Liberation Liquidation Day, brought to you by OMAGA Bane Laden

https://www.ft.com/content/8ba439ec-297c-4372-ba45-37e9d7fd1771

https://www.lawyer-monthly.com/2025/04/hedge-funds-margin-calls-tariff-crash72961/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14574029/hedge-funds-margin-calls-donald-trump-tariffs.html

Since WSB and Stocks reddit won't let this post stay up because they are afraid of the market panic. I will try to post this here. This is a fucking big deal. We're looking at a black Monday.

Wall Street Meltdown: Trump's Tariff Sparks Hedge Fund Bloodbath.

Hedge funds are facing Lehman-style margin calls as a market crash triggered by President Donald Trump's tariffs raises fears of a looming 'Black Monday.'

The significant decline in the market has compelled hedge funds to liquidate assets, with prominent Wall Street banks requesting additional collateral following a sharp decrease in the value of their holdings, according to insiders.

There is growing apprehension about a recurrence of the catastrophic 'Black Monday' that occurred on October 19, 1987, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by 22.6 percent, marking the largest single-day percentage drop in history.

This situation arises as a 10 percent global 'baseline' tariff was implemented late last night, affecting all U.S. imports except those from Mexico and Canada. By April 9, approximately 60 trading partners, including the European Union, Japan, and China, are expected to encounter even steeper tariffs tailored to their respective economies.

Margin Calls and Market Mayhem: Hedge Funds in Freefall

In the wake of Trump's tariff disruptions, several major banks have issued their largest margin calls to clients since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. The magnitude of these calls, spanning various sectors such as technology and consumer goods, has raised alarms that the aggressive sell-off may persist into Monday. Margin calls can trigger a detrimental cycle, as selling stocks to fulfill these calls can further depress prices. On Friday, gold prices dropped by more than 3 percent, reversing earlier gains from the week, as investors were compelled to sell bullion to offset their losses.

'Rates, equities, and oil were all down significantly… it was the broad market movements that caused the scale of the margin calls,' one prime brokerage executive told the Financial Times.Wall Street Meltdown: Trump's Tariff Sparks Hedge Fund Bloodbath.
Hedge funds are facing Lehman-style margin calls as a market crash triggered by President Donald Trump's tariffs raises fears of a looming 'Black Monday.'
The significant decline in the market has compelled hedge funds to liquidate assets, with prominent Wall Street banks requesting additional collateral following a sharp decrease in the value of their holdings, according to insiders.
There is growing apprehension about a recurrence of the catastrophic
'Black Monday' that occurred on October 19, 1987, when the Dow Jones
Industrial Average fell by 22.6 percent, marking the largest single-day
percentage drop in history.

This situation arises as a 10 percent global 'baseline' tariff was
implemented late last night, affecting all U.S. imports except those
from Mexico and Canada. By April 9, approximately 60 trading partners,
including the European Union, Japan, and China, are expected to
encounter even steeper tariffs tailored to their respective economies.
Margin Calls and Market Mayhem: Hedge Funds in Freefall
In the wake of Trump's tariff disruptions, several major banks have
issued their largest margin calls to clients since the beginning of the
COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. The magnitude of these calls, spanning
various sectors such as technology and consumer goods, has raised alarms
that the aggressive sell-off may persist into Monday. Margin calls can
trigger a detrimental cycle, as selling stocks to fulfill these calls
can further depress prices. On Friday, gold prices dropped by more than 3
percent, reversing earlier gains from the week, as investors were
compelled to sell bullion to offset their losses.
'Rates, equities, and oil were all down significantly… it was the
broad market movements that caused the scale of the margin calls,' one
prime brokerage executive told the Financial Times.

Source: https://x.com/weakinstrument/status/1908251973356576895?t=qaWTOtBfWJTpHTP-FZ2S3A&s=19

A lot of people are confused about why the current Republican administration would be willing to crash the economy for these dumb tariffs. I've seen Redditors proposing various ideas for what they think is The Plan, trying to get all of this to make sense. They think surely it must make sense somehow because he has people like Musk around him who they think are smart.

Then I've also seen other people saying there is no plan. He just likes feeling powerful, he likes that tariffs are something he can do unilaterally (in truth he actually still needs Congress' consent, but the Republican Congress spread their cheeks for his dick long ago), and that's the extent of it. No plan, just a narcissist and whatever impulses or crazy ideas he wakes up with that morning.

