Politics & Stuff

[Fernando 6,534]

1 hour ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Shares are dropping this morning (25k off my portfolio) and its like we said each country scrabbling to do their own grubby deal with Washington. That will backfire in most cases. If every country united and demanded 50% tariffs off the US it would end. 😜

Republicans back Trump for the conservative approach but many will turn on him when he tanks the economy. 

He could get shot again. I will not be surprised if it's a Republican that does it. 

Lunacy from Trump with all these tariffs. 

[Fulham Broadway 17,092]

Just now, Fernando said:

Republicans back Trump for the conservative approach but many will turn on him when he tanks the economy. 

He could get shot again. I will not be surprised if it's a Republican that does it. 

Lunacy from Trump with all these tariffs. 

Think you are right. Republicans will not like it.

Though it seems the Trump administration had thought of that...Howard Lutnick, the US Commerce Secretary and former CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, has been instrumental in shaping Donald Trump’s tariff strategy.  He will be the fall guy.... but it also will tarnish Trump in the longer term

[Vesper 29,448]

Royal Mail takeover deal by Czech billionaire to be finalised this month

Daniel Křetínský clears final regulatory hurdles for £3.6bn takeover of Royal Mail parent company

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/apr/03/royal-mail-takeover-deal-czech-billionaire-finalised-daniel-kretinsky

The £3.6bn takeover of Royal Mail’s parent company will be completed this month, nearly a year after it was first agreed, as the Czech billionaire Daniel Křetínský cleared the final regulatory hurdles standing in the way.

International Distribution Services (IDS), the owner of the 508-year-old Royal Mail, said on Thursday the deal “may become or be declared unconditional” by 30 April, after a delay due to issues in Romania.

The most pressing issue, UK government approval, was clinched in December after a state review of national security laws.

However, Křetínský’s company had warned in March that the deal might not be finalised until the second quarter of this year due to regulatory issues relating to foreign direct investment in Romania.

But in a triumph for the billionaire known as the “Czech sphinx”, Křetínský’s EP Group confirmed on Thursday that “all of the regulatory and anti-trust conditions in relation to the offer were satisfied”.

The deal will mean Royal Mail will be controlled by an overseas owner for the first time in its history, which can be traced as far back as 1516 under Henry VIII.

The takeover comes with a number of conditions from the UK government, including that it will retain a “golden share” in IDS, which means any changes to Royal Mail’s ownership, tax residency or headquarters will need its approval. The UK owns golden shares in companies that are regarded as crucial to its security, including the weapons manufacturers BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce.

The takeover had been called in for a review in August on national security grounds, because Royal Mail’s letter delivery still plays a crucial – albeit diminishing – role in the country’s communications infrastructure.

The Royal Mail brand will also be protected for as long as EP owns the company.

EP Group has also agreed to retain the universal service obligation, which guarantees a first-class postal service to anywhere in the UK for a fixed price six days a week, while Křetínský is in control. IDS has suggested second-class post could be reduced to every other weekday.

The government has blocked Royal Mail from making dividend payouts, or other similar payments to its owners, unless the company meets financial targets and has improved its postal delivery performance.

Dividends and asset sales will also be blocked if they put the universal service at risk.

Royal Mail is the latest British asset to be snapped up by Křetínský, who already owns 27% of West Ham United football club and 10% of the Sainsbury’s supermarket chain. He also holds stakes in several retailers including the US department store Macy’s, the trainer retailer Foot Locker, and the German retailer turned wholesaler Metro.

Meanwhile, Křetínský’s EP Group, Royal Mail’s new owner, primarily runs coal, gas and power generation operations.

[Fulham Broadway 17,092]

Seems backlash is starting....While Trump celebrated his so-called "Liberation Day” at the White House this week, the real victory happened hundreds of miles away in Wisconsin.

Voters defied Elon Musk’s $20 million influx of cash, rejected deceptive campaign tactics, and elected Judge Susan Crawford. The state seems to have turned on Trump, swinging to the left across the board.

[Vesper 29,448]

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/will-careless-stupidity-kill-the

America created the modern world trading system. The rules governing tariffs and the negotiating process that brought those tariffs down over time grew out of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, devised by FDR in 1934. The growth in international trade under that system had some negative aspects but was on balance very good for America and the world. It was, in fact, one of our greatest policy achievements.

