Trump Accidentally Tells Truth, Market Tanks, Oil Banks, Bond Yields Rise Again
I started the week claiming “Trump’s Israel-Iran Schmeasefire Blows Apart.” Then, yesterday, I reported on how Trump’s lie count for claims that “Iran really wants to do a deal, and the war will end in 2-3 more days” hit instant-replay #38. And now on Wednesday, just two days after I declared the blowout of the Schmeasefire, the feigned deal to be made has disintegrated to a level that blew a fuse in Trump’s brain, causing him to accidentally get honest for once. And that’s when the bottom fell out of the stock market and the elevator went up on oil.
President Donald Trump said Wednesday that the U.S. would hit Iran “very hard” again, escalating his public threats as he pressed Tehran to sign a deal.
“We hit them hard yesterday, and we’re going to hit them hard again today,” Trump said at a White House signing event for the Secure America Act. “We’re going to be attacking them and attacking them very hard.”
As a result, the running-on-fumes, jawboned stock market plunged 953 points on the Dow (-1.87%) and 509 points on the smaller NASDAQ (-1.98%)
The real moment of honesty came when …
He wrote early Wednesday that Iran has “taken too long to negotiate a deal that would have been great for them, now they will have to pay the price!!!”
Waiting too long is a sure sign that it really wants to make a deal. It has, of course, waited too long because, as I’ve said every time Trump spoons a little of his snake oil to his willingly captive stock market, Iran is not the least bit anxious to make a deal. Iran is hoping to make Israel and US suffer severely, and it has said so. It has said the war will be over when Iran decides the war is over. Iran has already been devastated by heavy bombing, but the regime has survived; and the regime wants to make sure to exact severe economic harm on the US and Israel and a great part of the West in revenge. More than three months ago, I said Iran had turned this war into a war of attrition when it blocked the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran knows that the longer it simply maintains the blockade, the more severe the damage will become for the rest of the world, including the US and Israel, and Israel becomes increasingly hated by nearly the whole world every time it tries to blow up a deal. So, stalling on every offered deal plays perfectly into Iran’s hand.
Trump has also now admitted that Iran did more than shoot down a US helicopter, it also attacked some US destroyers.
Of course, because the stock market has licked every drop of Trump’s snake oil from its lips, the market has a lot of re-reckoning to do as the fact that the war is not ending soon gets relentlessly pounded into incredibly-dense-because-incredibly-greedy investors’ heads. Both the stock market and oil market.
“The Iran war story is really consequential,” said Jed Ellerbroek, portfolio manager at Argent Capital Management. “Either investors are going to be proven right, that [there’s] nothing to worry about, Trump will take care of it, we’ll get a deal with Iran and the strait will open up, but if not, it feels like oil prices are going to have to go up a lot.”
Again, the former leading market stocks continued to lead the market down today, which has been my thesis for months—that AI would take everything else down in a dot-com style bust. That was my claim even back in the days when all the experts were spelling out why that could never happen. Now, it’s happening.
You see, the market cannot handle the truth from the Don because he has nurtured it on lies for so long, that accepting the truth will require major re-orientation, and that will become very disorderly.
Shares of Micron Technology Advanced Micro Devices,and Broadcom were lower, falling for the fourth day in five. The iShares Semiconductor ETF dropped more than 3% rolling over on Tuesday. Chip stocks were pummeled at the end of last week, culminating in a 10% decline for the SOXX ETF on Friday. The group then rebounded slightly Monday before the selling resumed Tuesday.
There are, of course, still idiots who …
believe the weakness is just profit taking after such a rapid run.
It should also come as no surprise that Iran’s war of attrition, which keeps oil prices elevated between $90-100/bbl, is now driving general inflation up more sharply. That came out in the news headlines below, too. Watch, as I have been forecasting, for the major inflation gauges to get red-hot as we move through the summer.
Trump said Iran “should sign the deal” and said that the U.S. wants an agreement “that’s meaningful and works.”
“We’ll see what happens with the deal,” Trump said.
Again, a little unintended honesty seeped in. It has always been the US (Trump) that “wants an agreement.” Iran has always made it crystal clear that it has little-to-no willingness to negotiate with Trump because it considers him a pathologically relentless liar and because the gap between his demands and theirs is so wide. The other unintentional honesty is that “We’ll see what happens with the deal.” Yes, we will. It has always been the case that we will see what really happens and that nothing we see ever looks anything like what Trump keeps saying is right around the corner.
Iran has a say in how the war goes, and their answer to Trump is that it goes hotter:
In response Wednesday afternoon, the head of the national security commission in Iran’s parliament, Ebrahim Azizi, wrote that “this time, the war won’t be limited to the region,” in a post on X.
Trump, as always, continued today to say Iran’s air force and navy have been completely wiped out, so it’s kind of peculiar that they keep managing to take out US helicopters and damage destroyers. We’re now way, way past the original 2-3 days that were supposed to take us to a deal with Iran, so I guess “we’ll see what happens” when Iran intensifies the war effort, as it now says it will do, since the US has gone back to a more intensified war. Iran has done much better at doing what it says it will do than Trump has.
An Iranian drone then brought down an American Apache helicopter prompting several hours of U.S. retaliatory strikes. Iranian officials tried to portray the downing as an accident, then launched missile and drone strikes on U.S. allies in the Gulf and Jordan in response to the American attacks.
Another bit of larger truth slipped out as the president lost his patience today because his delusions are not being fulfilled by Iran:
US President Donald Trump said three US Navy destroyers were attacked as they moved through the Strait of Hormuz….
Earlier he had mentioned only the helicopter. However, after this new revelation, things get foggy again:
“Three World Class American Destroyers just transited, very successfully, out of the Strait of Hormuz, under fire. There was no damage done to the three Destroyers, but great damage done to the Iranian attackers,” Trump wrote on Truth Social….
“They trifled with us today. We blew them away,” Trump said in Washington.
But Iran’s top joint military command accused the US of violating the ceasefire by targeting an Iranian oil tanker and another ship. It also said the US carried out air attacks on civilian areas on Qeshm Island, a strategic point at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz believed to house much of Iran’s naval force, and nearby coastal areas in Bandar Khamir and Sirik in southern Iran. Iranian air defences were also triggered over western Tehran. The military said it had responded to these incidents by striking US military vessels east of the strait and south of the port of Chabahar.
A spokesperson for Iran’s Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters, the operational base of Iran’s Armed Forces, claimed the Iranian strikes inflicted “significant damage”, contrasting with the US Central Command claim that none of its assets had been hit.
Who you gonna believe? Last time Trump said our aircraft carriers were not harmed, we saw photos of them smoking and limping off for repairs and heard about whole compartments being burned out.
Reassuringly, Vice President JD Vance indicated today that the war may continue for another year (at most, he said). I guess we’ll see what happens there, too.
There is just so much winning! Actually, I can tell you one kind of winning that has a good chance of playing out in the next couple of days. It is now widely known that every time Trump makes a big announcement like today, very large inside trading moves appear in the stock market 15-30 minutes before his announcement. So, maybe Trump & Co. shorted the market in all the right places before the announcement today, and then will buy many stocks in 24-48 hours because Trump will announce another 2-3 day horizon for deal #39. He and his will make bank twice in about forty-eight hours … again. Somebody is doing it. We don’t know who, but we do know large bets are being placed just in time every time.
So much winning! And to think I saw someone say again today how benevolent Trump is to continue to work as president and not collect his salary! When you have the choicest throne in the world for making pronouncements to benefit insider traders plus supreme-court-granted “total immunity” for everything you do as an official action, who needs a paycheck when you can make bank off proclamations of war and peace?
