Looking Backwards …
LB #1
There are some unhappy people with the United States and our government’s actions lately. The nicest people in the world, the Canadians, are up in arms and booing the US national anthem. If I was to have a sanity check for good moral behavior, I would probably ask a Canadian first. They aren’t the nation of OnlyFans they are the nation of Only Hockey Fans. This upsets me that they are upset.
Here are numerous examples from around the world from Peter Beaumont at the Guardian, “The renowned German classical violinist Christian Tetzlaff was blunt in explaining why he and his quartet have cancelled a summer tour of the US.
“There seems to be a quietness or denial about what’s going on,” Tetzlaff said, describing his horror at the authoritarian polices of Donald Trump and the response of US elites to the country’s growing democratic crisis.
“I feel utter anger. I cannot go on with this feeling inside. I cannot just go and play a tour of beautiful concerts… In Canada, where the American national anthem has been booed during hockey matches with US teams, a slew of apps has emerged with names such as “buy beaver”, “maple scan” and “is this Canadian” to allow shoppers to scan QR barcodes and reject US produce from alcohol to pizza toppings. Figures released this week suggested the number of Canadians taking road trips to the US – representing the majority of Canadians who normally visit – had dropped by 23% compared with February 2024, according to Statistics Canada.”
Beautiful concerts, this guy is speaking Trump’s language and he is boycotting the US? What is interesting about this boycott is that it hurts the boycotters. This Christian fella was touring the US to make his living, and he is willing to stand on his principles. Good for him. Nothing sacrificed, nothing gained. Do I agree? Not important. Canadians are boycotting Tesla and American alcohol brands. If they wanted a Tesla and didn’t buy one because of their principles, good for them. Drink a little VO and drink a Molson instead, good for you if that is what you want. Buy Beaver is what Trump wants to see in his country so nationalism is spreading just like we said it would. Why did we say it would because this is what happened when we had a colossal trade war in 1930 with the Smoot Hawley tariffs and trade between countries dropped precipitously. Joe Deaux, a metals and mining expert, was on Bloomberg and had this to say and I am paraphrasing, “They aren’t buying now and you want to raise prices 25%?” This is the surest way to slow trade or stop trade in its tracks. Bingo 1930.
It isn’t just in North America Beaumont writes, “In Sweden, more than 70,000 users have joined a Facebook group calling for a boycott of US companies – ironically including Facebook itself – which features alternatives to US consumer products.
“I’ll replace as many American goods as I can and if many do so, it will clearly affect the supply in stores,” wrote one member of the group.
In Denmark, where there has been widespread anger over Trump’s threat to bring the autonomous territory of Greenland under US control, the largest grocery company, the Salling group, has said it will tag European-made goods with a black star to allow consumers to choose them over products made in the US.
“We are making it easier to shop for European brands,” its chief executive, Anders Hagh, wrote on LinkedIn, although he said the company would still stock US products.
More striking, perhaps, is the decision by companies to cut ties with the US. Norway’s largest oil bunkering operation, the privately owned Haltbakk, recently announced a boycott of its occasional supplying of fuel to US navy ships.”
Like I have been saying, we can bully individual countries, but if they all band together they will whip the bully. Be careful Don, you might get what you are wishing for. If his goal is to balance trade it helps to have people ready and lined up to buy your products not boycott them. The good news is we don’t produce enough stuff that people want anyway. Our trade deficit last month was an all-time record of $134.1 billion.
LB #2
I hold it self evident that I have a solemn duty to provide you with all the important happenings of the week and this is no exception. From Kipp Jones at MediaIte, “President Donald Trump announced on Friday night that he had added Fox News hosts Maria Bartiromo and Laura Ingraham to the board of trustees at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
The announcement came weeks after Trump fired much of the venue’s board and appointed himself chair. In a post from his Truth Social account, Trump said Bartiromo and Ingraham would be the last people appointed to the center’s board of trustees.
“I am thrilled to announce that Laura Ingraham and Maria Bartiromo will be joining our Kennedy Center Board – This completes our selection,” Trump wrote. “We look forward to restoring the Center to Greatness, and ushering in America’s Golden Age. Together, we will Make the Arts Great Again! Other members appointed since Trump took over the Kennedy Center include Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s wife, Allison Lutnick and Vice President JD Vance’s wife, Usha Vance.”
Folks, this is why I don’t read ads, and monetize this site. I want complete editorial freedom to bring you the important things like the board of the Kennedy Performing Arts Center. The Kennedy Center is where traveling ballets perform, dead sea scrolls are read to a rapt and attentive audience, and Hamilton must have a residency. Oh wait, Nate Freeman reports on that very topic for Vanity Fair, “Then came a bombshell Wednesday evening Lin-Manuel Miranda announced that a planned run of Hamilton at the Kennedy Center tied to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence would be canceled. The hit musical’s creator said it would be “untenable for us to participate in an organization that had become so deeply politicized.” Trump is packing the board with the wives of his coworkers and the Fox News team which serves as a minor league for his cabinet selections. This is the equivalent of the charm and beauty classes undertaken by those great athletes of yesteryear coached by Jimmy Dugan, the Rockford Peaches. “And sit, right over left, legs always together, a lady reveals nothing.” Trump might prove to be an effective president this term in comparison to his last but in all his shady business dealings, all his top-rated shows, and all his publicity no one has ever accused him of being classy. Perhaps instead of Hamilton they can show reruns of the Apprentice.
