Looking Backwards …
LB #1
We check in on part of the Fox news crew joining positions of power in the government. Thomas Homan, the deportation expert and former Fox news contributor, made news this week. This from Dan Mangan at CNBC, “President Donald Trump’s border czar implicitly warned New York Mayor Eric Adams during a joint televised interview Friday to follow through on his promise to allow federal immigration authorities into the city’s massive jail complex on Rikers Island.
“If he doesn’t come through, I’ll be back in New York City, and we won’t be sitting on a couch,” Trump immigration chief Thomas Homan said Friday in a joint interview with Adams on “Fox and Friends.”
“I’ll be in his office, up his butt, saying, ‘Where the hell is the agreement we came to?”
It turns out that the mayor of New York is going to have to let Homan have access to the illegals at Rikers island or face the consequences which seem to be having Homan up his butt, which doesn’t sound good and/or he is going to face corruption charges. My questions are two; first, why can’t we get Mayor Adams charged with corruption and have access to the illegals held at Rikers and second why is Homan threatening to get up in Adams butt. What a weird but possibly effective threat out of the new administration.
Speaking of the new administration, we go to Fox weekend correspondent Pete Hegseth. Hegseth is the new Secretary of Defense after attaining the rank of major while in uniform during his three different stints in the military. He served in both the Minnesota Army National Guard and the District of Columbia Army National Guard. A major ranks 4th out of 10 positions on the Army’s officer candidate ranks. This would be the equivalent perhaps of taking a high school basketball coach and having them coach in the NBA Finals. It is unsurprising to see Pete get off to a rough start then as Alex Griffing reports for Mediaite, “Hegseth made news on Wednesday by declaring “we must start by recognizing that returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective” and arguing that Ukraine joining NATO was not likely. Many pundits and observers slammed Hegseth after he walked back the comments, arguing that he had given up leverage to Russia without gaining any concessions. The Economist’s Shashank Joshi added, “Hegseth’s lack of experience is already showing. Publicly makes a series of pre-emptive concessions prior to the most important negotiations in many years, and then has to publicly explain that he had no authority to say any of those things.”
Meanwhile in the military and the Mediterranean Sea, one of our aircraft carriers collided with a ship. This from ZeroHedge, “How is that two massive ships, one a US Navy Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, crash into each other on the open waters of the Mediterranean? That’s what Pentagon investigators will be looking at in the wake of Wednesday’s incident off Egypt.
The USS Harry S. Truman and the Panamanian-flagged merchant vessel Besiktas-M collided at around noon local time on Wednesday. On Friday the first photo emerged of damage to the US carrier, and it looks extensive. The vessels collided near Port Said, but there were no injuries reported on either ship. No injuries or flooding on the aircraft carrier were reported, and its propulsion plants “are unaffected and in a safe and stable condition,” the Navy’s 6th Fleet said. By all accounts this is pretty embarrassing for the US Navy, also given that the merchant bulk carrier is a huge ship. Again, how does this happen?”
Let’s hope that Hegseth gets better at his job and quickly.
LB #2
Speaking of foreign negotiations, Donald Trump set off a firestorm in the Middle East with his plan to take over the Gaza strip and export the Palestinians. This from Middle East Eye via ZeroHedge “Egypt has announced an emergency Arab summit to be held on February 27 in response to US President Donald Trump’s recent call to expel Palestinians from Gaza. Trump said he plans to take over the Gaza Strip, transfer its Palestinian population to other countries, and rebuild the territory into the “Riviera of the Middle East”.
Former Egyptian ambassador to the UN, Mootaz Ahmadein, said Trump’s words “should be taken very seriously”.
“Cairo must respond with a simple yet powerful phrase that could unsettle him: ‘No, this is not possible,’” Ahmadein told MEE. Ahmadein further suggested that Egypt should coordinate with other nations that have been affected by Trump’s controversial policies – such as Canada, Panama, Greenland (Denmark), Colombia, Brazil, Mexico and the European Union – and seek their support in opposing him.”
We have talked about this. We have talked about Canada also having a summit to discuss dealing with Trump and his new policies, it seems that the world is quickly turning against us in response to us deciding to bully them. One country that is not going to take this new bullying stance seems to be Denmark. This from Travis Schlepp at KTLA5 news, “In response to President Donald Trump’s continued musing about the U.S. acquiring Greenland from Denmark, Danish citizens have launched their own effort to purchase America’s most economically prosperous state.
An online petition seeking the “Denmarkification” of California has seemingly garnered nearly 200,000 signatures, with a pitch to Danish citizens that purchasing the Golden State would provide them with more sunshine, dominance in the tech industry, limitless avocado toast and easy access to Disneyland — which organizers say would be renamed to honor fairytale author and poet Hans Christian Andersen.
“Have you ever looked at a map and thought, ‘You know what Denmark needs? More sunshine, palm trees, and roller skates.’ Well, we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make that dream a reality,” petition organizers write on the online page.
The petition is a tongue-in-cheek rebuttal to Trump’s fixation on acquiring Greenland, a Danish territory, which he says is critical to America’s national security interests. Republican legislators have also highlighted Greenland’s access to natural resources like oil, gas and minerals as reasons the U.S. should prioritize acquiring the territory.”
A month ago, I might have said this is outlandish, now I shrug and say this is just another Monday.
LB #3
Moving from our foreign policy to domestic, it seems that the LA wildfires have started to take their toll financially. This from the Insurance Journal, “State Farm General said on Monday it is asking the California Department of Insurance to immediately approve interim rate increases, including 22% average for homeowners.
The carrier, the state’s top homeowners insurer, is partly blaming the devastating Los Angeles wildfires for the request.
