They're all nuts.
Tuesday, April 8, 2025
DOGE World's Elon Musk tries to escape universal opprobrium, calls Tariff World's Peter Navarro Peter Retarrdo, dumber than a sack of bricks
Might as well go out with guns a-blazin'.
Musk is a free-trader who is not down for the tariff struggle.
Monday, April 7, 2025
Kilmar Abrego Garcia will have to wait in an El Salvador prison for the US Supreme Court to decide what to do with him
... Roberts issued a terse administrative order indefinitely lifting the deadline of 11:59 EDT to return Abrego Garcia set by U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis. The Trump administration had said that deadline was “impossible” to meet. ...
More.
Trump's biggest tariff, 50%, was on tiny landlocked poverty-stricken Lesotho inside South Africa, over a minuscule trade imbalance of $234.5 MILLION in 2024, which is under a treaty for godsakes
Lesotho's exports to the US in 2024 were valued at $237.3 MILLION lol. Trump now wants 50% of that.
King George III, who also was nuts, was a benevolent king to America compared to this guy.
Trump's biggest tariff was on tiny Lesotho. Here's what to know about the African kingdom.
... Mr. Trump's so-called "Liberation Day" tariffs
included a whopping 50% levy on the small, impoverished nation's
imports, and the Lesotho government quickly said it would send a
delegation to Washington. ...
Lesotho's annual gross domestic product of $2 billion is highly reliant on exports, mostly of textiles, including jeans. ...
The White House claims, by way of [its] formula, that Lesotho imposes 99% tariffs and other barriers on U.S. imports. ...
With an annual gross domestic product of just over $2 billion, Lesotho is largely dependent on South Africa — it biggest trading partner — from which it imports most of its food, selling water in return.
The economy has been heavily reliant on textile exports bound for the United States through the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) trade deal, which provides duty-free access to the U.S. market for some African products. The Trump administration's imposition of tariffs on African nations has raised questions over how likely the White House is to renew the AGOA pact when it expires in September. ...
Trump's top trade advisor is nuts, 0% tariff offer from Vietnam isn't good enough
They're making it impossible for the world, which will end up trading with everybody except us.
... A value added tax is a system used by many countries around the world and is in some ways similar to sales taxes in the U.S. The Trump administration’s argument that the tax should count as a trade barrier is not widely accepted.
“We have tried at the World Trade Organization since the 1970s to get VAT-tax relief, and they’ve told us no every single time,” Navarro said Monday.
The trade adviser also said Monday that the value added tax would be an issue in any negotiations around tariffs with the European Union.
Gold hit another new record high on Thursday April 3, 2025 at $3,167.57
... Gold prices fell to a
more-than-three-week low on Monday amid a wider market sell-off,
continuing their retreat as investors dumped bullion to cover their
losses in other trades on fears of a global recession due to an
escalating global trade war. ...
More.
Car manufacturing jobs, so-called good jobs, already don't pay enough to enable these Detroit auto workers to buy their own homes and have families, and they fear layoffs because of the tariffs
The Wall Street Journal doesn't mention it here.
This guy's been working for the company for 10 years and he's still renting.
... Daniel Campbell, who maneuvers steel auto parts around a Stellantis factory north of Detroit, says he and many of his colleagues are worried about layoffs.
“I’m scared,” he said from his brick bungalow on the west side of Detroit, which he rents with two roommates. “We’re complaining about gas and eggs now. Who is going to be able to buy these cars that are already $80,000, and then you make it $90,000?”
The 46-year-old UAW member, who makes about $30 an hour, and one of his roommates have talked about trimming their spending, including eating out less and cutting clothing and electronics purchases.
“There’s going to come a time where we’re not going to be able to go and spend,” he said.
At work, the assembly lines have been running faster in recent weeks as Stellantis has tried to stockpile parts ahead of the tariffs, Campbell said. He and his co-workers are running out of room to store the parts. ...
