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This article was first published by me on Talkmarkets: https://talkmarkets.com/content/commodities/suicide-watch-farmers-are-hurting-mr-trump?post=182941&uid=4798

Farmers are losing ground under Donald Trump. Farm gross receipts grew from the end of the Great Recession peaking in Q2 of 2014. Under Barack Obama, receipts looked good until a steady decline caused a likely defeat for Hillary Clinton in rural states.

The only problem is that Donald Trump is putting farmers on the front line with trade. There is a mental health danger discussed below as well as farmers being subject to demand shocks that come with trade uncertainty.

So the following chart is one to watch, though Trump was failing them miserably before the tariff applications, although NAFTA was in discussion. There will be financial and real bloodshed from suicide out in the field unless farmers can convince POTUS to stop sacrificing a group that is very important to the well being of all Americans.

The decline was pr…

This article was first published by me on Talkmarkets: https://talkmarkets.com/content/global-markets/trumps-punishment-of-china-the-start-of-a-radical-rejection-of-foreign-capital?post=182537&uid=4798

Donald Trump really wants to punish China and the world. We can focus on China and see what will happen to our relationship with the world. Tariffs keep escalating. Trump says the trade war is easy to win. Chinese stocks are leveraged as collateral to other deals, and are subject to margin calls. There may be some weakness in China.

The one thing we need to know about Donald Trump is that he has certain principles. They can be dangerous, and against all sound economic reasoning. But that doesn't matter to him. His tariffs are one manifestation. His desire to buy back treasuries on the cheap is another manifestation.

And yet, reading the Chinese is difficult. If the going gets rough, and as the stock markets in China continue to decline, China will likely sell a lot of US Treasu…

This article was first published by me on Talkmarkets: https://talkmarkets.com/content/stocks--equities/the-achilles-heel-of-trumps-tariffs?post=181415&uid=4798

The Trump Tariff plans have an Achilles Heel. We know that there are basic weaknesses that can be found in all tariff plans. For example, the consumer in the US is very weak, tariffs have failed in history, etc. But the real weakness of the plans for our time is the global supply chain.

As auto companies turn on Trump, we are learning more about them. General Motors has said it may have to shrink the presence of its operations in America, and we can read into this, to avoid tariffs from Europe and the rest of the world.

Cars made in the USA are loaded with a certain percentage of foreign parts. It is this supply chain reality that makes it impossible for companies like Kia to put more factories in the US while tariffs are in place. The investment would be huge, and immediately roughly 30 percent of the car would be subjec…

There is a disturbing behavior taking place with mainstream media on the subject of climate change. The number of articles from US and European media opposing Donald Trump's decision to pull out of the Paris Accord compared to those backing Trump are disturbingly lopsided in terms of numbers. This does not mean that I support Trump as president. He has to go. He is a racist.

Before listing a few of these articles I have to point out that the science of global warming is in dispute. That is, it is likely that the 1. 8 degree target for the Paris Accord will do nothing to save the world from global warming. It has been said that this is not going to make a difference. Scientists have said this.

So, if it is not going to make any difference, what is the justification for the cost? The cost will be massive, in terms of energy costs and jobs. If jobs are created, most of them will be created in tech areas and not in the areas of rural America that are hurting. And all this for dubious…

This article was first published by me at talkmarkets: https://talkmarkets.com/content/real-estate--reits/yes-there-was-a-housing-bubble?post=181387&uid=4798

Scott Sumner is dead wrong about the housing bubble last decade. Here is his view on the matter, recently published on his interesting blog, The Money Illusion:


There are two powerful pieces of evidence against the claim that the US housing market was overvalued.  First, many who made that claim also said the same thing about housing markets in Canada, Australia, the UK, and other countries.  And yet many of those other countries did not crash.  Even worse, America’s housing market has mostly recovered, and yet I see almost no one currently saying “America’s in a huge housing bubble, and when it crashes we’ll have another Great Recession”.  So why continue to claim the 2008 recession was caused by a housing bubble that no longer even looks like a bubble at all?
The problem with his analysis is that last decade, mortgage rates…

This article was first published by me on Talkmarkets: https://talkmarkets.com/content/economics--politics/keynes-and-trump-tariffs?post=180941&uid=4798

It is important to look at the arguments for tariffs in the Great Depression era of the 1930's if we are to understand the full danger they bring to the world.

In modern times, the basic argument against tariffs is of course, the complexity of the world we live in. Something labelled made in America may have parts from different nations. Same holds true with something made in Mexico. But in the days of the Great Depression, the complexity did not exist.

But in the Great Depression, the issue was a simple one. Tariffs are difficult to roll back. They cannot be applied temporarily. Of course, the argument that they could be applied temporarily was made by John Maynard Keynes, British economist, and the most influential economist of his time. keynes was a free trader who saw the need to modify his views as the Great Depression b…

It is important to look at all things Hitler when attempting to analyse Donald Trump. Examples of this are the similarity of their statements and actions, including the separation of children from their parents. This was a tactic used by Adolph Hitler for intimidation of Jews before and during the Holocaust.

While Trump's actions have not risen to the level of evil of Nazi Germany, the inability to relocate parents to children based on this flawed activity is certainly Nazi-like. The suffering of children and of parents who love them is disturbing. The crying and suffering has been documented. It is really a dreadful situation Donald Trump and his compassionless architect Stephen Miller have created. When Steve Bannon was fired by POTUS, Miller was retained. I thought at the time that was a bad sign.

Trump borrows many sayings and actions from Hitler himself! This is not to say that Obama and other presidents have not dabbled in detention camps, even to the point of separation of…