‘A Complete Embarrassment’: Critics Skewer Trump For Declaring ‘Russia Wants To See Ukraine Succeed’
Zelensky smirks as Trump says ‘Russia wants Ukraine to succeed’
Monday, December 29, 2025
Gold and silver retreat from new record high prices at $4,549.71 and $83.62
... Spot gold declined 1.4% at $4,470.56 per ounce, after hitting a record high of $4,549.71 on Friday. ...
Spot silver shed 4.8% at $75.32 per ounce, retreating from an all-time high of $83.62 hit earlier in the session. ...
Spot platinum fell 6% to $2,305.15 per ounce, after rising to an all-time high of $2,478.50 earlier in the day, while palladium plunged 13.2% to $1,669.11 per ounce. ...
More.
Sunday, December 28, 2025
One silver observer found someone projecting silver going as high as $1,400 lol
$1,400 silver seems absolutely ludicrous to me, but maybe not $300 silver.
The Coinage Act of 1792 fixed the ratio of silver to gold at 15:1. Gold then was $19.39 and silver was $1.29.
The Coinage Act of 1873 effectively ended this bimetallism in the United States in favor of gold but was not widely understood to have done so until after the fact. By 1913 silver averaged about only sixty cents, for various reasons, and the silver to gold ratio went to about 34:1.
Gold at $4,533 on Friday implies silver at $302 at the 15:1 ratio, but silver is actually only about $80. Divided by 34, however, the implied silver price is about $133. The ratio at about $80 is 57:1.
The main driver of the silver price in our time is industrial, but the ratio is instructive for contextualizing, as the kids say, its relative value.
Saturday, December 27, 2025
Three in four Americans say groceries are so expensive they’ve been forced to cut down on entertainment, travel, clothing, and food and drink away from home
Reported here.
So, what do those of us cut, who long ago completely cut out entertainment, travel, food and drink away from home, and mend the clothes we cannot replace?
Drink period, for starters:
THE alcohol industry has faced financial hardship in 2025, leading to several distilleries filing for bankruptcy as Americans are drinking at the lowest levels in history. ... An August poll conducted by Gallup found that 54% of adults say they consume alcohol, which was down from 58% in 2024 and 62% in 2023. Gallup said the 54% finding is “the lowest by one percentage point in Gallup’s nearly 90-year trend.” ... Gallup found that 53% of Americans said having one or two drinks a day is bad for one’s health, while 37% say it makes no difference and 6% say it’s good for one’s health. ...
More.
Bankruptcies in 2025 surge to a level not seen since 2010
Corporate bankruptcies surged in 2025, rivaling levels not seen since the immediate aftermath of the Great Recession, as import-dependent businesses absorbed the highest tariffs in decades.
At least 717 companies filed for bankruptcy through November, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence. That’s roughly 14 percent more than the same 11 months of 2024, and the highest tally since 2010. ...
More.
Trump likes to trumpet the billion$ he's collecting in tariffs, but there is no single report which calculates the hundreds of billion$ these bankruptcies must cost the economy over time.
Friday, December 26, 2025
Liberal democracy must solve the problems of Gen Z globally, which works a lot but stays poor, or it will perish
Crushed by soaring rents and living costs and staring down a future where robots and AI threaten their jobs, Gen Z is unleashing a wave of protests that is rattling governments worldwide. ...
More.
Thursday, December 25, 2025
Unbelievably rosy GDP report contained core pce inflation data at 2.9% countering previous rosy core cpi inflation report at 2.6% and indicating rising inflation
The U.S. economy grew at a much greater-than-expected pace in the third quarter, boosted by strong consumer spending, a delayed report released Tuesday showed.
U.S. gross domestic product, a sum of all goods and services produced in the sprawling U.S. economy, expanded by 4.3% in the July-September period, the Commerce Department said in its initial reading of third-quarter growth. Economists polled by Dow Jones expect a gain of 3.2%. ...The economy moved forward during the period despite persistent signs of inflation pressures.
The personal consumption expenditures price index, the Fed’s primary inflation gauge, rose 2.8% during the period, and 2.9% for core which excludes food and energy. Both were above prior respective readings of 2.1% and 2.6% and remain well above the Fed’s 2% inflation gauge. Also, the chain-weighted price index, which accounts for changes in consumer behavior such as switching to less expensive products for pricier items, rose 3.8%, a full percentage point above the forecast. ...
