changegonnacome

To be fair....your somewhat right.....I'm having a little fun with it.....which is not to say that directionally things are playing out more like my fanciful narratives.....that even I'm surprised.....nuclear subs & Russia is a wonderful distraction from Epstein....my narrative fiction fun is having a horrible way of turning into reality adjacent headlines

Never said that.....only that you could impose a high price on her for not talking.........which would result in talk.....instead she's getting sweetheart deals and moved to the Hilton Prison Hotel.....as long as she keeps her mouth on El Presidente

The President playing footsie with a convicted paedophile (& former friend) was not in my playbook......I think MAGA might not understand.....but you dont need to incentivize convicted felons to talk....you can convene a grand jury and if she refuses to co-operate or take the 5th on what your looking for her assistance on - you can dole out contempt charges leading to incremental jail time on top of her sentence.....put another way Ghilaine has two choices......help with whatever incremental DOJ investigations are happening or have her sentence extended from 20yrs to life......so yeah in my universe I expect paedos to talk for nothing.....they deserve nothing but contempt. But you and I know this isn't about bringing more people to justice......its about protecting the President from a period in his life which is at a minimum deeply embarrassing but is now shaping up (based on his behaviour) to be a period where he was doing much worse things than embarrassing stuff and Ghilaine has the dirt on him....the 50th Birthday Book came from her.....and I'm sure she's a treasure drove of stuff on him!

Just for posterity....my post from a few days ago

"Trump Says US Moved Nuclear Submarines in Response to Russia" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-01/trump-says-us-moved-nuclear-submarines-in-response-to-russia?srnd=homepage-americas&sref=7zqHEcxJ That didn't take long.....so predictable.

Ghislaine Maxwell moved to minimum security prison camp - https://www.axios.com/2025/08/01/ghislaine-maxwell-moved-minimum-security-prison-camp Well what do you know.....Ghislaine Maxwell just got upgraded to a minimum security prison, after her two day chat with Trump's criminal defense attorney (sorry, sorry Deputy Attorney General in the DOJ) A little downpayment on a future commutation or pardon?.....an act of goodwill/kindness, for her goodwill/kindness in not releasing any more damaging information re:Trump/Epstein? The stink coming off this situation is getting to be foul. No matter.....ramping up military tensions with Russia in a few days time might help switch up the headlines.

Should have put a smily face on the end of it.......but you know.....now when I think about.....for certain job categories & activities....hotel room cleaning lady for example......I think you'd be very surprised at the % level at which illegal migrants effectively supply the category. Suspect if Trump keeps this up your going to find a lot of industries squealing in pain cause they can't fill the lowest level & least desirable positons.

ICE....I rename you.....the U.S. Inflation Creation Engine........loading ICE with cash and going after the 5% of the people in America doing 50% of the work.......on top of all these tariffs.......you can see why J-Pow has some inflationary concerns. It will be very interesting to watch the bottom quartiles real wages over the next few years - definitely an argument to say that their bargaining power over employers is going to greatly increase in direct proportion to how succesful ICE is at ramping up deportations (& scaring away prospective illegal immigrants which I think is where the BIG 'lost workers' numbers already are).

You bet - I'm in NYC......sometimes I stop and look around and the ONLY people I see working are these folks. The flip side of Trump's immigration crackdown....is upward pressure on labor availability (basically the inverse of my illegals solved 2022 inflation story).....I get the pro-Main St. element to this.....labor might have a shot of squeezing more terms from capital......company margins should go down and real wages should go up....its an admirable project.....income & wealth inequality works beautifully (for the top) for a while, till the revolt kicks-in....Donalds political success & Bernie's nearly political success plus Mamdani in NYC are the populists canary's in the coal mine that if the system doesn't get a bit more equitable.......well strange things will happen.

Italy perhaps a bad European example.......US companies in the main offshore to Europe .....look to the Netherlands, UK, Ireland and then Eastern Europe.....Italy not super high on the FDI list. Even as the worst example like for like and on an FX basis - an Italian worker versus a US (all in) is still cheaper.....the sad reality is that as the US has diverged from EU and become wealthier and wealthier.....they are no longer comparable in terms of costs structures.....THIS is a good thing for the USA....it outpaced Europe and became an expensive place to do business as a result....a trade deficit and services surplus is what that looks like......Europe would kill to have the USA's "problem".....which amounts to something like we are so wealthy and successful and at full employment that manufactoring here versus overseas has become a very hard math problem!!! Yeah agree....it reminds there is a couple of days work to figure out what companies are going to benefit from this provision.....I think alot of companies are going to wake up in a few months time and realize this provision exists and how attractive it is.....and will bring forward equipment & fixed asset investments......its a very pro-growth provision....and possibly the one thing in the BBB that I think is very smart politics and will result in meaningful activity next year coming up to the mid-terms.

