As I research the Deeper Dive I promised this weekend, covering a possible White House conspiracy to crash the dollar for paying subscribers, the more and more I find about Bessent, the more and more troubling he looks. So far, no solid evidence that he's designing to crash the dollar, but an awful lot of motives, M.O.s, and grounds for suspicion, and I haven't even finished my research.
Have you considered the possibility that preserving the dollar's status as the global trade currency is NOT a long term goal for Trump?
Perhaps preserving this status was already made impossible by policies enacted from the 1980s through 2016, and Trump's team is just adapting to the new arrangement ahead of everyone else?
well written and interesting but this essay presumes that a fragmentation of the deeply centralized global financial system is inherently a bad thing when solid arguments, with mountains of supporting historical observations to back them up, can be made that a retreat from global economic central planning and a restoring of regionalized and to a lesser but still substantial extent localized capital formation and capital deployment decision making would be a great thing not just for economies but also for civilization itself, and there will *always* be cross border trade, in fact, the economic growth tat occurs because of it will actually *increase* trade as their sill be far more firms to do trade in the first place
Actually, I don't presume fragmentation of globalization is a bad thing. I think the breakup of globalization is ultimately needed because it was wrongly conceived in the first place. HOWEVER, that does not mean that the breakup of an ill-conceived global plan that has been deeply implemented will not be deeply destructive FOR EVERYONE! Don't kid yourself. We are all deeply wrapped up in it, even if we hated the way it was happening under te Bush's etc. for decades!
On top of that, it doesn't mean we are not adding to the pain with a tariff war that focuses on such silly things as trade imbalances. How will ANY nation seeking the trade that benefits its citizens the most experience a better lifestyle by making certain that POOR nations that cannot afford much buy as much from it as it buys from them (especially when in most cases the US ALSO has a bigger population)? Clearly, it is impossible for smaller, poorer nations to equal us in what they buy, so the only way to achieve that is for Americans to buy FAR less, which means living with far less. How is that to our advantage? How is that to the advantage of those nations?
There are smart ways of making sure trade if fair and ham-fisted ways that clobber people for simply providing things we like at a price we love!
I'm all for the localization. I always lean toward more expensive purchases IF they support my local economy and I'm getting good quality stuff. But the idea of "balanced" trade with impoverished nations is a ridiculous worry. What do I care if they sell ten times more stuff to me at a cheap price because I am wealthy enough to buy and enjoy it all than what they buy from me because they are poor and cannot afford much. It's way of mismeasuring globalization.
LET them make money selling good things at low prices to me! I truly hope it helps them, and would even be willing to pay a little more anytime I could know the additional profit margin went straight to the worker at the bottom of it all (but it never does). I'm glad if selling a ton of stuff inexpensively to me improves their lives. I really am. I genuinely HOPE it does. If that means their tiny nation sells 10x more stuff to our big nation than our nation sells to them, what can you expect? They're poor!
In fact, any government trying to force balance trade actually is CENTRAL PLANNING. The government should stay out of it and let me buy all I want and let them sell all they want. Quotas are brain-dead. Making sure the playing field if fair is a different matter, but Trump is focusing on balanced trade--obsessively-- and that's just dumb.
Its about capital formation, banking and finance regulations, and development economics. The reason the Congo "sells" more to us than we do to them is not because they are poorer, its because the are effectively a mining colony. A mining colony will always run a trade surplus.
I decided to revisit the period of American history known as the 'Bank War'. After having read five books on it, in order to find out what it was really about I had to pay to access a wide partisan range of papers from the time and then also look through us state level legislative records, and theres something telling about that.
The 'Bank War' was about capital formation, banking and finance regulations, and development economics. California was very close to having a development economics program applied to it that was almost the same as the one that has been applied to the Congo for the past fifty years. Complete with "regulatory harmonization", strict and nonnegotiable economic/legal structures that asserted the concepts of comparative advantage and a highly precise American continental division of labor. Well, we've seen the results.
Using Massachusetts as microcosm, Worcester Ma -- a socio-economic political community -- gaining the ability to, within limits, for the most part dictate the deployment of *its own* area capital led to huge investments in everything from new infrastructure and businesses and a high quality technical academy called WPI (at first a predecessor programs(s) to it) and lots else.
There are accurate global maps of capital flows would shock many people. No such map could every come about absent planetary central planning. We have planetary economic central planning. If things of the sort I mentioned were rectified, then even if every nation had a 100% tariff on literally every item, international trade would still soon begin to greatly increase
The ‘trial’ program to allow certain Chinese insurance firms to hold 1% of their assets in gold will likely be made permanent and extend to many, if not all, of Chinese insurance firms.
