President Trump Stews in a Swamp of his Own Making
It may be endless war and soaring grocery prices; but, hey, at least the price of oil futures is plummeting again, and stocks just hit new records! And a small cabal is getting RICH off of it!
The Trump administration’s blabbergassing is working extremely well today. President Trump and Treasury Secretary Bessent jawboned the S&P back out of what had looked like a triple top followed by a long slow decline all the way to a new record high! Likewise, for the Dow. And the NASDAQ is on a tear back upward, approaching its last summit, too. Wow!
The dynamic duo also talked oil futures prices into absolutely plummeting from an earlier rise with an 8% plunge in the price of WTI crude intraday. Stunning market reversals made out of nothing but hot air and opium fumes.
The juice that hit the markets was a Trumpian claim that a deal is near to being made that COULD open the Strait of Hormuz back up by tomorrow. Woohoo! Never mind that Iran, wary of the putrid swamp farts Team Trump is going to constantly blow their way, was right on it and said there is no deal in the works with the US over the Strait of Hormuz at all. Trump dismissed them as “unbelievably duplicitous” because that is how you talk about people when you are actually sitting on the cusp of a real deal waiting for their signatures that you are confident enough of to announce.
The US president describes them as “unbelievably duplicitious” in a post that resembles what we’ve seen from him frequently throughout the war.
Trump hits out at Iran for claiming there are no talks happening, saying they asked for them - “some would say ‘beg’” [some being HE would beg] - and adds Tehran’s claims around controlling the Strait of Hormuz are the “usual blather”.
Talk about the toilet calling the sink dirty!
From the Clown King’s post:
They then go on to give their usual blather in saying, the Strait of Hormuz will be operated powerfully by them, when it is already completely controlled by the United States Navy and our “Blockade” or, as some say, “The United States Wall of Steel!”
Now, there’s some blather!
Nothing gets through to Iran, unless we want it to, and nothing will get through, unless a Deal, or Total Surrender, is accomplished. Whether Iran wants to admit it or not, we are, in fact, talking of a solution to a problem that they have caused, for decades.
Completely controlled, except for the part that’s controlled by Iran, which is any part that isn’t servicing Iran’s needs. Yes, we have controlled all ships going in and out of Iranian ports, as Trump says. They control all the rest. Neither side can turn back on what the other side has shut off. All the US can do is open up the strait to the ships going to and from Iranian ports—the ones Iran wants to pass through. The US cannot open up the strait to the ships the Trump wants through that carry oil from other ports. Iran will blow holes in their tops and burn the oil up.
This is clearly clownish schoolboy boasting. I’d ask if there is anyone dumb enough to believe any of this schoolboy talk, but clearly the AI bots are, and maybe that is all that matters to Trump—opportunity to score more TACO trades in markets that are not even high-functioning casinos anymore because there is only one game in clown town—Trump’s game.
The Clown King closes his post like this:
It is very simple, IRAN WILL NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON. Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP.
He writes like he is ruling by decree, but the clownish part is that he dictates his decrees by social media posts: “Thank you for your attention to this matter.” I.e, get it done—signed, the president. We are no closer to a deal on those final words about a nuclear weapon than we were before the war began. We have seen this repeat month after month. Trump keeps believing his magical thinking can speak reality into being, and he seems to be getting irate and frustrated to find that isn’t working. That or it’s all betting scam, and I WILL get to that with a breaking report today.
So expect oil to get shorter and shorter in supply even if the price keeps going back down because we are not moving forward in getting the strait opened. Iran stated, as it has consistently said since Trump’s last vacuous schmeasefire blew to bits, that it is working on a deal with Oman, which controls the opposite shore of the strait. Iran says that, under this new bilateral deal, not multi-lateral, Oman will control all outbound traffic, which will run along its side of the strait, and Iran will control all inbound traffic, which will run on Iran’s side. Iran said they won’t charge tolls for right of passage, just “fees.” The fees, it says, will cover costs of policing the strait and of insuring safe passage. Of course, since Iran is the only party blowing up ships in the strait, other than the US blowing up Iranian ships, that sounds a lot like mafia insurance money. Pay us the insurance money, and we won’t blow you up.
Here’s the clincher: Once again, to prove its point, as you can hear all about in full detail in a video posted in the headlines section, Iran attacked, at least, one US air base today (“maybe multiple”) with three drones in Kuwait again and has struck a cargo ship in the Strait of Hormuz—not the kind of work done by someone that is sitting on the cusp of actually signing a deal!
