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founding

Thanks for the helpful pricing scenarios, Peter. Politically, trump needs to hammer home that Harris ALLOWED this inflation to happen. Even more importantly, he needs to access which scarce items are going to affect voters’ holiday plans. Your kids can’t get this year’s most desirable toys for Christmas? You’ll gain back all the weight you lost because you can’t get Ozembic, and that means you’ll have to starve yourself this holiday season? Which now-unattainable or impossibly expensive items will trigger rage against HarrIs and a vote for Trump?

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author

At this juncture Harris certainly allowed the strike to happen.

What's really stupid is that Hurricane Helene would have given the Administration perfect cover for invoking Taft-Hartley. Kick the can down the road for 80 days so that there's good "hurricane cleanup".

I'm not a fan of Taft-Hartley and I don't like government stepping in and ordering workers back to work like they did with the railroads, but, for better or worse, Taft-Harley powers are real. This would be the type of scenario where it was meant to be invoked.

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Hypothetical for you. Supposing the strike lasts until Christmas or even beyond into first 1/2 of 2025. In your opinion would that cause potentially enough stress in the system, via either inflation to make the government discuss "protecting" private pensions, etc by transferring into government bonds or some such bond ? Ie protect the forced savings of the average workers, etc. Speculation I know but I'm following a trail of other signals as well, so I'm investigating a pattern I'm noticing.😉

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author

That's an extreme scenario. For that scenario to come to pass fourteen of the nation's ports--and six of the ten busiest--would have to be completely idled for upwards of three months.

If we're looking at a total shutdown of all fourteen ports for that long.....I think I'm more worried about civil unrest than anything else.

Problem is, the civil unrest from that would fly off in ten different directions all at the same time. I'm not sure you could even put that genie back in the bottle.

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