Economics/Statistics

White House Lacks Financial Literacy – ‘Tariffs’ Show

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by Moon of Alabama

Presidential Message on National Financial Literacy Month, 2025 – The White House, Apr 1 2025

The foundation of American economic prosperity is a society empowered with the knowledge and tools to make informed financial decisions to achieve the American Dream. …

I welcome that message.

Teaching financial literacy must start at the top. The members of the Trump administration obviously lack the knowledge and tools to make informed financial decisions.

It is the only possible explanation for how they came up with these numbers:


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China does not have a 67% tariff on U.S. goods (it’s 7.3%). The EU does not have a 39% tariff on U.S. goods (it’s 5.2%). The numbers are bollocks.

So where do they come from? The official explanation from the U.S. Trade Representative is here. Its baloney:

James Surowiecki @JamesSurowiecki – 0:22 UTC · Apr 3, 2025Just figured out where these fake tariff rates come from. They didn’t actually calculate tariff rates + non-tariff barriers, as they say they did. Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country’s exports to us.

So we have a $17.9 billion trade deficit with Indonesia. Its exports to us are $28 billion. $17.9/$28 = 64%, which Trump claims is the tariff rate Indonesia charges us. What extraordinary nonsense this is.
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Even given that it’s Trump, I cannot believe they said “We’ll just divide the trade deficit by imports and tell people that’s the tariff rate.” And then they decided to set our tariffs by just cutting that totally made-up rate in half! This is so dumb and deceptive.
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.. it’s actually worse than I thought: in calculating the tariff rate, Trump’s people only used the trade deficit in goods. So even though we run a trade surplus in services with the world, those exports don’t count as far as Trump is concerned.

The last point is a major one, for China, but especially for the EU :

EU-US trade in goods and services reached an impressive €1.6 trillion in 2023. This means that every day, €4.4 billion worth of goods and services cross the Atlantic between the EU and the US.
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The total bilateral trade in goods reached €851 billion in 2023. The EU exported €503 billion of goods to the US market, while importing €347 billion; this resulted in a goods trade surplus of €157 billion for the EU.Total bilateral trade in services between the EU and the US was worth €746 billion in 2023. The EU exported €319 billion of services to the US, while importing €427 billion from the US; this resulted in a services trade deficit of €109 billion for the EU.
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EU-US goods and services trade is balanced: the difference between EU exports to the US and US exports to the EU stood at €48 billion in 2023; the equivalent of just 3% of the total trade between the EU and the US.

Despite that Trump has decreed a 20% on all goods from the EU. The natural countermeasure from the EU will be to put a 20+% tariff on all import of U.S. services.

Trump also decreed a minimum 10% tariff on imports from every country. Products made by the penguins of the uninhabited Heard and McDonald Islands in the Antarctic will now come with a 10% surcharge.

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There is really no economic reasoning behind these numbers.

Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand – 4:16 AM · Apr 3, 2025To illustrate just how nonsensically these tariffs were calculated, take the example of Lesotho, one of the poorest countries in Africa with just $2.4 billion in annual GDP, which is being struck with a 50% tariff rate under the Trump plan, the highest rate among all countries on the list.
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As a matter of fact Lesotho, as a member of the Southern African Customs Union (SACU), applies the common external tariff structure established by this regional trade bloc.
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So since the tariffs charged by these 5 countries on U.S. products are exactly the same, they must all be struck with a 50% tariff rate by the U.S., right? Not at all: South Africa is getting 30%, Namibia 21%, Botswana 37% and Eswatini just 10%, the lowest rate possible among all countries.

Looking at Lesotho specifically, every year the U.S. imports approximately $236 million in goods from Lesotho (primarily diamonds, textiles and apparel) while exporting only about $7 million worth of goods to Lesotho (https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/LSO/Year/2022/TradeFlow/EXPIMP/Partner/by-country).

Why do they export so little? Again this is an extremely poor country where 56.2% of the population lives with less than $3.65 a day (https://databankfiles.worldbank.org/public/…), i.e. $1,300 a year. They simply can’t afford U.S. products, no-one is going to buy an iPhone or a Tesla on that sort of income…

The way the tariffs are ACTUALLY calculated appears to be based on a simplistic and economically senseless formula: you take the trade deficit the U.S. has with a country, divide it by that country’s exports to the U.S and declare this – falsely – “the tariff they charge on the U.S.”

And then as Trump did in his speech last night, you magnanimously declare that you’ll only “reciprocate” by charging half that “tariff” on them.

As such, for Lesotho, the calculation goes like this: ($236M – $7M)/$235M = 97%. That’s the “tariff” Lesotho is deemed to charge this U.S. and half of that, i.e. roughly 50% is what the U.S. “reciprocates” with.

It’s extremely easy to see why this makes no sense at all.

Lesotho has a comparative advantage over the U.S. as it can dig up and sell diamonds. But it lacks the purchasing power to buy U.S. goods and services. The calculations by the Trump administration ignore those basic facts.

No tariffs were by the way introduced against Belarus, Russia and North Korea. This because of sanction, the U.S. has allegedly no trade relation with them. (Other than buying enriched Uranium for its nuclear power stations?)

Did the Trump administration anticipate how this nonsense will explode in its face?

It is Smoot-Hawley writ large.

Energy Wars

The Myth of Peak Oil – Oil is as Natural as Water

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This is a short 8-minute video about the alleged politics behind how the term “fossil fuel” came to be used.

“Is Greta Thunberg right on climate change, Mr. President?”

But the best work on this topic of “abiotic oil”, in my opinion, is from Dr. John Kenney, the founder and Chairman of JP Kenny Petroleum Ltd, and also a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences – Joint Institute of The Physics of the Earth.

He has probably researched this topic more than anyone else in the U.S., deriving his research from the Russian scientific literature.

Here is an interview he did with NPR (National Public Radio) back in 1994. He had just published a paper where he claimed to have created petroleum in a laboratory.

0:30 / 18:21

This is his Introduction from his website.

Introduction

An introduction to the modern petroleum science, and to the Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins.

J. F. Kenney

Russian Academy of Sciences – Joint Institute of The Physics of the Earth.

Gas Resources Corporation, 11811 North Freeway, Houston, TX 77060, U.S.A.