This is Iran’s way of underscoring its point that Trump is a liar. It is their way of proving they have zero interest in negotiating with him. Let the buffoon say whatever he wants: Iran clearly has a different tale to tell and it is speaking with actions, not empty words. But, hey, oil futures down, regardless; but here’s the next clincher, actual oil for immediate delivery UP today because if you really want it with a commitment to accept delivery and a shipping schedule so you can actually use it and not just trade it, good luck getting it! (Ah, but wait until you read where the actual gaming is happening!)
Of course, an Oman-Iran pact to control all shipping through the strait and charge “fees,” not “tolls,” is a deal that won’t likely get the US to lift its blockade on Iranian shipping, and Iran also said that nothing will be opened in the strait until the US lifts its blockade. Iran reiterated none of its deal with Oman has anything to do with the US and its demands. It’s just Iran finalizing how its newly established control of the strait will work in cooperation with its neighbor since the both share the shores of the strait.
As for Iran and the US, the sides are as far apart as they ever were, but I guess the Clown King thinks he can speak his will into being if he just says it enough because that has worked for him in the past—repeat the big lie until everyone believes it. It might work with soulless AI trading bots. It’s not working with Iran. (But there is more to that story!)
Therefore, the oil market and stock market continue to operate at peak levels of human retardation if the decisions are being made by human investors at all. More likely, as Ron Unz put together, the oil markets and the stock market are monopolized by AI and algorithms, which have learned or been programmed to take anything Trump and his lackeys say at face value and trade the tirades and fake promises with no regard to reality at all even though the telling side of this tale is in the reality side of today’s news. (Well that and a couple of sly Trumpian operators who have the massive money—and inside knowledge—to game the algos.)
Reality bites
Oil prices PLUNGED and stocks hit new record highs a day after Shell Oil’s CEO said diesel and gasoline rationing in the US are likely just a few weeks away and hours after London’s Gatwick Airport sent out an “urgent” warning to airline pilots, telling them to try to refuel in other nations because Gatwick is nearly out of jet fuel for the week. So, yeah, it makes sense if you’re mentally unstable to think that the arrival of spotty shortages in critical fuels would cause American crude to absolutely plunge in price.
Donald Trump’s word still clearly carries weight.
After he cancelled strikes to work on a deal, the oil price dropped to a three-week low.
As trading began last night, the benchmark price, a barrel of Brent crude, dropped to $82.18.
Oil prices fell sharply Tuesday after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent indicated there may be a deal to open the key Strait of Hormuz as soon as this week.
“We are in talks with the Iranians,” Bessent told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “There is a chance we may have a deal today or tomorrow to open the Strait and move towards a more normalized position in this conflict.”
“It would be freedom of movement,” the Treasury Secretary said when asked whether Iran would be allowed to charge a toll.
We live in a world that is so utterly run by the flapping mouths of lunatics, most likely due to AI and algos that add amperage to human bets to make markets happen and that make no value judgements about what the president and his team say, that nothing makes sense anymore. They take the headlines at face value as I wrote about in my Deeper Dive and run with them. That or it’s just mass human retardation. That’s always possible, too. If we were run by today’s combination of news and maladjusted logic, we should hope several other major airports run out of jet fuel this week so we could really hammer down the price of fuel!
Iran better watch it, though, because Trump also warned them today that this is their last chance to get a “good deal.” We know how that has terrified them into action in the past!
“Iran is unlikely to agree to any deal without getting control of the Strait, and thus we view any potential deal as being highly likely to fail at this point,” said Ryan McKay, director of commodity strategy at TD Securities.
Someone still has a brain. Just not very many someones. And they are even less likely to agree to a deal that tags on, “and you’ll give all your enriched uranium to us.”
Reflecting on the filth of your government
But, hey, Trump & Co. are the same government guys who claimed the reflecting pool failed because some former Olympic athlete, David Hearn, peeled off some of the new finish. According to Trump that almost instantly turned the whole pond into pea soup. It couldn’t have been that Trump’s new deep, dark finish absorbed the suns rays, rather than reflected them and warmed the water causing algae to grow. That would be old-world logic like saying threats of fuel shortages by, actually, three of the nation’s leading Big Oil execs should cause oil prices to spike, not plummet. Trumpworld logic looks for scapegoats.