As for the GDP report, even if you accept the rosy number as reported, it remains that . . .
Trump's real GDP since 2017 is growing at a compound annual rate which is 5% lower than the rate for 1984-2017; and
Trump's GDP since 2017 is growing at a compound annual rate 21% lower than the rate for 1947-2017.
Meanwhile GDP since 1984 is growing at a compound annual rate which is 28% lower than for 1947-1984.
And GDP since the Great Recession in 2007 is growing at a compound annual rate 42% lower than for 1947-2007.
The results of the era inaugurated by Reagan have been devastating. Real GDP today would be much higher had the previous long term trend continued.
3Q1984 Reagan real GDP of 8252.46 at the pre-Reagan rate of compound annual growth since 1947 would be 36213.94 today instead of 24024.95, 50% higher.
The Trump era is doubling down on stupid, not breaking with it. It is guaranteed to get us nowhere, faster.
It's completely crazy that an entry level ice cream scooper in Brooklyn, New York earns almost as much as an entry level small engine mechanic
Fifty cents an hour less.
It's as if the weight of wealth accumulation by the top 10% has squished and compressed those beneath them into one giant, undifferentiated blob scooping ice cream alongside this woman.
... When I started working at Lady Moo Moo in Bed-Stuy, I found myself surrounded by people who, like me, had already built careers and are now navigating an unpredictable job market. Some had been laid off just as I had. Others, like my colleague who is a sex educator and public health advocate, lost funding in their fields. A few are juggling multiple part-time roles to stay afloat. ... Every shift, I met people who never imagined they would be picking up part-time work: artists, teachers, nonprofit workers, tech employees, museum curators, and neighbors doing their best to make life work in a difficult economy. ...
A Christmas of silver and gold
... Spot gold was down 0.4% at $4,468.96 per ounce, after marking a record high of $4,525.18 earlier in the session. ...
Silver prices have surged 147% year-to-date on strong fundamentals, outpacing bullion’s gain of over 70% during the same period. ...
Silver hit an all-time high of $72.70 but was last down 0.8% at $70.86 an ounce. ...
More.
Wednesday, December 24, 2025
Tuesday, December 23, 2025
Because we can't build them ourselves
Manufacturing capacity utilization was down in November, a pale reflection of its former self before globalization.
Same with manufacturing employment.
Manufacturing production was barely up in November and is effectively flat since the Great Recession, before which it was still rising.
Trump stupidly thinks tariffs can reverse all this, when you're supposed to use tariffs to protect what you have, not what you don't.
Monday, December 22, 2025
Stories like this about China destroying the U.S. Dollar just make me want to howl
But hey, what do you expect from MarketWatch?
... As more commodities get priced in yuan instead of dollars, demand for dollars softens. As central banks diversify into gold, they buy fewer Treasurys. As fewer foreigners buy U.S. debt, interest rates drift higher. As the dollar’s purchasing power erodes, everything you import costs more. ...
This, like most of the story, is a load of BS.
Global demand for U.S. debt is at an ALL TIME HIGH, a record $9.2 trillion in the last three months through October.
You'll know the yuan has replaced the dollar when the world buys Chinese sovereign debt instead of ours. And right now the world owns less than $300 billion of Chinese sovereign debt, billion with a B, not trillion with a T.
Nobody trusts China like they trust us.
The writer, who owns gold and silver, wants you to dump long term bonds and buy short term bills and . . . gold and silver. Gee, what a coincidence.
Meanwhile foreign governments continue to prefer long term U.S. Treasuries and own relatively few bills.
And the dollar is relatively strong, not weak as the writer says, in November 2025.
click to enlarge
Democrat minority leader in the House Hakeem Jeffries imitates Nancy Pelosi in sabotage of Congressional stock trading ban legislation
Once again the most progressive Democrat elites, who pushed out Joe Biden, prove that they are not on the side of the people.
Good morning to everyone who is not a member of Congress
The median net worth of an American household in 2023 was less than $200,000.
The median net worth of a current member of the U.S. Congress is $1,000,000.
Sunday, December 21, 2025
Populist taxes to match Trump's populist rhetoric
The original personal exemption from the income tax was $3,000 in 1913. The equivalent of that in September 2025 is $97,440.
