Excellent. The devil is in the details, but it’s progress.
U.S. President Donald Trump Wednesday said that China will supply rare earths upfront to the U.S. as part of a trade agreement.
The relationship between the world’s two largest economies is “excellent,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social, while adding, “WE ARE GETTING A TOTAL OF 55% TARIFFS, CHINA IS GETTING 10%.”
He added that full magnets and “any necessary rare earths” will be supplied up front by China and that the U.S. will in turn make certain concessions such as allowing Chinese students to attend U.S. colleges and universities.
The agreement is subject to final approval with himself and China President Xi Jinping, the White House leader said.
Representatives from both sides had on Tuesday revealed that a deal had been reached on trade after a second day of high-level talks in London.
“We have reached a framework to implement the Geneva consensus and the call between the two presidents,” U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told reporters.
(The Center Square) – Wisconsin ranked 22nd in the American Legislative Exchange Council’s new labor policy rankings.
The state was graded with a total of three stars while Arizona and Utah led the way with 5.5 stars and both Alabama and Arkansas had five stars.
“Wisconsin made history with Act 10, a landmark reform that stood up to entrenched special interests and put power back in the hands of taxpayers,” said Alan Jernigan, manager of the ALEC Commerce, Insurance and Economic Development Task Force. “That moment inspired a national movement. But real reform is never a one-time event, it’s a continuous process.”
The housing market varies greatly by geography, but the national trend is moving toward buyers. If the Fed would get off it’s butt and lower interest rates, Gen Y might be able to afford a house this decade.
There are an estimated 1.9 million home sellers in the U.S. housing market and an estimated 1.5 million homebuyers. In other words, there are 33.7% more sellers than buyers (or 490,041 more, to be exact). At no other point in records dating back to 2013 have sellers outnumbered buyers by this large of a number or percentage. A year ago, sellers outnumbered buyers by just 6.5%, and two years ago, buyers outnumbered sellers.
There haven’t been this many home sellers since March 2020. There haven’t been this few buyers at any point in records dating back to 2013 aside from April 2020, when the onset of the coronavirus pandemic brought the housing market to a halt.
Admittedly, I have a bias because I hate tariffs and I am not a lawyer, but I think I agree with the court. The Executive Branch does not have the power to arbitrarily impose tariffs in the Constitution and the notion that we have an economic emergency is dubious, at best. I certainly wouldn’t want a Leftist president to declare an economic emergency and make all kinds of sweeping arbitrary decisions and I don’t want Trump doing it either. Yes, this means that Congress needs to get off their asses, but that’s how our government was designed.
A federal court ruled Wednesday that President Donald Trump exceeded his authority with his reciprocal tariffs, dealing a blow to a major tenet of the president’s economic agenda.
A three-judge panel at the Court of International Trade ruled that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a 1977 law that Trump invoked to justify the tariffs, does not actually give the president the power to unilaterally implement the sweeping duties.
“The Worldwide and Retaliatory Tariff Orders exceed any authority granted to the President by IEEPA to regulate importation by means of tariffs,” the judges wrote in their ruling.
“The Trafficking Tariffs fail because they do not deal with the threats set forth in those orders,” they continued.
Dow futures jumped 400 points Wednesday on news of the ruling.
Implementing tariffs typically requires congressional approval, but Trump chose to bypass Congress by declaring a national economic emergency, and using the purported emergency as justification for invoking the tariffs on his own.
The Trump administration swiftly appealed the ruling Wednesday.
“Foreign countries’ nonreciprocal treatment of the United States has fueled America’s historic and persistent trade deficits,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai said in a statement after the order.
“These deficits have created a national emergency that has decimated American communities, left our workers behind, and weakened our defense industrial base – facts that the court did not dispute.”
Frankly, Moody’s was negligent by not lowering it sooner. Until our politicians control spending and get our debt under control, we are a credit risk. Pretty soon our Congress is going to be getting payday loans to keep the spending going.
The US was stripped of its last top credit rating by Moody’s Ratings, reflecting deepening concern that ballooning debt and deficits will damage America’s standing as the preeminent destination for global capital and increase the government’s borrowing costs.
Moody’s lowered the US credit score to Aa1 from Aaa on Friday, joining Fitch Ratings and S&P Global Ratings in grading the world’s biggest economy below the top, triple-A position. The one-notch cut comes more than a year after Moody’s changed its outlook on the US rating to negative. The credit assessor now has a stable outlook.