If you look at the current facts and the Republican party's history and ideology, I actually do think there's a plan. It's just not one anybody's currently talking about, not publicly anyway, but it is a plan that has the benefit of making sense given everything we know.

The first thing to understand is this is not happening in a vacuum. As the administration is raising taxes on everyone, particularly the poor and middle class who spend a disproportionate amount of their income on now-tariffed products as compared to the wealthy, they have also been talking in the background about eliminating federal income taxes for people and corporations. Just Google 'eliminating income taxes' and you'll see many recent articles about figures in the administration talking about this. So they effectively want to get rid of income taxes and various other federal taxes and replace that tax revenue with tariff revenue instead.

But here's the thing about tariff revenue - it tends to naturally go down over time. As many have noted, tariffs incentivize domestic production of previously imported goods, which reduces import volume over time and thereby reduces tariff revenue. Another way is that tariffs incentivize smuggling, misclassification of goods, and other forms of evasion that erode the revenue base, especially when combined with reduced government oversight due to layoffs and downsizing. There are more reasons than this but you get the idea. Tariffs by their nature encourage their own dwindling returns.

So we'd be replacing a reliable revenue source that grows over time, income taxes, which even if you leave at the same rate nonetheless grows in dollars with inflation and economic growth, with one that instead dwindles over time and could even all-but disappear eventually.

Which brings us to Republican party ideology and a tactic they pioneered many decades ago known as 'starve the beast'. Google it. In the case of this analogy, the government is the beast. This strategy dates back to the Reagan era. The basic idea is, Americans don't easily give up their government. Eliminating what they call entitlements, your Social Security, your Medicare, that would be politically unpopular, right? But what you can do is, every time you're in office, you lower taxes. And then again. And again. And again. And you never, ever, vote to raise them back up.

So the idea goes, eventually, the government, starved of money, will simply have to downsize, right? Eventually we just won't be able to afford programs like Social Security and Medicare, and the Republicans will take no blame, they'll just say we have no choice but to tighten our belt now. From their perspective, they can finally get the citizens off the government's teat, and they'll probably manage to blame the Democrats for the whole situation to begin with using their right wing media machine. It's a good plan.

But here's the thing. It's been 45 years since they started this plan, and instead of tightening the belt, we've just decided to go further and further into debt instead. The day they pined for, that they long envisioned, has just never come. It probably would eventually come if they kept up this strategy, but it's taking much, much longer than they ever expected, and in the meantime we just keep going deeper into debt.

So now, Trump and his cohorts have found a new strategy. Get us off steady revenue, shift over to a source that's basically disappearing ink, they'll finally collapse the entire federal government and we'll live in the pure corporate oligarchy conservatives have long been trying to move us into. That's the plan. If they have to crash the economy to initiate it, so be it.

Monday open?

You can choose to ignore what I say, but this is purely my opinion. The US markets are headed towards a death spiral. Historically, every time markets have gone down, they've eventually come back up. Why? Because the US is the world's number one economy, and nearly every global product and service is connected in some way to a US multinational that typically offers a superior experience.

But here's what's going to happen now: the rest of the world will simply stop trading and investing with the US and will instead begin forming Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) with each other. They'll reduce their reliance on US goods, both for domestic companies and ordinary citizens, which will lead to less dependency on the dollar. As a result, the dollar’s value will decline significantly.

US companies' profits will tank, employees will earn less, and people will pay higher prices for goods due to tariffs on imports and exports. With reduced disposable income, spending on discretionary items will drop sharply, causing businesses to suffer even more during a recession intensified by tariffs.

Put simply, you can bully a couple of people in class and still remain popular, but when you bully everyone, you're going to get smacked hard.

The only way to avoid this scenario is if Trump faces immense pressure either from powerful corporate entities or his own cabinet to remove all tariffs, and this could potentially happen within the next few weeks. If his current policy continues for years, it could mark the end of US global dominance for a very long time. There would be no bounce back scenario. Instead, you'd see S&P 500 returns resembling the FTSE’s performance, which has only yielded around a 5% total return over the past six years.

Lets go (back to) Brandon

We didn't know what we had until we lost it. Puts, calls, holds, all are fucked for the forseable future. Take me back to some low and slow stonks only go up.

Heard & Mcdonald Island will impose a 10% tariff on all imports from the US starting April 10, according to the official Shitpost News Agency.