And if Vince Landi and Eric Yeung are correct, that 1% will ultimately become 5%, as China sees a dual use for this policy. Shore up the balance sheet of their insurance industry and pressure the gold price in the US (and the West in general).
China restricts the export of 7 critical rate earths, specifically the ones needed to make the powerful magnets that are required to build EVs, weapons systems, satellites, and hundreds of other applications.
And, I read last night (can’t find the source) that China is (or soon will be) instructing their banking sector to begin building a silver reserve by accumulating physical silver. Assuming this is true, this could put immense pressure on the physical silver market, and start the process of destroying the massive amount of paper short positions held by the bullion banks, JP Morgan in particular.
Nothing would make me happier than to see JPM destroyed. But sadly the price for that happening is likely more than we want to
For sure on JPM getting flushed, except for the fact that you can be sure we'll all pay dearly for that, whether they let it fall on us or use us to bail it out because they have spent years since the GFC making certain that it is much too bigger to fail than it was. Every time they parted out a failing bank, they put the savory pieces into JPM (as I know you know, so just ranting here) to make it even more gargantuan. It's sickening, but I'd still rather see it be forced to fail entirely when it brings failure upon itself, regardless of the cost of not bailing it out.
Your ignorance is peeking through your mediocrity, dave......
UNLESS you are a Spiritual Master, aware of humanity's difficult place & journey through this Universe, through the illusion of time & space......that you have deep understanding of Man's Karmic debt at personal, national & world level...that there are No Accidents in the Universe...that every thought, word & deed has its consequence....that war, with all its perceived horrors, is but a culmination of those consequences necessary in the Kali Yuga in which we find ourselves, as a purge, a cleansing, with the slight opportunity at least, through that cleansing, of rising above, breaking out from, the iron bonds of physicality & ignorance with which we are justly bound, to continue our long journey back to Source...
...in which case, kindly put me on the waiting list for your next beginners class.
I don’t have a good feeling about Bessent. He seems to be a yes man.
As I research the Deeper Dive I promised this weekend, covering a possible White House conspiracy to crash the dollar for paying subscribers, the more and more I find about Bessent, the more and more troubling he looks. So far, no solid evidence that he's designing to crash the dollar, but an awful lot of motives, M.O.s, and grounds for suspicion, and I haven't even finished my research.
As long as Warren Buffett holds dollars,
The dollar will be ok.
Have you considered the possibility that preserving the dollar's status as the global trade currency is NOT a long term goal for Trump?
Perhaps preserving this status was already made impossible by policies enacted from the 1980s through 2016, and Trump's team is just adapting to the new arrangement ahead of everyone else?
I'm considering it very strongly in the Deeper Dive I'm starting to write today.
well written and interesting but this essay presumes that a fragmentation of the deeply centralized global financial system is inherently a bad thing when solid arguments, with mountains of supporting historical observations to back them up, can be made that a retreat from global economic central planning and a restoring of regionalized and to a lesser but still substantial extent localized capital formation and capital deployment decision making would be a great thing not just for economies but also for civilization itself, and there will *always* be cross border trade, in fact, the economic growth tat occurs because of it will actually *increase* trade as their sill be far more firms to do trade in the first place
Actually, I don't presume fragmentation of globalization is a bad thing. I think the breakup of globalization is ultimately needed because it was wrongly conceived in the first place. HOWEVER, that does not mean that the breakup of an ill-conceived global plan that has been deeply implemented will not be deeply destructive FOR EVERYONE! Don't kid yourself. We are all deeply wrapped up in it, even if we hated the way it was happening under te Bush's etc. for decades!
On top of that, it doesn't mean we are not adding to the pain with a tariff war that focuses on such silly things as trade imbalances. How will ANY nation seeking the trade that benefits its citizens the most experience a better lifestyle by making certain that POOR nations that cannot afford much buy as much from it as it buys from them (especially when in most cases the US ALSO has a bigger population)? Clearly, it is impossible for smaller, poorer nations to equal us in what they buy, so the only way to achieve that is for Americans to buy FAR less, which means living with far less. How is that to our advantage? How is that to the advantage of those nations?
There are smart ways of making sure trade if fair and ham-fisted ways that clobber people for simply providing things we like at a price we love!
I'm all for the localization. I always lean toward more expensive purchases IF they support my local economy and I'm getting good quality stuff. But the idea of "balanced" trade with impoverished nations is a ridiculous worry. What do I care if they sell ten times more stuff to me at a cheap price because I am wealthy enough to buy and enjoy it all than what they buy from me because they are poor and cannot afford much. It's way of mismeasuring globalization.