For married filing jointly the personal exemption was $4,000 in 1913. The equivalent of that in September 2025 is $129,920.
This personal exemption, which Trump eliminated in 2018, should be reinstated, and indexed to inflation in this way from here on out, and this income should be entirely federal-tax-free, except of course for Social Security taxes, Medicare taxes, and state and local taxes.
About 83% of individual wage earners made $97k or less in 2023.
That's what actual populist taxation would look like.
Remember, the roughly top 20% would not pay taxes on their first $97k either, so they would be just like everybody else in respect of basic income. If they can't live on that, then neither can we.
Standard deductions and/or itemized deductions for the top 20% are for the debates over the rates they should pay progressively, and should be a moot point for the majority because the majority wouldn't be paying federal taxes anyway.
Corporate income taxes and capital gains taxes muddy these waters, but those taxes were originally placed on Wall Street fat cats at a time when farmers all across this land faced punitive taxes on property which the Wall Streeters did not. Corporate income and capital gains taxes were meant to address that inequity.
The income tax was subsequently added, on the rich obviously, in part because those other taxes didn't really work to address the inequity. But now we have this Rube Goldberg machine of taxation which Trump has merely tweaked again but is not fundamentally reformed.
The fact is that today we still have horrible tax inequity where some income is more equal than others, with much lower tax rates on capital gains held more than one year.
This overwhelmingly benefits the top 20% by wealth, who own about 90% of the stock market's value*. The owners of this wealth routinely take their income from this source, not from W-2 income, but they are taxed at much lower long term capital gains tax rates of 0%, 15%, and 20%.
* the top 20% of households as measured by income own about 87% of directly-held equities
-- Michael Hiltzik, here
Let's compare a person's taxes on next year's income of $97,000 under the Big Ugly Bill's ordinary income tax rates versus the capital gains tax rates.
Starting in 2026, a single filer will get a standard deduction of $16,100. If he makes $97,000 next year in ordinary income, his taxable income will be $80,900 and his federal income tax will be $12,510 ($5,800 plus 22% of the amount over $50,400). The effective tax rate is 12.89% on $97,000.
The same filer without W-2 income but with $97,000 of long term capital gains income instead comes out way ahead. His taxable income is the same because his standard deduction is the same: $80,900. However, on the first $49,450 of taxable income he pays 0% capital gains tax because he held it longer than one year. The remaining $31,450 is taxed at just 15%, which is $4,717.50. The effective tax rate is 4.86%, not 12.89%! That's 62% lower.
If we treated all income from every source the same way and taxed accordingly, the playing field would be more level.
If the people are taxed at ordinary income tax rates, arguably all entities should be. Corporations are people, they tell us, so there should be no story ever again about a profitable company escaping federal taxation in this country.
But Tesla and Meta, for example, paid no tax in 2023. About 25% of companies don't on average.
As for individuals, the data about how many escape taxation is harder to come by, but an estimated 90,000 households making $200k or more in 2022 escaped taxation legally, and about 3,200 individuals making $1 million or more paid no federal tax.
There is nothing populist about a system which treats the income of rich people worthy of a privilege the income of the rest of us is not.
Grand Rapids, Michigan billionaire Doug DeVos admits America hasn't made all that much progress since 1976
... On the eve of the 1976 election, President Gerald Ford wanted to hold a motorcade parade in Grand Rapids, where he grew up ... filled with boarded-up buildings ... a downtrodden place ...
America on the eve of 2026 feels an awful lot like Grand Rapids in 1976. There’s a palpable sense that the country is struggling, if not starting to fail. It isn’t only the sorry state of big cities. It’s the state of the nation’s schools as kids fall behind in basic math and reading. It’s the state of the body politic as division and violence spread. It’s the sorry feeling that we’re a nation without a rudder, drifting toward inevitable decline. According to Pew Research, about half of Americans say the U.S. can’t solve many of its important problems. ...
More here.
Even Larry Kudlow recognizes that GDP hasn't been good since 1984
... The last time real GDP hit 5 percent for the entire year was Ronald Reagan’s 1984, where the number was 5.6 percent for that whole year. ...
Here.
If Larry were completely honest he'd recognize that real GDP growth has been in steady decline in the entire post-war.