Yesterday Donald Trump burned it all down. Here’s what just happened to the average U.S. tariff rate:

The tariffs Trump announced were higher than almost anyone expected. This is a much bigger shock to the economy than the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930, especially when you bear in mind that international trade is about three times as important now as it was then.

The size of the tariffs, however, wasn’t the only shocking thing about the Rose Garden announcement. Arguably what we learned about how the Trump team arrived at those tariff rates — the sheer malignant stupidity of the whole thing — was even worse.

You might be tempted to dismiss complaints about the policy process as elitist snobbery. But credibility is a crucial part of policymaking. Businesses can’t plan if they have no idea what to expect next. Foreign governments won’t make policies that help America if they don’t expect us to respond rationally.

So what do we know about how the Trumpists arrived at their tariff plan? Trump claimed that the tariff rates imposed on different countries reflected their policies, but James Surowiecki soon noted that the tariffs applied to each country appeared to be derived from a crude formula based on the U.S. trade deficit with that country. Trump officials denied this, while at the same time the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative released a note confirming Surowiecki’s guess. Here’s their explanation:

 

Ignore the Greek letters, which cancel each other out. This says that the assumed level of a country’s protectionism is equal to its trade surplus with America divided by its exports to America.

Trump also set minimum tariffs of 10 percent on everyone, which means among other things imposing tariffs on uninhabited islands.

There’s so much wrong with this approach that it’s hard to know where to start. But one easy thing to point out is that the Trump calculation only considers trade in goods, while ignoring trade in services. This is a big omission. Notably, the European Union runs a substantial surplus with us if you only look at trade in goods — but this is largely offset by an EU deficit in services trade:

So if Trump’s people had plugged all trade with the EU, not just trade in physical goods, into their formula they would have concluded that Europe is hardly protectionist at all.

Where is this stuff coming from? One of these days we’ll probably get the full story, but it looks to me like something thrown together by a junior staffer with only a couple of hours’ notice. That USTR note, in particular, reads like something written by a student who hasn’t done the reading and is trying to bullshit their way through an exam.

But it may be even worse than that. The Trump formula is apparently what you get if you ask ChatGPT and other AI models to make tariff policy:

In my post immediately following the Trump announcement I speculated that Elon Musk’s Dunning-Kruger kids might be responsible for those tariff numbers. That now looks like a distinct possibility.

Who makes policy this way? The key point is that Trump isn’t really trying to accomplish economic goals. This should all be seen as a dominance display, intended to shock and awe people and make them grovel, rather than policy in the normal sense.

Again, I’m not being snobbish here. When the fate of the world economy is on the line, the malignant stupidity of the policy process is arguably as important as the policies themselves. How can anyone, whether they’re businesspeople or foreign governments, trust anything coming out of an administration that behaves like this?

Next thing you’ll be telling me that Trump’s people are planning military actions over insecure channels and accidentally sharing those plans with journalists. Oh, wait.

I’d like to imagine that Trump will admit that he messed up, cancel the whole thing, and start over. But he won’t, because that would spoil the dominance display. Ignorant irresponsibility is part of the message.

MUSICAL CODA

 

 

[Fulham Broadway 17,092]

Must be a lot of voters regret now

[Fernando 6,534]

3 hours ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Must be a lot of voters regret now

Probably. 

But I wish I could ask him a question. What is the plan for housing?

Why no one ask this? Trump is a mogul in real estate, surely he must have some plan. 

Unless his plan is to take us to recession so housing becomes cheap? 

[Fulham Broadway 17,092]

8 minutes ago, Fernando said:

Probably. 

But I wish I could ask him a question. What is the plan for housing?

Why no one ask this? Trump is a mogul in real estate, surely he must have some plan. 

Unless his plan is to take us to recession so housing becomes cheap? 