LET them make money selling good things at low prices to me! I truly hope it helps them, and would even be willing to pay a little more anytime I could know the additional profit margin went straight to the worker at the bottom of it all (but it never does). I'm glad if selling a ton of stuff inexpensively to me improves their lives. I really am. I genuinely HOPE it does. If that means their tiny nation sells 10x more stuff to our big nation than our nation sells to them, what can you expect? They're poor!
In fact, any government trying to force balance trade actually is CENTRAL PLANNING. The government should stay out of it and let me buy all I want and let them sell all they want. Quotas are brain-dead. Making sure the playing field if fair is a different matter, but Trump is focusing on balanced trade--obsessively-- and that's just dumb.
Its about capital formation, banking and finance regulations, and development economics. The reason the Congo "sells" more to us than we do to them is not because they are poorer, its because the are effectively a mining colony. A mining colony will always run a trade surplus.
I decided to revisit the period of American history known as the 'Bank War'. After having read five books on it, in order to find out what it was really about I had to pay to access a wide partisan range of papers from the time and then also look through us state level legislative records, and theres something telling about that.
The 'Bank War' was about capital formation, banking and finance regulations, and development economics. California was very close to having a development economics program applied to it that was almost the same as the one that has been applied to the Congo for the past fifty years. Complete with "regulatory harmonization", strict and nonnegotiable economic/legal structures that asserted the concepts of comparative advantage and a highly precise American continental division of labor. Well, we've seen the results.
Using Massachusetts as microcosm, Worcester Ma -- a socio-economic political community -- gaining the ability to, within limits, for the most part dictate the deployment of *its own* area capital led to huge investments in everything from new infrastructure and businesses and a high quality technical academy called WPI (at first a predecessor programs(s) to it) and lots else.
There are accurate global maps of capital flows would shock many people. No such map could every come about absent planetary central planning. We have planetary economic central planning. If things of the sort I mentioned were rectified, then even if every nation had a 100% tariff on literally every item, international trade would still soon begin to greatly increase
Mortgage rates now at 7.5%
The ‘trial’ program to allow certain Chinese insurance firms to hold 1% of their assets in gold will likely be made permanent and extend to many, if not all, of Chinese insurance firms.
And if Vince Landi and Eric Yeung are correct, that 1% will ultimately become 5%, as China sees a dual use for this policy. Shore up the balance sheet of their insurance industry and pressure the gold price in the US (and the West in general).
China restricts the export of 7 critical rate earths, specifically the ones needed to make the powerful magnets that are required to build EVs, weapons systems, satellites, and hundreds of other applications.
And, I read last night (can’t find the source) that China is (or soon will be) instructing their banking sector to begin building a silver reserve by accumulating physical silver. Assuming this is true, this could put immense pressure on the physical silver market, and start the process of destroying the massive amount of paper short positions held by the bullion banks, JP Morgan in particular.
Nothing would make me happier than to see JPM destroyed. But sadly the price for that happening is likely more than we want to
Pay.
For sure on JPM getting flushed, except for the fact that you can be sure we'll all pay dearly for that, whether they let it fall on us or use us to bail it out because they have spent years since the GFC making certain that it is much too bigger to fail than it was. Every time they parted out a failing bank, they put the savory pieces into JPM (as I know you know, so just ranting here) to make it even more gargantuan. It's sickening, but I'd still rather see it be forced to fail entirely when it brings failure upon itself, regardless of the cost of not bailing it out.
Nice analysis old mate...but you didn't state the bleedin' obvious: This is all leading to WAR!
War is good for progress. THE best thing actually
Your ignorance is peeking through your mediocrity, dave......
UNLESS you are a Spiritual Master, aware of humanity's difficult place & journey through this Universe, through the illusion of time & space......that you have deep understanding of Man's Karmic debt at personal, national & world level...that there are No Accidents in the Universe...that every thought, word & deed has its consequence....that war, with all its perceived horrors, is but a culmination of those consequences necessary in the Kali Yuga in which we find ourselves, as a purge, a cleansing, with the slight opportunity at least, through that cleansing, of rising above, breaking out from, the iron bonds of physicality & ignorance with which we are justly bound, to continue our long journey back to Source...
...in which case, kindly put me on the waiting list for your next beginners class.
But it's true. Almost every technological progress has been in the pursuit of making better war
My first sentence applies. Please cancel my application.
Since it was obvious, I didn't need to ; ) Also, I did mention that a couple of times ago.