The percent change peaks are plain as day, unless you're an ideologue.
We've gone from 8.69% in 1950, to 7.23% in 1984, to 6.15 in 2021 (COVID panic spending), and the dozen or so routine percent change years above 5% between 1950 and 1984 when the economy was still holding its own have disappeared.
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| click to expand |
The Reagan Revolution didn't do one thing to stem the decline, the Trump Gimmickry even less. In fact, the Reagan Revolution made it worse.
The answer why is paradoxical.
The debt-based economy of the United States ran out of gas under Reagan because he cut the taxes which paid for that debt, too much and on the wrong people. It's still a debt-based economy, but we don't want to pay for it anymore.
This is the infantile cry of libertarianism.
We all think the growth of debt has been the problem when paying for that growth has been the problem. We threw a tantrum and decided to stop paying for it, and its growth naturally contracted, and along with it GDP, in self-defense so to speak.
Growth of TCMDO, the total universe of debt, which steadily climbed the ladder in the post-war, plunged after 1985, from percent change 15.36% to 11.11% in 2004 to 9.51% in 2020 (COVID panic spending).
Debt draws future prosperity into the present, but what you get if you don't pay for it sufficiently is less prosperity when you reach the future from which you borrowed.
And as you pay less, you then borrow even more less so to speak, and get even more less. Rinse and repeat.
Welcome to the future.
It's really that simple.
Taxes have been much too low on the rich, and for a long time, and reversing that is the sober reflection of an age which realizes it made a mistake, starting long before Reagan with JFK, the libertarian cad who bedded more women in the White House than the rest of them combined. His Revenue Act of 1964 passed under LBJ cut the top income tax bracket from 91% to 70%.
The question we have to ask ourselves now is, are we ready to give our system another try and tax everyone, but progressively, and practice fiscal and moral restraint for a change . . .
or are we going to say yes to the billionaires who were made by all this obscene excess and who want to impose an un-American system of feudalism with themselves at the top and the rest of us their humble serfs?
George Washington wouldn't kneel even in church.
I'm with that guy.
Saturday, December 20, 2025
30 people have died in ICE custody in 2025, 4 between Dec 12 and Dec 15 alone, the most since 2004, and it's costing TENS OF BILLIONS
Four ICE detainee deaths in four days spark alarm as arrests grow
... The recent deaths bring total detainee deaths to 30 in 2025, the highest number since 2004, when 32 people died in ICE custody. This year’s total includes two detainees who were killed after a shooting at a Dallas ICE facility. At least two others died this year, according to ICE, but not in immigration detention.
Nearly 66,000 people are in detention, according to ICE data, a record high, and the Trump administration is seeking to spend $45 billion to expand immigration detention after receiving an infusion of cash from Congress. ...
The unemployment rate at 4.6% in November 2025 can't be right
The unemployment rate at 4.6% in November 2025 can't be right with Initial Claims for Unemployment so low, averaging 223k.
The January to September averages were 4.2% unemployment with 222k initial claims.
Compare:
2024: 4.0% at 221k
2023: 3.6% at 221k
2022: 3.6% at 215k
2019: 3.7% at 217k
2018: 3.9% at 220k.
Household Survey response rates, from which we get the unemployment rate, have plunged since the pandemic, from above 80% before COVID to below 70% now.
As a consequence 2025 and 2024 look suspiciously higher than they probably are when compared with prior years.
Initial claims for unemployment is more certain as a measurement because the data is aggregated from state unemployment agencies which pay actual people who make actual claims, not people who answer (or don't answer) a poll.
With claims still historically low, the Fed is making a big mistake in reducing interest rates because it thinks employment is softening based on the Household Survey.
They risk reigniting inflation.
Under Trump America is for sale, to the highest bidder: Give me your best, your rich, your preening elites yearning to drink tea . . .
Pretty strange for a "movement" which is supposed to be P O P U L I S T.
... The card is a whopping $1 million for individuals to purchase, and $2 million for corporations, and gives recipients lawful permanent residence status as an EB-1 or EB-1 visa holder. ...
Trump T. Trump sat on a wall . . .
Doonesbury, November 20, 1988 . . .
My name means quality. It's synonymous with quality. I want to legally rename myself Trump T. Trump. It screams quality.
