Politics & Stuff

[Vesper 29,406]

11 minutes ago, Fernando said:

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. 

gold is a safety valve, a hedge against inflation and economic turmoil

[Fernando 6,532]

8 minutes ago, Vesper said:

gold is a safety valve, a hedge against inflation and economic turmoil

Majority of the time but this is what happens when the major markets are crashing. Traders will get margin calls as they are in world of pain and what they do is close their strongest positions to meet those Margin calls. Hence you get selling of gold. 

Edited 17 hours ago by Fernando

[Fulham Broadway 17,091]

1 hour ago, Fernando said:

Majority of the time but this is what happens when the major markets are crashing. Traders will get margin calls as they are in world of pain and what they do is close their strongest positions to meet those Margin calls. Hence you get selling of gold. 

Always know when a recession is coming - all the London and provincial pawnbrokers dust off their signs 'We Want Your Gold' 'Best Prices Paid for Your Gold' 

They're doing that now.....

[Vesper 29,406]

U.S. stock market has wiped out $9.6 trillion since Inauguration Day

https://www.marketwatch.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-s-p-and-nasdaq-set-for-further-losses-after-1-679-point-blue-chip-tumble/card/u-s-stock-market-has-lost-9-6-trillion-in-value-since-inauguration-day-6NL1f3p5I5eUhbOGt2Wy

U.S. stocks have had a rough go of it since President Donald Trump was sworn into office for his second term in January.

Since Jan. 17, the Friday before Inauguration Day, the U.S. stock market has seen $9.6 trillion in value erased, according to data from FactSet and Dow Jones Market Data. Of those losses, $5 trillion has been erased just over the past two days -- the largest two-day loss on record.

Major equity indexes were seeing their losses deepen in early trading on Friday. The Dow was down by more than 1,200 points in recent trading, bringing its losses since the market opened on Thursday to nearly 3,000 points.

The S&P 500 was down by 3.6%, while the Nasdaq Composite was off by 3.8%, leaving it on the cusp of bear-market territory. The Russell 2000 has fallen by another 4.1% since it became the first major U.S. equity index to enter bear-market territory on Thursday.

[Fulham Broadway 17,091]

Just now, Vesper said:

U.S. stock market has wiped out $9.6 trillion since Inauguration Day

https://www.marketwatch.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-s-p-and-nasdaq-set-for-further-losses-after-1-679-point-blue-chip-tumble/card/u-s-stock-market-has-lost-9-6-trillion-in-value-since-inauguration-day-6NL1f3p5I5eUhbOGt2Wy

U.S. stocks have had a rough go of it since President Donald Trump was sworn into office for his second term in January.

Since Jan. 17, the Friday before Inauguration Day, the U.S. stock market has seen $9.6 trillion in value erased, according to data from FactSet and Dow Jones Market Data. Of those losses, $5 trillion has been erased just over the past two days -- the largest two-day loss on record.

Major equity indexes were seeing their losses deepen in early trading on Friday. The Dow was down by more than 1,200 points in recent trading, bringing its losses since the market opened on Thursday to nearly 3,000 points.

The S&P 500 was down by 3.6%, while the Nasdaq Composite was off by 3.8%, leaving it on the cusp of bear-market territory. The Russell 2000 has fallen by another 4.1% since it became the first major U.S. equity index to enter bear-market territory on Thursday.

Making America Gash Again 😅

[Vesper 29,406]

Trump’s Tariff Gamble: Global Chaos or Calculated Concessions?

Paul Mason 4th April 2025

A looming trade war and security threats leave European leaders scrambling to decipher the American president’s true intentions.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/trumps-tariff-gamble-global-chaos-or-calculated-concessions

 

There are two strategic implications that can be drawn from Donald Trump’s decision to declare a tariff war on the rest of the world. One is that he intends to restructure the entire global economy around US interests, destroying the export models of numerous emerging and global south economies and plunging the world into a recession. A second implication is that, under threat of the above, he merely hopes to extract concessions on the domestic economic policies of rival countries that are favourable to the USA and the dollar, but non-catastrophic for the rest.