[…]
The shift comes at a time when the federal budget deficit is running near $2 trillion a year, or more than 6% of gross domestic product. A weaker US economy in the wake of a global tariff war is set to increase the deficit as government spending typically rises when activity slows.
That outlook comes as the overall debt level for the US has already surpassed the size of the economy in the wake of profligate borrowing since Covid. Higher interest rates over the past several years have also pushed up the cost to service the government’s debt.
[…]
The US government is on track to surpass record debt levels set after World War II in just four years, reaching 107% of gross domestic product by 2029, the Congressional Budget Office warned in January.
While this story is written to insinuate that the federal government is inappropriately favoring Musk, this is happening all across the country. It’s a good thing. The federal government’s regulatory overreach works to retard growth and we should celebrate the Trump administration for pulling the government regulators back.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk’s regulatory problems have started to fade into the past.
Since the start of the second Trump administration, federal agencies that had scrutinized Musk and his business empire in recent years have begun to look a lot different. At the Department of Agriculture, for example, President Donald Trump fired the person who had been investigating the Musk company Neuralink. At other agencies including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Trump and Musk have tried to slash the number of employees — potentially hobbling those regulators’ ability to enforce the law against companies including Musk’s Tesla and X.
In the past few months, Trump’s Justice Department has dropped a case against Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, and his Labor Department has canceled a planned civil rights review of his automaker, Tesla. Another regulatory matter against SpaceX has entered settlement talks with the National Labor Relations Board.
I am one of those who thinks we should abolish the Federal Reserve Bank and this is one of the reasons why. Their decisions don’t follow any kind of data-driven process. Based on the rate of inflation, employment, and every other metric, the Fed would have lowered interest rates if Biden were president. Because they don’t like the current president, they decided to keep interest rates where they are. If the Fed is just another political body trying to manage our economy based on political motivations, then they are doing more harm than good.
The Federal Reserve held interest rates steady on Wednesday, just weeks after President Donald Trump intensified calls for lower borrowing costs and voiced eagerness about the potential “termination” of Fed Chair Jerome Powell.
Some things never change. Just read the Leftists’ opposition to ICE raids. Illegal immigrants are exploited by employers who can underpay and abuse them because they know that the illegals will never go to the cops. This is this slave labor relationship that the Leftists persist in defending. And while they try to confuse the issue by lumping legal and illegal immigrants together, ICE is only concerned with the illegals.
“If ICE wants to snatch up every single immigrant working in food service and delivery, then the entire industry will collapse,” Amy Fischer, a core organizer with Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid, which supports migrants arriving in the capital, said in a statement.
The Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington — which represents the more than 60,000 restaurant workers in the area — said in a statement shared with ABC News that it was “deeply concerned” by the reports of ICE raids and drop-ins across Washington, D.C.
[…]
“Immigrants make up a significant portion of our workforce at all levels. From dishwashers to executive chefs to restaurant owners, immigrants are irreplaceable contributors to our most celebrated restaurants and beloved neighborhood establishments,” the statement said. “The immigrant workforce has been essential to sustaining and growing our local restaurant industry and has been a major contributor to our local economy.”
Nuclear developer Elementl Power said Wednesday it’s signed an agreement with Google to develop three sites for advanced reactors. It’s the latest example of tech giants teaming up with the nuclear industry in an effort to meet the vast energy needs of data centers.
Google will commit early-stage development capital to the three projects, although the exact terms of the deal remain private. Each site will generate at least 600 megawatts of power capacity, and Google will have the option to buy the power once the sites are up and running. The proposed locations remain private, but Elementl said Google’s funding will be used for things like site permitting, securing interconnection rights to the transmission system, contract negotiations and other early-stage matters.
“Google is committed to catalyzing projects that strengthen the power grids where we operate, and advanced nuclear technology provides reliable, baseload, 24/7 energy,” said Amanda Peterson Corio, global head of data center energy at Google.
“Our collaboration with Elementl Power enhances our ability to move at the speed required to meet this moment of AI and American innovation,” she added.
Elementl Power, which was founded in 2022 as a nuclear power project developer, hasn’t yet built any sites.
