CNBC here.
Monday, February 24, 2025
In the aggregate US Treasury yields haven't moved much since the end of November, after which duration began to normalize, but looky here
On Nov 29, 2024 the yield curve averaged 4.356 in the aggregate, after which we began to see duration normalize.
On Feb 21, 2025 it averages 4.357.
Now, however, there are seven securities in the Bills category, not just six, with Treasury rolling out the new 1.5-month (6-week) security as part of debt-ceiling-forced "extraordinary measures". There are five in the Notes, and two in the Bonds.
Duration normalization has now partly reversed because of the extraordinary measures, at least on a weekly basis, with yields for Notes once again falling below those for Bills on average on Friday.
If you count just the traditional 1MO, 3MO, 6MO, and 1Y among the Bills, the Bills yield average is nearly identical to Notes at 4.2825.
These falling yields may be both signaling and spurring increased purchasing of UST, including among the Notes to lock in an anticipated disappearance of opportunity as Bills issuance surges to fund the Treasury General Account. The increased issuance of Bills means yields fall across the curve, at least temporarily, as investors lock in.
The special 6-week security rolled out at 4.41 on 2/18 and was paying 4.39 on Friday vs. only 4.15 for the 1Y and 4.42 for the 10Y, the latter's lowest yield all month. Falling yields for the 10Y is a specific goal of the Treasury under Trump. Evidently the temporary 6-week Bill is helping them achieve that . . . for now.
Reported Feb 5 and Feb 6:
Bessent's focus on 10-year US Treasury yield may let Fed off the hook
..."The president wants lower interest rates and ... in my talks with him, he and I are focused on the 10-year Treasury," Bessent said. "He is not calling on the Fed to lower rates. He believes that if we ... deregulate the economy, if we get this tax bill done, if we get energy down, then rates will take care of themselves and the dollar will take care of itself." ...
10-year Treasury yield drops as traders digest news on issuance, fresh data
... The [Treasury] department also said it will be issuing more short-term bills than usual as it uses “extraordinary measures” to keep the government operating while Congress battles over the debt limit. That announcement came despite new Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent previously criticizing his predecessor, Janet Yellen, for issuing unusually large amounts of shorter-term debt. ...
Nutball worlds in collision: Trumpism defends freedom in Europe with its right hand, stabs it in the back in Ukraine with its left, Biden defended freedom in Ukraine with his right, attacked it in America with his left
But The Federalist has its blinders on. Biden baaaaaaad! Trump gooooood!
"Let's see if we can find some naive kid to write a story about it!"
By Defending Free Speech Worldwide, Team Trump Reclaims America’s Global Moral High Ground:
Under President Donald Trump, the suppression of natural rights by Western powers will no longer be ignored by the United States.
Yep, J. D. Vance goes to Europe to beat up on our friends. But suppression of freedom will be ignored, in places like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and China. And above all in Ukraine.
This is the essence of libertarianism: Make the good the enemy of the perfect.
But defending freedom where it really counts would take some courage, and they don't have it.
The author of this article, who graduated from college in 2022 with a BA in political "science", ends it touting the execrable Darren Beattie at Marco Rubio's State Department, a Taiwan surrender monkey.
The article is the second in the queue at Real Clear Politics this morning. One goes there looking for some serious editorial judgment and gets this.
Trump/Vance don't have the moral high ground. They are just the cowardly other side of the same old hypocritical American coin.
Trump appoints another election loser
Ex-Secret Service agent and conservative media personality Dan Bongino picked as FBI deputy director
... Bongino ran for a U.S. Senate seat in Maryland in 2012 and for congressional seats in 2014 and 2016 in Maryland and Florida, after moving in 2015. He lost the three races. ...
Sunday, February 23, 2025
Ironically enough, Kash Patel at FBI might, might turn out to be resistance
FBI Nominee Kash Patel Warned Elon Musk Is Becoming "One Ginormous Trust"
Kash Patel ripped into Elon Musk in unearthed podcast episodes
... “So, what scares me is, like,” Patel continued, “you wanna talk about a monopoly? It is the ultimate monopoly. Is he going to execute the businesses and allow others to compete? On free speech platforms, that is? Is he just going to buy everything up, and then become one ginormous trust—for lack of a better word, a monopoly—which is supposedly illegal under antitrust laws?” MAGA stalwarts such as Vice President J.D. Vance have been vehemently against monopolistic behavior and Trump even ran on a quasi-anti-trust platform. ...
