surprise me coming from politicians (see "alternative facts" in the first Trump administration to excuse outright lies), but do you have a source for that or at least a source for what you're paraphrasing if it's not a direct quote?
EDIT: Wait a second, I need to check something.
EDIT 2: Huh, I think I fell for this the entire time.
It's "Z podobnym problemem mierzyliśmy się, kiedy sprawowaliśmy władzę w latach 2005-2007. Wtedy poszliśmy w kierunku bardzo eksperckim, właśnie otwartych konkursów jeśli chodzi o rady nadzorcze. Trafiali tam eksperci z rynku, trafiały osoby z tytułami naukowymi, z SGH, z innych uczelni. No i problem okazał się taki, że ich sposób myślenia o gospodarce, o zarządzaniu był zupełnie sprzeczny z tym, co Prawo i Sprawiedliwość ma w swoim programie."
Which translates to "We faced a similar problem when we were in power in 2005-2007. Then we went in a very expert direction, precisely open competitions when it came to supervisory boards. Experts from the market ended up there, people with academic degrees, from the Warsaw School of Economics, from other universities.
Well, and the problem turned out to be that their way of thinking about the economy, about management was completely contrary to what Law and Justice has in its program."
... so that quote was from editiorial summarising it, not that person himself.
