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Simon

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Financial advisors come in many forms.  When it comes to investment advisors, if you are engaging an advisor who is paid from the investments sold, you are the product which the advisor is selling to the fund companies.  An advisor who charges fees to you (whether based on an hourly rate or a % of your portfolio), you are the client and the investments are the product, so he had best focus on serving you.

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I've often heard remarks from people both here and generally, that media outlets, notably American ones, are biased to either "right" or "left" -leaning views, and therefore can't be trusted to provide balanced, impartial coverage. I've been keeping my eye on various news sources with that in mind. Recent stories on Fox News, and the Atlantic, seem rather emblematic of trends I noticed:

 

Trump rips CNN over debunked Trump Tower story: 'They got caught red handed'

 

Devin Nunes’s Curious Trip to London

 

Level of headline histrionics aside, the report in the Atlantic seems more dispassionate, and makes a greater effort to provide documentation supporting the author's points. I find that to be typical for the majority of established, high-profile American news sources. The Fox article is more blatant in drawing broad conclusions from narrower details, and using them to promote a general narrative with a clear agenda. The latter example is worrying to me in that many (though certainly not all) proponents of the "right" in America today hold up Fox News as an example of fair and honest reporting.

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4 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

I've often heard remarks from people both here and generally, that media outlets, notably American ones, are biased to either "right" or "left" -leaning views, and therefore can't be trusted to provide balanced, impartial coverage. I've been keeping my eye on various news sources with that in mind. Recent stories on Fox News, and the Atlantic, seem rather emblematic of trends I noticed:

 

Trump rips CNN over debunked Trump Tower story: 'They got caught red handed'

 

Devin Nunes’s Curious Trip to London

 

Level of headline histrionics aside, the report in the Atlantic seems more dispassionate, and makes a greater effort to provide documentation supporting the author's points. I find that to be typical for the majority of established, high-profile American news sources. The Fox article is more blatant in drawing broad conclusions from narrower details, and using them to promote a general narrative with a clear agenda. The latter example is worrying to me in that many (though certainly not all) proponents of the "right" in America today hold up Fox News as an example of fair and honest reporting.

 

< sigh >

 

I lost a massive response post I'd worked on for a couple of hours and don't really feel up to re-writing it all.

 

Speaking as someone who was part of the small conservative minority section of the Republican party for over four decades, Fox News is a cheerleading organization rather than a news organization. They pick a winner and a loser on each issue then slant all their coverage toward that bias. They'll go after a Ted Cruz in the 2016 election (or Newt Gingrich in 2012) with much the same glee as they go against Democrats. They have a business model where they jump on or create a bandwagon then use the effect of that to attract or keep viewers.

 

When I spent 15 years doing massive amounts of political blogging, I actively avoided reading the Fox News website and never linked to it. I was much better served by reading articles on a particular story on several liberal-slanting websites (and British websites when those were available) then comparing those articles against each other to filter out the bias to figure out exactly what's happening.

 

The Atlantic, in my experience, doesn't do a good job of presenting the news or commentary in an unbiased manner. But when you're comparing it to Fox News, sure it's going to be better most of the time due to Fox's business model of "promote or denigrate" everything.

 

When I have some time, I'm hoping to read and comment on that particular Atlantic article link. But if I don't get around to it, well, it's the Atlantic. ;)

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I don't know how many of our American forumites have been following the free trade negotiations between the US, Mexico and Canada, but up here in the Great White North it's headline news. The following story from the Toronto Star is acknowledged as being a leak from an unnamed source, about a media interview of Trump by Bloomberg News which they reportedly agreed to keep off the record, regarding his position on negotiating with Canada. If accurate, I find it a telling insight into his thought process and strategy. https://www.msn.com/en-ca/money/topstories/bombshell-leak-to-toronto-star-upends-nafta-talks-in-secret-‘so-insulting’-remarks-trump-says-he-isn’t-compromising-at-all-with-canada/ar-BBMHIVD?li=AAggNb9

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Trump doesn't understand world trade.  In business, if you drive a really hard bargain and come away with no deal, you move on to the next company.  In world trade, if you drive a really hard bargain and come away with no deal, there's no other Canada to move on to.

 

The Canadians are also well aware by now that Trump is a serial fraudster whose word is worthless.

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1 hour ago, Old Man said:

Trump doesn't understand world trade.  In business, if you drive a really hard bargain and come away with no deal, you move on to the next company.  In world trade, if you drive a really hard bargain and come away with no deal, there's no other Canada to move on to.

