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It appears he plans to put tariffs on all agricultural imports

A thought just occurred to me on these tariffs. There is of course the bullying and domestic political reasons for Trump doing it. But it could also be accomplishing a roundabout, latent greedflation sort of thing for US companies.

These tariffs go into effect, US companies importing these goods raise their prices at least in commensurate, but in many cases a little more. It sucks for a while but the economy absorbs it generally; people are just forced to take out more credit and/or shift their spending (even though for a great many, there is not much more blood left in the stone). Eventually Trump takes the tariffs away, and perhaps companies lower their prices a little bit, as a PR show, but nowhere near to reflect the full tariff relief. That then sets the new standard, and latent profits start flowing.

Idk, it would be playing with fire though, especially in very low margin industries. For smaller companies that can’t handle it, they may get hit too hard and could go under. Doing this could also open space in tight markets and provide some further juice to capital consolidation

as i posted this random noise yesterday, duality of polling, cont.:

also, interesting article, in case newsheads don't poke around website:

https://jacobin.com/2025/03/class-dealignment-occupation-progressive-electorate

we are in the cool zone now

Canadian oil is partially exempt from the US tariffs, will be tariffed at 10% (current tariff is 0%), instead of at 25% like everything else.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/03/04/meet-trumps-new-best-friend/

bernie panders has a take (extreme brainworms abound), including: russia had a movement towards democracy, russia annexed georgia, kids sent to re education camps (lmao), hacking infrastructure, putin is the richest person in the world (shades of stalin was wealthy). Simply extraordinary

Just heard a guest on the UK’s biggest radio station (BBC Radio 2), during mid-afternoon programming, making the liberal case for aligning with Trump on Ukraine and that the war is unwinnable, even with US support. The UK and Europe should adopt a “polite” version of Trump’s foreign policy. No pushback at all from the interviewer - even soft endorsement of it.

Leftist podcasters taking piss out of calling z-man dictator do be annoying, how the fuck a person outlawing political parties he don't like (including (chuddy) communists) (and pro russian is not fucking excuse, they are parties not militant movements, allegedly democracy allows for parties being elected who pursue different foreign policy), arresting them on treason if they criticize him, and extending his rule by pure fiat is not a dictator. And american prestige honestly citing 57 percent approval rating is just lmao.

The Trump admin has officially designated Ansar Allah a terrorist organization.

https://www.state.gov/designation-of-ansarallah-as-a-foreign-terrorist-organization/

Is there any historical parallel to something as large and complex as the United States trying to run on its own momentum while all the essential bureaucrats and government funding are being purged on a whim? Because that's the position we were in even before Trump decided to blow up the economy.

....is the JDPON Don meme real?

Bloomberg: China Sets GDP Target at About 5% Despite US Tariffs

Another one

Some worrying events in the Middle East as of the past 48-72 hours. A United States Navy Carrier Strike Group, presumably the USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75), was spotted entering the Red Sea on ESA Satellite Imagery on March 2, and one of its planes was observed on FlightRadar24. So the US carrier is back in the Red Sea.

Earlier today (March 4) , the United States Air Force flew a nuclear capable B-52H Stratofortress bomber off of the coast of Israel and Gaza, descending down to a low altitude of 11 000ft at times. We know that this bomber (Registration 60-0037) is nuclear capable due to the presence of 'New START agreement' fins on it's fuselage, pictured below. If you're interested in reading the whole documentation of how New START applies to the B-52 fleet, the 240 page PDF documentation is available here. So yes, the USA did fly a nuclear capable bomber off of the coast of Gaza.

In response, Ansarallah (known as the Houthis in western media) have claimed to have shot down the 15th MQ-9 Reaper drone of the conflict so far, with the wreckage landing in the Red Sea. The US will be forced to fly their jet engined RQ-4B and MQ-4C drones again to carry out surveillance.