“What's he going to do with all the data? That's my concern,” Patel said. “The data collection — he's got a global wifi satellite system, in space, for the world: Starlink. He has Tesla, he has, as I said, the SpaceX program, and now he'll have Twitter.” ...
“Do you allow the CCP to have backdoors? Like other companies, like TikTok, has done in the past, and sell Americans’ data? Or provide Americans data directly to the CCP for future use against American and American interests? Those are questions that people should be asking, I think, rather than fixating on the ups or downs of Elon buying Twitter,” Patel said. ...
In one post from July 2023, Patel accused Musk of being “big tech colluding with our government to censor our elections,” adding: “Your cheap Titter [sic] posts and your Mickey Mouse clown droppings do not absolve you,” as first reported by The Daily Beast. “You are as bad as FBI/DOJ n you and are making millions from the disinformation campaigns. You are a complete and total fake who cares only about $.” ...
Kash Patel Tells FBI Staff To Ignore Elon Musk's Demand: Report
The new Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Kash Patel has reportedly told the agency's staff to ignore Elon Musk's request to justify their work or lose their jobs.
"For now, please pause any responses," reads a message sent by Patel on Saturday to all FBI personnel, calling for employees to wait for a coordinated response from the bureau. ...
Now the Trump administration is imitating the most odious revolutionary rhetoric of the Obama administration
We are fundamentally transforming our country for the better, truly restoring our government, the 27-year old know-nothing says, when they're actually gutting it.
These people all think they're so smart.
They think they're cutting something down to size which is already on its knees. Federal employment today has hardly been lower as a percentage of civilian population in the post-war. The low point was achieved already in 2018. The Leviathan State is a complete myth.
If Trump truly restored our government, he'd be hiring dramatically, not firing.
For all of Trump’s and Musk’s talk of efficiency, their policies will likely slow down the government. The state needs capacity to perform core tasks, such as collecting revenue, taking care of veterans, tracking weather, and ensuring that travel, medicine, food, and workplaces are safe. But Trump seems intent on pushing more employees to leave and making the civil service more political and an even less inviting job option. He bullies federal employees, labeling them as “crooked” and likening their removal to “getting rid of all the cancer.” A smaller, terrified, and politicized public workforce will not be an effective one.
To start, let’s dispense with the notion that the government is too big. It is not. As a share of the workforce, federal employment has declined in the past several decades. Civilian employees represent about 1.5 percent of the population and account for less than 7 percent of total government spending. According to the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, seven out of 10 civilian employees work in organizations that deal with national security, including departments—such as Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security—that the public supports.
The reality is that the federal government has long faced a human-capital crisis. ...
More.
The country is $36 trillion in debt because it is not taxing enough, and hasn't been taxing enough since Ronald Reagan. We pretend we can borrow to infinity for what we want, but we can't afford it all anymore. That is why they're surrendering to Putin, and taking a meat cleaver to DC.
This is not a serious country, otherwise a South African wouldn't be running it.
In his Feb 21 debate with the conservative historian Niall Ferguson, J. D. Vance said Trump was trying to achieve a lasting piece of Ukraine lol
A very unfortunate but accurate Freudian slip.
And the idea that "we're not going to telegraph our negotiating posture" is just laughable on its face. The administration has publicly said Ukraine won't get any land back and will not become part of NATO, both of which are concessions before negotiations have even begun.
These people are a joke, a very bad joke.
Saturday, February 22, 2025
The Putin-Trump Piece Plan demonstrates that neither Russia nor America has any respect whatsover for Ukraine's property
Left is, finally and above all, lack of respect for property.
-- Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision, 1934
A purported descendant of Patrick Henry and James Madison blasted The Tyrant Trump in GA-7 townhall represented by Rich McCormick
Trump’s first weeks in office have been characterized by a string of successful Cabinet nominations and a relentless testing of executive power and governing norms. Many critics saw Trump’s social media declaration “Long live the King!’ as emblematic of that approach.