yep you might remember I had my whole a productivity miracle wasn't going to save the day because you only have so many workers and demographics are terrible and so the US really had this fixed output potential problem against which wage growth & COLA adjustments was just overwhelming the kinda fixed slowly growing productivity output potential....the delta being inflation........what I got totally wrong and in my defense it wasn't in the data, cause these we're illegals......was Joe & Kamala's incompetence had enabled an absolute avalanche of working age (& highly motivated individuals) enter the US through the Southern Border & Airports!.....and I know these guys and you know these guys.......they work two jobs.......so 10m of them in get in......and its really like adding 15-20m standard American workers to the workforce.....anyway at some point I think we get a post-mortem on this period and the recession that never was & the miraculous disinflation.....your theory of its just the supply chains stupid, at this point, has stood up way better than mine.

This is an interesting period to look at......and I was most certainly one who called 2022 correctly as the classical correction to overvaluation and raising rates damage to the underlying economy as means by which to tackle inflation.......however what I would say is I remained too bearish into 2023 as my monetary inflation theory mixed with supply chain thesis started to break down in the face of stronger than expected dis-inflation (relative to the economic strength or should I say only slight economic weakness). Like anyone I can get too wedded to a thesis........but one variable nobody was working with at the time in that 2022 period was the unknown and MASSIVE influx of illegal migrants coming across the border.....my new theory of that period......is J-Pow had to do something with rates (when summed up all the money injected into the US was extreme and more extreme than other advanced economies) and rates being held where they we're are/were necessary.....but IMO the 'X Factor' was illegal migrants saved the day.....which is to say that it didn't take a recession to cool inflation......cause 10 million who knows 15 million plus workers flowed through the southern border...that combined with the cooling effect of higher rates fixed inflation enough so that we didnt need a recession to fix it this time (unlike all the previous periods)..or maybe thats a story I tell myself and it was all just supply chains!!

Your right - the expensing regime is attractive and durable......I was totally wrong to exclude that.....your right to call that out as counter to my argument. What I would say however...when you look at the 10, 20yr life of fixed asset investments....you ask yourself over 10yr period what gets to a be bigger number.....capex or opex?.....Trump has done nothing to address the Opex burden of an American workforce versus say an Italian one.....the delta is large here mainly due ironically to healthcare costs....so Opex matters more in a model than Capex when you run it out years....and of course capex itself is more expensive in the USA vs. competing jurisdictions.....so sure the immediate expensing regime gets you 21% of costs delivered back as a tax rebate in Yr1 and the time value of money means its worth more than that.....but you know your spreadsheet still shows Mexico is 50% to build and as I said above opex costs begin to drive numbers bus very quickly once you go outside year 5. Your point is well made - at the margins I think tariffs + expensing is going to move some marginal projects into the USA column.......I guess my less hyperbolic point is I'm seeing enough for a wholesale renaissance he's hyping up here.

Based on all the action since liberation day and the deals announced so far - I have serious serious question marks around wether trade imbalances & re-industrialization we're ever the target here.....its more and more a smash and grab for revenue (& clientelism)........and as per Trump 2.0, the imperial presidency.....he is really only interested in doing things unilaterally...........fentanyl, 232....just mechanism by which he gets to pretend like he isnt in a constituently democracy.....he's living out his Xi, Kim Jong Un & Putin fantasies here and loving the attention.......until the courts or then the congress burst his bubble.....the key point that any company looking at all this policy volatility will see......is that there is zero policy durability to anything he has done......it would be foolish for a company to make a long run fixed asset investment for such tiny deltas created by these tariffs versus the ultra-high cost USA and if it that alone weren't enough......the policy durability of any of this is extremely extremely weak and so provides no certainty to capital.

as much as I like speculating on what he's doing....what I prefer doing is making money off the guy......and to that end....I think Trump (via my Russia/Epstein distraction thesis) is going to make volatility great again in the month of August.....my bets are laid on! Let's see if Donald continues to boost my 2025 returns - he's been my favourite President in many years on this narrow metric.

