Odds and Ends — 29 April 2025

@preparedwombat 77

2 days ago

oddsandends

Cryptocurrency, Investing, Money, Economy, Business, AI, and Debt:

BlackRock Bitcoin ETF buys $970M in BTC as inflows surge

Tether Gold Token Backed by 7.7 Tons of Physical Gold: Report

Amazon to Display Tariff Costs for Consumers

Amazon doesn’t want to shoulder the blame for the cost of President Donald Trump’s trade war.
So the e-commerce giant will soon show how much Trump’s tariffs are adding to the price of each product.

https://twitter.com/Indian_Bronson/status/1916836974519873902

GM Withdraws Profit Forecast

General Motors is abandoning a previous forecast for solid profit growth this year as a result of the uncertainty created by President Trump’s trade policies.

Coronavirus News, Analysis, and Opinion:

U.S. health officials inject new uncertainty into approval process for Covid boosters

Politics:

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1916867202751336485

Thankfully, Canadians are not stupid: Mark Carney’s Liberals win pivotal Canadian election

How Bad Was the Conservatives’ Loss in Canada?

So bad that shortly before 5 a.m. this morning, with more than 98% of the vote counted, CBC News declared that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre — a man who looked all but certain to be Canada’s next prime minister just a few months ago — lost his own bid for reelection to a Liberal challenger.

https://twitter.com/TristanSnell/status/1917046500787458048

Trump’s 100 days of chaos

’Flooding the zone’ was a strategy devised by Donald Trump’s first-term adviser Steve Bannon to generate such a blur of news that the media could not keep track. Trump has elevated it in his second term to a method of governing. The blizzard of executive orders in the first 100 days of Trump 2.0 outstrips, by far, even that in Franklin Roosevelt’s first term.
Yet FDR inherited an economic crisis and set about reforms that changed America for the better. Trump inherited one of the strongest economies of any recent president. In trying to remake the US in his own image he has created crises that threaten immense long-term harm to the American republic, and its place in the world.

https://twitter.com/NOTUSreports/status/1915864392115114044

———— Autocracy R Us ————

https://twitter.com/thejackhopkins/status/1917000663302603188

Trump: ‘I run the country and the world’

https://twitter.com/SarahLarchmont/status/1916662537489125381
https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1916917967180251400

The Longest 100 Days

Judged against Roosevelt’s record, the first 100 days of the second Trump term would be deemed a miserable failure. The president has passed no major legislation, and his economic interventions have had the opposite effect of Roosevelt’s, injecting uncertainty into a healthy recovery and seeding an economic crisis.
Yet his presidency has still been consequential. In just a few months, Trump has smashed democratic norms, crippled the federal bureaucracy, and realigned America against its traditional friends. Because Trump’s goals are so historically aberrant, the traditional measure of presidential achievement is of hardly any use.
His Carter-esque record as legislator and economic steward stands in stark contrast to his Lenin-esque record in stamping out opposition. For the president’s ruling claque, the effect is a triumph. For nearly everybody else, it portends ruin.

MAGA man leads the field before Romanian election rerun

https://twitter.com/ReichlinMelnick/status/1916860218794713348

Trump’s aggressive actions against free speech speak a lot louder than his words defending it

https://twitter.com/AnnJacobsMKE/status/1917023274179133509

———— Smoot-Hawley 2.0 ————

https://twitter.com/krassenstein/status/1916803660572471518

Whistling past the graveyard: Treasury Secretary Not Worried About Empty Shelves

https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1917018095023259876

https://twitter.com/cwebbonline/status/1916686751269294082

No Tariff Exemptions for American Farmers

They voted for the tariffs when they voted for Trump.

National security agencies across the Trump administration are ramping up investigations into alleged leaks to the news media, in some cases using polygraph tests that current and former officials say are creating a climate of fear and intimidation.
Said one official: “It’s a toxic environment. First you’ve got the insecurity of not knowing whether you’re going to get fired or not. Then there’s the witch hunt to find the whistleblowers who are exposing the ineptitude and bad management of agencies. They’re trying to silence those who do not follow the party line.”

Never mind that polygraphs are bogus pseudoscience…

https://twitter.com/WUTangKids/status/1916646826523975726

Huge Majority Oppose Trump’s Expansionist Goals

https://twitter.com/loren_cossette/status/1916891739966636081

Trump’s federal return-to-office orders are massively backfiring