The following articles take up, from different perspectives, the modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins. Because that subject is one of which most persons outside the former U.S.S.R. are not familiar, a short synopsis of it and of its provenance and history, are given now.

1. The essence of the modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins.

The modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins is an extensive body of scientific knowledge which covers the subjects of the chemical genesis of the hydrocarbon molecules which comprise natural petroleum, the physical processes which occasion their terrestrial concentration, the dynamical processes of the movement of that material into geological reservoirs of petroleum, and the location and economic production of petroleum.

The modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins recognizes that petroleum is a primordial material of deep origin which has been erupted into the crust of the Earth. In short, and bluntly, petroleum is not a “fossil fuel” and has no intrinsic connection with dead dinosaurs (or any other biological detritus) “in the sediments” (or anywhere else).

The modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of petroleum is based upon rigorous scientific reasoning, consistent with the laws of physics and chemistry, as well as upon extensive geological observation, and rests squarely in the mainstream of modern physics and chemistry, from which it draws its provenance.

Much of the modern Russian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum genesis developed from the sciences of chemistry and thermodynamics, and accordingly the modern theory has steadfastly held as a central tenet that the generation of hydrocarbons must conform to the general laws of chemical thermodynamics, – as must likewise all matter.

In such respect, modern Russian-Ukrainian petroleum science contrasts strongly to what are too often passed off as “theories” in the field of geology in Britain and the U.S.A.

As will be shown explicitly in a following articles, petroleum has no intrinsic association with biological material. The only hydrocarbon molecules which are exceptions to this point are methane, the hydrocarbon alkane specie of lowest chemical potential of all hydrocarbons, and to a lesser extent, ethene, the alkene of the lowest chemical potential of its homologous molecular series.

Only methane is thermodynamically stable in the pressure and temperature regime of the near-surface crust of the Earth and accordingly can be generated there spontaneously, as is indeed observed for phenomena such as swamp gas or sewer gas.

However, methane is practically the sole hydrocarbon molecule possessing such thermodynamic characteristic in that thermodynamic regime; almost all other reduced hydrocarbon molecules excepting only the lightest ones, are high pressure polymorphs of the hydrogen-carbon system.

Spontaneous genesis of the heavier hydrocarbons which comprise natural petroleum occurs only in multi-kilobar regimes of high pressures, as is shown in a following article.

2. The historical beginnings of petroleum science, – with a touch of irony.

The history of petroleum science might be considered to have begun in the year 1757 when the great Russian scholar Mikhailo V. Lomonosov enunciated the hypothesis that oil might originate from biological detritus.

Applying the rudimentary powers of observation and the necessarily limited analytical skills available in his time, Lomonosov hypothesized that “… ‘rock oil’ [crude oil, or petroleum] originated as the minute bodies of dead marine and other animals which were buried in the sediments and which, over the passage of a great duration of time under the influence of heat and pressure, transformed into ‘rock oil’.”

Such was the descriptive science practiced in the eighteenth century by Lomonosov and Linnaeus.

The scientists who first rejected Lomonsov’s hypothesis, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, were the famous German naturalist and geologist Alexander von Humboldt and the French chemist and thermodynamicist Louis Joseph Gay-Lussac who together enunciated the proposition that oil is a primordial material erupted from great depth, and is unconnected with any biological matter near the surface of the Earth.

Thus both ideas were delivered with powerful pedigrees: the wrong biological notion having been put forward by the greatest Russian scientist of his time; and the abiotic proposition approximately a half century later by, respectively, two of the greatest German and French scientists.

Historically, the first scientific repudiation Lomonosov’s hypothesis of a biological origin of petroleum came from chemists and thermodynamicists. With the nascent development of chemistry during the nineteenth century, and following particularly the enunciation of the second law of thermodynamics by Clausius in 1850, Lomonosov’s biological hypothesis came inevitably under attack.

The great French chemist Marcellin Berthelot particularly scorned the hypothesis of a biological origin for petroleum. Berthelot first carried out experiments involving, among others, a series of what are now referred to as Kolbe reactions and demonstrated the generation of petroleum by dissolving steel in strong acid.

He produced the suite of n-alkanes and made it plain that such were generated in total absence of any “biological” molecule or process. Berthelot’s investigations were later extended and refined by other scientists, including Biasson and Sokolov, all of whom observed similar phenomena and likewise concluded that petroleum was unconnected to biological matter.

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the great Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev also examined and rejected Lomonosov’s hypothesis of a biological origin for petroleum.

In contrast to Berthelot who had made no suggestion as to where or how petroleum might have come, Mendeleev stated clearly that petroleum is a primordial material which has erupted from great depth.

With extraordinary perception, Mendeleev hypothesized the existence of geological structures which he called “deep faults,” and correctly identified such as the locus of weakness in the crust of the Earth via which petroleum would travel from the depths.

After he made that hypothesis, Mendeleev was abusively criticized by the geologists of his time, for the notion of deep faults was then unknown.

Today, of course, an understanding of plate tectonics would be unimaginable without recognition of deep faults.

3. The enunciation and development of modern petroleum science.

The impetus for development of modern petroleum science came shortly after the end of World War II, and was impelled by recognition by the government of the (then) U.S.S.R. of the crucial necessity of petroleum in modern warfare.

In 1947, the U.S.S.R. had (as its petroleum “experts” then estimated) very limited petroleum reserves, of which the largest were the oil fields in the region of the Abseron peninsula, near the Caspian city Baku in the present country of Azerbaijan.

At that time, the oil fields near Baku were considered to be “depleting” and “nearing exhaustion.”

During World War II, the Soviets had occupied the two northern provinces of Iran; in 1946, the British government had forced them out.

By 1947, the Soviets realized that the American, British, and French were not going to allow them to operate in the middle east, nor in the petroleum producing areas of Africa, nor Indonesia, nor Burma, nor Malaysia, nor anywhere in the far east, nor in Latin America.

The government of the Soviet Union recognized then that new petroleum reserves would have to be discovered and developed within the U.S.S.R.

The government of the Soviet Union initiated a “Manhattan Project” type program, which was given the highest priority to study every aspect of petroleum, to determine its origins and how petroleum reserves are generated, and to ascertain what might be the most effective strategies for petroleum exploration.

