Average US Treasury yields aggregated monthly started to normalize in November as yields fell for bills but rose for bonds

Interpreted politically one could say yields for notes and bonds reversed their slide starting in October as Harris' lead evaporated at the end of September and bond markets started to bet on a Trump win, bringing with it higher deficits because of his proposed tariffs and tax cuts.

 

The whole point of stories like this is to make you think "crony capitalism" isn't a description of what's been going on and continues to go on right now

 

 Ken Griffin just hates tariffs, which funded the (necessarily very small) federal government until the 20th century.

Meanwhile he's afraid the 12,000 lobbyists which already populate Washington procuring handouts like the Chips Act's billions of dollars for businesses will be replaced with 12,000 other ones lobbying for something else, ROFLMAO.

 

 Citadel’s Ken Griffin says Trump’s tariffs could lead to crony capitalism

“I am gravely concerned that the rise of tariffs puts us on a slippery slope towards crony capitalism,” the billionaire investor said Thursday at the Economic Club of New York. ...

“Those same companies that enjoy that momentary sugar rush of having their competitors removed from the battlefield, soon become complacent, soon take for granted their newfound economic superiority, and frankly, they become less competitive on both the world stage and less competitive at meeting the needs of the American consumer,” Griffin said at the event. ...

“Now you’re going to find the halls of Washington really filled with the special interest groups and the lobbyists as people look for continued higher and higher tariffs to keep away foreign competition, and to protect inefficient American businesses have failed to meet the needs of the American consumer,” Griffin said.

 

Trump has learned nothing, floats wacko bird pie-in-the-sky elimination of income tax

The federal government now needs about $6 trillion in revenue annually for the budget, social security, and medicare.

Imports of goods and services last year were valued at $3.83 trillion. You'd have to tariff all that at 160% or so to come up with $6 trillion. When pigs fly.

Trump promised big cuts to spending and to the size of the government workforce in 2016. Never happened.

This won't either.

 

Remember when Joe Biden pledged to reverse Trump's senseless tariffs lol?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Biden Levies Sweeping Tariffs on China, Intensifying Trade Fight With Trump

Bloomberg economic model forecasts 25% tariffs between democratic and autocratic countries would roll back globalization to 1990s levels and leave the world 3.5% poorer

Arguably that would be a good thing for American workers, but Bloomberg doesn't care about that.

 

For three decades, a defining feature of the world economy has been its ability to churn out ever more goods at ever lower prices. The entry of more than a billion workers from China and the former Soviet bloc into the global labor market, coupled with falling trade barriers and hyper-efficient logistics, produced an age of abundance for many.But the last four years have brought an escalating series of disruptions. Tariffs multiplied during the US-China trade war. The pandemic brought lockdowns. And now, sanctions and export controls are upending the supply of commodities and goods.All of this risks leaving advanced economies facing a problem they thought they’d vanquished long ago: that of scarcity. Emerging nations could see more acute threats to energy and food security, like the ones already causing turmoil in countries from Sri Lanka to Peru. And everyone will have to grapple with higher prices.

More.

The story never mentions how those newly introduced extra billion plus workers reduced economic outcomes for the already established middle classes around the world, especially in America where the full time job of the 1990s became a thing of the past.

If I'm repeating myself, I don't care.

 

 

 

Joe Biden is loudly for tariff punishment of China for burning coal

He's a Democrat Trump.

This bad Greer take is like George W. Bush saying you're either with us or against us in his war on terror

Tariffs are especially called for against communists qua communists, but Trump would be just fine with free trade with the Chicoms as long as it were truly free. Trump has no there there.

Jeffrey Snider: The whole global economy is in trouble, and it isn't because of a few billion in US tariffs on Chinese goods

Rather it is because hundreds of billions of dollars worth of liquidity keep disappearing since the Great Financial Crisis.

Snowflake presidency: China threatens Hong Kong, Trump delays threatened tariffs until December minutes later

What's happened to Justin Amash is simple: He'll be off the political stage in 2021 so he has nothing left to lose

Democrats are about to redistrict him out of a job, he's isolated himself in his own party over five terms, Trump's tariffs threaten the family's Chinese tool business fortune, and his best friends are the likes of WaPo's Jennifer Rubin and union president Randi Weingarten. Might as well go all in against Trump and help deprive him of a win in Michigan while losing re-election to MI-03 or as the inglorious Libertarian Party candidate for president in 2020. It's what libertarians are best at and live to do: spoil elections. Or, just switch to the Democrat Party and go on living like Arlen Specter. Republicans could hasten things along by kicking him out of the party.

