Shrinking from calling what Russia did an invasion was a temporary flight from reality for CNBC, probably motivated by keeping people from panicking and selling stocks.
It's all about the money, for Trump no less than for CNBC. And also for Vladimir Putin.
It should be about something else.
Stock futures surge. Crude oil surges. US Treasury yields surge.
Trump had imposed tariffs of up to 145% on Chinese imports, prompting Beijing to respond with retaliatory curbs of its own, including restrictions on some rare earth elements. ...
It's a long way down to normal.
The 2022 lows got us back only to the 2000 high, and people thought it was the end of the world when all it was was a good beginning lol.
Nominal GDP in 1Q2025 is estimated at $29.9776 trillion by the BEA this morning.
$SPX closed at 5611.85 on March 31, 2025.
That yields a ratio of 187 vs. the historical mean of 81, or 131% overvalued.
Guru Focus gets similar results from the Buffett Indicator:
Bloomberg published the story just before noon on Tuesday reporting the closed-door meeting where Bessent said he expected the tariff stand-off with China to de-escalate, and that the current situation, which amounts to a trade embargo, is unsustainable and will de-escalate in the very near future.
Markets opened Tuesday morning strongly higher and by 11:00 AM were up 110 points on the $SPX.
The Secretary of the Treasury shouldn't be having closed door meetings with the very people most likely to profit from what he has to say.
This is quite literally fascist economics.
CNBC:
Citigroup on Tuesday posted first-quarter results that exceeded analysts’ estimates as the firm’s traders generated more revenue than expected. ... “increased market volatility” and higher client activity led to more transactions ... a boom in equities trading revenue as the banks took advantage of volatility in the quarter. ...
Bank of America on Tuesday posted first-quarter results that topped analysts’ expectations for profit and revenue on stronger-than-expected net interest income and trading revenue. ...
JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs each exceeded analysts’ estimates on a boom in equities trading revenue as banks took advantage of volatility in the quarter.
More.
On again, off again, on again tariffs from The Puppet Master have enriched stock traders Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley. They don't care if stocks go up, or down, as long as they keep going up, going down, going up. Trump chaos is literally traders' gold.
Goldman profit is up 15% from the year earlier period.
Goldman Sachs tops estimates on boom in equities trading revenue
... equity trading revenue rose 27%. ... On Friday, rivals JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley each topped expectations for first-quarter results on booming equities trading.
Equities trading revenue surged 48% and 45% at the banks, respectively, thanks to volatility in the opening months of Trump’s tenure amid his efforts to reshape global trade agreements.
Most of the pissing and moaning is from investors who pulled the bond trigger too soon, plowed into fixed income, and got burned badly because interest rates reasserted themselves.
The press this weekend is instead full of apocalyptic language about the Treasury market and the implications for America on a grand scale. It's complete rot and I'm ignoring it. It's all designed to pressure the Fed to lower their rate again.
The last time the Fed embarked on rate cuts is instructive. It was late September 2024. The average of the aggregate of the curve had fallen to just north of 4. Inflation rates seemed to be trending down. So the Fed cut, and voila! Treasury rates hilariously shot upward!
The burn was real.
$TLT investors, who were down 4.76% in 2021, 31.41% in 2022, up 2.96% in 2023, went down again, 7.84% in 2024 as a result. Ouch.
They are back, itching again for a policy reversal like they have a flea infestation, so bad they are bleeding.
As things stand year to date, long term investment grade investors in VWESX, for example, are down 1.43%. It wasn't supposed to be this way, not again.
So everyone hates the bond vigilantes with the heat of 1,000 suns, and urges more imprudence.
Meanwhile in "cash" you go on making 4.3% or so, and in gold you have made a killing, while stocks reel under Trump's stupid tariff shotgun blasts which are wounding everyone in the field, including himself.