At that time, Russia benefited from the excellent educational system which had been introduced after the 1917 revolution. The Russian petroleum community had then almost two generations of highly educated, scientifically competent men and women, ready to take up the problem of petroleum origins.

Modern Russian petroleum science followed within five years.

In 1951, the modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins was first enunciated by Nikolai A. Kudryavtsev at the All-Union petroleum geology congress.

Kudryavtsev analyzed the hypothesis of a biological origin of petroleum, and pointed out the failures of the claims then commonly put forth to support that hypothesis.

Kudryavtsev was soon joined by numerous other Russian and Ukrainian geologists, among the first of whom were P. N. Kropotkin, K. A. Shakhvarstova, G. N. Dolenko, V. F. Linetskii, V. B. Porfir’yev, and K. A. Anikiev.

During the first decade of its existence, the modern theory of petroleum origins was the subject of great contention and controversy. Between the years 1951 and 1965, with the leadership of Kudryavtsev and Porfir’yev, increasing numbers of geologists published articles demonstrating the failures and inconsistencies inherent in the old “biogenic origin” hypothesis.

With the passing of the first decade of the modern theory, the failure of the previous, eighteenth century hypothesis of an origin of petroleum from biological detritus in the near-surface sediments had been thoroughly demonstrated, the hypothesis of Lomonosov discredited, and the modern theory firmly established.

An important point to be recognized is that the modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of abiotic petroleum origins was, initially, a geologists’ theory.

Kudryavtsev, Kropotkin, Dolenko, Porfir’yev and the developers of the modern theory of petroleum were all geologists. Their arguments were necessarily those of geologists, developed from many observations, and much data, organized into a pattern, and argued by persuasion.

By contrast, the practice of mainstream, predictive modern science, particularly physics and chemistry, involves a minimum of observation or data, and applies only a minimum of physical law, inevitably expressed with formal mathematics, and argues by compulsion.

Such predictive proof of the geologists assertions for the modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins had to wait almost a half century, for such required the development not only of modern quantum statistical mechanics but also that of the techniques of many-body theory and the application of statistical geometry to the analysis of dense fluids, designated scaled particle theory.

Read the full Introduction and other articles at Gasresources.net.

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geopolitical issues

The Fallacy of Transactional Trumpism

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by Alastair Crooke via
Strategic-Culture

© Photo: Public domain

A U.S. economic ‘re-balancing’ is coming. Putin is right. The post-WWII economic order ‘is gone’

The post-WWII geo-political outcome effectively determined the post-war global economic structure. Both are now undergoing huge change. What remains stuck fast however, is the general (Western) weltanschauung that everything must ‘change’ only for it to stay the same. Things financial will continue as before; do not disturb the slumber. The assumption is that the oligarch/donor class will see to it that things remain the same.

However, the power distribution of the post-war era was unique. There is nothing ‘forever’ about it; nothing inherently permanent.

At a recent conference of Russian industrialists and entrepreneurs, President Putin highlighted both the global fracture, and set out an alternate vision which is likely to be adopted by BRICS and many beyond. His address was, metaphorically speaking, the financial counterpart to his 2007 Munich Security Forum speech, at which he accepted the military défie posed by ‘collective NATO’.

Putin is now hinting that Russia has accepted the challenge posed by the post-war financial order. Russia has persevered against the financial war, and is prevailing in that too.

Putin’s address last week was, in one sense, nothing really new: It reflected the classic doctrine of the former premier, Yevgeny Primakov. No romantic about the West, Primakov understood its hegemonic world order would always treat Russia as a subordinate. So he proposed a different model – the multipolar order – where Moscow balances power blocs, but does not join them.

At its heart, the Primakov Doctrine was the avoidance of binary alignments; the preservation of sovereignty; the cultivation of ties with other great powers, and the rejection of ideology in favour of a Russian nationalist vision.

Today’s negotiations with Washington (now narrowly centred on Ukraine) reflect this logic. Russia isn’t begging for sanctions relief or threatening anything specific. It is conducting strategic procrastination: waiting out electoral cycles, testing Western unity, and keeping all doors ajar. Yet Putin is not adverse either to exerting a little pressure of his own – the window for accepting Russian sovereignty of the four eastern oblasts is not forever: “This point can also move”, he said.

It is not Russia racing ahead with the negotiations; quite the reverse – it is Trump who is racing ahead. Why? It appears to hark back to the American attachment to Kissinger-esque triangulation strategy: Subordinate Russia; peel away Iran; and then peel Russia from China. Offer carrots and threaten to ‘stick’ to Russia, and once subordinated in this way, Russia might then be detached from Iran – thus removing any Russian impediments to an Israel-Washington Axis attack on Iran.

Primakov, were he here, likely would be warning that Trump’s ‘Big Strategy’ is to tie Russia into subordinate status quickly, so that Trump can continue the Israel normalisation of the entire Middle East.

Witkoff has made Trump’s strategy very plain:

“The next thing is: we need to deal with Iran … they’re a benefactor of proxy armies … but if we can get these terrorist organisations eliminated as risks … Then we’ll normalise everywhere. I think Lebanon could normalise with Israel …That’s really possible … Syria, too: So maybe Jolani in Syria [now] is a different guy. They’ve driven Iran out …ImagineImagine if Lebanon … Syria … and the Saudis sign a normalisation treaty with Israel … I mean that would be epic!”

U.S. officials say the deadline for an Iran ‘decision’ is in the spring …

And with Russia reduced to supplicant status and Iran dealt with (in such fantastical thinking), Team Trump can turn to the main adversary – China.

Putin, of course, understands this well, and duly debunked all such illusions: “Set illusions aside”, he told delegates last week:

“Sanctions and restrictions are today’s reality – together with a new spiral of economic rivalry already unleashed …”.

“Hold to no illusions: There is nothing beyond this reality …”.

“Sanctions are neither temporary nor targeted measures; they constitute a mechanism of systemic, strategic pressure against our nation. Regardless of global developments or shifts in the international order, our competitors will perpetually seek to constrain Russia and diminish its economic and technological capacities …”.