I am constantly entertained when Trump does Trump things. I envision the Kennedy Center going bankrupt in less than four years and he will have no one to blame but himself and the board.
LB #3
Enough tomfoolery, or should I say Trumpfoolery, I was ready to talk about Ontario putting tariffs on American electricity but that lasted only a couple hours before everyone did a take back. Instead we can talk about the thing that hasn’t been taken back and that’s the Atlanta GDPnow forecast. Connor Smith writes for Barron’s “The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s running forecast for first-quarter gross domestic product slid again on Monday.
The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow estimate now calls for a first-quarter GDP decline of 2.8%, down from a decline of 1.5% on Friday. As recently as Feb. 19, GDPNow predicted growth of 2.3%.
GDPNow isn’t the Atlanta Fed’s official forecast; instead it’s a reading that reflects economic data so far this quarter.” This is a huge drop and would put us half way to a huge recession if it were actualized. This seems unimportant but I can assure you it is. This was released on March 3. This from Kristen Altus at Fox business on Friday the 14th 11 days after the GDPnow forecast came out, “U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick was apparently shocked on Friday, after learning that a recent estimate from the Federal Reserve shows the U.S. economy shrinking in Q1.
“Wait, wait, wait, say that again. What? A what?” Lutnick interrupted FOX Business’ Maria Bartiromo after she read the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta estimate that gross domestic product (GDP) is expected to contract in the first quarter.
“A contraction?” he continued. “Okay… right here, right now, that is ridiculous.” Lutnick noted he has “absolutely not” spoken to Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic about the matter.”
This is your Commerce Secretary folks. He happens to the Kennedy Center board member’s husband and being interviewed by another board member. He was on Bloomberg this week and had his two talking points that Trump was only concerned in steel and aluminum tariffs and while he was speaking Trump threatened a 200% tariff on European wine. The Bloomberg host was kind and gently ribbed him, but chalk this guy up to not knowing what the hell is happening. Perhaps he is too busy keeping his eye on his multibillion crypto business that stockpiles US Treasuries. Remember, we just got a crypto reserve started this last week, maybe he didn’t realize that the other arm of the government is forecasting a deep recession. He is another billionaire that took a place in government and now we have a crypto reserve benefitting him. Trump made his billions with the Trump and Melania coin, Musk is getting access to all the government information he wants which is very helpful when your business is acquiring government contracts. Keep an eye on your hens, because there are foxes running around.
Looking Forwards…
LF#1
I will continue to bore you with this topic as long as I can draw a breath because I think it is the most important thing happening in the world today and it should be the talk of every water cooler and poker game and sewing circle in the land and alas it is not. 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 just reported, in February the US government spent a staggering $603 billion, a 6% increase from the $567 billion a year ago… … while it collected just $296 billion in tax revenues… … which resulted in a $307 billion budget deficit for the month, which means that all tax revenues collected by the US government in February were less than the deficit! Said otherwise, the US spent more than twice what it collected in February.”
Crochet on that. It is accelerating and getting worse. I know we have had a debt for a long time, and yes, we have had a debt problem for a long time, and yes, we have talked about it for a long time, but dammit listen up. It is the rate of change! It is at ramming speed! It is the going parabolic that is the problem. We are trying to cut, and it gets worse. If this is a relationship breakup, the its not you its me speech would be given and then the you would put handcuffs on the me and say where do you think you are going. Nowhere without me, which sounds like its own type of hell, but I digress. The debt is the accumulation of the deficits, and the deficits are accelerating. If the stock market keeps dropping then the tax receipts will fall and the deficits will only widen. This is what makes this log rolling high wire act that Trump, Musk, and Bessent are trying to pull so damn delicate. They are losing and about to go into the water and they just got on the log. This isn’t their fault currently as Musk and Bessent were both Democrats when Obama was running up the deficits and then Trump had his disastrous campaign and then Biden said watch this. But here we are, 50 years of cumulative mistakes by both parties and Congress deserves more blame than any president because Congress controls the purse but no one seems to be mad at Congress except me! Meanwhile Rand Paul and Thomas Massie are both voting against Republicans on this big beautiful bill that passed Friday night that will add hundreds more billions to the deficits! All the Democrats just vote against Republicans, so we have 2 out of 535 that are to be trusted in the financial well-being of the country department of the government that controls spending. So if Trump and Elon want to eliminate entire departments of the government that is fine by me, but the next thing that should be taken away in the name of Austerity is these damn golf trips. Buy a simulator and put it in the White House Don. Maybe we can sell the naming rights to the Gulf of America to Bezos and call it the Gulf of Amazon just to piss off the Brazilians.