Sunday, April 6, 2025
The economy under Biden was a catastrophe now requiring draconian tariffs, just like we're being invaded by Venezuelan gangs everywhere requiring extraordinary measures which violate due process of law
Everything is either awesome or awful, Republican or Democrat, white or black in our hysterical country.
The economy went from being enviable by others in the world in October to a catastrophe just like that in January.
And now it really might become a catastrophe but you'll hear only that it's AWESOME.
Can wage and price controls be far behind?
Elon Musk forgets that Peter Navarro built license plates for four months last year lol
... “A PhD in Econ from Harvard is a bad thing, not a good thing. Results in the ego/brains>>1 problem,” Musk wrote in one post. (Navarro earned a PhD in economics from Harvard in the 1980s.)
The Department of Government Efficiency head replied to another user’s comment on the video lauding Navarro’s explanation, writing of the economist: “He ain’t built shit.” ...
More.
 |
| this was subsequently deleted by Musk |
Trump says Hang Tough because we have $5 trillion of new investment after $11 trillion in stocks wiped out lol
What, $5 trillion in crypto? Ukraine?
Normally you institute protectionist policies like tariffs when you already have something to protect, not before
But our Orwellian Republicans put the cart before the horse.
You can't return to something which no longer exists. The net trade deficit for 2024 is nearly $1 trillion, instead of flat like during the post-war up until Reagan, who first ran in 1976 against Ford, when tariffs still had something to protect but we listened to the siren song of free-trade instead.
That is why the Trump administration has had to cast about for at least six different reasons for instituting tariffs at the present time, none of which are at all convincing otherwise there wouldn't be six of them, not to mention that the math used for them is preposterous, or that they are the farthest thing from reciprocal.
The real reason for them, however, is that the tariffs, like the executive orders which now number over 100, are the immediate strings available to our Puppet Master, which he can pull this way one day and that way another, your ever present reminder of who is in charge around here. Suck up to him and he'll make a deal.
Trump's White House laughably brags about these things.
New taxes, which is what these tariffs are, are liberating don't you see!
Our mad King Ludwig needs this constant adulation. The tyrant has desires which he can never fulfill, Plato warned us.
But of course all this can be undone by the next president, which is no way to run a country. It makes for deep institutional instability and distrust throughout the global economy, for which few can reasonably plan.
The message remains the same: Expect Kaos.
Saturday, April 5, 2025
Federal judge orders US authorities to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador by April 7
A federal judge ordered the Trump administration on Friday to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to the United States after he was accidentally sent to a notorious megajail in El Salvador.
U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, Maryland, Judge Paula Xinis ruled that the government must return Garcia by April 7 at 11:59 pm.
Garcia, a protected legal resident who has been living in Maryland since 2011 and is originally from El Salvador, was sent back to El Salvador on March 15 because of what the Trump administration called an “administrative error” in court filings Monday. ...
More.
Friday, April 4, 2025
Trump nukes $6.6 trillion from the stock market in the last two days with tariff announcement, the biggest 2-day wipeout in history, $11.1 trillion since the inauguration
Reported here:
Roughly $11.1 trillion has been wiped away from the U.S. stock market since Jan. 17, the Friday before President Donald Trump took the oath of office and began his second term, according to data from Dow Jones Market Data.
Some $6.6 trillion of that figure was lost on Thursday and Friday alone — the largest two-day wipeout of shareholder value on record, Dow Jones data showed. ...
Investors sell gold to cover stock losses, but price remains above moving average of $3,023
Reported here:
... Spot gold was down 2.9% at $3,024.2 an ounce, after hitting a session low of $3,015.29 earlier in the session.
It hit a record high of $3,167.57 on Thursday. For the week, gold was down 1.9%.
U.S. gold futures settled 2.8% lower at $3,035.40.
On the technical front, spot gold price managed to hold above its 21-day moving average of $3,023. ...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)