In geopolitics, we’ve already faced the same kind of dilemma. After Trump sent Pete Hegseth and JD Vance to blow up the Rammstein Group and then the Munich Security Conference, in February, European security chiefs asked themselves: does Trump mean to walk away from collective security altogether? Or is this a ploy to force us to spend more money on defence, take on more of the burden of European security, and support for Ukraine? The fact that, in the parallel worlds of defence and trade, policymakers are facing the same cognitive challenge tells us something significant about the Trump administration. It has decided to achieve things through uncertainty.

Over the past six weeks, I have asked every policymaker I meet who has access to intelligence: do you know what Trump’s endgame is? Most have confessed ignorance. Some speculate that, when it comes to defence, Washington is factionally divided between a group that only wants to reorient toward confronting China and another that – in order to do so – is willing to make a strategic deal with Russia, carving Europe out of the peace talks over Ukraine, out of access to the Arctic, and allowing Putin to menace his next targets in the Baltic, the high North, or the Black Sea.

Even in macroeconomics, a harder science than geopolitics, I have analyst notes on my desk saying there’s a good chance that the tariffs are gestural and may be withdrawn, with all the soaraway consequences for stock markets that would presage. Since Trump came back to power, my watchword with the MAGA crowd has been: focus on what they do, not what they say. Their outpourings of invective, insult, and disinformation are – as far as modern statecraft is concerned – a distraction technique, nothing more.

But we do now have a consistent and observable pattern of action: the Trump administration is prepared to take actions that destabilise their allies, both economically and in security terms, and to use uncertainty and disinformation as weapons to achieve this end.
In response, there is one rational course of action for European liberals, Greens, and social democrats: prepare for American autarky and isolationism and pursue European greatness. It would be irresponsible to do anything less.

The EU, together with the CPTPP countries, South Korea, and Norway, represent 35 percent of global import demand, while America accounts for 15 percent. These countries also wield immense fiscal firepower and institutional strength. But we face a challenge. Whatever first-order measures we take – which could be retaliatory tariffs, industrial strategies that re-shore production, or, in the defence sphere, seeking technological sovereignty – it is the second-order effects of Trump’s actions, our reaction, and the reaction of China that will ultimately shape the mid-21st century.

In 1930, for example, when the Smoot-Hawley Act raised US tariff barriers against the world, neither Britain nor France retaliated. The UK was determined to remain the last free trade power standing. But as its exports to America collapsed by a third in the space of a year and its balance of payments went negative, the Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald was forced into an austerity programme which led to a naval mutiny, a back-bench rebellion, and summary collapse. The National Government that replaced Labour was forced to abandon both the Gold Standard and free trade because the second-order effects of Smoot-Hawley – the surge of cheap imports into the unprotected British economy – were unstoppable.

So the facts have changed, and, as John Maynard Keynes put it, we must change our minds. Social democrats in Europe are looking at the combined prospect of having to rearm rapidly and doing so in conditions of rapidly restructured global supply chains. As we address these tasks, it is vital that Europeans do so proactively, asking – as Keynes’ generation did during the Second World War – what does the world look like when we win? The most fatal stance we could adopt is that of the passive victim, mourning the death of the rules-based order, while reacting to other countries’ agency but never using our own.

“Winning” can no longer mean defending the status quo. It means imagining a new status quo to be attained once the Trump experiment has crashed and burned. It means assembling a coalition of countries whose voters still want to live in a world governed by international law and universal concepts of right and justice. And it means an appeal to the working people of the world – whose factories in countries like Cambodia, Sri Lanka, and Nicaragua may soon be shuttered – to join us in a new project of free and fair trade, human rights, and labour rights. The global working class is bigger than it has ever been, and its industrial heartlands will now become landscapes of class struggle at an intensity not seen in the era of globalisation.