It will be more privatization, imo, - high end of the market is all theyre interested in. They dont give a flying fuck about 'ordinary struggling people' trying to start out on the housing ladder. Theyve already privatised Fanny mae and Freddie Mac who were federal and reponsiblefor 3/4 of sll mortgages. So basiclally houses will become more expensive

[Fernando 6,534]

10 hours ago, Fulham Broadway said:

It will be more privatization, imo, - high end of the market is all theyre interested in. They dont give a flying fuck about 'ordinary struggling people' trying to start out on the housing ladder. Theyve already privatised Fanny mae and Freddie Mac who were federal and reponsiblefor 3/4 of sll mortgages. So basiclally houses will become more expensive

Interesting I saw this old video from Trump. In it he discussed how many countries are ripping us of like Japan. 

It seems like he always wanted to have some kind of plan like all these tariffs. Insane. 

 

 

[Vesper 29,448]

'The most economically illiterate speech I have ever heard', analyst says • FRANCE 24 English

 

[whats happening 1,563]

17 hours ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Must be a lot of voters regret now

they deserve it.

[Vesper 29,448]

3 hours ago, Fernando said:

Interesting I saw this old video from Trump. In it he discussed how many countries are ripping us of like Japan. 

It seems like he always wanted to have some kind of plan like all these tariffs. Insane. 

 

 

Absolute bollocks.

Most every time the US has tried large tariff regimes in the past it has caused economic disaster.

Please go do the most basic of research about it before you listen to that profoundly ignorant fool Trump.

I will assist you with one such instance, one that greatly deepened The Great Depression:

 

Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot–Hawley_Tariff_Act

The Tariff Act of 1930, also known as the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act, was a protectionist trade measure signed into law in the United States by President Herbert Hoover on June 17, 1930. Named after its chief congressional sponsors, Senator Reed Smoot and Representative Willis C. Hawley, the act raised tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods in an effort to shield American industries from foreign competition during the onset of the Great Depression, which had started in October 1929. Excluding duty-free imports, the tariffs imposed by the act raised the existing import duties by an average of 20%, to the third highest levels in U.S. history, after the tariffs imposed on the world by President Donald Trump in 2025 and the Tariff of 1828.

Hoover signed the bill against the advice of many senior economists, yielding to pressure from his party and business leaders. Intended to bolster domestic employment and manufacturing, the tariffs instead deepened the Depression because the U.S.'s trading partners retaliated with tariffs of their own, leading to U.S. exports and global trade plummeting. Economists and historians widely regard the act as a policy misstep, and it remains a cautionary example of protectionist policy in modern economic debates. It was followed by more liberal trade agreements, such as the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934.

 

snip

 

During his 2024 political campaign, Donald Trump pledged to institute similar tariffs.

In its annual forecast supplement for the global economy that was published in November 2024 ('Year Ahead' for 2025), The Economist observed that [in the wake of the Tariff Act] "... global trade fell by two-thirds. It was so catastrophic for growth in America and around the world that legislators have not touched the issue since. 'Smoot-Hawley' became synonymous with disastrous policy making".

 

[Vesper 29,448]

[Vesper 29,448]

Will Trump’s tariffs cause global economic crash? | Robert Kaplan | Fourcast

Channel 4 News
 

 

 

Donald Trump has announced global tariffs on an unprecedented scale, holding up a chart in the White House Rose Garden outlining what each country will pay and while the UK seems to have got off relatively lightly, almost nowhere has escaped America's determination to bolster its home-grown trade and manufacturing.

Even the penguins that are the only inhabitants of a chain of remote Antarctic islands have been slapped with a 10 percent tariff. Prices in the US are likely to go up. The global economy faces a period of chaos amid plunging markets. But is a trade war inevitable? And could it spiral out of control and escalate into something much worse?

For this episode of the Fourcast, Krishnan Guru-Murthy is joined by the American author and commentator Robert Kaplan whose writing examines the nature of US power, and Channel 4 News Economics Correspondent Helia Ebrahimi.

Edited Friday at 12:54 by Vesper

[Vesper 29,448]

[Vesper 29,448]

"American Empire Is in Decline": Economist Richard Wolff on Trump's Trade War & Tariffs

 

[Fernando 6,534]

Yes oil coming down and 10 year coming down is just one thing, recession. 

Gold still holding strong but I bet they sell that one fast next week as well. 

[Vesper 29,448]

UK police charge comedian Russell Brand with rape

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/uk-police-charge-comedian-russell-brand-with-rape/ar-AA1Cim1R