That was certainly the case when Rep. Rich McCormick (R-GA) — who endorsed Trump in 2024 after first supporting Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) — faced constituents at a town hall meeting in Roswell, Georgia on Thursday.
A woman named Virginia Lim prefaced her scathing question to McCormick by referencing her familial connection to the Founding Fathers — then laid into Trump:
VICTORIA LIM: Thank you so much, Congressman, for taking my question. I do so appreciate it.
I’m a direct descendant of Susanna Henry Madison, one of Patrick Henry’s younger sisters and a cousin by marriage of James Madison.
Do you know who Patrick Henry was? And James Madison, sir? (NODS)
I’m so glad to hear that. While arguing the need for the American Revolution, Patrick Henry said “A king is a tyrant. If a wrong step is made now, the Republic will be lost forever and tyranny will rise.”.
I believe you know the rest of his speech. Something about “give me liberty.”.
It’s clear from all the writings of our Founding Fathers that our great Republic was never meant to be ruled by a dictator, nor a king.
(CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)
So. So you can imagine my shock and pure horror when I woke up to find that our president had given himself unprecedented executive powers, and then, within a few days, named himself King to his followers. (APPLAUSE).
Tyranny. Tyranny—!
MODERATOR: Virginia. Do you have a question for the congressman?
VICTORIA LIM: I do, I do. Thank you. Tyranny is rising in the white House, and a man has declared himself our king. So I would like to know. Rather the people would like to know what you, congressman, and your fellow congressman are going to do to rein in the megalomaniac in the White House.
(CROWD STANDS AND CHEERS).
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you!
REP. RICH MCCORMICK: Thank you. I’m not going to give you my best Foghorn Leghorn response to that. But what I was — so you can go ahead and sit down — thank you.
The — when you talk about tyranny, when you talk about presidential power, I remember having the same discussion with Republicans when Biden was elected.
(JEERING).
The funny thing is, the funny thing is —
(JEERING CONTINUES).
The funny thing is, you’re sitting here in your body, you would probably say those January 6ers who were yelling just as loud as you, who were upset just like you, and not listen —
(INDISTINCT SHOUTING)
MODERATOR: Hey, hey, hey, let’s restore some order! Let’s restore some order! Hey hey hey, let’s restore some order!
REP. RICH MCCORMICK: So yelling, yelling at me is not going to get any answer, okay? Hey, like I said, like I said, we’re not going to give order right now.
MODERATOR: Let’s get through this. Congressman.
AUDIENCE: Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame!
REP. RICH MCCORMICK: I’ve seen Game of Thrones, too. Thank you.
Eventually, McCormick cited the so-called REINS Act, claiming it “reins in executive power” — but the bill actually has to do with rule-making at federal agencies.
Friday, February 21, 2025
This is wild: This morning we learned Judge Ali again ruled that all foreign aid must be distributed, tonight Judge Nichols says it's OK for Trump to fire all the employees at USAID who do that
That doesn't make any sense!
Judge gives go ahead for Trump administration to gut USAID’s workforce
A federal judge Friday paved the way for the Trump administration to move forward with plans to remove thousands of U.S. Agency for International Development workers from their jobs.
U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols denied a request from labor groups to issue a preliminary injunction after the Trump administration said thousands of USAID employees would be placed on administrative leave and ordered agency personnel abroad to return to the U.S. within 30 days. ...
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: To watch our ally of 80 years, the USA, turn on us with ferocity and blithely team up with our declared enemy really is the end of days
Trump’s embrace of Putin is a Molotov-Ribbentrop crisis for Europe:
The new regime in Washington is testing pro-American sympathies to breaking point
We are at that moment in Animal Farm when the gentle carthorse Clover looks through the window to see the pigs playing cards and drinking a toast with men.
The pigs are all perfectly at ease and sitting back in chairs around a table, no doubt a rougher surface than the luxurious polished table used to host America’s Marco Rubio and Russia’s Sergei Lavrov in Saudi Arabia this week. The Russian press reports that the meeting was a love-fest of jokes and bonhomie, with a “very tasty lunch”.
