Gold prices eased on Thursday after a sharp rise in the previous session as investors booked profits ahead of a long weekend, although softer dollar and escalating U.S.-China trade tensions kept bullion above the $3,300 per ounce level.
Spot gold slipped 0.5% to $3,326.51 an ounce, after touching a record high of $3,357.40 earlier in the session. Bullion has gained nearly 3% this week. ...
More.
This guy is shaping up to be much worse than Donald Trump.
Vance must never become president.
... 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
On Monday Trump chose to ignore a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling to repatriate an illegally deported man.
As it happens Garcia seems like he was a pretty good father, contrary to what Kremlin Karoline says, but that is irrelevant to justice, which is supposed to be blind to such things.
Trump has trampled over the entire process which allowed Garcia to remain in the United States.
What will he trample next?
It shouldn't be this hard, or this costly, to pay taxes.
My TurboTax bill this year came to $278, and my time came to about nine hours collecting the data and preparing the return. It saved me oodles of more time than that, as well as the fear and the frustration, but still, it's a giant pain in the butt, and an annual expense which just seems to get larger every year.
Average American Spends 13 Hours and $290 to File Taxes
Meanwhile the income tax code is not proportional, which is to say it is not fair.
If the tax code were proportional, everyone would pay the same rate.
Instead it is progressive, which means you pay at higher rates the more you make, and some people pay nothing at all.
The rich are not equal to the poor . . . by law. And in between the rich and the poor are all those people who are arguably the least equal of all, because they don't ever get the privilege of paying nothing at all. Something close to one third of filers pay nothing, and they are mostly rich and poor, even though everyone who works does pay Social Security and Medicare taxes, which incidentally almost everyone pays equally because they pay at the same rate.
Shouldn't that be the case with income taxes, too?
Consider that grand total federal outlays in 2022 were $6.27 trillion, which includes the Social Security and Medicare programs in addition to all other federal spending, on defense, interest on the debt, etc.
That year gross national income came to $26.23 trillion.
The implied tax rate for almost everything is therefore 23.9%.
Collect that right off the top when you earn it or receive it and no one would need to go through the hassle of filing a return, and the budget would have balanced too. And individual income tax filers wouldn't have to spend $464 billion or whatever it is, using TurboTax or a CPA or some other tax preparer, or paper, pencil, and untold hours of time.
Instead we collected taxes in 2022 which were $1.37 trillion short of the $6.27 trillion in outlays, which we had to borrow and which got added to the national debt and increased the interest expense which we must cover out of current tax receipts.
Of course I would be upset if I had to pay 24% on all income as I earned it because I don't pay anywhere close to that. But that is the true cost of government, which is one reason why we don't pay that way. It's more prudent to hide the truth, and pit one group against another instead of treating people as we would wish to be treated. The rich are a small minority, which is why they can be bullied to pay more equally than others.
Another reason we don't pay the way I have described is because people would demand we spend a lot less if we did.
And we can't have that, now can we?
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.
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.
CNBC:
Spot gold was down 1.1% at $3,200.11 an ounce after hitting an all-time high of $3,245.42. U.S. gold futures fell 0.9% to $3,216.20.
The previous high was $3,245.28, just 14 cents lower than the new all-time high, which makes the new high kinda lame.
El Salvador President Nayib Bukele says he won’t return Abrego Garcia to U.S.
... [Trump] also said he wants Bukele to accept as many criminals as possible. ...
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.
People need to get a grip.
Blaming hapless Liz Truss' two-months as PM in September and October 2022 for the UK's high interest rates pretends that the Bank of England didn't raise interest rates in response to inflation same as the US Federal Reserve Bank.
This trashy headline belongs in The Daily Star, not the UK Telegraph. No wonder they're trying to sell you a 1-year subscription for only 29 pounds.
Trump exempts phones, computers, chips from new tariffs
President Donald Trump exempted smartphones, computers, and other tech devices and components from his reciprocal tariffs, new guidance from U.S. Customs and Border Protection shows.
The guidance, issued late Friday evening, comes after Trump earlier this month imposed 145% tariffs on products from China, a move that threatened to take a toll on tech giants like Apple, which makes iPhones and most of its other products in China.
The guidance also includes exclusions for other electronic devices and components, including semiconductors, solar cells, flat panel TV displays, flash drives, and memory cards. ...
Phony, baloney, plastic banana, good time rock 'n rolla.
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.
... Spot gold was up nearly 2% at $3,235.89 an ounce, after hitting a record high of $3,245.28 earlier in the session. Bullion is up over 6% this week. ...
“Gold is clearly seen as the favored safe-haven asset in a world
upended by Trump’s trade war. The U.S. dollar has depreciated, and U.S.
Treasuries are selling off hard, as faith in the U.S. as a reliable
trading partner has diminished,” said Nitesh Shah, commodities
strategist at WisdomTree. ...
More.
Sam's Club, when it has eggs in stock, is charging in the mid to high 4s per dozen.
... Spot gold jumped over 1.3% to $3,216.27 an ounce after hitting a record high of $3,219.84 earlier in the session. Bullion is up over 5% so far this week. U.S. gold futures climbed 1.7% to $3,230.60. ...
More.
Have there been no savings from the Department of Defense, the costliest department in the federal government? No $1,000 toilet seats to be found? No savings from sex change operation eliminations? How about the $7 billion in military equipment left behind in Afghanistan, stuff like that? Didn't we get booted from Niger last year? Anything left behind there? You get the idea, but we've heard nothing about Department of Defense waste, fraud, and abuse.
I mean, where did Army Surplus come from in the first place?
