The funniest thing that's happening to Donald Trump right now is that while he tries to intimidate the Fed to reduce interest rates and they do nothing, yields are soaring all by themselves

 The bond market is issuing a vote of no confidence in our elected leadership.

One branch of Republican government thinks this is the 19th century with a robust manufacturing base it needs to protect with crazy wild tariffs, and another branch of Republican government thinks it's just fine to go on spending like drunken sailors and not raise taxes to pay for any of it.

Interest payments alone on the national debt in fiscal year 2024 soared to $1.1 trillion against revenues of $4.9 trillion.

Meanwhile the most powerful military in the world can't stop a bunch of rag-headed heathen bastards from launching missiles at Israel.

These people are crackerdog.

US Treasury yields are now up a net 2.37% across the curve since last Friday.

 

Long duration is very unhappy: 10Y at 4.53 at the close yesterday, 20Y at 5.00, 30Y at 4.97.

 

VUSTX ytd total return: -0.53%.

 

 

No DOGE savings show up in April US Treasury Statement of Receipts and Outlays of the Federal Government, but higher deficits sure do, $194 billion higher year to date than last year

Fiscal 2025 deficit, October-April: $1.049 trillion

Fiscal 2024 deficit, October-April: $0.855 trillion

Increase in the deficit in 2025 Oct-Apr: $194 billion 

 

Meanwhile CNBC blows smoke up your ass:

Tariff receipts topped $16 billion in April, a record that helped cut the budget deficit

 

 

Trump's phony Liberation Day for working Americans evaporates into thin air, new 90-day pause brings 145% reciprocal tariffs on China, which tanked markets in early April, down to 30%

Stock futures surge. Crude oil surges. US Treasury yields surge.

U.S. and China agree to slash tariffs for 90 days in major trade breakthrough

 

... The trade agreement means that “reciprocal” tariffs between both countries will be cut from 125% to 10%. The U.S.′ 20% duties on Chinese imports relating to fentanyl will remain in place, meaning total tariffs on China stand at 30%. ...

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. ...

Only Trump can do it

 hehe

No One Person Can Pull Dems Out of the Ditch

Michael Goodwin, New York Post

 

... Although there’s obvious appeal to finding a star headliner, no one person can pull the Dems out of the ditch. ...

 

  

 

Trade tariff manipulation is a stock-trading racket for them

Tariffs were enacted April 2, then suspended April 9.

 

One month ago:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Yesterday:

 

This morning.

Trump's tariffs will bankrupt thousands of American businesses and millions will be unemployed as a result

 So says Ryan Petersen, founder and CEO of Flexport, in The Wall Street Journal, here:

... If the tariffs on Chinese goods continue at this rate, he says, thousands of American companies will fail and millions of employees will lose their jobs. ...

When the pandemic clogged up supply chains, he rented a boat so he could tour the Port of Long Beach, Calif., and see the bottlenecks for himself.

When he’s not cruising around ports for information, he’s getting it directly from his company’s 13,000 customers. They are companies that sell electronics, furniture, clothing, toys, diapers, pet feeders—basically everything. He makes it a priority to talk with as many of them as he possibly can. ...

This past week, he traveled from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., where he spent two days meeting with government officials to make the case that tariffs pose an existential threat to his customers. ...

Resolution by Senators Ron Wyden and Rand Paul to scrap Trump's craziest tariffs fails 49-49

 Senate resolution to scrap Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs fails despite some GOP support 

A Senate vote to scrap President Trump’s wide-ranging “Liberation Day” tariffs narrowly failed on Wednesday, sparing Republicans a second consecutive blow as the president’s trade policy continues to face opposition. 

Three Republicans — Sens. Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Rand Paul (Ky.) — voted in favor of the resolution alongside every present Senate Democrat. 

But Democrats ran into attendance problems. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) was absent, along with Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who had voted in favor of a similar bill reversing tariffs on Canada earlier this month.

The final tally was 49-49.

McConnell and Whitehouse had both missed the two votes earlier in the day. One Senate GOP member told The Hill that McConnell was sick and unable to vote. ...

Ding dong Howard Lutnick says we're going to be training all those new factory workers how to spy lol

And Elon Musk wanted this guy to be Treasury Secretary instead of Bessent, which is even funnier.

 

 

This number seems wei tu lo

 

IMF Warns Trump Could Cost the World a Trillion Dollars

The Guardian

 

Is that all?

 

World GDP in 2023 was $106.2 trillion according to the World Bank, whose graph shows that the 2009 Great Recession contraction was $3.34 trillion. The Grauniad is worried that the Trump trade war will cost a third of the 2009 contraction, based on an analysis by the IMF, "the most sober of global institutions" lol.

 

Meanwhile there was a 2015 contraction in global GDP which was much larger, $4.55 trillion. That was much worse than the so-called Great Recession. And much worse than the global impact of COVID in 2020, which was $2.39 trillion according to the World Bank's data.

 

Why isn't this popularly discussed?

 

AI laughably tells me "global GDP did not actually contract in 2015".