I finally figured out why Trump has moved up the Russia deadline....from 50 days to 10 or 12 for no apparent reason..........cause this damn Epstein story wont go away no matter how much he tries to change the narrative.....the Obama treason distraction didn't work......threatening to arrest Oprah and Beyonce didn't work......trade deals haven't worked........ I know what will work thinks Trump.....bringing World War III up to the boil with Putin will definitely work. August is a slow news month in D.C......Trump needs a new ball for the media to chase in August, cause if he doesn't they'll be chasing the Epstein ball relentlessly and for some strange reason he is very very afraid of whats in the Epstein files & to that you can add the Maxwell files..... Indeed my base case now is that Ghislaine Maxwell provided the WSJ with access to the 50th birthday book to bring Trump to the heel and to the table as her appeal case is winding its way towards a big fail at the Supreme Court and she knows it....this Trump angle is her last shot at freedom........and you can only say it has worked beautifully......Maxwell just spent two full days with the President's criminal defense attorney (sorry No.2 at the DOJ). Todd Blanche was not down in Florida for two days to find out what Ghilaine knows to prosecute other bad boys on the Epstein list.....he was down there to find out what other compromising material & info she has in the same vain as the 50th book and to figure out her mindset, willingness and strategy she has to use it........and to understand what it might take to get her to stop (commutation/pardon). When you put a scumbag in the White House, I guess you get scummy things - playing footsie with a convicted paedophile is new low that even Clinton didn't get to in his scummy time in office. Ugggh.

Tariffs will push Procter & Gamble's prices higher, but maker of consumer products is wary of the discounting frenzy- https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20250729135/tariffs-will-push-procter-gambles-prices-higher-but-maker-of-consumer-products-is-wary-of-the-discounting-frenzy About what I expected….companies took and wait see approach to tariffs….but the dam is bursting….and tariffs are getting passed through to Joe Sixpack starting about now. Revenue raising, fantasy re-industrialization…..call it what you like…. pushing prices up for everyday consumers is political suicide for the GOP…it’s like they want to be slaughtered at the midterms or something.

Oh sure...many pages back you and discussed this.....Russia views a neutral Ukraine and Belarus as essentially existentially important to its security architecture....once the Iinvasion/coup of Kyiv failed and the West/Ukraine was not willing to agree to Ukrainian non-NATO membership in Istanbul but instead decided to fight on......Russia had no choice but to impose its will by force....the fact that they turned their whole economy into a war machine is the evidence one needs to understand the importance it places on this red line issue....if it weren't red line a simple retreat to the pre-March 2022 borders was an easy de-escalatory route for Russia (& the West) but they chose not to proceed with this instead turning their whole economy on to a war footing. I disagree that Putin will continue to Kyiv once the East falls......conquering and occupying a hostile Western Ukraine is a decades long headache of dissidents, gorilla warfare and revolutions to put down. In short it would be a nightmare for Putin and his successors. Putin is not foolish enough to sign up for whats he watched from afar....the US attempt to occupy a foreign territories for decades in Iraq and then Afghanistan where the base layer of the population despises them. Now I think its possible in a total Ukrainian capitulation that he drives towards Kyiv for a short occupation if he felt that it would lead to a final surrender by Ukraine/Trump & the West that met all Russia's peace terms ......but I think he would ultimately hand it back in a settlement of some sorts rather than occupy it......but your right once the warlords start making bank logic can go out the window marshalling these forces will be a test of Putin's power and control.

Trump says he's shortening deadline for Putin to reach Russia-Ukraine ceasefire to just 10 or 12 days https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-scotland-uk-starmer-eu-trade-deal/ 50 days.....now 10 or 12 days.......I'm sorry this is totally retarded.......what exactly is Trump going to do in 10 days or 12 days or 50 days or 500 days exactly?........Russia is overwhelming Ukraine on the front lines....and inflicting damage at will behind the lines in Kyiv etc......the artillery mismatch cannot be addressed by the US or Europe.....the shells & industrial capacity simply don't exist anywhere and the manpower mismatch cannot be addressed by the US or Europe because no US soldier or EU soldier is going to die in the mud in Eastern Ukraine. Sanctions have been pushed to their limit and haven't worked, so pray tell how secondary sanctions are going to change anything? This is very poor politics, if nothing else, by Trump to continue to entwine himself further into the narrative fabric of this war....his naive peacetalk talk at the start of his term was hubris, throwing Ukraine publicly under the Kremlin bus embarrassing and counterproductive, all while he has completely misjudged the nature of his relationship with Putin.....to say nothing of the fact that Trump's peace envoy to Ukraine/Russia, is also his peace envoy to the Gaza/Israel conflict and also the guy managing the US/Israel/Iran portfolio.....to which you might say well this guy is a foreign affairs genius, a peace whisperer with 50yrs experience......nope its Steve Witcoff....a Manhattan real estate developer turned Henry Kissinger a few months ago. If all that weren't enough this 10 day ultimatum bravado shows a complete lack of understanding of the realities on the battlefield and the strategic options left to the US/Europe to affect meaningful change on the battlefield. Short answer there are none. This is a battle of attrition. As best I can tell Russia is likely to collapse the Ukrainian front lines during Trump's term (perhaps within the year) and drive forward to take whatever territory they feel in Ukraine is sustainable to hold without too many on-going headaches from dissidents (i.e. they'll have an ethno-Russian population density overlay, so going to far West is not attractive)....this likely means at least a full takeover of the four oblasts in the East.....and my guess is, once the front lines fall, some territorial expansion beyond this that will later be used as demilitarized buffer zone as well as some useless (to Russia) territorial expansion that they can give back at the negotiating table later as a zero cost bargaining chip. Very surprised to see Trump play a game of chicken he's going to loose......it does nothing to further the war in Ukraine and serves only to dent what credibility he has on the world stage left......Xi must be laughing into his tea at these shenanigans......while thinking to himself, what better time than the next three years might there be to move on Taiwan....when such a strategic military amateur is in the White House and one who clearly doesn't listen to those with more experience around him.