What Trump has done since taking power – both on the security agenda and on trade – is an expression of pure national self-interest: blowing up the game because America was losing. From now on, European liberalism, centrist conservatism, and social democracy should converge on a project not just to defend their welfare states, the Single Market, and collective security. They should seek the widest cooperation from like-minded democratic countries to extend and solidify their open and progressive systems across continents and oceans.

Europe does not have to be a rule taker from Trump, whether on digital services, abortion rights, hate speech, or chlorinated chicken. And if it chooses to continue making its own rules according to the liberal internationalist values it was founded on, the European Union will need to make the UK an offer it cannot refuse. Sure, there are billionaire-backed pro-Trump media outlets trying to set the UK’s agenda; and there is Musk and X.com; and relentless Russian hybrid operations in British civil society. But none of that is strong enough to force the UK into an act of strategic self-harm – which is what aligning with Trump would constitute. I don’t think even the Conservative Party, which is now full of MAGA fanboys and girls, could stomach seeing the UK become Trump’s economic colony.

Europe has the muscle memory of state direction and, in the Nordic countries, active expertise in state-led industrial strategies. It has strong national and pan-national institutions. It has, above all, a population whose majority is for now resistant to ethno-nationalism and prepared to see the continental project as the greater good. Thus, both on trade and security, it falls to Europe to reorganise the world around its own strategic self-interest, and for the UK to become part of the project, not part of the problem.

I think we will see the economic impacts of Trump’s tariffs happen fast. The financial impacts – as in 2008 – will only be predictable when we see how much risk has been hidden within the global shadow banking system and how exposed it is to trade. What nobody has properly focused on, however, is the class struggles that could ensue. Behind every prediction of a slump in US imports is a factory in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Honduras, or even China that is going to close. And in an information economy, it is unthinkable that the trade war will fail to spill over into the world of brands, social media platforms, intellectual property, and free speech laws.

If Trump really did just press the demolition button on globalisation, then the positive-sum game the world has been playing is over. That means, in the short term, adapting social democracy to a zero-sum world. To create a new positive-sum game between the consumers of Europe and the producers of the global south requires this generation of centre-left politicians to do something they weren’t trained for: to fight and win a systemic conflict – first against Russia in Ukraine, second against America over tariffs, and third against the CCP over democracy.

Absolute clarity in the selection of these goals is what I want to see from those in power in Europe.

This is a joint column with IPS Journal

[Vesper 29,406]

Welcome to the era of Daily Mail socialism

Morgan McSweeney’s relationship with Britain’s most important tabloid is as ideological as it is strategic.

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-politics/2025/04/welcome-to-the-era-of-daily-mail-socialism

On the staff of the Morning Lark, the fictional tabloid that crops up in a few Martin Amis novels, readers of the paper are known as its “wankers”. Editors ask, “Is this of genuine interest to our wankers?” The political positions of the Lark are weighed up, “out of deference to the deepest personal considerations of our wankers”. Any drop in readership is described as “losing wankers”. The readers aren’t seen simply as a vulgar blob either, but a genuine social stratum. Clint Smoker, one of the Lark’s senior reporters, explains: “The quality broadsheets are aimed at the establishment and the intelligentsia. The downmarket tabloids are aimed at the proletariat.” The Lark – aimed at “the unemployed” – is a second cousin to the Daily Star, dealing in royal news, football news and pornography (ideally all three at once).

Couched between solidarity and contempt, this language would surely not be found in a real newsroom. But the truth in this satire is that newspapers have types. Where Mondeo Man is a psephological fantasy, newspapers have what we might call imagined communities, vast numbers of readers who otherwise know nothing about each other, yet breathe the same cultural snorkel of information, opinion and sudoku. And in an age of low circulations, as newspapers fall back on their core constituencies, these communities are only more pronounced. This makes them a vital subject for political study. Where else can strategists find herds of voters who form one inky silhouette?