 

 

 

 

 

But the World Bank itself traces the 2015 global GDP hit to a massive contraction in trade, at the heart of which was the forced restructuring of the Chinese economy under Xi Jinping, who is a communist reactionary.

 

The sizes of the tariffs of Donald Trump, which far exceed those of the Smoot-Hawley era, especially with trade hegemon China, seem uniquely poised to wreak havoc on a world whose experts today can't draw the obvious parallel to the right year.

Chicoms tell Trump to go pound sand

 China says no ongoing trade talks with the U.S., calls for canceling ‘unilateral’ tariffs

"At present there are absolutely no negotiations on the economy and trade between China and the U.S.,” said Ministry of Commerce Spokesperson He Yadong. ... "If the U.S. really wants to resolve the problem ... it should cancel all the unilateral measures on China,” He said.

Pyrex glass plant in Charleroi PA closes after 132 years because of Chinese imports, Trump powerless to stop it

The casualties of America’s loss of glassware manufacturing to China

... Anchor Hocking took over the Charleroi plant in March of 2024 and announced they would close it and move operations to their plant in Lancaster, Ohio — it too was a company founded at the turn of the century by Isaac Jacob in Lancaster, Ohio. ...

 ... the U.S. glass industry lost almost 40,000 manufacturing jobs between 2000 to 2008. At the same time, China’s share of the U.S. market rose from 3% to 31%.

As U.S. glass and glassware plants closed, Chinese manufacturers expanded. China now leads glass production globally, exporting 28.7% of the world’s glass and glassware compared to the United States’ 6.6%.

That is a hard pill to swallow if you are from Charleroi, once known as the “Glass City” where PPG once had one of its major glass factories. ...

More.

Trump's tariffs mean that the skies will be empty, along with the shelves

 Boeing hopes to find new buyers for up to 50 planes returned by China

... Two Boeing jets have returned to the US from China, with another on the way, after the imposition of steep 125% tariffs on American imports. China imposed the levies in retaliation to the White House’s 145% rate that threatens to significantly slow down the world economy. ...

Blank Sailings Rattle Trans-Pacific Trade as China Imports Nosedive

... Container shipping companies have blanked at least 80 sailings this month, compared to 51 in March 2020, when volumes crashed amid early Covid-19 lockdowns, Sea-Intelligence said. ...

The US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent is under fire for market manipulation because he made closed-door comments yesterday morning to big shots gathered for IMF and World Bank meetings

 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.

High unemployment, high inflation, and high interest rates 6% or higher all at the same time plagued the country for six years 1975-1982, but we survived

 There were six years when all three, the unemployment rate, headline inflation, and 10-year US Treasury yield, were at 6% or higher on an average basis at the same time:

1975: 8.5%  9.14%  7.99%

1977: 7.1%  6.46%  7.42%

1978: 6.1%  7.62%  8.41%

1980: 7.2%  13.5%  11.43%

1981: 7.6%  10.37%  13.92%

1982: 9.7%  6.15%  13.01%.

 

In March 2025 unemployment was 4.2%, headline inflation was 2.4%, and the 10Y yielded 4.28%.

The current data set is no compelling case for reducing interest rates.  If Trump had confidence in his tariff regime, he wouldn't be clamoring for further reductions.

 

LOL Trump tariff revenue, about $7 billion a month, is averaging what came in under Joe Biden in 2024, which was $7.2 billion per month

 

... The agency said in a statement to CNBC, “Since April 5, CBP has collected over $500 million under the new reciprocal tariffs, contributing to more than $21 billion in total tariff revenue from 15 presidential trade actions implemented since Jan 20, 2025.” ...

Trump has repeatedly said the United States is taking in $2 billion per day from tariffs. ...

-- CNBC

 

In the age of everything that is good is awesome, everything bad must be an emergency

 The Zeitgeist is epitomized by a general hysteria, incapable of proportional thinking and hostile to reason, and so it should come as no surprise that our new leadership is exploiting that for its own ends, mostly to distract you while they make money hand over fist.

Everything is awesome. Everyone is great.

But everything is also a disaster, and the worst ever.

COVID was going to kill us all. The vaccines were going to save us all.

Biden was going to cure cancer. RFK Jr is going to solve the mystery of autism by September.

All those people streaming across the border during the Biden administration were seeking asylum. Now under Trump they were an invading enemy army.

The recession of 2008 had to be The Great Recession, or The Great Financial Crisis, as if 10.7% unemployment in 4Q1982 was the golden age of Ronald Reagan, and over 3,000 savings and loans didn't go belly up during that decade and part of the next.

Heat waves and cold waves are unprecedented, unless you talk to an old person. We have 12 years left before global warming kills us all.

Putin is going to launch a thermonuclear WWIII, same as Saddam Hussein.

So of course trade deficits are suddenly an emergency.

U.S. businesses sue to block Trump tariffs, say trade deficits are not an emergency

 

Citigroup profits rise 21%, stock trading revenue rises 23%

 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 overall profits up 11%, stock trading revenue up 17%

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.

Morgan Stanley: But we'll be there for ya!

Morgan Stanley: Expect to be ‘fooled many more times’ on tariffs

Trump tariff chaos is literally equity traders' gold

 

 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.