Pretty pathetic when someone as powerful as a president has to wreck the life of one small individual and former US champion athlete just to avoid taking the blame for his own failed job. He’s so extreme that he sounds like he may even fire Judge Jeanine Pirro, who has been a master at Trump sycophancy for years so that she went from TV judge to US Attorney for the District of Columbia because, after reviewing his case she couldn’t find a case to be made. Clearly, she’s an idiot who “folded like an umbrella,” as Trump said. That’s what you get for being a Trump loyalist so she won’t get any sympathy from me, but the injustice is so clear that it is turning the reflecting pool into the prefect symbol of the entire Trump swamp.
Trump, of course, claims loads of evidence that has never been produced to anyone (even to Jeanine Pirro), such as purported videos of people ripping the finish too shreds. But that is typical Trump, just like all the evidence of election tampering that failed to be produced in 60 court cases where all but one court threw the cases out of court for lack of court-worthy evidence. You can be sure that if Trump actually had videos of a bunch of hooligan Olympiads practicing their canoeing and swimming skills in front of the Lincoln Memorial by diving around the reflecting pool and cutting up the finish with box cutters as Trump claimed … you could be sure that Karoline Leavitt and her staff would be posting the videos all over the internet.
In the court filing, Pirro said the Department of the Interior only provided documents to her office that suggested damage to the Reflecting Pool was due to a “rushed and flawed installation” of the pool’s lining after it had already issued Hearn’s indictment. The indictment had been made based on the Interior Department’s claim that vandals were to blame for the damage, Pirro’s filing says. Had the Interior Department been “forthcoming with the information clearly in its possession, the government would not have sought a grand jury indictment [of Hearn],” the filing says.
Those would be facts, Pirro, and we don’t use those in the United States anymore. Why on earth would you drop your case just because no one actually delivered you any facts to back up their allegations. We operated in a fact-free world now. (But, then, why would you even file a case against someone before you had SEEN the facts—the material evidence. So, you just indicted yourself for running out ahead of the facts.)
The Trump administration’s repairs to the Reflecting Pool have been plagued with persistent algae and a peeling liner, though Trump has consistently blamed alleged vandals for the damage. In posts on Truth Social and in comments to reporters, Trump’s claims about the pool damage have varied—he once alleged there is a 250-foot gash, and another time alleged there is a 300-yard gash, which would equal 900 feet, though the draining of the pool did not appear to reveal such a cut. A Washington Post analysis of the pool, based on satellite imagery and conversations with experts, found the lining appears to be peeling in about seven places, indicating apparent problems with its installation. The administration’s renovation of the pool, which reportedly ballooned in cost from about $1.8 million to $16 million, is facing a probe from Senate Democrats, who said the repairs have raised “serious questions about project management, contracting practices, quality control, and fiscal responsibility.”
Let’s not be clouding the waters around here with facts! And let’s hope the gold in the new ballroom hangs on better.
What a charade! Now you have one branch of the government saying no evidence was delivered to Pirro at all (her branch) until after her department filed its case while another claims to have evidence it hasn’t produced to the person running the case, so Trump talks about dismissing the person in charge of whomever is running the case.
Herein lies the state of US government:
We have actual adults in positions of immense power bickering over a clearly made-up story about pool vandals, a story that led to an innocent American having his life turned upside down.
No wonder AI ignores the truth values of Trump’s statements. We’ve raised it on ourselves, often showing that truth doesn’t matter. It has no reason to be any more honest than the worst of us, and it proves that frequently. So, yeah, let’s have it run our stock market and our oil markets.
It takes a special kind of stupid to turn the rehabbing of a national monument like the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool into a full-blown presidential scandal. But President Donald Trump found a way to pull it off, creating a wet, ogre-colored metaphor for his administration’s stumbling lack of focus, casual dishonesty and utter inability to govern….
We all saw ample photographic evidence of the liner swiftly deteriorating and peeling up [on its own].
Unable to simply admit he screwed up a multimillion government project that nobody asked for, Trump concocted a tale of “vandals” he alleged had gashed the new pool liner with box cutters. He claimed these vandals were, of course, radical, America-hating leftists. Hearn and other pool visitors were swept up in the ginned-up fervor, targets of a feeble executive in need of arrests.
Little boy fat brat at school. “They did it,” he screams, the chocolate from the stolen candy still moist upon his sticky fingers.
