Or possibly ever again. Eras like this one can be what kills an empire/great power.

I think one of the greater risks to a power like the U.S. is getting old enough where it's felt like things always were, and therefore always will be. When there is no-longer a grandparent at the dinner table who can even tell you when his grandparent at the dinner table spoke about the before times.

In most areas (drug enforcement, basic education, healthcare, gun culture...) nobody should have been taking the US seriously maybe since Reagan. Finance, science and war were the only areas you could count on the US but now they went full Roman on the rest of the world not even that anymore. War is the only thing that's left I think.

The US gained almost immeasurable power and influence by virtue of the 2 World Wars and being largely directly unaffected by those wars, whereas Europe was levelled, particularly by WW2. And that power came from selling weapons.

The world order was reset after 1945 and designed largely by the US for the benefit of the US, particularly the financial system. People will often mistake cause and effect. A common one is the petrodollar. The US dollar isn't strong because oil is traded in it. No. Oil is traded in the dollar because of demand fo the dollar. The world oil market could switch to Euros or RMB tomorrow and the net effect would be that people would hold USD and trade it for whatever currency as needed and convert any such currency immediately back to dollars.

But underpinning this has been the appearance of integrity in the US financial system and, in particular, the Federal Reserve and the SEC. That trust and that system is being rapidly destroyed for a few billion dollars in personal profit. All of this was enabled by an ideological Supreme Court who invented out of thin air the concept of presidential immunity to make the president a king in a country that rebelled against a monarchy.

We're living in times that will be written about in history books as the end of the post-1945 era, particularly with the Iran War. I, for one, called this the most disastrous US strategic defeat in the entire of US history and it's not even close back in April. And I stand by that.

There was a time when corrupt heads of state kept up appearances of not being corrupt. It was done in secret through layers of secrecy. That's gone now. The corruption is very much out in the open.

It's not to see this as anything other than China's rise to global prominence and the irony is they just had to do nothing while letting the US commit suicide.

The messed up part is that it's not even technically insider trading as long as they release the same information publicly shortly after... so they're not actually breaking any laws. So much of the way the US government has operated is based on some shared standard of moral sense that the current administration lacks completely.

> No one is going to take the US seriously for the next 50 years.

I hate this obvious pay-for-access thing as much as anyone, but this isn’t going to define the US for the next 50 years. The second the next president is in office every other country will adapt to working with them, just as been happening every 4-8 years.

If insider trading is your concern then the country hasn't been serious for a long time, everyone in government does it and it's never punished even when exploited to the levels of 9 figures of assets.

Should just be legalized at this point so we can all take advantage if they're all gonna get away with it.