“You should not hope for complete freedom of trade, payments and capital transfers. You should not count on Western mechanisms to protect the rights of investors and entrepreneurs … I’m not talking about any legal systems – they just don’t exist! They exist there only for themselves! That’s the trick. Do you understand?!”.

Our [Russian] challenges exist, ‘yes’ – “but theirs are abundant also. Western dominance is slipping away. New centres of global growth are taking centre stage”, Putin said.

These [challenges] are not the ‘problem’; they are the opportunity, Putin outlined: ‘We will prioritise domestic manufacturing and the development of tech industries. The old model is over. Oil and gas production will be simply the adjunct to a largely internally circulating, self-sufficient ‘real economy’ – with energy no longer its driver. We are open to western investment – but only on our terms – and the small ‘open’ sector of our otherwise closed economy will of course still trade with our BRICS partners’.

What Putin outlined effectively is the return to the mainly closed internally-circulating economy model of the German school (à la Friedrich List) and of the Russian Premier, Sergei Witte.

Just to be clear – Putin was not just explaining how Russia had transformed into a sanctions-resistant economy that could equally disdain the apparent enticements of the West, as well as its threats. He was challenging the Western economic model more fundamentally.

Friedrich List had, from the outset, been wary of Adam Smith’s thinking that formed the basis of the ‘Anglo-model’. List warned that it would ultimately be self-defeating; it would bias the system away from wealth creation, and ultimately make it impossible to consume as much, or to employ so many.

Such a shift of economic model has profound consequences: It undercuts the entirety of the transactional ‘Art of the Deal’ mode of diplomacy on which Trump relies. It exposes the transactional weaknesses. ‘Your enticement of the lifting of sanctions, plus the other inducements of western investment and technology, now mean nothing’ – for we will accept these things henceforth: on our terms only’, Putin said. ‘Nor’, he argued, ‘do your threats of a further sanctions siege carry weight – for your sanctions were the boon that took us to our new economic model’.

In other words, be it Ukraine, or relations with China and Iran, Russia can be largely impervious (short of the mutually destructive threat of WWIII) to U.S. blandishments. Moscow can take its sweet time on Ukraine and consider other issues on a strictly cost-benefit analysis. It can see that the U.S. has no real leverage.

Yet the great paradox to this is that List and Witte were right – and Adam Smith was wrong. For it is now the U.S. that has discovered that the Anglo model indeed has proved to be self-defeating.

The U.S. has been forced into two major conclusions: First, that the budget deficit coupled with exploding Federal debt finally has turned the ‘Resource Curse’ back onto the U.S.

As the ‘keeper’ of the global Reserve Currency – and as JD Vance explicitly said – it has necessarily made America’s primordial export to become the U.S. dollar. By extension, it means that the strong dollar (buoyed by a global synthetic demand for the reserve currency) has eviscerated America’s real economy – its manufacturing base.

This is ‘Dutch Disease’, whereby currency appreciation suppresses the development of productive export sectors, and turns politics into a zero-sum conflict over resource rents.

At last year’s Senate hearing with Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve Chair, Vance asked the Fed Chairman whether the U.S. dollar’s status as the global Reserve Currency might have some downsides. Vance drew parallels to the classic “resource curse”, suggesting the dollar’s global role contributed to financialization at the expense of investment in the real economy: The Anglo model leads economies to overspecialize in their abundant factor, be it natural resources, low-wage labour, or financialised assets.

The second point – related to security – a subject which the Pentagon has been harping on for ten years or so,is that the Reserve Currency (and consequentially strong dollar) has pushed many U.S. military supply lines out to China. It makes no sense, the Pentagon argues, for the U.S. to depend on Chinese supply lines to provide the inputs to U.S. military manufactured weapons – by which it would then fight China.

The U.S. Administration has two answers to this conundrum: First, a multilateral agreement (on the lines of the 1985 Plaza Accord) to weaken the value of the dollar (and pari passu, therefore, to increase the value of the partner states’ currencies). This is the ‘Mar-a-Lago Accord’ option. The U.S.’ solution is to force the rest of the world to appreciate their currencies in order to improve U.S. export competitiveness.

The mechanism for achieving these objectives is to threaten trade and investment partners with tariffs and withdrawal of the U.S. security umbrella. As a further twist, the plan considers the possibility to revalue U.S. gold reserves – a move that would inversely cut the valuation of the dollar, U.S. debt, and foreign holdings of U.S. Treasuries.

The second option is the unilateral approach: In the unilateral approach, a ‘user fee’ on foreign official holdings of U.S. Treasuries would be imposed to drive reserve managers out of the dollar – and thus weaken it.

Well, it is obvious, is it not? A U.S. economic ‘re-balancing’ is coming. Putin is right. The post-WWII economic order “is gone”.

Will bluster and threats of sanctions force big states to strengthen their currencies and accept U.S. debt restructuring (i.e. haircuts imposed on their bond holdings)? It seems improbable.

The Plaza Accord realignment of currencies depended on the co-operation of major states, without which unilateral moves can turn ugly.

Who is the weaker party? Who has the leverage now in the balance of power? Putin answered that question on 18 March 2025.

Democracy as Mob Rule

The Plot Thickens – Israel, Signal and More

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Capitalism in Decay

Auto War: Trump Hits Tokyo and Frankfurt with a Sledgehammer

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by Gerry Nolan

Trump’s trade war just went nuclear again, this time slamming the global auto industry with a 25% tariff hammer that sent shockwaves through European and Asian markets. The move, touted by Trump as a bold step toward reviving American manufacturing, has already vaporized over $14 billion in market value from Europe’s largest carmakers, according to The Telegraph. From Frankfurt to Tokyo, the message was clear: the United States is no longer playing by the old rules.

Japan took a heavy blow. Toyota’s shares dropped 2%, Nissan lost 1.7%, and Honda tumbled 2.5% in response to the announcement. This isn’t just investor jitters, it’s economic reality. Automobiles make up nearly 28.3% of Japan’s total exports to the U.S., pumping out roughly $63 billion annually. According to estimates from Nomura Research Institute, Trump’s tariffs could slice 0.2% off Japan’s GDP, about $8 billion gone, evaporated by the stroke of a presidential pen. The timing couldn’t be worse for Tokyo. With consumer inflation already above target, the Bank of Japan had been eyeing a long-awaited rate hike in May. That window may have just slammed shut.

