Odds and Ends — 7 April 2025
Cryptocurrency, Investing, Money, Economy, Business, AI, and Debt:
Ethereum, Solana, Cardano Plunge Double Digits as Crypto Market Rout Deepens
Investors discounted everything Trump has ever said about trade and tariffs. We’re all going to pay for that mistake.
https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1909025957937140060
Trump administration to markets: Don't expect a rescue
If there was one consistent message from Trump administration economic officials Sunday morning, it was this: We’re not worried about the stock market plunging, and the cavalry isn’t coming to save you from tariffs, either.
Coronavirus News, Analysis, and Opinion:
Long COVID Cuts Imperil Treatment Progress, Researchers Warn
Canada trucker protest organizers found guilty of mischief
Politics:
https://twitter.com/donwinslow/status/1908665264725709276
Trump’s Extension of the TikTok Deadline Is Illegal
There is no mechanism in the law for the president to issue any such extension. What he’s saying is what he said the last time: he’s instructing Attorney General Pam Bondi not to enforce the law, and pinky-swearing that U.S. companies that are breaking the law to keep TikTok available (Akamai, Oracle, Google, Apple) won’t be held responsible for it. It’s just a complete abdication of the rule of law.
Not a peep from Republican Tom Cotton, who, on the cusp of Trump taking office again, was crowing about the PAFACA Act coming into effect to shut TikTok down in the U.S.
The Cabinet Secretary Who Wants His Cookies Freshly Baked
The unusual requests made of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s staff are raising concerns all the way to the White House.
https://twitter.com/BMeiselas/status/1909019742939320654
———— Smoot-Hawley 2.0 ————
https://twitter.com/AdamKinzinger/status/1908669401005539578
This is supposed to be reassuring. Or something:
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1908895557973598536
A New Golden Age for Bootleggers
President Donald Trump’s high-tariff regime will impose higher prices and lower growth on Americans. It will have another effect that nobody in the administration seems to have considered at all: a tsunami of smuggling.
In a few days’ time, every desirable consumer good will be dramatically more expensive in the United States than on world markets. Flat-screen TVs, athletic shoes, video-game equipment, even household basics such as coffee, toilet paper, and soy sauce—all will soon cost 20, 25, 35 percent more than they cost on world markets.
Trump has just opened perhaps the greatest arbitrage opportunity in the history of world trade. His effort to repeat the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of the 1930s will also replicate the cross-border bootlegging of alcohol during Prohibition.
Pro tip: soy sauce (in a glass bottle) has so much salt in it that an unopened bottle would still be okay to consume long after you’re dead. Your not-yet-born grandkids could use it.
https://twitter.com/ArtCandee/status/1908863975468442025
Trump and Republicans Made a Massive Bet
The Republican Party embarked this week on a haphazard experiment in economic policymaking, wagering that the United States can weather a monumental tax increase in the form of broad tariffs on imported goods as long as Congress also cuts taxes on income.
It’s a mash-up that many investors, economists and even some G.O.P. lawmakers expect to be a failure.
Said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a conservative economist: “I always think that with gambling, at least you have a chance of winning. This is worse than that. This is betting with the mafia. You’re going to lose.”
https://twitter.com/DashDobrofsky/status/1908912669056524779
Commerce Secretary Lutnick doesn’t back down in face of market sell-off: ‘The tariffs are coming’
Said Lutnick: “The tariffs are coming. He announced it, and he wasn’t kidding. The tariffs are coming. Of course they are.”
He added: “There is no postponing. They are definitely going to stay in place for days and weeks. The president needs to reset global trade. Everybody has a trade surplus and we have a trade deficit.”
Days and weeks? WTF?
Trump’s Tariffs Based on Massive Error
The formula used by the Trump administration to levy reciprocal tariffs contains a serious math error that over-inflates the impact by about a factor of four, economists at the American Enterprise Institute said.
The conservative think tank says the error led to tariff rates massively higher than they should have been to achieve the goals the administration sought.
———— Autocracy R Us ————
Judge says deportation of Maryland man to an El Salvador prison was ‘wholly lawless’
https://twitter.com/TVietor08/status/1908960283902771550
https://twitter.com/OldManLefty1/status/1908824163571437834
———— Putin&Krasnov ————
‘There is no ceasefire. Attacks are ongoing’: how Putin’s envoy played US over Ukraine
The 3 words that Putin apologists use to blame the West for Russian aggression
———— Melon Husk ————
‘0 to 1939 in 3 seconds’: Why Anti-Elon Musk Satire Is Flourishing in Britain
Musk Is Showing Signs of Weakness and Fear, Germany’s Habeck Says
———— Signalgate ————
The Greater Scandal of Signalgate
The spectacle of incompetence and the attempts to smear a reporter are a misery; even worse is the encroaching threat of autocracy that cannot be concealed or encrypted.
———— Mors Imperii ————
https://twitter.com/RachelBitecofer/status/1908994540964602047
Appeals court halts Trump independent agency firings, spurring Supreme Court battle
Trump Now Reportedly Subjecting His Minions to Lie Detector Tests for Absolute Loyalty
The head of a federal agency was reportedly given a polygraph test after an apparent news leak — even though such "lie detection" measures are considered junk science.
https://twitter.com/quadcarl_carl/status/1909114265983725750
Serendipity:
https://twitter.com/hepburnfiles/status/1908642711931859413
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You won't know yourselves.
We live in the stupidest timeline.
I don't whether you've come across The Rest is History podcast or can access it. I've been listening to the one about 1974, another year when things were going wrong. It's so British, I think you will enjoy it. Some of it is hilarious.