You don’t have to turn to satire to find the Sun’s type, at least you didn’t during the 1980s when its readership rallied to the side of Margaret Thatcher. According to Chris Horrie and Peter Chippindale’s history of the paper, Stick It Up Your Punter!, its greatest and most terrible editor, Kelvin MacKenzie, summarised it during an office argument over an article on the legalisation of marijuana: “You don’t understand the readers, do you, eh? He’s the bloke you see in the pub – a right old fascist, wants to send the w*** back, buy his poxy council house, he’s afraid of the unions, afraid of the Russians, hates the queers and weirdos and drug dealers. He doesn’t want to hear about that stuff!”

In so far as the Daily Mail imagines its community, Morgan McSweeney, Labour’s chief of staff, very much wants it for his own. “If I could marry a front page, it would be this one,” McSweeney said last year, after the Mail splashed “Starmer: UK nuclear deterrent is safe in my hands”. The quote is from Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund’s book Get In, and the echo of Thatcher’s declaring the NHS “safe in our hands” to ward off fears of privatisation was unmissable.

If McSweeney did marry that front page, his head might have recently been turned by: “Finally! Patients to be put before NHS bureaucrats” (this represented the Mail ’s enthusiastic response to the abolition of NHS England). Things have been tougher between Labour and the Mail since late March: Rachel Reeves’ Spring Statement has been pilloried harder than Prince Harry’s charity shenanigans in its pages. But when the PM contributes a Mail op-ed telling its readers they “are RIGHT to be angry about illegal immigration”, as he did recently, we know who McSweeney’s talking to.

For some of Labour’s modern constituency, the McSweeney turn is viewed as betrayal. The public sector is their people; institutions are there to be preserved, not flattened. And when it comes to Starmer’s welfare reforms and maintenance of the two-child benefit cap – that’s not Labour behaviour. There’s a reason they’re called “Tory cuts”.

But viewed from the bloody crossroads where Fleet Street and Whitehall meet, British political history isn’t that straightforward. Sneering at Michael Foot’s advocacy for the Falklands War in Iron Britannia, Anthony Barnett spoke of “Daily Express socialism”. Linking Foot’s invective against Leopoldo Galtieri to his days on the Express during the Second World War, Barnett’s aside captures a tradition that is vivid in Labour Party history. It is patriotic yet unafraid of class warfare; it’s redistributive, but cheerful about defence spending; and it interprets public opinion instead of trying to patronise it. McSweeney, for instance, is mindful of polling showing the two-child benefit cap, loathed by Labour MPs, is popular among voters.

With the ascendancy of McSweeney’s Labour Party, we are seeing this Labour tradition in its 21st-century form. This is the age of Daily Mail socialism. And its enemies are as easily personified as its Middle England constituents. McSweeney again: “Why should Labour be the party of the judges? Why should we be the party of the BBC?” For the parts of the left that turned Brenda Hale into an anti-Brexit hero, for the public-sector workers who reliably vote Labour, such talk will seem heretical.

This is the most potentially transformative part of what was once called the Starmer project. McSweeney accepts the criticisms of progressives as his premises. The left, he believes, has abandoned “its people”; it no longer speaks the national demotic; it must accept the ambient social conservatism in British culture if it is to achieve its goals. Reorienting Labour around these axioms might be seen as McSweeney’s historic mission – copy of the Mail folded under his arm. But in a Labour Party of declining popularity, the question for its strategist remains (in the unreconstructed language of the Morning Lark) : who are the Labour Party’s true wankers? And can one bunch be so easily exchanged for another?

[See also: Putin’s endgame]

Edited 15 hours ago by Vesper

[Fulham Broadway 17,091]

Latest Israeli airstrikes kill 100 Palestinians -mostly children at school

The attack on the school in the Tuffah neighborhood of Gaza City has been branded a "heinous massacre"

Israel’s military said the stepped-up offensive is intended to pressure Hamas and eventually expel the militant group, stressing it was a "Hamas command and control centre" in the Gaza Strip. 

 Israel gave the same reason — striking Hamas militants in a "command and control centre" — for attacking a United Nations building used as a shelter on Wednesday, killing at least 17 people.

AP Press

 

The UN was set up after WW2 to protect the same people committing genocide now