Japan’s Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba kept his response measured, stating Tokyo is evaluating “what’s best for Japan’s national interest,” and that all options are on the table. But the subtext was clear: Japan’s political class is scrambling to recalibrate its approach in the face of Washington’s increasingly erratic protectionism.

For Trump, this isn’t just economic policy, it’s domestic theater. He claims the tariffs will generate $100 billion annually in tax revenue and revive an American auto industry hollowed out by decades of neoliberal outsourcing. The tariffs are scheduled to kick in on April 2, with a second wave targeting car parts one month later. Meanwhile, S&P Global Mobility reports that nearly half of all new passenger vehicles sold in the U.S. last year were manufactured abroad, underscoring how deeply integrated America’s auto market has become with the very nations now under fire.

But here’s where it gets deeper and darker.

This isn’t just about trade. It’s about empire in retreat, turning in on its own vassals. Trump is torching what remains of transatlantic and transpacific economic cooperation, turning Germany and Japan from loyal vassals into collateral damage. This is the late-stage imperial reflex: when you can’t win against China or Russia, you cannibalize your own “allies” to buy time and votes at home.

Europe, already battered by energy shocks and NATO overreach, now watches as its industrial core is gutted by the very hegemon it once pledged allegiance to. Japan, caught between hosting U.S. bases and courting Chinese trade, is learning the hard way what multipolarity means: adapt or perish.

This is the “America First” doctrine in its final form, not strategy, but economic Darwinism. Allies be damned. Supply chains be damned. Stability be damned. Trump doesn’t care if Tokyo burns or Frankfurt bleeds, as long as Michigan gets a few more factory jobs and the illusion of sovereignty returns to dying Rust Belt towns. Funny thing is many of these don’t have recripocrical tarrifs at least until now, but the US simply couldn’t complete.

The irony? While Washington imposes tariffs to build cars at home, Russia and China are building a new world economy, outside the dollar, outside dinosaur SWIFT, and increasingly outside the gravitational pull of American policy altogether. Eurasia is rising. BRICS is expanding. And the West, led by a tariff-throwing real estate mogul turned messiah, is punching its allies in the face, again. I love it.

What began as a trade war is ending as a self-inflicted collapse.

https://t.me/TheIslanderNews

Democracy as Mob Rule

The US under Trump is Becoming Albania with Nukes

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byJohn Helmer, Moscow via John Helmer
@bears_with

In Hollywood as in Bollywood, filmmakers and the executive directors representing the production financiers know that the money shot is the climactic moment in the shooting script which is put there to excite the audience, and to persuade the investors there’s money to be made. [ . . . ]

President Donald Trump has been emitting tweets to announce his money shot on the battlefield of the Ukraine, in the genocide in Gaza, and in his wars against the Houthis, Iran, and China. To implement his desire, he recently sent Christopher Landau, his nominee to become Deputy Secretary of State — the brains behind Secretary Marco Rubio — to announce to the US Senate a policy of “commercial statecraft.”

By that, Landau — a Harvard-educated lawyer and Ambassador to Mexico during Trump’s first term – meant that “there is no force in the world that is as powerful as the American private sector”; and that it will be the Trump Administration’s objective to “unleash our private sector”, “out-hustle foreign competitors”, and fight China because they “are out-hustling us”.

One of the first tactics in this American hustle strategy has been Trump’s executive order restoring the lawfulness of US corporate bribery for “gaining strategic business advantages whether in critical minerals, deep-water ports, or other key infrastructure or assets.”

This hustle strategy and the tactics of the money shot are behind Trump’s announcement that as part of his end-of-war terms under negotiation with Russia at the moment, he aims to take US control of rare earth mining in the Ukraine, and also of the Ukraine’s nuclear power generating assets. A shot at taking over the port of Odessa can be expected to follow.

Like old-fashioned make-war profiteering, this is end-of-war profiteering by corporatizing the terms of ceasefire, armistice, capitulation, security guarantees, and reparations. Two of Trump’s hustling associates, Steven Witkoff, the president’s special negotiator for Russia and the Middle East, and Howard Lutnick, the new US Secretary of Commerce, are his brokers in this plan.

Because Landau will not be confirmed by the US Senate until Monday, March 24, he has not been named to lead the US expert-group negotiators to meet in Saudi Arabia with the Russian team headed by Deputy Foreign Minister (retired) and Senator Grigory Karasin, and Colonel-General Sergei Beseda, formerly of the Federal Security Service (FSB). Because Landau is a Spanish-speaking specialist on Latin America, he is afraid of being “out-hustled” by the Russians, and so he is obliged to depend on subordinates; they have not yet been identified.* His chief subordinate, the Under Secretary of State for political affairs, is currently acting in the job. She is Lisa Kenna, a Middle East expert at the CIA and Arabic and Spanish speaker without expertise on Russia. Like Landau, she is a partisan Trump tweeter.

The US negotiators in Saudi Arabia will rank below Landau and Kenna, and not above them in expertise on Russia or the war in the Ukraine.*

Listen to this discussion of the Trump Administration’s vulnerabilities with leading Indian military and intelligence experts, Lieutenant General P.R. Shankar and Brigadier Arun Saghal.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2urWmCJOZU
For more Indian expert analysis of geopolitics, warfighting, and intelligence follow the Gunners Shot website.

For analysis of the US president’s hustle strategy, start with Trump’s falsification of the value of US military and financial aid to the Ukraine by reading this. For the current hustle of Trump & Co. to capitalize on the sabotaged Nord Stream 2 pipeline and on the seizure of Rosneft’s oil refining assets in Germany, read this.

The only question the senators asked him on Russia and the Ukraine war was whether he agreed that Trump has been so hostile towards the Ukraine and so favourable towards Russia, he should be termed a “Russian asset.” Landau replied: “The President is an exceptionally gifted dealmaker. He is probably the only individual in the entire universe that could actually stop this [war]” – Minute 2:08:00.

