Wednesday, April 16, 2025
Ten foods making new all time high average prices in March 2025 per FRED Economic Data
At around noon on 14 April, 2025, America ceased to have a law-abiding government
On Monday Trump chose to ignore a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling to repatriate an illegally deported man.
Tuesday, April 15, 2025
What matters in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia is that he had an immigration judge's order protecting him from deportation and Trump violated that order
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?
Speaking of the dearth of proportional thinking, today is April 15th, when the tax code obscures the fact that the cost of government is about 24%
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?
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.
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.
Monday, April 14, 2025
Gold to $3,245.42
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.
Trump lets the president of El Salvador do his defying of the Supreme Court for him, won't return Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States
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. ...
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.
Sunday, April 13, 2025
They're calling the 10Y at 4.5% the moron premium because everyone hates Trump and his tariffs, but I don't remember it being called the 5% dotard premium under Joe Biden
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.
Saturday, April 12, 2025
Paper tiger strikes again: Another delay for Liberation Day as Trump exempts China's number one export category to the United States from draconian tariffs
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.
Week over week US Treasury yields in the aggregate popped 5.8% on net to an average 4.335% after declining for months from 4.5 to 4.0 and everybody's freaking out like this hasn't happened, what, six times now in the current era
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.
Friday, April 11, 2025
Gold just keeps making new records: $3,245.28
... 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.
Liars all over Elon Musk's X kept saying Trump brought egg prices down, but in March 2025 they were more expensive than ever on an average basis: $6.227 per dozen
Sam's Club, when it has eggs in stock, is charging in the mid to high 4s per dozen.