George Orwell’s scene was an allegory of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, when Europe’s great power alignment suddenly and violently shifted. The liberal democracies woke up on Aug 23 1939 to discover that the Soviet Union had reached a non-aggression deal with Nazi Germany. Days later, Hitler and Stalin carved up Eastern Europe between them. The Nazis could then turn their concentrated fury on France and Britain without having to worry about a second front.
Britain had started to re-arm as early as 1935. Neville Chamberlain hurled money at the Royal Air Force in the late 1930s, with Spitfire squadrons arriving just in time. Defence spending had risen to 9pc of GDP by 1939.
This time, Europe’s democracies have indulged the same pacifist illusions as they did in the run up to 1939 but have milked the peace dividend even longer. Military spending by EU states was 1.9pc of GDP in 2024, a full 17 years after Vladimir Putin declared political war on liberal civilisation and all its works at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 – “a good speech” said one Angela Merkel, audibly, in the front row.
He then set about restoring the tsarist empire to the borders of Catherine the Great with an unswerving consistency. Austria is not even part of Nato and behaves accordingly.
Some are rising to the challenge. Denmark has given its stock of munitions to Ukraine and even the trade unions back a war tax to raise defence spending to 4pc of GDP. “We are in a very, very critical period in world history,” said Lars Løkke Rasmussen, the Danish foreign minister.
Poland’s military budget is already up to 4.7pc. “We’re that afraid,” said his Polish counterpart Radosław Sikorski at last week’s Munich forum.
Lithuania aims for 5pc to 6pc of GDP by next year, alarmed by intelligence warnings that Putin may seize the Suwalki Gap, which runs through its territory from Belarus to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.
They all know that Putin has a narrow window of time to attack if the Ukraine war is quickly settled on Russian terms. His advantage is temporary: a greatly enlarged army heading for 1.5m by 2026 and an industrial war economy firing on all cylinders but untenable for much longer.
Fears are growing that Donald Trump will order the US military to pull its Nato tripwire forces out of the Baltics in order to seal the “deal of the century” with the Kremlin. Will he swallow the bait as the smooth McKinsey-trained head of Russia’s investment fund, Kirill Dmitriev, dangles the offer of hydrocarbon riches – real or imagined – in Russian Arctic waters?
The issue runs deeper in any case. Maga America has a greater natural affinity for Putin’s Right-wing cultural Weltanschauung than it does for the liberal democracies. After the battering of the last two weeks, some of us are forced to conclude that Britain and Europe are now the real enemies for this new Washington and, furthermore, that the US is anything but isolationist under Donald Trump.
He will not let us carry on being different. He will force-feed us his Maga ideology. His oil-fracking energy secretary was in London this week describing our renewables as “sinister”. Will we face sanctions for trying to do something about CO2 emissions? Perhaps, yes. Particularly for that.
I do not wish to dissect every post by Trump on Truth Social, or dwell on the speech by JD Vance. I think Britain should repeal all its hate legislation and stop misusing police resources on thought crimes. It should stop dividing us into categories and return to colour-blind liberalism. But one can agree with elements of Vance’s anti-woke critique while entirely rejecting the larger message behind it.
We are told repeatedly by Trump’s circle that he does not really mean what he says, or that we should not overreact to what he is very clearly doing. Let us hope they are right, but it is becoming harder by the day to have confidence in such assurances, or to believe that either Republicans or plutocrats will lift a finger to stop him – and I say this as a defender of Pax Americana for half a century.
Sir Keir Starmer is right to stay calm and try to defuse this terrifying inter-allied crisis on his visit to the White House. But we of The Telegraph parish, readers and writers alike, will all have to look into our souls if, as now seems painfully plausible, Britain is singled out for tariff warfare along with Europe on the pretext of our VAT taxes.
Worse yet if Trump does this while reaching a cosy commodity deal with Putin along with a grand bargain with Xi Jinping to protect Elon Musk’s interests in China. That would test one’s pro-American sympathies to breaking point.
Europe shares much of the blame for the disintegration of the Western alliance system. It failed to re-arm after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. Germany rewarded Putin months later by launching the Nord Stream 2 project, which had no purpose other than depriving Kyiv of strategic leverage by re-routing Siberian gas through Baltic pipelines. In return, Germany enjoyed a sweetheart gas deal at sub-market prices.