If the Fed had done a proper job against inflation by jacking up the Fed Funds Rate to meaningfully combat the core pce inflation rate of its average 5.35% in 2022 instead of going only where it did, which was 1.69% on an average basis, maybe we wouldn't still have this lingering inflation for the bond vigilantes to demand payment against. Core pce inflation hasn't moved materially off 2.8% in a year now, still much too high.
The bond market is "she who must be obeyed". She doesn't tell you everything you need to know, but she does tell you the most important thing.
But what the hell do I know. I'm just some punk keyboard warrior blogging in his underwear in the basement to the money men. So yippee-ki-yay, you earned it. Especially you Donald Trump, you complete ignoramus.
Trump was asked by a reporter on Wednesday when he decided to put a pause on the tariffs.
It's always for them.
He should be in Sing Sing for this utter corruption.
Meanwhile all that bullshit about Liberation will have to wait 90 days.
Trump’s morning ‘buy’ call nets huge returns for those who listened
... Trump Media & Technology shares initially popped after Trump referenced his initials in the post, with some investors appearing to know he was referring to the stock ticker.
The stock fell to $16.69 in the minute of his post to buy shares. It has since soared as high as $20.40, which marks a jump of more than 22%. ...
The White House’s push for for expanded presidential power threatens US economic stability
Donald Trump is systematically purging every US government institution, a pattern familiar to anybody who has studied the caudillo regimes of Latin America, or the playbook of today’s Putin-Orbán-Erdoğan prototypes.
It is a racing certainty that he will soon do the same to the Federal Reserve, forcing the central bank to cut interest rates into the teeth of rising inflation, with epic consequences for the world’s dollarised financial system and for €39 trillion (£33 trillion) of offshore dollar debt contracts and swaps.
Late last week he fired the head of the National Security Agency and its top officials at the behest of Laura Loomer, a fringe conspiracy theorist, who whispered into Trump’s ear that they were disloyal to the Maga movement.
He has already fired the heads of the FBI’s intelligence division, its counterterrorism division and criminal investigations division, as well as the heads of the Washington and New York offices.
He has fired the top brass of the US military, starting with a preemptive strike on the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. An earlier chairman – General Mark Milley – refused to ratify Trump’s attempted coup d’etat on Jan 6 2021.
“We don’t take an oath to a king, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We take an oath to the constitution,” said Milley in his parting shot.
But Trump also fired the three judge advocates general, who are legally independent by Congressional statute and have the authority to decide which military orders should be disobeyed – such as Trump’s order to “just shoot” American protesters, on American soil, during the Black Lives Matter saga.
That obstacle will not recur. Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary, said the three judges had been sacked to stop them posing any “roadblocks to orders given by the commander-in-chief”.
You can go through the list, agency by agency, extending to the universities and private law firms, and even to the muzzled editorials of some of America’s once great newspapers: the purge is Bolshevik in ambition.
Does anybody in their right mind think that Trump will spare the Fed’s Jerome Powell as the two men gear up for an almighty clash over US monetary policy? “CUT INTEREST RATES, JEROME, AND STOP PLAYING POLITICS!” bellowed Trump in capital letters on Truth Social on Friday.
The Fed will indeed cut rates this year but not until it is able to see through the confusing blizzard of tariffs and the ricochet retaliation of an angry world.
Powell told Congress that the tariff shock is much bigger than expected and may set off “persistent” inflation rather than just a one-off jump in the price level. He came close to damning Trumponomics as a recipe for low-growth stagflation. That is a red flag to a bull.
The current debate over whether or not Trump has the legal power to fire Powell entirely misunderstands the character of the Maga revolution. America’s rule of law is for guidance only these days.
You could say it was ever thus. Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court after it blocked the New Deal. He failed, and unleashed tax investigations to settle scores, as did Richard Nixon. But Trump is an order of magnitude more outrageous.
Powell will not go without a fight. “I will never, ever, ever leave this job voluntarily until my term ends under any circumstances,” he said during Trump 1.0.
Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, said the administration could sideline Powell by appointing a “shadow” Fed chairman, who could steer the markets by issuing forward guidance. But this does not overcome resistance from the Fed board and the hawkish regional presidents.
A secretive team of Trump loyalists drew up a 10-page report before the election proposing more radical measures. These include forcing the Fed to “align policy with administration goals” or even to make the president an “acting” member of the Fed board.
Trump could purge members of the seven-strong Fed board one by one until they get the message. The law states that the president can terminate the 14-year term of a Fed governor “for cause”, usually meaning malfeasance or neglect.
But Trump has just abused his tariff powers on an heroic scale by invoking fictitious “emergencies”. He could no doubt stretch the meaning of “for cause” to anything he wants. The Supreme Court has the last say, but Trump-appointed justices have already shown a strong leaning towards an imperial presidency.
In any case, there are other methods to bring the Fed to heel.
Maga vigilantes are intimidating American judges by having pizzas delivered to their homes – a mob tactic to say “we know where you live”. So we can assume that recalcitrant members of the Federal Open Market Committee will face this sort of treatment.
The major US banks are raising their inflation forecasts to 4pc or higher this year. This inflation will hit before the last three price shocks – Covid, the Putin commodity spike and Biden’s overspending – have faded from immediate memory. It is exactly how inflation psychology becomes embedded.
A variant happened in the 1970s. Nixon bullied the Fed into expansionary policies, with some choice language on “the myth of the autonomous Fed” that later surfaced in the Oval Office tapes.
Loose money stoked inflation, so Nixon ordered a freeze on prices and wages in 1971, declaring war on “gougers”. It was very popular. Illiterate policies often are.
If Trump succeeds in extracting rate cuts from the Fed and tax cuts from Congress, the same problem is going to arise. So my assumption is that he will blame the symptoms and will resort to price controls.
The elephantine difference is that US federal debt was 34pc of GDP in 1971. Today it is 122pc on the Fed measure, and galloping upwards. The fiscal deficit is over 6pc as far as the eye can see.
The US does not have the domestic savings to fund this debt appetite. The savings rate has collapsed to 0.6pc of national income. It was 12pc in the 1960s.
Foreign investors have been plugging the gap. This soaks up a large part of the world’s savings – the underlying cause of America’s trade deficit.
If you think the stock market gyrations of the last few days are terrifying, just wait until Trump destroys the credibility of the Fed and of US treasury debt, the anchor of the global system.
He could order a captive Fed to relaunch quantitative easing and buy the bonds, but to do that when inflation is running hot would be seen by the whole world as naked fiscal dominance. It would set off a price spiral and a collapse of the currency – the sort of outcome seen over the decades in Latin America, or Erdoğan’s Turkey.
The end destination is a return to US capital controls to stop foreign funds and US investors from taking their money out of America. A man willing to impose 116pc tariffs – including pre-existing ones – on Chinese goods and shut down the biggest bilateral trade relationship in the world as if it were a TV reality show will stop at nothing.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/04/08/trump-sell-off-is-bad-wait-until-wreck-us-bond-market/
What, $5 trillion in crypto? Ukraine?
Reported here:
Roughly $11.1 trillion has been wiped away from the U.S. stock market since Jan. 17, the Friday before President Donald Trump took the oath of office and began his second term, according to data from Dow Jones Market Data.
Some $6.6 trillion of that figure was lost on Thursday and Friday alone — the largest two-day wipeout of shareholder value on record, Dow Jones data showed. ...
Reported here:
... Spot gold was down 2.9% at $3,024.2 an ounce, after hitting a session low of $3,015.29 earlier in the session.
It hit a record high of $3,167.57 on Thursday. For the week, gold was down 1.9%.
U.S. gold futures settled 2.8% lower at $3,035.40.
On the technical front, spot gold price managed to hold above its 21-day moving average of $3,023. ...