The first direct challenge to this corporatization of Trump’s warmaking followed a leak from Pentagon officials last week that Elon Musk had arranged with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to receive a personal, top-secret briefing on the “U.S. military’s plan for any war that might break out with China.” The leak appeared in the New York Times on March 20; Musk then appeared the next day at the Pentagon, but he was restricted to a 30-minute handshake with Secretary of Defense Peter Hegseth. The war plan briefing was cancelled.

Hegseth then hurried to the White House to join Trump in a press briefing. “Certainly,” Trump said, “you wouldn’t show it [China war plan] to a businessman who is helping us so much… Elon has businesses in China, and he would be susceptible perhaps to that.” Standing next to Trump, Hegseth claimed the newspaper report was a “fake story…meant to undermine whatever relationship the Pentagon has with Elon Musk.” The Defense Secretary was lying.

The episode also reveals that Trump’s chief of staff, Susan Wiles, a corporate lobbyist, is unable or unwilling to control either Musk or other subordinates and associates of the President from exploiting their relationship with Trump to advance their personal and corporate interests. In Landau’s restatement to the Senate, these interests aren’t conflicts – they are “commercial statecraft”, and that now includes bribery and corruption.

“On the one hand, this is an example of just how chaotic things are in Washington,” comments a US source in a position to know. “How did Trump not know about Musk’s planned attendance at the Pentagon meeting, or did he know and was playing dumb? Hegseth’s behaviour suggests he’s on the take from Musk or that he understands how much power Musk has with Trump, and that he cannot cross Musk for fear of what Trump will do to him.”

“I’ve begun to see the pattern with Trump. When something he’s been sounding off about doesn’t go his way – for example, “peace” with Russia, “peace” in Gaza — he moves on to another subject, another target, where he figures he can show force and strength. Like Yemen, like Canada. But they aren’t working out either.”

In the podcast discussion, Tulsi Gabbard’s performance on her visit to New Delhi on March 17-18, where she met her Indian intelligence counterparts, is examined for her vacuity on policy details and for her political advertising for Trump.

Gabbard opened her speech with the Hawaiian language greeting, “Aloha”. Gabbard is not an ethnic Hawaiian – American mother, Samoan father -- and she does not share the indigenous belief that Hawaii was the target of takeover by American “commercial statecraft” in 1893. That was when US businessmen and US Marines launched a coup d’état to remove the Hawaiian monarch, Queen Liliuokalani, and five years later annexed the kingdom as a US territory; it became the 50th US state in 1959.

In Gabbard’s official press release, issued after she returned to Washington, she identified Trump in five of the statement’s six paragraphs. Her talks with Indian officials focused, she said, on “intelligence-sharing, defence, counterterrorism, and transnational threats…President Trump remains unwavering in his commitment to achieving peace through a strategy rooted in realism and pragmatism. Securing peace through strength requires strong leadership with a clear-eyed and realistic understanding of global challenges and opportunities.

An Indian business source in Moscow responds: “President Putin will come to Delhi in April and he will show that, compared to Trump in the US, Russia offers long-term stability as well as short-term profitability for Indian interests. He will be too polite to say about the US what is becoming more and more obvious to us – it’s unstable, unpredictable, unreliable. To reverse something American leaders once said about Russia – the US under Trump is becoming Albania with nukes.”

[*] After this podcast, it was announced that the US negotiating team in Saudi Arabia is led by two mid-level staffers of Trump’s first term, Andrew Peek and Michael Anton.

Peek is now Michael Waltz’s deputy at the National Security Council (NSC). He has been a Congressional staffer and intelligence advisor to the US military command in Afghanistan. He was at the NSC and State Department during the first Trump term, and specialized on the Middle East. Peek’s published material is limited to the Middle East. So is his tweet record. Before the Special Military Operation began in February 2022, Peek was a keen Russia warfighter.

The second US negotiator is Michael Anton, the new director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, and a veteran of Trump’s first term. His background includes jobs as a speechwriter for George W. Bush and Rudolf Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, and press spokesman for Black Rock. For an indirect expression of his view on negotiating with Russians, read his essay on George Kennan.

Western Hegemony's Collapse

Is China About To Wreck U.S. Tech?

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Authored by Balaji Srinivasan on X

AI Overproduction
China seeks to commoditize their complements. So, over the following months, I expect a complete blitz of Chinese open-source AI models for everything from computer vision to robotics to image generation.

Why? I’m just inferring this from public statements, but their apparent goal is to take the profit out of AI software since they make money on AI-enabled hardware. Basically, they want to do to US tech (the last stronghold) what they already did to US manufacturing. Namely: copy it, optimize it, scale it, then wreck the Western original with low prices.

I don’t know if they’ll succeed. But here’s the logic:

  • First, China noticed that DeepSeek’s release temporarily knocked ~$1T off US tech market caps.
  • Second, China’s core competency is exporting physical widgets, more than it is software.
  • Third, China’s other core competency is exporting things at such massive scale that all foreign producers are bankrupted and they win the market. See what they’re doing to German and Japanese cars, for example.
  • Fourth, China is well aware that it lacks global prestige as it’s historically been a copycat. With DeepSeek, becoming #1 in AI is now something they actually consider possibly achievable, and a matter of national pride.
  • Fifth, DeepSeek has gone viral in China and its open source nature means that everyone can rapidly integrate it, down to the level of local officials and obscure companies. And they are doing so, and posting the results for praise on WeChat.
  • Finally, while DeepSeek was obscure before recent events, it’s now a household name, and the founder (Liang Wengfeng) has met both with Xi but also the #2 in China, Li Qiang. They likely have unlimited resources now.
  • So, if you put all that together, China thinks it has an opportunity to hit US tech companies, boost its prestige, help its internal economy, and take the margins out of AI software globally (at least at the model level).

They will instead make their money by selling inexpensive AI-enabled hardware of increasing quality, from smart homes and self-driving cars to consumer drones and robot dogs.

Basically, China is trying to do to AI what they always do: study, copy, optimize, and then bankrupt everyone with low prices and enormous scale.

I don’t know if they’ll succeed at the app layer. But it could be hard for closed-source AI model developers to recoup the high fixed costs associated with training state-of-the-art models when great open source models are available.

Last, I agree it’s surprising that the country of the Great Firewall is suddenly the country of open source AI. But it is consistent in a different way, which is that China is just focused on doing whatever it takes to win — even to the point of copying partially-abandoned Western values like open source, which seemed like the hardest thing to adopt.