Britain could have rebuilt its military hardware at ultra-low borrowing costs during the secular stagnation of the 2010s, when it had ample spare capacity. It could have rebuilt its decaying infrastructure and revived its economy at the same time. The multiplier effect would have let us do these things without pushing the debt ratio any faster. Britain pursued austerity instead. Now it faces a greater task, in a hostile bond market.
Europe was even more destructive. Germany cut public investment and military spending to the bone for 15 years. It relied on mercantilist export surpluses of 8pc of GDP to drive growth, a policy that has left Germany in the cross-hairs of Trump’s trade warriors.
The eurozone debt crisis – self-inflicted because the European Central Bank did not then have political approval to back-stop debts – turned into a wider depression because Brussels over-egged austerity and used bailouts to impose drastic spending cuts. There was no exemption for military spending.
Defence as a share of GDP in 2015 was Hungary 0.5pc, Belgium 0.8pc, Germany 1.0pc, Spain 1.0pc, Italy 1.2pc, France 1.8pc –and that was after Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Military budgets crept up slowly thereafter but not enough to prevent further disarmament.
Europe thought it could keep free-riding on Uncle Sucker forever, despite warnings that this would end badly. There was much talk along the way of a European army and endless euro-speak meetings about procedures, modalities and the architecture of EU defence, but never anything real. That is why Europe today finds itself utterly naked.
But nobody expected it to end this badly and this suddenly. To watch an ally of 80 years turn on us with ferocity and blithely team up with our declared enemy really is the end of days.
Mad King Ludwig to say Russia not the aggressor, Putin not a war criminal, and leave the 40-nation coalition forming the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine
My country is dead to me.
Trump to abandon Russia war crimes prosecution:
Washington signals end to pursuit of Putin as third anniversary of Ukraine invasion looms
The US has signalled that it could leave an international effort to prosecute Russia for invading Ukraine, The Telegraph can reveal.
US envoys refused to label Russia as an “aggressor” at a meeting of a “core group” of countries preparing a Nuremberg-style tribunal to try Vladimir Putin for his war crimes, according to Western officials.
Washington is similarly refusing to co-sponsor a United Nations statement that supports Ukraine’s territorial integrity and demands Moscow to withdraw its forces from the war-torn nation.
Mr Trump’s administration has also refused to sign off a planned G7 statement calling Russia the “aggressor” in the war with Ukraine to mark the third anniversary of the conflict on Monday.
The US president has blamed Ukraine for starting the war, branded Volodymyr Zelensky a “dictator” and pushed for Russia to be invited back to the alliance of industrialised nations.
European officials fear Mr Trump’s flattery of Putin could lead to the Russian despot being let off the hook for his invasion as part of any peace settlement.
This stance has put preparations for the final meeting of the “core group” next month in doubt. The group is leading a 40-nation coalition to form a Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine, modelled on the response to Nazi war crimes after the Second World War.
It would involve the US and other countries joining Ukraine to grant jurisdiction to a dedicated criminal tribunal to investigate both the perpetrators of the crime of aggression and those complicit in that crime.
The crime of aggression cannot be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
“Unless they acknowledge it’s an aggression, they can’t participate,” an official said of US opposition to the labelling of Russia as an aggressor.
Losing Washington’s backing for the tribunal will be a major blow to the project’s international reputation and standing.
“This is quite a drastic shift,” a European diplomat told The Telegraph. “Rewriting history and pretending that Russia wasn’t the one who started this war is something that we simply cannot and will not agree to.”
The US has not yet officially withdrawn from the scheme and is expected to attend its next meeting next month in Strasbourg, France.
A diplomatic note seen by The Telegraph revealed that European officials were “shocked” at US claims at a series of international meetings that Russia should be invited back into the “civilised world”.
European capitals are now holding talks over a possible collapse of the special tribunal if the US does walk away as feared.
The latest US position marks a significant shift in policy between Joe Biden and Mr Trump.
The former president had branded Putin a “war criminal” and signed off a series of international statements that described Russia as the aggressor state.
Washington is now pushing for the almost three-year war to be called the “Ukraine conflict” in discussions with international allies.
A State Department readout of the meeting between Marco Rubio, the US state secretary, and Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, twice described the war as “the conflict in Ukraine”.
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