Always true...but on a like for like basis....what you find is that depending on the product the true economic cost of the tariff gets absorbed by a mix of the consumer, the importer & the overseas manufacturer.....but then externalities occur also.....domestic consumption falls due to higher prices, trade frictions go up, domestic producers raise prices in the slip stream of the overseas product going up and finally the government now holds capital that was once in the private sectors hands and so it moves from efficient and productive hands to inefficient and unproductive hands. Yes - I can assure you that Ursula von der Leyen does not have the legislative authority to commit a single EU27 country to invest in the USA. Whatever you heard re:EU investment commitment in the US over the next X number of years is complete bullshit. Its clear the US side has focused grouped this element of the announced trade deal and found that MAGA can really wrap their head around this element of deals and so it will be included in every announced deal. Smoke and mirrors would be too kind a word for what is hocus pocus.

Like when you piss your pants

The saving grace for the PE guys is that Scott Bessent is in the same predicament......the PE industry is riding two horses to get out of trouble town.....one is a return to ZIRP-like financial conditions.....the second is dumping this toxic junk into retail pension funds. I really hope they dont get away with it but suspect they will.

Yep more and more - this is netting out to be 1% federal sales tax. Taking so many raw input goods and singling them out for outlandish tariffs (steel, aluminum)….is truly counterproductive….better to direct subsidies to these industries if you want to stand them up…than to put your finished goods exporters at such a disadvantage. Currently the rates announced against UK, EU & Japan are not sufficient to move manufacturing (the tariffs are too low) and if that weren’t enough alone (& they are) you take one look at the policy durability of all this trade adventure and you realize no company would make long run capital decisions based these trade frameworks, flimsy 232 executive actions and reciprocal tariffs headed for Supreme Court overturning in mid-2026. Re-industrialization is a smoke screen….revenue raising & political clientalism appears to to be the true deliverable here. Cause I can’t help but think this is also an election plan for Trump and the GOP to build a tariff constituency voter bloc (& corporate donor class)….that will backfill the demographic problem that bedeviles the current Republican voter base who keep dropping off the voter rolls….and the democratic machine that somehow always out fundraisers the GOP. Well no more - autoworkers, steel workers etc etc and their respective companies know where their bread is buttered….the GOP is now the mob boss keeping your business safe from global trouble….just remember to pay your dues when they are due every two years now kids!

Everything you said - is accurate when framed by the China relationship....market access etc.....big picture when you look at trading partner allies (Canada, Mexico, EU, Japan, S.Korea) what I would say (with some notable little examples & emotive issues around milk tariffs or certain products banned) and when you take services & trade value into the mix)...........tariff barriers and market access barriers to the US played up by the Trump administration are completely overplayed.....the terms of trade for these allies when goods and services are taken in the round we're quite advatngous.....I've seen little concrete improvement in these terms of trade.....tariff rates of 2% like in the EU going to 0% changes little in reality.....all the DST talk and VAT rates are gone.......the EU, UK & Japan deals so far.....look like smash and grab deals for the US tax revenue boost.....the tariff rates arent high enough to move factories (so the liberation day rhetortic has turned out to be nonsense).....the market access concessions not robust enough to expand markets enough such that one can make a terms of trade argument for these tariffs being a postive net-net....... Shaking down a trade partner for tax revenue is a win......no doubt.....but the deal and the liberation day promise....has fallen a little flat from its lofty goals....factories aren't moving cause of 15% and American exporters are not going to enjoy a boom IMO as it pertains to Europe acess getting blown wide open by this.....US consumers will end up with at least a high single digit price increase for the novel things the EU supplies with no good substitutes (pharma products, french cheese etc etc.). This Liberation day project is becoming more and more a revenue exercise only - I hope they do better with China than they did with the UK/EU/Japan....so far....this is a complicated and volatile way to introduce a defacto 1-2% federal sales tax!