Oh, by the way, the Pentagon failed its seventh audit in a row in November 2024. It has $4 trillion in assets in every US state and 4,500 locations worldwide, but Elon Musk couldn't find one thing to eliminate?
Yeah, but they're on track to fire 300,000 federal workers.
Meanwhile the $150 billion in claimed savings to come, if they actually do get here, is already gone, swallowed up by the Giant Squid. The deficit year to date is already $242 billion higher than it was last year at this time.
DOGE has been nothing but theatre, and Elon's just taking a bow as his gig comes to an end at the close of May.
Has anything in recent memory failed more spectacularly than this?
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Thursday said the Trump administration must work to bring back a Maryland man who was mistakenly deported to prison in El Salvador, rejecting the administration’s emergency appeal.
The court acted in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran citizen who had an immigration court order preventing his deportation to his native country over fears he would face persecution from local gangs.
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis had ordered Abrego Garcia, now being held in a notorious Salvadoran prison, returned to the United States by midnight Monday.
“The order properly requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador,” the court said in an unsigned order with no noted dissents. ...
More.
Trump was asked by a reporter on Wednesday when he decided to put a pause on the tariffs.
... As of February 2025, 21.2% of adults 18+ in the U.S. have received a 2024–25 COVID-19 vaccine and 42.8% have received a 2024–25 flu vaccine. ...
More.
The fiscal year to date deficit last year was $1.064691 trillion.
The fiscal year to date deficit this year is $1.307132 trillion, $242.441 billion higher.
The monthly US Treasury statement may be found here.
US 30-year bond auction: 4.813% vs. 4.623% previously.
This follows the US 10-year note auction yesterday: 4.435% vs. 4.31% previously.
Gold hits record high as U.S.-China trade war intensifies, dollar weakens
Gold prices jumped nearly 3% to an all-time high on Thursday, as a drop in the dollar and an escalating trade war between the U.S. and China drove investors towards the safe-haven allure of the precious metal.
Spot gold climbed 2.5% to $3,158.28 an ounce, after hitting a record high of $3,171.49 earlier in the session. ...
Spartz and Massie, the lone Republican Nay votes, are not members of the House Freedom Caucus.
Now they all take two weeks off.
House Republicans on Thursday adopted the Senate’s framework that will be used to enact key parts of President Trump’s legislative agenda, getting the blueprint over the finish line after a last-minute scramble to win over conservatives who had spent days railing against the measure.
The largely party line 216-214 vote marks a big win for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who has pushed an aggressive timeline to advance Trump’s domestic policy priorities, and President Trump, who endorsed the legislation and lobbied those on the right flank to get on board.
Only two Republicans — Reps. Thomas Massie (Ky.) and Victoria Spartz (Ind.) — voted against the measure. ...
More.
... Food prices climbed 0.4% on the month. Egg prices rose another 5.9% and were up 60.4% from a year ago. Moreover, shelter prices, among the most stubborn components of inflation, increased just 0.2% in March and were up 4% on a 12-month basis, the smallest gain since November 2021. ...
More.
The expectation was for core at 3%.
James Carville must be laughing his ass off.
On March 6, at the start of the still-simmering trade war between the U.S. and Canada, hydropower generator Hydro‑Québec quietly stopped exporting electricity to New England. ...
Hydro‑Québec’s main transmission line into New England, known as the Phase II line, stopped exporting any meaningful amount of power two days after President Donald Trump’s tariff on Canadian imports went into effect. Last March, by comparison, anywhere from a few hundred megawatts to more than 1,200 MW flowed along the line at any given time, making up between 5% and 10% of the region’s electricity use on average, Turner estimated. ...
Last year, 5,560 gigawatt-hours of power traveled into the region over the Phase II line, less than half the amount exported in 2022. ...
More.
It went to Afghanistan and Iraq and never came back.
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%. ...
President Donald Trump on Wednesday dropped tariffs under his new trade plan to 10% on imports from most countries, as he announced a 90-day pause for stiffer, so-called reciprocal tariffs that took effect this week. ...
More.
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/
They are as stupid as they are insufferably arrogant.
 |
| US GDP as a share of world GDP has been in steady decline since 1960 to just 26% in 2023 |
The phenomenon is mirrored in the states by the enthusiasm for referenda, aka ballot measures, which are promoted as democracy but are in fact simply a reflection of elected representatives' desire to escape the consequences of their votes.
"Hey, don't look at me, that's what the people wanted".
7 GOP senators sign on to bill to check Trump’s trade authority
Seven Republican senators, including Sen. Chuck Grassley (Iowa), the Senate’s president pro tempore, and Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.), the former Senate Republican leader, have signed on to a bipartisan bill that would require Congress to approve President Trump’s steep tariffs on trading partners.
Grassley and McConnell have joined five other Republicans — Sens. Jerry Moran (Kan.),
Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Thom Tillis (N.C.), Todd Young (Ind.) and
Susan Collins (Maine) — in supporting the Trade Review Act of 2025. ...
It would require that new tariffs sunset after 60 days unless Congress passes a joint resolution approving them.
And it provides a pathway for Congress to cancel tariffs before the 60-day period expires by passing a joint resolution of disapproval.
Trump has already threatened to veto the bill. ...
Trump last week announced reciprocal tariffs on more than 180 countries and territories by invoking his authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
Yeah, that saying everything is an emergency business has got to go, too
Asking the people to make more sacrifices, to get even poorer through tariff-induced higher prices, all for the sake of The Party und Der Führer is really . . . rich.
Might as well go out with guns a-blazin'.
Musk is a free-trader who is not down for the tariff struggle.