All but the most brainwashed among us knew this was a desperate fiction spun by an addled, aging narcissist. And we were right.
Even Pirro, much as she’d love in typical Trump-toady manner to please her boss in order to keep her job, couldn’t find a way to spin what she had into a case that would not be scorned out of court by any judge, and she knew it. That’s the only reason she would put her job and her influence with Trump on the line.
None other than President Trump snapped back at Pirro – part of his own Justice Department – writing on social media: “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool. I don’t know what she was thinking?”
Therein lies the problem. She was thinking. And we don’t do that anymore in America … at least not if you watch how our markets move on every word Trump speaks exactly opposite of where the daily news should point them.
Interior Department Secretary Doug Burgum also got mad at Pirro, writing on X: “The evidence is clear, vandals have repeatedly caused damage to the Reflecting Pool.”
The evidence is about as clear as the algae-covered Reflecting Pool. And if these mopes had video evidence of teams of boxcutter-wielding antifa frogmen descending on the Reflecting Pool under cover of darkness to do massive destruction, they would have aired that video everywhere and quite literally never shut up about it.
Exactly. Put up or shut up.
They have nothing, aside from their own incompetence. Period.
But I do love seeing these assorted losers fight. They’re doing a perfect job showing the American people the bungling uselessness of the Trump administration….
Put simply, this stinks. And it’s not going to get better. The Reflecting Pool debacle could have and should have been dealt with swiftly and put to bed. But it has been going on for months, and it keeps getting stupider.
It’s a total clown show. Look at how badly they bungled the Epstain investigation. But, hey, at least all the flapjawing got that off their backs. It’s hardly being talked about, so I’ll put it back in the news today via cartoons in the headlines that follow.
No wonder the war is progressing so well. As the idiots spend time bickering between each other about the phantom pool vandals and finding an American champion to pin the failed job on as scapegoat, you can, at least, be sure YOUR price of fuel is going higher because, no matter what the futures market is doing today, when the shortages show up, as I’ve said all along, your price is going through the roof.
Shell Oil yesterday and now Exxon and Chevron say, “Any week now!” Meanwhile trucking companies are going out of business because they cannot afford the price of fuel and are not able to fully pass the price increases on to their customers. (See the headlines below.)
Exxon, Shell and Chevron are warning that the real bottleneck in energy markets is refined fuel, not crude, even as oil futures ease. Wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, plus export curbs from China and Russia, have cut global refining capacity by as much as 10%, and refiners are already running near their limits ahead of autumn maintenance season.
Exxon, Shell and Chevron say pump prices will stay elevated regardless of where crude oil trades, arguing the squeeze has shifted from the wellhead to the refinery. Big Oil now joins analysts who had flagged the physical fuel market rather than futures charts.
Of course, they all want to maintain the huge windfalls they are making on their crude oil and shift your focus to the problem being a lack of refining capacity. While that IS a big problem—and we will see rising fuel prices—it is untrue that the reduction in crude is not a problem. It is THE problem that caused the initial rise in fuel prices before refineries were destroyed.
Exxon’s Gulf Coast refineries have been running at a 95% utilization rate, Chevron’s at 97%, and Shell’s topped 100%, clocking in at 102% over the second quarter. That rate cannot be sustained for long without raising the risk of adverse consequences, meaning refiners will eventually cut runs and output.
According to Exxon’s chief financial officer Neil Hansen: “The constraint pain point in the energy system is refining”, he told Bloomberg last week, adding that this is perhaps something the market isn’t fully focused on.
That is true for the United States where we have a lot of our own oil; but there is more to it than that. Big Oil is running refineries at record rates because they can sell all the fuel they make at exorbitant prices all over the world to other nations that do not have enough crude of their own to make fuels. In many places crude is very much the limiting factor.
Rabobank senior energy strategist Joe DeLaura told the Wall Street Journal that Persian Gulf refineries cannot move product out, calling diesel the fuel the industrial economy runs on. Shell’s chief executive Wael Sawan told CNBC that price signals now show the market is short on diesel and gasoline, requiring refiners to reoptimize.
Exxon’s chief executive said last month that available refining capacity relative to demand has never been this low, adding that the industry will need time to recover.
The grifters
According to one report in the headlines below, one major oil-producing nation has now discovered WHO is manipulating prices in the oil futures market and HOW….
