Odds and Ends — 4 April 2025

I’m reading Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World. It’s a fascinating blend of physics, chemistry, history, and fiction.

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

Arthur Hayes loves tariffs as printed money pain is good for Bitcoin

https://twitter.com/BraddrofliT/status/1907899692257833435

BlackRock's BUIDL Fund Reaches $1.94B AUM, Pays $4.17M March Dividends, Dominates Tokenized Finance

Coronavirus and Public Health:

The Evermaskers

The isolation of people who take precautions against COVID has only gotten more intense.

After promising transparency, RFK guts public records teams at HHS

Politics:

South Korean Court Removes President from Office

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol was removed from office Friday, when the country’s Constitutional Court upheld a parliamentary vote to impeach him over his December effort to impose martial law.

Donald Trump must pay $821,000 legal bill over 'Steele dossier' lawsuit, UK court rules

https://twitter.com/donwinslow/status/1907933922497114185

National Security Agency and Cyber Command chief Gen. Timothy Haugh ousted

———— Smoot-Hawley 2.0 ————

These Aren’t Reciprocal Tariffs

One of the aspects of Trump’s announcement enraging U.S. trade partners is the simplistic method used to calculate each tariff. This internet sleuth figured out the U.S. tariff rates are based entirely upon America’s trade deficits with individual countries — meaning these are not really ‘reciprocal’ tariffs at all.

https://twitter.com/Mickey4x/status/1907674291174519042

We live in the stupidest timeline: Trump’s Tariff Math Came from an AI Chatbot

When President Donald Trump began yesterday’s announcement of the White House’s latest trade policy brandishing a novelty-sized cardboard sign labeled “Reciprocal Tariffs,” the immediate and nearly unanimous response was bafflement. Trump slapped a 10 percent baseline tariff on all imports into the US, including from uninhabited islands, plus absurdly high rates on specific countries, supposedly based on “tariffs charged to the USA” — which didn’t match up to other, non-cardboard-sign-based estimates. Stock markets have plummeted and consumers are facing down sharp price hikes on potentially almost everything they buy.
Where did these numbers come from? Apparently, an oversimplified calculation that several major AI chatbots happen to recommend.

https://twitter.com/LHSummers/status/1907841817740997040

The Fatal Flaw In Trump’s Trade War

…Donald Trump’s sweeping tariff regime will completely transform America’s economic relationship with the rest of the world, all in the name of revitalizing domestic manufacturing.
And yet, many businesses won’t be rushing to shift their supply chains to U.S. shores.
For all the detail in Trump’s Wednesday announcement, his endgame is still shrouded in confusion. That’s lethal for long-term investment, making confident planning all but impossible.

Will Malignant Stupidity Kill the World Economy?

The tariffs Trump announced were higher than almost anyone expected. This is a much bigger shock to the economy than the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930, especially when you bear in mind that international trade is about three times as important now as it was then.
The size of the tariffs, however, wasn’t the only shocking thing about the Rose Garden announcement. Arguably what we learned about how the Trump team arrived at those tariff rates — the sheer malignant stupidity of the whole thing — was even worse.
You might be tempted to dismiss complaints about the policy process as elitist snobbery. But credibility is a crucial part of policymaking. Businesses can’t plan if they have no idea what to expect next. Foreign governments won’t make policies that help America if they don’t expect us to respond rationally.

https://twitter.com/TidefallCapital/status/1907758916789772597

The Economist is not amused: President Trump’s mindless tariffs will cause economic havoc

If you failed to spot America being ‘looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far’ or it being cruelly denied a ‘turn to prosper’, then congratulations: you have a firmer grip on reality than the president of the United States. It’s hard to know which is more unsettling: that the leader of the free world could spout complete drivel about its most successful and admired economy. Or the fact that on April 2nd, spurred on by his delusions, Donald Trump announced the biggest break in America’s trade policy in over a century—and committed the most profound, harmful and unnecessary economic error in the modern era.

Trump’s Tariffs Are A Colossal Self-Own For The Ages

The disastrous tariffs that Trump proudly unveiled in the Rose Garden take a sledgehammer to the tentpoles of a U.S.-centered trade and financial system that accrued often invisible benefits to American consumers, businesses, diplomats, and war fighters.
Make America Great Again somehow means in Trump’s mind returning to a time before America stood astride the world stage. His lack of awareness mirrors the country’s chronic obliviousness to how good we have had it in the post-WWII era. A key element of privilege is not recognizing it.
The damage will be so vast and foreseeable that it’s hard not to veer into wondering about Trump’s motives in unleashing this much destruction on his own country.