On that point: they did build censorship into the released DeepSeek AI models, but in a manner that’s easily circumvented outside China. So, you might conclude they don’t really care what non-Chinese people are saying outside China in other languages, so long as this doesn’t “interfere with China’s internal affairs.”

Anyway —this is an area I’ve been watching, and my reluctant conclusion is that China is getting better at software faster than the West is getting better at hardware.

Uncategorized

Is Israel the Deep State?

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The public mind is managed to avert from that which matters most: The settler colonial project, what lies behind the JFK assassination, the ongoing genocide and Israel’s unacknowledged nuclear threat.
by Sam Husseini via https://husseini.substack.com/p/is-israel-the-deep-state

I’m continuing to heal from the concussion I got courtesy of the State Department. This limits the amount of time I can spend in front of a computer screen and is affecting me in other ways. I feel like my writing now has to be more flowing and less filled with links and such.

It’s been eerie going to the State Department briefings under these conditions. And of course they have been refusing to call on me even as I have my hand up for virtually every question and regularly holler “followup” or such. The Rubio/Trump State Department is imposing a new structure on briefings. Most obviously, seating is now assigned. And they put me in the second to last row. By the door. As Decensored News remarked, maybe they figure having me near the door will make it an easier haul if they are going to try to carry me out again. I view my questioning — or attempted questioning — there as an important step in transforming the US from an Empire to a democracy and a republic as swiftly and peacefully as possible.

Read more https://husseini.substack.com/p/is-israel-the-deep-state

geopolitical issues

Is Donald Trump Managing the Possible Collapse of the “American Empire”?

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by Thierry Meyssan via https://www.voltairenet.org/article221903.html

For a month, the accumulation of critical events around the United States, Ukraine and the European Union has been difficult to interpret because each power has been advancing in disguise. European leaders assume a stupid air by assuring that they continue to support the Ukrainian integral nationalists while Washington and Moscow have already agreed on a peace agreement. However, it is possible that the diplomatic summits are hiding another issue: the prevention of a major economic crisis in the West. In this case, Washington must terrorize its allies to force them to pay off its debts.

It was in the kitsch decor of his Mar-a-Lago residence that Donald Trump convinced allied central bankers and finance ministers that he was going to make them pay the United States’ debts.

De-dollarization, that is, using the dollar only at the national level of the United States and no longer in international trade, is the sea serpent of finance. However, following the unilateral coercive measures that the United States imposed on its allies, first against Iran, then against Russia (measures wrongly described as “sanctions” by Atlantic propaganda), Russia created a Financial Message Transfer System (SPFS), China the Interbank Payment System (CIPS) and the European Union the European Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (INSTEX). As a result, the use of the dollar has declined by about a quarter in international trade.

However, the US public debt has now reached the astronomical sum of 34,000 billion dollars, of which only a third is held by foreign investors, according to Forbes [1]. If some of the US creditors, mainly China and Saudi Arabia, were to ask for repayment, a gigantic economic crisis would occur as in 1929.

Many economists regularly warn of this prospect. However, according to Jon Hartley of the Hoover Institution, central banks have not reduced the share of the dollar in their foreign exchange reserves since the war in Ukraine. However, on February 20, a videoconference by analyst Jim Bianco, taken up by the Bloomberg agency [2], rekindled concerns. According to this analyst, the Trump administration is following a plan, the “Mar-a-Lago Agreement”. It intends to radically restructure the US debt burden by reorganizing world trade through tariffs, devaluing the dollar and, ultimately, reducing the cost of borrowing, all with the aim of putting US industry on an equal footing with its competitors in the rest of the world.

The idea of the “Mar-a-Lago Accord” refers to an article by Stephen Miran of the Manhattan Institute [3]; Miran was appointed by President Trump to chair the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) and he himself, Donald Trump, gave a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 22 that seems to go in this direction.

The expression “Mar-a-Lago Accord” refers to the “Plaza Accord” when, in 1985, the United States implemented a policy of weakening its currency in order to boost its exports. In practice, the financial mechanisms having been poorly controlled, the US economy restarted by causing a very serious recession in Japan.

On January 21 and 22, Donald Trump had gathered the central bankers and finance ministers of the G7 in his Mar-a-Lago residence. He is said to have welcomed them by telling them: “No one will leave this room until we have found an agreement on the dollar.” [4]. The agreement in question would therefore have been approved by the allies.

The main idea would be for the US Treasury to issue government bonds that do not pay interest (what are called “zero coupons”) and that would not mature for a century (that is, could not be exchanged for cash for 100 years). Washington would therefore have to force its allies to convert their debts into “zero coupons”.

If we accept this analysis, we must reinterpret various actions of President Trump, in terms of customs duties or the creation of a sovereign wealth fund. They no longer seem as erratic as the international press describes them, but on the contrary very logical.

We must therefore consider that Donald Trump is trying to manage the possible economic collapse of Joe Biden’s “American empire” as Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko and Mikhail Gorbachev tried to manage that of Leonid Brezhnev’s “Soviet empire”.

I am all the more attentive to this hypothesis because, in my opinion, the coup of September 11, 2001 had no other goal than to postpone the foreseeable collapse of the “American empire”. The last two decades have been only a reprieve that, far from solving the problem, have only made it much more complex.

Let us recall: in 1989, the Russian Mikhail Gorbachev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, decided to reduce state spending. He abruptly stopped aid to the USSR’s allies and gave everyone their freedom. Simultaneously, the East Germans toppled the Berlin Wall, while the Poles elected members of Solidarity to the Diet and the Senate. This is the end of the imperialism of the Ukrainian Leonid Brezhnev who, in 1968, had imposed on all the allies of the USSR to adopt, defend and preserve the economic model of Moscow.

This is probably what we are witnessing today: Donald Trump, President of the United States, is dissolving the “American empire” as he had tried to undo it in 2017 [5]. On July 28, 2017, he had reorganized the National Security Council by liquidating the permanent seats of the director of the CIA and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This was followed by three weeks of war in Washington and, ultimately, the resignation of the National Security Advisor, General Michael T. Flynn. The latter, who has disappeared from the radar, is in fact still active today and organizes meetings at Mar-a-Lago for opponents of the allied countries.