Warren Buffett has announced he will retire as chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway at the end of the year.
The veteran investor, known as the Oracle of Omaha, told his company’s annual meeting he would hand over the reins to Vice-Chairman Greg Abel.
“I think the time has arrived where Greg should become the chief executive of the company at year end,” said Buffett, 94.
Mr Buffett, who built Berkshire Hathaway from a failing textile maker into an investment juggernaut worth $1.16tn (£870bn), is arguably the world’s most successful investor.
There’s an old saying in economics… there are no solutions, just tradeoffs. Overall, tariffs are bad policy, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t positive tradeoffs. Here’s a potential positive tradeoff
TOKYO (Reuters) -Honda is considering switching some car production from Mexico and Canada to the United States, aiming for 90% of cars sold in the country to be made locally in response to new U.S. auto tariffs, the Nikkei newspaper reported on Tuesday.
Japan’s second-biggest automaker by sales plans to increase U.S. vehicle production by as much as 30% over two to three years in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to put a 25% levy on imported vehicles, Nikkei said.
Honda declined to comment, saying the information was not announced by the company.
Asia-Pacific markets extended their sell-off Monday as fears over a global trade war sparked by U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs fueled a risk-off mood.
Japanese markets led losses in the region in early trade. The benchmark Nikkei 225 plunged 8.03% while the broader Topix index plummeted 8.64%.
Over in South Korea, the Kospi index fell 4.34% at the open, while the small-cap Kosdaq fell 3.48%.
Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 declined 6.07% at the open. The benchmark slid into correction territory with an 11% decline since its last high in February, in its previous session.
Futures for Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index stood at 22,772 pointing to a stronger open compared to the HSI’s last close of 22,849.81.
I’m not panicked. I’m not pulling out of the equity markets. I think tariffs are terrible policy, but I also think that the U.S. economy was inflated. The U.S. economy is incredibly resilient and will bounce back fine.
Now that’s just some plain BS. The market clearly reacted to Trump’s Tariffs. The fact that his administration is trying to deflect blame instead of owning it and explaining it as a temporary pullback in the name of the longer term good (not that I agree with that, but that is the argument he should be making) is stupid on multiple levels.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Wednesday the sell-off in the stock market is due more to a sharp pullback in the biggest technology stocks instead of the protectionist policies coming from the Trump administration.
“I’m trying to be Secretary of Treasury, not a market commentator. What I would point out is that especially the Nasdaq peaked on DeepSeek day so that’s a Mag 7 problem, not a MAGA problem,” Bessent said on Bloomberg TV Wednesday evening.
Bessent was referring to Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, whose new language models sparked a rout in U.S. technology stocks in late January. The emergence of DeepSeek’s highly competitive and potentially much cheaper models stoked doubts about the billions that the big U.S. tech companies are spending on AI.
The so-called Magnificent 7 stocks — Apple, Amazon, Tesla, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Nvidia — started selling off drastically, pulling the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite into correction territory. The tech-heavy benchmark is down about 13% from its record high reached on December 16.
However, the secretary downplayed the impact from President Donald Trump’s steep tariffs, which caught many investors off guard and fueled fears of a re-acceleration in inflation, slower economic growth and even a recession. Many investors have blamed the tariff rollout for driving the S&P 500 briefly into correction territory from its record reached in late February. Wall Street defines a correction as a drop of 10% from a recent high.
President Donald Trump on Wednesday laid out the U.S. “reciprocal tariff” rates that more than 180 countries and territories, including European Union members, will face under his sweeping new trade policy.
Trump and the White House shared a series of charts on social media detailing the tariff rates they say other countries impose on the U.S. Those purported rates include the countries’ “Currency Manipulation and Trade Barriers.”
An adjacent column shows the new U.S. tariff rates on each country, as well as the European Union.
Those rates are, in most cases, roughly half of what the Trump administration claims each country has “charged” the U.S.
No, I don’t like tariffs. They are stupid policy. An argument can be made for reciprocal tariffs to create a fair playing field (with the hope that both countries back down), but even then it’s a risky policy playing with consumers’ money.
But even if the reciprocal tariffs were a good idea as a policy or a tactic, Trump’s timing is terrible. He is on a very short clock to get some big things done in terms of cutting government, cutting taxes, cutting regulations, etc. He needs Congress’ support for that and the Republican margins in Congress are razor thin. When Trump’s approval rating starts sagging because everyone’s 401(k) is crashing, those marginal Republicans will stray. Trump will not be able to help encourage party discipline if he’s a lame duck president with a weak approval rating.