LF#2
We might not just be watching the era of American exceptionalism end , but we also got to see the downfall of another formerly great organization. I am talking about of course Southwest Airlines. The airline Wallet Hub has called the worst in America 3 years in a row has now done two things thought impossible in its illustrious history. It laid off a sizable chunk of its workforce and changed its policy to 2 bags no longer fly free. This from ZeroHedge, “Southwest’s policy changes came after Paul Singer’s Elliott Management pressured the airline to end its 54-year history of offering free first- and second-checked bags. With this major value proposition now lost, the carrier will be seen as just another airline—on par with Spirit Airlines.” Let’s not besmirch Spirit Airlines now ZeroHedge, they were bad and cheap. Southwest was just bad and now about to get even more expensive.
Another company about to make major changes as this recession roils the economy, Irobot. Remember the Roomba? This from ZeroHedge, “iRobot’s shares crashed by as much as 40% in early cash trading in New York after the maker of robotic household vacuums issued a going concern warning for the next 12 months following a dismal fourth-quarter earnings report… What spoked the market was the company’s going concern…”
When the talk of can it be a going concern…that is when you know it is bad. Let this be a lesson to how well and competitive American technology companies truly are on the global stage. We couldn’t replace housewives with robots and make a profit so what is this future of robotics you speak of? Househusbands? Illegal immigrant househelp? I am not sure how to land this plane and be politically correct, oh wait, I don’t have to anymore. Thank you Trump for making America great again. Fellas the Roomba is dead, hand your ladies a broom, give her a firm pat on the tookus, and tell her that kitchen isn’t gonna sweep itself. Let this bygone relic know how that works out for ya…
LF#3
Lastly, I want to discuss a topic that I see becoming more and more prevalent in the news. I don’t know how much of it is meaningful, but it is interesting to watch. I think Musk and Trump will not be together long, but I don’t know when they have their its not you its me moment. Only neither of them would allow that. Both of them break up by saying its not me its you, but I digress. This from Edwad Luce in the FT, “When Elon Musk said he loved Donald Trump “as much as a straight man can love another”, the emetic effect was widespread. Trump is one of the few people left in Washington DC who likes having Musk around. Yet having given Musk more power than any private figure in US history, the president is watching his benefactor turn into an albatross. The question is how Trump will get rid of Musk, not whether.
The price of having him as co-helmsman is already steep. The New York Times chronicled how Trump clipped Musk’s wings in a heated cabinet meeting last week. Cabinet heads, rather than Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, would take care of their own hiring and firing, Trump said. His White House had until then been notably leak free — in contrast to his first term. But it appears senior staff are keen to see the back of the chainsaw-wielding oligarch. The showdown had been set up with the aim of hastening that day… A measure of Musk’s worry about his waning star is that his visit to Mar-a-Lago last weekend was not originally scheduled, say insiders. Moreover, Musk has tried to funnel millions more into Trump’s political action committees and been turned down. Trump is not known to refuse money. But it would look like Musk was buying his prolonged stay. His standing is dropping as fast as Tesla’s stock price. Trump’s approval rating has remained steady. With signs of a coming “Trump recession”, Musk may still be a useful lightning rod.
But that is the extent of his upside. His sway is mostly negative. There is not a Republican legislator or Trump principal who is not terrified of Musk’s power. A $50mn cheque to fund a primary challenge could end a senator’s career — $10mn for a legislator.
I think I am starting to see why Musk has received so much government money, tax credits, contracts, and legal rulings go his way… There appears to be nothing Musk will not say to defame those in his way. This has been apparent since he accused a beleaguered caver of being a pedophile a few years ago… But the cost of keeping him by Trump’s side is growing. In ignorance of how the federal government works, Musk is only causing damage. This also undercuts Russell Vought, head of the White House Office of Management and Budget, who has spent years drawing up plans to deconstruct the administrative state. He was co-author of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s radical blueprint for a second Trump term. The traumatising of America’s civil service will outlast Musk. But Vought is likely to do it less incompetently. Nor does he share Musk’s seeming reluctance to go after the Pentagon, which is a major source of Musk’s federal contracts.”
I for one have always questioned Musk’s motives, his methods, and his results. His cars have been surpassed in quality despite his first mover advantage, his twittering stock price manipulation would have landed any other executive in jail, and his cars still don’t have the robo-taxi capabilities he promised a decade ago. Last I checked half the country’s houses aren’t covered in Tesla solar panels either, but I might be the only elephant that stills remembers when he was running that scam. Caveat emptor Donald…
Sincerely Yours,
C Thomas Printer
The Dow Jones finished trading …at 41,488.
The 10-year Treasury bond is at …4.32%
The price of Brent Crude is … at $70.58 per barrel.
The price of gold is … at an all-time high of $3,001/oz.
The price of silver is … at $34.43/oz.
I leave you with this from the information superhighway, what did one hat say to the other? You wait here, I’ll go on ahead.
Thank you for listening today and you can find all of our articles and more on our website cthomasprinter.com.