The Frankish Reich

Unfortunately, the truth is that all the righties here (and a lot of the non-righties) always view these things through the lens of race.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-is-stupid-erratic-and-weak says it all.

Another good analysis, also paywalled, because I guess you get what you pay for (example: Catturd vs. the WSJ). Steve Miran, yet another nutcase in the administration: https://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/us-dollar-treasury-bonds-trade-war-028e8765?mod=WSJ_home_supertopperbottom_pos_2 The dollar’s reserve status makes it artificially strong, which results in exports being more expensive and imports cheaper, contributing to the U.S. trade deficit. In a speech this week Steve Miran, chairman of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, said other countries should share the U.S.’s burden of providing its defense umbrella and a reserve currency. One way, he said, was by paying tariffs. Before joining the administration, Miran had, in a report, suggested other countries could help hold down the dollar through a “Mar-a-Lago” accord, and if they didn’t, the U.S. could impose a fee on their holdings of Treasurys. In an email Wednesday, Miran said that he wasn’t advocating either idea then, and that the administration isn’t considering either now.

You will toil and sacrifice for the motherland and you will like it.

No showerhead gonna bring back that hair on top.

Probably. We've already seen Trump urging the Fed to cut rates. This time it amounts to "I broke the economy, so you better cut rates to avert a deep recession." And the Fed's "unwinding" of it's treasuries is likely to be paused too. It seems Republicans these days love inflation and cheap money too.

Tarheel must be tired tonight. 10 posts in this self-pleasuring thread out of 14 total, with just token attaboys from his diminishing fanboys.

I've said this ever since the Rose Garden tariff announcement. I'd be stunned if insiders - including the Trump kin - aren't trading on this. That's what happens when you let one man have such power over the markets. Maybe those drafters of the constitution knew what they were doing when the expressly assigned the tariff power to Congress and only Congress.

For whatever reason, I'm still partial to The Good Son. The funny Nick is best exemplified by his Grinderman alter ego:

My scorecard: - Prediction CORRECT - Timing off by about 48 hours I'll take the win. You're welcome. Now go back to listening to your damn fool tweeters.

Now that's my vision of a Great America!

Hate to interrupt the favorite photo reels of the Trumpies, but back to the topic: "bond market in chaos." Here's why the "mainstream media" is essential. This is mainstream UK conservatism, the Financial Times. I got my month for a dollar deal to try to keep up with all the trade shenanigans of the past few days; get yours too or keep reading "Trump Playing 5D Chess" tweets and remain ignorant. The truth is we were getting to a 2008 Lehman or 2022 Liz Truss situation in which the bond market becomes illiquid - that means there's no functioning market in trading treasuries, and that's the systemic risk of a damn fool pulling tariff numbers out of his fat ass. https://www.ft.com/content/6e6261e1-42bd-4cca-827e-218c111a6432?emailId=cba474cf-958e-4cf8-a9c5-c8a8d0767405&segmentId=22011ee7-896a-8c4c-22a0-7603348b7f22 We realise that not everyone is quite the fixed income dorks that we are, so here’s an explainer of some of the more common “relative-value” strategies that hedge funds often pursue in the bond market. This is not the really funky stuff. These are actually fairly plain-vanilla trades that have in some form been around for decades. But quite a few of them were supercharged in the post-crisis era — thanks to the regulation-enforced retreat of banks and the rise of leaner algorithmic market-makers — and all have the potential to blow up rarely but spectacularly (viz LTCM). OK OK that’s enough. So what does it all mean? Well, that Treasury market volatility triggered by the Trump administration’s new tariff regime has now sparked a technical unwind of billions of dollars of highly leveraged hedge fund trades — a bit like how Liz Truss’s badly-judged budget plans triggered a meltdown of LDI strategies in the gilt market. All these trades are in their basic form pretty safe, and arguably a service to financial markets, by helping support Treasury markets and ensuring that all the different parts of the wider rates ecosystem is tied together. It’s the level and fickleness of the leverage that can make them dangerous occasionally. Normally these things burn themselves out soon enough, but there are rising expectations that the Federal Reserve may have to step in to prevent the Treasury sell-off from becoming disorderly and destructive. In other words, not per se to keep yields low, but to ensure that there are no major financial mishaps. However, at some point we really should stop and think about whether we want the US Treasury market to be so vulnerable to these kinds of situations that it requires central bank intervention again and again?

I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. I think he did kill a white dude, right? Whatever ...

Bessent was freaking out, coming out every morning to try to sell calm while the financial world around him was descending into chaos.

Of course, this arrest report supports the theory that this was Rittenhouse-style "self-defense."

^^Even more QAnon'd than we thought. Time to start sucking Trump butt again, Bill Ackman. Right on cue.

The real story: Treasury market chaos was coming. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-08/treasury-yield-surge-stokes-fear-of-next-big-basis-trade-unwind?embedded-checkout=true

That's why it is best described as a cult. Now we get the old chestnut "he's crazy like a fox." This was capitulation; all his rich guy supporters were freaking out, and with good reason.

You can't pull off the same bluff twice. The called him on his bs.

@JDHillFan is kind of the Human (?) Wayback Machine. You can expect this everytime current events indicate that a braindead president somehow managed things better than a clinically insane control freak.

Here's what the non-retarrdo (to borrow a phrase from the world's smarter man) right has to say: https://www.ft.com/content/e4c937a8-209c-449d-b7c0-82811e5c151b Has America discovered its ‘moron risk premium’? Bond bombshell

Balls like steel. They called his bluff.

Exactly. Krugman gives a good explanation of what the bond markets portend. Hint: it ain't good. https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-cost-of-chaos-this-is-getting Right now (personal experience): we're seeing the chaos in bond markets reflected in a loss of liquidity. Bid/Ask spreads are getting larger. One thing you never, ever, ever want to happen is for the US Treasury market to seize up

Wonky, but the analysis is solid: https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-cost-of-chaos-this-is-getting I don't understand the idea of pushing the world toward recession/depression, but then again I am not a MAGAite hell-bent on on a return to the early 1900s.