Get the big stuff done in Congress FIRST. The play with international trade with tariffs if you want. As he’s doing it, even if some other countries do lower their tariffs and open up markets for American goods, it will take capital to invest in building the capacity to serve those markets. It’s much harder to get capital when we suck trillions of dollars out of the equity markets.
It’s a shame what’s happened to this once great brand. A large number of those stores are in California.
Kohl’s is closing a slew of stores across 15 states this weekend.
Back in January, Kohl’s issued a press release to announce its “real estate change for 2025,” revealing the company planned to close 27 “underperforming stores” this year. In addition, Kohl’s will be closing its San Bernardino E-commerce Fulfillment Center in California in May.
I think it’s funny that the reporter felt the need to call them “import taxes” instead of “tariffs.” They seem to think that readers are too dumb to know what tariffs are. They may be right.
Speaking of dumb, tariffs are dumb. Yes, I expected Trump to follow through on his promise to implement tariffs and I still voted for him for other reasons, but tariffs are dumb economic policy.
US President Donald Trump has announced new import taxes of 25% on cars and car parts coming into the US in a move that threatens to widen the global trade war.
Trump said the latest tariffs would come into effect on 2 April, with charges on businesses importing vehicles starting the next day. Charges on parts are set to start in May or later.
The president claimed the measure would lead to “tremendous growth” for the car industry, promising it would spur jobs and investment in the US.
But analysts have said the move is likely to lead to the temporary shutdown of significant car production in the US, increase prices, and strain relations with allies.
I have not been willing to send my DNA to someone to satiate my curiosity for exactly this reason. The DNA of millions of people is this company’s most valuable asset. They are going to sell that asset to pay the bills (if they haven’t already been doing so). Insurance companies, Big Pharma, and any number of other firms will pay for that data. Furthermore, they can sell it more than once. No thanks. I don’t need to know that I’m 27% Irish.
Genetic testing company 23andMe announced on Sunday that it has filed for bankruptcy due to low demand for its ancestry kits and after a 2023 data breach damaged its reputation.
The company, which has over 15 million customers worldwide, said it voluntarily filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy to “facilitate a sale process to maximize the value of its business.” 23andMe is seeking authorization from a bankruptcy court in Missouri to “sell substantially all of its assets.”
The company’s market value peaked at almost $6 billion after it went public in 2021, but 23andMe reported a 7% decline in revenue and losses of $174 million in the first nine months of its current fiscal year.
South Korean conglomerate Hyundai will announce a $20 billion investment in U.S. onshoring that includes a $5 billion steel plant in Louisiana, according to people familiar with the plans.
The plant is set to hire roughly 1,500 employees and will produce next-generation steel that will be used by Hyundai’s two U.S. auto plants to manufacture electric vehicles. The investment is expected to be announced Monday at the White House by President Donald Trump, Hyundai Chairman Euisun Chung and Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry.
This is smart. One of the more frustrating things about the Biden Administration was when they would throw our BS economic stats as a counterargument to people sharing their economic woes.
The Treasury Secretary has candidly admitted that the GDP numbers that dominated the previous administration’s economic approach are not accurate.
[…]
When asked point-blank whether he believed that GDP numbers and nonfarm payrolls were accurate on the All-In podcast last week, Bessent replied: ‘No. They’re subject to big revisions over time.
‘I thought one of the big mistakes of the Biden administration was that they went with the numbers and not what the American people were feeling.’
The Treasury Secretary said the economic concerns of the public were dismissed as merely a ‘vibe-cession’ and that Biden told them, ‘you don’t know how good you’ve got it.’
Instead, Bessent said the Trump administration was going to ‘have respect for how [the public] feel and then we need to go back and look at what is causing this anxiety.’
[…]
Podcast co-host Palihapitiya praised Trump’s team for having a ‘better beat on the fact that this data is not as reliable as other administrations would say they were in order to do whatever it is they wanted to do anyway.’
Bessent agreed with the interviewer, saying that the Trump White House would not use data to justify their actions and instead listen to Americans when they express anxiety or financial hurt.