Friday, December 19, 2025
Trump's Department of Injustice will violate the law again today by not releasing the Epstein files
"One law for me, another for thee".
Alleged 2025 MIT and Brown University killer was a Portugese national who obtained permanent resident status under President Donald Trump in 2017
Brown and MIT prof shooter suspect Neves Valente is found dead, authorities say
... Authorities said he is believed to have originally been in the United States on a student visa and obtained lawful permanent resident status in 2017.
Trump immediately tries to cover his ass:
U.S. green card lottery suspended after Brown University shooting
... Noem said that Valente entered the U.S. through the DV1 program in 2017 and was granted a green card.
“In 2017, President Trump fought to end this program, following the devastating NYC truck ramming by an ISIS terrorist, who entered under the DV1 program, and murdered eight people,” she wrote on X.
The Diversity Immigrant Visa Program (DV Program) allocates up to 50,000 immigrant visas every year, according to the USCIS website.
The program is a lottery. Visas are randomly allocated to individuals from countries with low rates of immigration to the U.S.
Bush didn't keep us safe on 911, and Trump didn't keep us safe in 2025. A young, talented College Republican is dead because of him.
If Trump can simply suspend the program in 2025, he could have done it in 2017 when he was president the first time, but he didn't.
Thursday, December 18, 2025
The BLS report of CPI is missing too much data for both October and November to be a reliable estimate of inflation
The 38-page pdf is full of tables with missing data like this " - ".
... CPI data collection resumed on November 14, 2025. ...
Trump gaslights America about affordability in last night's speech, says it only became an issue during the Biden administration
I've been talking about affordability until I'm blue in the face right here ever since the Great Recession wrecked America and Obama did nothing about it.
There's even a label for it, with over 120 posts about it going all the way back to the beginning.
Affordability has become an even bigger problem because of the recent episode of inflation, no question about it.
For example in 2025 the average sales price of a single family home in my county has been $433k, 87% higher than it was in 2019.
For that to be affordable, an income of $166.5k is necessary (2.6x = 433,000), but 94% of individual wage earners didn't make that much in 2023.
But in Trump's America in 2019, when the average sales price of a single family home in my county was only $232k, 85% couldn't afford it because they didn't make the necessary $89.2k a year.
Same shit, different day. Illegal aliens weren't to blame in 2019 any more than they are in 2025.
Millions of Americans lost their jobs in 2009 and never got them back. Many of them lost their homes, too, and much else. Zero interest rate policy for a subsequent decade is what made housing unaffordable then, and Trump is calling for more of the same now.
People like me voted for Trump in 2016 because we thought that finally we had someone who meant business about stuff like that, but his failure to prioritize illegal immigration in 2017, his signature campaign issue, indicated that he wasn't a serious person, and the rest of his tenure proved it.
And he still isn't serious.
He's wasting billions of dollars rounding up illegals whom he now laughably says number 25 million when he should be rounding up their employers and passing legislation which puts the screws to THEM instead of to some grandma with a sign at a protest rally.
He's also wasting billions going after Venezuela, which hasn't paid ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips about $10 billion for expropriating their oil assets in 2007. Fighting this small potatoes matter is also costing us a fortune.
He also wasted $9-$12 billion in the Red Sea trying to stop the Houthis, but cut and ran when it got too expensive, leaving shipping the sitting duck it was in the first place, so it still goes around Africa instead. Transits through the Suez are down 50% and tonnage is down 66% compared with 2023.
America is no longer the guarantor of freedom of navigation on the seas. It doesn't care about freedom in Ukraine, and it certainly doesn't care about economic freedom at home. If it did it wouldn't spend the country into oblivion, and would tax the bejeebers out of the billionaires and leave the rest of us alone.
We do not have a serious president.
It's all theatre.
Trump's energy price fantasies last night: Gasoline is $2.50 in much of the country, other energy prices will fall dramatically
Gasoline averages $3.22, and average prices for electricity and natural gas rose in November from September.
The Trump Regime wants you to believe that core cpi inflation dropped from 3.01% year over year in September to 2.63% in November, lower than April's 2.77% and lower than at any point since 2021
October 2025 is missing.
The BLS remains in the hands of an acting commissioner since Trump fired McEntarfer in August.
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