https://twitter.com/RasmusJarlov/status/1907878938958815482

Republicans Own This

It’s hard to find a single Republican who ran for office promising to raise tariffs. Trade wars have never been part of the modern GOP orthodoxy. And yet, Donald Trump is now fully embracing one—openly and aggressively.
And the consequences? They belong entirely to Republicans.

https://twitter.com/ArmandDoma/status/1907627576132272600

Trump’s Totally Arbitrary Tariff Regime

There are two main takeaways from yesterday’s so-called ‘Liberation Day’ announcements.
The new tariffs are economically illiterate, self-destructive, top-to-bottom nonsense, imposed with no sense of rhyme or reason, assembled by White House staffers who do not know which territories have serious trade relationships with the U.S. and which ones are inhabited entirely by penguins.
Also, the White House continues to avoid almost any decision that could possibly antagonize Vladimir Putin, while inflicting as much pain as possible on longtime allies and vulnerable friends like Israel and Taiwan.

https://twitter.com/P_Kallioniemi/status/1907759698171846783

https://twitter.com/DrewPavlou/status/1907700160744095879

A Third Global Recession in 20 Years Looms

A truly enormous shock is needed to tip the entire global economy into recession. Since World War II, there have been two of these events: the financial crisis of 2008-09, and the coronavirus pandemic of 2020.
President Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs, if they stay in place and especially if they face retaliation from targeted nations, could be the third such economic earthquake in 17 years.

https://twitter.com/Andie00471/status/1907802916720680969

https://twitter.com/SocialPowerOne1/status/1907622243732947090

White House Says No Negotiations on Tariffs

White House officials have circulated internal talking points telling surrogates that President Donald Trump’s new global tariff regime should not be characterized as a starting point for negotiations.
As the world tries to make sense of Trump’s sprawling new import taxes, the administration’s internal instructions say advisers should characterize the tariffs as a response to a national emergency, rather than the basis for potential new trade talks… In addition to the talking points, Trump himself has told advisers the tariffs are not about setting up negotiations.

Trump vows his policies will ‘never change’ after China retaliates

———— Autocracy R Us ————

https://twitter.com/MacFarlaneNews/status/1907868806988325254

———— Melon Husk ————

https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1907780702348734708

https://twitter.com/PrezLives2022/status/1907860238813831300

———— Signalgate ————

Inspector General to Probe Pete Hegseth’s Use of Signal

The Pentagon’s acting inspector general announced Thursday that he would review Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of the Signal messaging app to convey plans for a military strike against Houthi militants in Yemen.
The review will also look at other defense officials’ use of the publicly available encrypted app, which is not able to handle classified material and is not part of the Defense Department’s secure communications network.

Given the pervasive corruption of the Trump regime, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for Hegseth’s head to roll.

———— Mors Imperii ————

The American Age Is Over

We cannot overstate what has just happened. It took just 71 days for Donald Trump to wreck the American economy, mortally wound NATO, and destroy the American-led world order.
He did this with the enthusiastic support of the entire Republican party and conservative movement.
He did it with the support of a plurality of American voters.
He did not hide his intentions. He campaigned on them. He made them the central thrust of his election. He told Americans that he would betray our allies and give up our leadership position in the world…
This realization may be painful for Americans. But we should know that the rest of the world understands us more clearly than we understand ourselves.
Vladimir Putin bet his life that American voters would be weak and decadent enough to return Donald Trump to the presidency. He was right.

Trump’s Appetite for Risk Knows No Bounds

It was the latest example of his willingness to take a maximalist position, essentially daring his opponents to take him on. Before the tariffs announcement, he moved to blow up a global alliance system the United States spent 80 years building embassy by embassy, silencing Voice of America and mostly removing the government from the business of providing food and medical aid.
Mr. Trump is more than willing to test the boundaries of a 250-year-old democracy to retaliate against perceived enemies or eviscerate parts of the federal government, even if that means risking the public health system or ignoring due process for immigrants living in the country legally.
And faced with daily competition with China over artificial intelligence, space and biological sciences, he is happy to risk cutting off funding to America’s largest research universities.

Congress Is Freaking Out About Trump’s Trade War

Republicans at the Capitol understand this is going to hurt not just Americans, but their own political futures. It’s why, in a low-key fever, they’re freaking out.
But here’s the rub: while they know this is bad for just about everyone, don’t expect them to exercise their congressional authority to get Trump to back off. Their prospects may be bad right now, but they view crossing a President who leads a vindictive movement as even worse. This is not a moment where anyone in Washington is expecting political bravery.
Said one Republican lobbyist: “None of this was thought through. The math doesn’t work. The end game doesn’t work. The politics doesn’t work. This is just a mess and it is going to cost Republicans seats.”

Serendipity:

Myanmar military’s ‘ceasefire’ follows a pattern of ruling generals exploiting disasters to shore up control

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