The Frankish Reich

You know the difference. This is basically printing a press release. It is not investigative reporting, whether it is retweeted by Catturd or reprinted by the NYT.

Find your lane for 2028, Ted! Since JD Vance and now Trump himself occupy the Orange King Can Do No Wrong lane, Ted has to bet on a tariff-induced recession. He's probably right.

Matt Damon figured it out for us. I think I can do it too.

You mean my trip to Mars?

The point, umm, Doc(tor) - when your own physical exam report accepts at face value your obvious lie about one thing, what are the chances it accepts a bunch of other self-aggrandizing lies?

More clever than anything they've done recently! James Austin Johnson is really really good at the Trump thing.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/biden-undergo-annual-physical-exam-wednesday-rcna140880 "Fit for duty." Reliable, just like Trump's! Trump is 6'3"? Here he is next to Prince William, who is ... 6'3" https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-14170459/Donald-Trump-height-Prince-William-Paris-notre-dame.html

Making it up as they go along. No strategy, no actual plan. What did you expect?

Unfortunately, the truth is that all the righties here (and a lot of the non-righties) always view these things through the lens of race.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-is-stupid-erratic-and-weak says it all.

Another good analysis, also paywalled, because I guess you get what you pay for (example: Catturd vs. the WSJ). Steve Miran, yet another nutcase in the administration: https://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/us-dollar-treasury-bonds-trade-war-028e8765?mod=WSJ_home_supertopperbottom_pos_2 The dollar’s reserve status makes it artificially strong, which results in exports being more expensive and imports cheaper, contributing to the U.S. trade deficit. In a speech this week Steve Miran, chairman of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, said other countries should share the U.S.’s burden of providing its defense umbrella and a reserve currency. One way, he said, was by paying tariffs. Before joining the administration, Miran had, in a report, suggested other countries could help hold down the dollar through a “Mar-a-Lago” accord, and if they didn’t, the U.S. could impose a fee on their holdings of Treasurys. In an email Wednesday, Miran said that he wasn’t advocating either idea then, and that the administration isn’t considering either now.

You will toil and sacrifice for the motherland and you will like it.

No showerhead gonna bring back that hair on top.

Probably. We've already seen Trump urging the Fed to cut rates. This time it amounts to "I broke the economy, so you better cut rates to avert a deep recession." And the Fed's "unwinding" of it's treasuries is likely to be paused too. It seems Republicans these days love inflation and cheap money too.

Tarheel must be tired tonight. 10 posts in this self-pleasuring thread out of 14 total, with just token attaboys from his diminishing fanboys.

I've said this ever since the Rose Garden tariff announcement. I'd be stunned if insiders - including the Trump kin - aren't trading on this. That's what happens when you let one man have such power over the markets. Maybe those drafters of the constitution knew what they were doing when the expressly assigned the tariff power to Congress and only Congress.

For whatever reason, I'm still partial to The Good Son. The funny Nick is best exemplified by his Grinderman alter ego:

My scorecard: - Prediction CORRECT - Timing off by about 48 hours I'll take the win. You're welcome. Now go back to listening to your damn fool tweeters.

Now that's my vision of a Great America!

Hate to interrupt the favorite photo reels of the Trumpies, but back to the topic: "bond market in chaos." Here's why the "mainstream media" is essential. This is mainstream UK conservatism, the Financial Times. I got my month for a dollar deal to try to keep up with all the trade shenanigans of the past few days; get yours too or keep reading "Trump Playing 5D Chess" tweets and remain ignorant. The truth is we were getting to a 2008 Lehman or 2022 Liz Truss situation in which the bond market becomes illiquid - that means there's no functioning market in trading treasuries, and that's the systemic risk of a damn fool pulling tariff numbers out of his fat ass. https://www.ft.com/content/6e6261e1-42bd-4cca-827e-218c111a6432?emailId=cba474cf-958e-4cf8-a9c5-c8a8d0767405&segmentId=22011ee7-896a-8c4c-22a0-7603348b7f22 We realise that not everyone is quite the fixed income dorks that we are, so here’s an explainer of some of the more common “relative-value” strategies that hedge funds often pursue in the bond market. This is not the really funky stuff. These are actually fairly plain-vanilla trades that have in some form been around for decades. But quite a few of them were supercharged in the post-crisis era — thanks to the regulation-enforced retreat of banks and the rise of leaner algorithmic market-makers — and all have the potential to blow up rarely but spectacularly (viz LTCM). OK OK that’s enough. So what does it all mean? Well, that Treasury market volatility triggered by the Trump administration’s new tariff regime has now sparked a technical unwind of billions of dollars of highly leveraged hedge fund trades — a bit like how Liz Truss’s badly-judged budget plans triggered a meltdown of LDI strategies in the gilt market. All these trades are in their basic form pretty safe, and arguably a service to financial markets, by helping support Treasury markets and ensuring that all the different parts of the wider rates ecosystem is tied together. It’s the level and fickleness of the leverage that can make them dangerous occasionally. Normally these things burn themselves out soon enough, but there are rising expectations that the Federal Reserve may have to step in to prevent the Treasury sell-off from becoming disorderly and destructive. In other words, not per se to keep yields low, but to ensure that there are no major financial mishaps. However, at some point we really should stop and think about whether we want the US Treasury market to be so vulnerable to these kinds of situations that it requires central bank intervention again and again?

I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. I think he did kill a white dude, right? Whatever ...

Bessent was freaking out, coming out every morning to try to sell calm while the financial world around him was descending into chaos.

Of course, this arrest report supports the theory that this was Rittenhouse-style "self-defense."

^^Even more QAnon'd than we thought. Time to start sucking Trump butt again, Bill Ackman. Right on cue.