Federal Reserve Bank Chair, Jerome Powell explains the inherent tension between:
This – when you’re Donald Trump – is how a businessman who can speak diplomatically starts to get you comfortable with the idea of stagflation.
Another stellar day in the stock market. Another 1-2 days like this and we’ll MAGA our way back to 2021.
My business partner made a sales call on one of our customers today. He said they are deadly slow, and very worried about sales. They said that nobody is buying anything due to the tariffs and uncertainties. And, this is Semiconductor production equipment.
I posted elsewhere that my wife works for a manufacturing company that did $450M in last quarter sales. They manufacture in the US and Mexico. They are shifting more manufacturing to Mexico since they have a lot of non-US based customers so this will help avoid the tariffs. Even with that, they expect they will have to pay about $40M in tariffs this current quarter. I know Trump says China pays those tariffs, but according to this company, Trump is full of shit.
I think we can point to “Trump threatens Fed Reserve” as the final straw that broke the world’s confidence in United States. The world economy can recover from turmoil eventually, but I don’t see how it recovers the mindset that the U.S. is a comparatively safer investment. It will take a long time for the world to wind down its U.S. treasury positions, but wind them down they will. Going forward, the U.S. will be just another large economy, and U.S. dollar will be just another currency.
From the BBC this morning:
- 21 April 2025
Updated 58 minutes ago
US stocks and the dollar plunged again as President Donald Trump intensified his attacks on the US central bank boss calling him “a major loser” for not lowering interest rates.
In a social media post, Trump called on Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell to cut interest rates “pre-emptively” to help boost the economy, saying Powell had been consistently too slow to respond to economic developments.
“There can be a SLOWING of the economy unless Mr. Too Late, a major loser, lowers interest rates, NOW,” he wrote.
My wife and I are both in pharmaceuticals. She’s more on the biotech startup side, which is a really exciting business, generally.
The startups are seeing the investment dry up. This is a business that has managed to mostly ignore the 2000 and 2008 recessions. Entirely a man-made crisis.
Trump will now say bad things about Ethan Hunt and the rest of the IMF.
Trump says he’s not going to try to fire Powell and that he’s not going to have a hard stance against trade with China. Sounds like someone sat him down and showed them whose boss at some point.
This is a little self-interested but it almost seems to me like Trump is going to uncrash the world economy just to save Tesla from going under 200 bucks with their terrible earnings. Tesla will do anything to avoid their reckoning including divine intervention.
Didn’t they see what happened when Vance met the Pope?
I was in a meeting today with a company that makes expensive scientific instrumentation that is manufactured in Japan. They said their company is shitting bricks over what to do with the tariff that will come with each $2M device. Adding $200,000 to each to cover the tariff or let their own profit go down the toilet?
Guess who isn’t paying the tariff? Japan. It’s the customers or the company. Of course we already knew that…
Global Vision, an up-to-now-American non-profit that provides low-cost glasses in low-income countries, is relocating to Winnipeg. Much of their glasses comes from China and the tariffs would destroy their (non)business model, making it impossible to provide glasses to people in low-income countries.
They need certainty to continue with their work.
There are no international container ships in Seattle’s harbor. The last container ship from China will dock at a West Coast harbor tomorrow and the last coming to the East Coast about May 10.
It’s hard to view this as either capricious or a good sign:
UPS to cut 20,000 jobs on reduced Amazon deliveries, as US tariffs weigh [Reuters]
Some specifics:
United Parcel Service on Tuesday said it would slash 20,000 jobs and shut 73 facilities as part of a planned reduction in deliveries for Amazon.com, and as U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs roil global trade.
UPS aims to shelter profits by cutting $3.5 billion in 2025 with its latest overhead reductions. UPS also said a big percentage of the volume reduction from Amazon is money-losing work moving goods from fulfillment centers.
The hardest part about playing chicken is knowing when to blink.
Donald??
It’s the same story at all US ports:
On the consumer side: people are starting to post what is (as of today) FORBIDDEN at Amazon: the amount of the Trump Tax per purchase, on online sites like Temu which DO permit disclosure of “import charges”:
(The Amazon reference:
The economy shrank in the first quarter of 2025. Two consecutive quarters of decline marks a recession. (Note that this shrinking occurred notwithstanding the fact that a lot of companies have tried to front load their spending to get out in front of upcoming tariffs)
January 29th 2024, when not in office:
Today:
Ha! I was going to come post this same thing. When times are good, Trump owns it. When times are bad, BIDEN! The “Thanks Obama” meme is now “Thanks Biden”.
My wife called me from Costco yesterday. “Should I pick up a bag of rice, since it will become expensive and / or scarce soon?” Sure, I said. “Basmati or Jasmine?” Eh, might as well get one of each, I say. Dried rice lasts indefinitely. So now we have an apocalypse survival amount of rice on hand. We won’t starve for awhile, at least 
My house cleaner was here today. Her business is her family (sister, husband, mother). They’re all from Brazil and they tell me here legally (I don’t really care).
She said people are pulling back and asking her to clean less frequently with weeklies going to biweekly and biweeklies going monthly.
We’re biweekly but on alternating weeks she also cleans the now vacant in-law apartment
She also complained about how many of her friends and family who have citizenship voted trump and are now shocked to see friends being rounded up. She claimed that for all we see of big raids on the news there are lots of little pickups we don’t hear about.