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Investors dare to imagine a world beyond the dollar

Investors are starting to imagine a financial system without the US at its centre, handing Europe an opportunity that it simply must not miss.

This exercise in thinking the unthinkable comes despite a cacophony of noise in markets. Mansoor Mohi-uddin, chief economist at Bank of Singapore, recently travelled to clients in Dubai and London. To his surprise, not one of them asked him about short-term issues like tech stocks or tweaks to interest rates. Instead, he says, “people were saying, ‘What’s going on?’ The free trade, free markets, globalisation era is over, and nobody knows what’s going to replace it.”

They refer, of course, to the new US administration. Within a month of retaking his seat at the White House, Donald Trump & co had all but trashed the transatlantic alliance, and ridden roughshod over the key checks, balances and institutions on which true US exceptionalism is built.

“It’s such a momentous change going on. If it continues like this, capital allocators will wonder: ‘Do I want to stay allocated to the US?’” Mohi-uddin says.

This cuts across asset classes. In stocks, the preference for Europe is clear — markets are streaking ahead of the US in a highly unusual pattern. But flighty stock markets are just the surface. The bit that really matters is the international use of the dollar, and dollar bond markets, as the supposedly risk-free bedrock of global finance.

This is already starting to show. On Tuesday, for instance, despite the shock of new US trade tariffs on Canada and Mexico, the dollar is not climbing in its usual fashion. Deutsche Bank says this in part reflects “the potential loss of the dollar’s safe-haven status”.

“We do not write this lightly,” wrote currencies analyst George Saravelos. “But the speed and scale of global shifts is so rapid that this needs to be acknowledged as a possibility.” What was once outlandish is now becoming plausible.

Economists close to Trump have been clear that they view the dollar’s status as the world’s pre-eminent reserve currency as a blessing and a curse — “burdensome” as adviser Stephen Miran put it. It remains a possibility — again unthinkable just a few weeks ago — that the US could seek to pull the dollar lower in an effort to support domestic manufacturing. But the US could also dismantle its own exorbitant privilege through accident rather than design by pushing the big beasts of bond markets — foreign central banks and other official reserve managers — into the arms of other nations.

The dollar makes up more than 57 per cent of global official reserves, according to benchmark data from the IMF, far in excess of the US’s slice of the global economy. The euro accounts for 20 per cent, and everyone else is picking up scraps.

Starry-eyed optimists have argued for years that the euro’s slice of the pie should be bigger, but they have been fighting reality. Europe’s bond markets are fragmented into constituent states, with Germany at the centre. The monetary cohesion is there but not the fiscal or strategic cohesion. No national market is simultaneously large, safe and liquid enough to suit a reserve manager’s needs. Super-sized trades leave a mark and in an emergency, these big hitters find only the slick US government bond market will do.

The EU has struggled to offer an alternative. That is where this moment in history comes in. Its urgent need for defence spending simply overwhelms the capacity of its individual national bond markets. Joint borrowing — easily said but devilishly tricky to do — is the obvious answer. The result could well be that Europe is thrust further to the centre of the global financial system.

The Covid-19 pandemic offered a taste of how pooling resources might work at scale. Then, bonds issued by the EU itself, rather than individual states, were met with enormous demand. The urgency of the present situation offers little choice but to move fast. “Collective action could be an answer, even if consensus has not built yet,” said analysts at rating agency S&P Global in a note last month.

If the EU could seize this moment, it would tap in to a deep well of willing buyers keen to trim US exposure. “Plenty of reserve managers could shift very quickly,” says Mohi-uddin. “There would be huge take-up.” US dominance of global debt markets does not have to end with a bang. Large, slow-moving investors would simply have to accumulate other assets rather than necessarily dumping their Treasuries. But over time, the result would be the same. Regime shifts of this kind do not happen often. But they do happen. Sterling was the global reserve currency once too.

Leave it to Comrade Trump to achieve the impossible, folks.

The question is what are they moving their assets into? Bitcoin and gold? lmao.