Spekulatius

Whatever Vance says is directed to the MAGA base not whoever he is talking to. If you understand that, you understand Vance.

I don’t think any incremental tariff will matter all that much for China and that’s what they figured. I wonder when Trump and his team figure that out too - probably fairly soon. I agree the risk with China and Chinese stocks went up quite a bit. Also keep in mind the Taiwan blockade exercise pretty much occurred at the same time that Trump announced his Liberation day. That was already a middle finger.

Gallium is way more expensive than Ge and is also covered in the export control. China has a 98% market share for Gallium according to some sources. I am not sure what super hard materials are included in the export control order. I think they have strong positions in synthetic diamond, sapphire or maybe the carbide metals like Tungsten. Might be a good time to start a thread on this. By the way, export control is pretty much an export ban in practical terms.

Keep in mind the bazooka China fired that nobody seems to talk about: https://investingnews.com/china-rare-earths-export-controls/ I expect shortages to pop up fairly soon in many places that will surprise people like magnets (used electric semiconductor tools, electric motors and a ton of others devices. It’s not just the raw material that were export controlled, but also products. They’d did the same thing with Germanium a few weeks ago. Germanium is easier to ramp up or to replace in some cases, but rare earth, which there are many off is much much trickier. Trumps emergency order that covers this a while ago probably leads to a bunch of investments but those take years to get online.

The low crude prices are about the worst thing that could happen to Russia as it will impede their ability to finance their war machinery. Drill baby drill the Russian war machine into the ground.

PIX (Brazilian payment system) was considered by Italy. I think it’s more likely that the EU may require to VISA to run Europe as a separate legal subsidy for oral security reasons . Europe after all was independently run until Visa bought them out about 10 years ago. Visa would likely incur somewhat higher cost (I recall them taking out some cost when they integrated VISA Europe) but it might not be that big of a deal.

A lot of the $5T in trade deals is vaporware. For example the Stargate announcement or the Apple deal of $500B which includes not just investments but all purchases from US suppliers. Apples Capex has an only been around $16B/ year and that has been shrinking. So there will be some jobs being created but not as much as you think given the headlines numbers. How many people does a $1B datacenter employ? Probably not more than a Walmart superstore.

Yes there are vey little SG&A expenses if you just sell a commodity. Thus a meaningless number if your compare to it to a business that also does chemicals and refining and marketing.

Counter tariffs are viable action In a tit for tat game theory game. It encourages others to do likewise against the US. If every trade partner does counter tariffs to the US it’s the US versus the rest of the world. All of the sudden the biggest bully is not that big any more. The US become a trade island of sorts. In a way that’s the only way the US get balanced on trade because I doubt that US exports will go up much.

The stamp duty applies to ADR shares as well.

Trump is fucking everyone over, except himself. He won’t make the US rich either. I think countries need to establish trade without the US and do their own deals bilaterally. The worst thing to happen is that every country establishes blanket tariffs. I think the right way to deals with this is to do targeted countermeasures/tariffs and do mitigations to reduce the impact. Here is one example of self harm: Howmet declared force majeure due to tariffs. That means they can and likely will cancel existing contracts. The auto and now apparently aerospace supply chains are messed up from tariffs which means that we are looking at a major mess here, similar to COVID-19 for these particular sectors. https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/jet-component-supplier-howmet-may-halt-shipments-amid-tariff-challenges-report

@nwoodman Yes, Stephen Miran is the master mind behind was Trump does. I think Bessent really didn’t know what he went into (at least the tariff part) and Lutnick is in way over his head. The plan proposed by Miran is a gamble even team that knows what it’s doing and yen current administration doesn’t even follow the proposed order much less the finesse needed to execute this. I wonder what Trump will do, if this blows up, which I think is what’s seems to be happening right now. My guess is he will blame it on Biden and declare another emergency and double up on power grab to fix the problems he just created. It’s like COVID-19 but the virus resides in the White House.

Can’t be worse that the Art or the deal. I bought it in the 90’s in thrift store in Germany for 1DM (~50c). All I really took away from the book that Trump was full of himself.

Free trade is not the goal, since it won’t balance the US trade balance. It’s what the administration calls Fair trade, but unlike the cute little shops, extortion will be needed to get customer to buy in. I guess one flavor could be a connect Mar de Largo deal, but who knows. Futures down another 4% as I type this. Ok they own the liberals, but not much more.

He talks about 10% tariffs but what Trump has enacted is way higher than that. That interview was from January. He probably has a massively different viewpoint right now.

We’ll, Trump put higher tariffs on Canadian lumber, so I guess the thinking is that we can just cut our own instead.

You have too much trust in checks and balances that Trump tries to bulldoze over. Given the lack of resistance so far has emboldened him to push the envelope much further than deemed possible.

Trump 2.0 and Trump 1.0 are completely different . Prior experience does not apply.

This Scottish fellow has a really bad sensor of humor then. What do you think would happen to him if he did that in the US? As far as Greece’s howled are concerned , any (like me) he lived in the US for many years, sometimes decades. They paid tens if not hundreds of thousand in taxes, a house, 401k etc. It’s not exactly like a temporary Visa. The status is called US person for good reasons. I am not aware of any administration that has done this before. Always remember the saying, first they come for x, then they come for y and then they come for you. Also look at this - news flash, the CCP does not do that for tourist or even long term work Visa. I am not sure what other county does this but you may have to go down to Iran or North Korea. Doesn’t look like free speech to me, more like a surveillance autocracy.

Same concerns that @dealraker is having regarding reduced defense spending. I also finds very attractive other opportunities out there and I need some cash in some accounts to buy these. It turned out to be profitable trade after all for me but that’s wasn’t why I sold it.

I think these thing are wrong but I can’t speak for the UK either. I am stating the background why Germans may look at some of the free speech versus human rights or hate speech stuff differntly. For example, Mark Meehan trained his dog to raise the paws when he said “gas the Jews” he did not get fined for doing this. He got fined for posting it in social media , or how did the police find out? Can I run around in the streets and say “Gas the Jews?” and not get fined? I claim it’s a joke - why not? In the US, Green card holders get deported for far less. Free speech as long as it agrees with the current administration is the theme I am seeing here.

Like crypto?

Interesting - Bessent track record on his own wasn’t very good. AUM collapsed due to shitty track record. Bessent’s hedge fund:

Sold most of my $CACI

The German constitution begins with Artikel 1 “ Die Würde des Menschen is Unantastbar” (for good reasons. I don’t know if they still teach the constitution in social sciences in Germany but if you look at the still recent history, there are very good reason why human dignity become before free speech. Germany also does not have anything like a “Patriot act” or the presidents emergency power which I think place the US Democracy at a significant risk. Also look at recent actions form the WH to limit access to reporters or agency that the administration doesn’t agree with. This is mit the case in Germany. We can argue if Germany takes an overzealous approach on free speech, but the US is hardly without issues.