 

The Canadians are also well aware by now that Trump is a serial fraudster whose word is worthless.

 

Not that I disagree with you about Trump but having "no deal" is itself a trade position because every country has rules for how to conduct business with other countries with which they have no special deal.

 

Countries start off with a baseline on how they treat trade with foreign countries then build bilateral trade deals to alter that baseline. It isn't the case that "this trade deal has to come together or trade between the two countries completely ends".

 

If the new deal doesn't come together and NAFTA is scrapped, the US and Canada will each treat each other in trade like they do all the other countries of the world with whom they have no particular special deals.

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Thanks for the clarification. Still, the point remains: This is not a game where a temperamental player can say, "If you don't play by MY RULES and let me win, I'll take my ball and go home!" The game continues. It just gets uglier and less profitable.

 

While I haven't actively followed the US/Canada trade talks, it comes up often on the radio program Marketplace from PRI. All Things Considered from NPR also covers it now and then. They both reported Trump's alleged insistence that the US will dictate trade terms to Canada and not compromise on anything. Which suggests that Trump not only doesn't understand international trade, he does not understand national sovereignty. Or just doesn't care, in his paranoid, narcissistic world of zero-sum dominance and submission. Canada is not so small that even the US can get away with treating it like an unruly satrapy.

 

I'm sure the Economist will report on it in full.

 

Dean Shomshak

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9 hours ago, archer said:

 

Not that I disagree with you about Trump but having "no deal" is itself a trade position because every country has rules for how to conduct business with other countries with which they have no special deal.

 

Countries start off with a baseline on how they treat trade with foreign countries then build bilateral trade deals to alter that baseline. It isn't the case that "this trade deal has to come together or trade between the two countries completely ends".

 

If the new deal doesn't come together and NAFTA is scrapped, the US and Canada will each treat each other in trade like they do all the other countries of the world with whom they have no particular special deals.

 

Yeah but it is at least in his mind that the US could withdraw from the WTO that provides that baseline:

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/30/trump-threatens-to-withdraw-from-world-trade-organization.html

 

I believe he has also failed to support the appointment of appellate judges which would gut the ability of the WTO to adjudicate disputes.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-puts-the-wto-on-the-ropes-1531340083

 

All of this is brinksmanship stuff.  I guess he is hoping everyone will be so desperate to maintain the status quo that he will get the judges he wants or the concessions he desires...

 

Doc

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Trade alternatives are talked about a lot in Canada these days, including by Trudeau. The possibilities are being actively and publicly pursued, by government and business. It will be a long time, if ever, before such deals can balance the enormous flow of trade between the United States and Canada; but there's a prevailing mood in Canada now that the US can no longer be counted on to be a safe, reliable trading partner.

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16 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

Trade alternatives are talked about a lot in Canada these days, including by Trudeau. The possibilities are being actively and publicly pursued, by government and business. It will be a long time, if ever, before such deals can balance the enormous flow of trade between the United States and Canada; but there's a prevailing mood in Canada now that the US can no longer be counted on to be a safe, reliable trading partner.

That mood seems to be prevalent in many other places as well.

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On 9/2/2018 at 7:46 AM, Lord Liaden said:

...but there's a prevailing mood in Canada now that the US can no longer be counted on to be a safe, reliable trading partner.

 

That's bad news for the US, considering that we buy more petroleum from Canada than from any other country.

 

In fact, I have this discussion with my students each year: the five nations from whom we buy the most oil are, in increasing order, Venezuela, Iraq, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and Canada.* And then I ask them: " How many of those countries would you say we consider 'good friends'?"

 

Right at this moment, I'd guess the safe answer is, "Maybe one."

 

*That was the list when last I checked, which has admittedly been a couple of years.

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Yeah, alienating Canada is spectacularly stupid. Alienating everyone in the world at once is even stupider.

 

Maybe the US could "win" a trade war with Canada and force its government to grovel. The US isn't going to do that to China, or the entire EU. Picking a half-dozen or more such fights at once is a plan for absolute defeat.

 

I remember a couple books called The Case for Goliath and Empires of Trust. Each, in its own way, made the case that an important leg of American primacy is by being useful and reliable. For all that people in other countries bitch about US dominance sometimes with justifiable irritation for American cluelessness and clumsiness -- they count on it to set limits to conflicts, stabilize markets, provide a safe haven for investments when their own country has a crisis, and so on. Trump seems determined to destroy that order in pursuit of a cruder dominance that he will not get.

 

Dean Shomshak

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