This time, cautiously, President Trump is lulling his public opinion to sleep by evoking the annexation of the entire North American continental shelf, from Greenland to the Panama Canal, while liquidating the war in Ukraine and the European Union.

If my hypothesis is correct, we must not believe a word of the threats of annexation of new territories, such as Canada, and not imagine that the United States is withdrawing militarily from Europe to confront China, but admit that it is militarily abandoning its European allies. We see that it is abandoning Germany and relying on Poland to organize Central Europe, even if it means letting Warsaw annex Eastern Galicia (currently Ukrainian). Similarly, we must prepare to see the United States abandon its Middle Eastern allies, with the exception of Israel. Indeed, it has just resumed arms deliveries to Tel Aviv and begun secret talks with Iran via Moscow. They let Saudi Arabia and Turkey divide up the Arab world.

The competition between Paris and London to take the lead in European defense should therefore not be understood as opposition to peace in Ukraine. Neither the French nor the British armies have the possibility of replacing Washington’s military support. It is rather a question of determining the role that the two capitals will subsequently play on the continent. Emmanuel Macron, the French president, hopes to develop his defense concept around the French strike force, while Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, intends to take advantage of the situation. The former is aware that the European Union, around Germany, is disintegrating and that President Trump prefers the “Three Seas Initiative”, around Poland. He could therefore reawaken the Weimar Triangle (Germany/France/Poland) to maintain some room for maneuver. While, from the same analysis and taking into account the disappearance of NATO, the second will ensure that Germany is kept as far away from Russia as possible, thus continuing his country’s foreign policy for a century and a half. Note that if the European allies, the Chinese and the Saudis should consider it a scam to exchange their debts for “zero coupons”, Russia should on the contrary support the United States in this maneuver. Indeed, during the dismantling of the Soviet Union, Russia went through a decade of recession and unrest, but today it needs the United States to avoid finding itself face to face with China.

Translation
Roger Lagassé

[1] «Why Trump’s ‘Mar-A-Lago Accord’ Would Financially Matter To You», Erik Sherman, Forbes, February 23, 2025.
[3] «A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System», Stephen Miran, Hudson Bay Capital, November 2025.
[4] «Et Donald Trump fit entrer Mar-a-Lago dans la légende du dollar», Nessim Aït-Kacimi, Les Échos, 25 février 2025.
[5] « Donald Trump dissout l’organisation de l’impérialisme états-unien», par Thierry Meyssan, Réseau Voltaire, 30 janvier 2017.
Democracy as Mob Rule

Trump, The Ultimate Hustler and Shyster

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by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with

At the beginning of this month, Bild, the German media sensationalist, claimed to have discovered “incredible developments between [Presidents] Trump and Putin. And they affect Germany! Bild research reveals secret talks between the US and Russia in Switzerland. It’s about an explosive gas deal for Germany! At the centre of the affair: once again the Baltic Sea pipeline Nord Stream 2.”

The Bild story alleged that Trump’s envoy for special missions, Richard Grenell, made several visits for negotiations at the headquarters of Nord Stream 2 AG — the Baltic seabed pipeline’s operator, wholly owned by Russia’s sanctioned Gazprom — in Steinhausen, in the Swiss canton of Zug. Grenell has denied the story.

The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, added there was no point in his commenting on Bild’s claims because Grenell “has already denied it. And so the Americans have denied it. Also, there is a lot of information [in the Bild publication] that is not true.”

The Bild report followed just hours after a report appeared in London by the Financial Times maintaining that “a former spy and close friend of Vladimir Putin has been engineering a restart of Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Europe with the backing of US investors, a once unthinkable move that shows the breadth of Donald Trump’s rapprochement with Moscow. The efforts on a deal, according to several people aware of the discussions, were the brainchild of Matthias Warnig, an ex-Stasi officer in East Germany who until 2023 ran Nord Stream 2’s parent company for the Kremlin-controlled gas giant Gazprom.”

The anonymous sources told the newspaper “Warnig’s plan involved outreach to the Trump team through US businessmen as part of back-channel efforts to broker an end to the war in Ukraine while deepening economic ties between the US and Russia. Some prominent Trump administration figures are aware of the initiative to bring in US investors, according to officials in Washington, and they see it as part of the push to rebuild relations with Moscow.”

Warnig told the FT he was “not involved in any discussions with any American politicians or business representatives.”

Stephen Lynch, a well-known arbitrageur between Russian and US asset buyers and sellers following the Yukos oil company’s nationalization between 2004 and 2007, was reportedly behind some of the fresh media leaks, according to which “one US-led consortium of investors has drawn up the outlines of a post-sanctions deal with Gazprom, according to one person with direct knowledge of talks who declined to disclose the identity of the prospective investors.” For Lynch’s record, including his attempt at a hostile takeover of gas assets of Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash in 2016, click to read the archive.

While Lynch has been promoting a Nord Stream takeover for his own commercial reasons, the planting of the story in Bild and the FT may have been an attempt by European officials to kill it.

“Senior EU officials,” according to the London newspaper, “became aware of the Nord Stream 2 discussion in recent weeks. Leaders of several European countries are concerned and have discussed the matter, according to several officials with knowledge of the discussions…The latest plan would in theory give the US unparalleled sway over energy supplies to Europe, the people said, after EU countries moved to end their dependence on Russian gas in the aftermath of the invasion.”

Russian analysis of these purported dealmakers and their targets has been compiled in this new piece, published on March 18 by the Moscow business weekly, Expert. In its assessment of the German and British claims, Expert concludes that American speculators are being attracted to the potential profit in schemes for buying low-priced Russian assets currently under sanctions; lobbying the Trump Administration to lift the sanctions as part of an end-of-war settlement in the Ukraine; and then reselling the assets if and when business with Russia revives and the Russian asset prices return to pre-war market levels. Lobbying the Trump Administration is the polite term for this.

According to Expert, a scheme to dismantle the current sanctions and refill the single, undamaged pipe of Nord Stream 2 with Gazprom gas for Germany is between improbable and impossible. However, an alternative with better chances for speculators is a buyout of Rosneft’s German oil refinery at Schwedt.