Tariff Man spooks markets, President Shapiro comes up short on the vision thing

Year of the paper tiger: One term president blinks on tariffs

US will hold off on raising China tariffs to 25% as Trump and Xi agree to a 90-day trade truce

China eating America's lunch for 25 years by following exactly the protectionist strategy free traders say will destroy US

Jeff Ferry here in USA Today says free traders can't explain China's success because their free trade ideology blinds them to how protectionism has made China great:

China has been eating America’s lunch for a quarter-century. And they’ve done it by following exactly the strategy that pundits and free traders now suggest will be destructive to the US economy. ... Unless Washington stands up to China now, the trajectory of the past 25 years points to a troubling, continued decline for America’s working families. And so, for those who suggest that tariffs are a mistake, they need merely look at China’s rise for an instructive rethink.

Chief economist at Merrill Lynch when it went bankrupt ignores the first 130 years of US history, aptly proffers a figure of mere myth

Turkey won't let Rev. Andrew Brunson go, Trump retaliates with tariffs as promised, Turkish lira plunges

Hooah President Trump!

The story is here.

Brunson had been imprisoned for a year and a half and is reportedly now under house arrest. The tyrannical government of Erdogan allegedly pressured his own parishioners to testify against him falsely under threats.

More here.

A country headed by the likes of Erdogan is not fit to be a NATO member country.

The Trump administration doesn't get it that the Chinese trade system is a strategic threat

And neither does the Politico story excerpted below. China faces an unpredictable foe in Trump and his tariff threats, but China is playing the long game of imperial expansion and domination and only seeks a path navigating through what it knows is the temporary and incoherent threat Trump represents. Trump does not bring a fundamental rethinking of China. Once he is gone the US trade stance will return, unfortunately, to the status quo ante, continuing the hollowing out of the West by enriching a few who sell these communist liars and thieves the rope they'll use to hang the rest of us.

From the story here:

The administration in May said it wanted China to commit to reducing the trade deficit by $200 billion by 2020. It also asked China to stop subsidizing high-tech sectors like robotics and alternative energy vehicles identified in its China’s strategic economic plan, cut tariffs on “all products in non-critical sectors” to levels at or below U.S. duties and assure that it would not challenge U.S. actions taken in intellectual property disputes.

Robert Lighthizer, Trump’s chief [trade] negotiator, said at the time that it wasn’t his goal to “change the Chinese system,” despite his long list of criticisms of that system.

JP Morgan: US tariffs on China to have only modest impact on US economy

From the story here:

Investment bank JPMorgan estimated in a report on Tuesday that Trump’s tariffs on China would have only modest effects on the broader U.S. economy. It based its analysis on a 12 percent average U.S. tariff on $450 billion of imports from China, estimating that this would add just 0.4 percentage points to U.S. consumer price inflation if the additional costs of the duties were passed on to consumers in their entirety.

Trump plays hardball with China, latest threatened tariffs impossible to match

Bloomberg reports here:

President urges levies on $100 billion more of Chinese goods . . . Were China to want to match Trump’s latest threat, it wouldn’t have enough American goods imports to target. It could take other measures like curbing package tours or student transfers to the U.S., or hamper American companies operating in China.

Robert Shiller: Great Depression tariffs did not plausibly, directly affect economic growth in a major degree

Everywhere we turn we hear the opposite. It's standard operating procedure to blame protectionism for the Great Depression. Shiller knows it can't be demonstrated from the data. Hence the psychological argument. 

Quoted here:

Shiller said he did not believe there would be a significant inflationary effect to the U.S. from steel and aluminum tariffs, but he warned that heated trade rhetoric from both sides could send the American economy reeling into a recession.

"When you ask about the size of the impact on the economy, I think a lot of it is more psychological than direct, unless they really slam on tariffs," he said. The Yale economist pointed to the "most famous tariff war of all" during the Great Depression, which he said did not "plausibly, directly" affect economic growth "in a major degree," but it may have helped "destroy confidence" and willingness to plan for the future.

"It's exactly those 'wait and see' attitudes that cause a recession," he explained.

Asian stock indices cratered overnight in the wake of Trump's imposition of tariffs on China