The increase is needed to align cost and risk and enable State Farm to rebuild capital. Over the last nine years, the lack of alignment has meant that for every $1 collected in premium, the carrier has spent $1.26, resulting in more $5 billion in cumulative underwriting losses, according to State Farm
In May 2023, State Farm stopped writing any new policies in California.”
It is my understanding that state laws have prohibited these insurers from charging appropriate rates for coverage. This is also happening in Florida. Insurers will, and have to, leave the state if they can’t run a profitable business. This is another sign of government intervention into business that mustn’t happen. If people want to live in California, get a mortgage, and require insurance then the insurance company should be able to offer prices that work for both parties the insurance company and the homeowner.
Looking Forwards…
LF#1
Mike Shedlock asks the question, “How Many More Ridiculous Green Energy Projects Will Fail? The answer is all of them, in due time. Here are the latest spectacular failures. It took 10 years, and hundreds-of-thousands of dead birds, before the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in California would meet its fate.
The Wall Street Journal explains in ‘A Prolific Executioner of Wildlife’
An Obama-era monument to green delusions finally faces extinction.
Longtime readers may recall a 2014 Journal editorial about California’s “bird-fryer” solar plant, a taxpayer-backed venture that was hell on local animals. Turns out it was also hell on electricity ratepayers. But as with so many politically favored green ventures, waiting for official acknowledgment of failure can feel like an eternity…There are 525,600 minutes in a year.
At one fried bird every two minutes, assuming sunshine 50 percent of the time (more in summer and less in winter), that’s 525,600 / 4 or roughly 131,400 dead birds per year. Over 10 years that would be 1.31 million dead birds. Ouch!
That may be the high side, perhaps even low side. However, it’s clear that hundreds of thousands of birds were killed in this boondoggle that was never profitable even with subsidies.”
Add it to the list of useless, tax payer wasting, green energy projects that transferred money from the average taxpayer to executives and politicians. The green scam is falling apart, and it can’t happen fast enough.
LF#2
We desperately need to stop this green idiocy because we can’t afford it. This from ZeroHedge, “First the good news: Elon Musk’s DOGE is going through government spending with a fine-toothed comb, slashing a million here, a billion there.
The bad news: at the rate it is going, DOGE will need a few hundred years to make a tangible impact, because as the Treasury reported earlier today, in January the US government spent a near-record $642 billion, a 29% increase from the $500 billion in January… … while it collected just $513.3 billion in tax revenues, a far more modest 7.5% increase YoY… … which resulted in a $129 billion budget deficit for the month… … the second highest January deficit on record (only the post-covid shock of 2021 was greater)… … and $840 billion so far in fiscal 2025. This is a problem because as shown in the next chart, the cumulative budget deficit for the first 4 months of fiscal 2025 is the highest on record, surpassing even the fiscal shock from the depths of the post-covid response. And the punchline is that no matter what Musk does, the USS Titanic is now more or less on autopilot because while a few billions in discretionary spending can be cut, interest on the debt can not be – without a default (it can however be inflated away… and it will be).”
The interest on the debt can’t be cut. That is exactly the point that I made in Bygone Relics Wednesday. So my logic tells me that Trump is trying to send us into a recession to lower the interest rates to reorganize the debt. He needs Bessent to lock it in long term. If we just try to inflate it away right now without the slowdown the yields on the long term bonds increase and the debt gets worse. We have to have a recession and a refinancing and only then we can inflate.
LF#3
On Friday the Trump administration announced that there would be 200,000 federal workers released from their positions. These were the lowest hanging fruit. These probationary employees are just the first wave as they don’t have long term contracts etc. These are regulators, paper shufflers, and are in addition to the 75,000 federal workers who took Trump’s buyout offer. Now most of these people live near Washington DC. This is going to affect the local economy tremendously. On Dec 22, 2024, we discussed just how dependent certain states were on the non-profit business model. 27% of Washington DC’s workforce is employed in the non-profit sector and these non-government organizations are funded by the very government money that DOGE is slashing.
This from ZeroHedge, “Bright MLS, one of the largest multiple listing services in the US, just recently cautioned real estate agents and industry professionals: A toxic mix of a “new Presidential administration and higher-than-expected mortgage rates contributed to a slow start to the 2025 housing market” across the Washington, DC, metro area, plus surrounding counties in Northern Virginia and Maryland. Now, the floodgates have opened—active listings are soaring, and jobless claims are spiking across the region, as the writing’s on the wall: an economic downturn is just ahead for the federal bureaucracy as ‘DC Swamp’ draining accelerates… Last month, local residential markets in Washington, DC, and surrounding counties in Northern Virginia and Maryland, saw a sharp increase in active listings, averaging 22.8%. Notably, Falls Church City, Virginia, experienced a 78.6% surge, followed by a 68.8% jump in Fairfax City, a 50.5% increase in Alexandria City, and a 33.5% uptick in Montgomery County, Maryland. These markets have a high concentration of federal workers, many of whom have spent their entire careers in the government without little to no experience in the private sector…Meanwhile, in Maryland, swamp draining by Trump and DOGE could push the state on a crash course to a “deep recession“ because of the already dire fiscal situation produced by far-left Democratic lawmakers, including Gov. Wes Moore. A large asset management company that operates in the region told us weeks ago that the financial situation in Maryland is so dire that they don’t even recommend the state’s muni bonds to their clients – and have instructed some clients to leave the state because of tax hike fears.”
Sincerely Yours,
C Thomas Printer
The Dow Jones finished trading …at 44,546.
The 10-year Treasury bond is at …4.478%
The price of Brent Crude is … at $74.74 per barrel.
The price of gold is … at $2,893/oz.
The price of silver is … at $32.65/oz.
I leave you with this from the information superhighway, What do you call it when Batman skips church? Christian Bale.
Thank you for listening today and you can find all of our articles and more on our website cthomasprinter.com.