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Money Circus

Money Circus
21 Apr 2025 | 4:34 pm

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1. Audio: Russia Seeks To Pry U.S. from Europe

Russia's foreign intelligence agency seeks to drive wedge between EU and the U.S.
Says Europe has a tendency to totalitarianism and periodic global war
EU warns leaders of punishment if they attend 80th WW2 parade in Moscow
Danger of a new conflict follows on the heels of Europe's economic collapse
Tariff war is a symptom of the offshoring that has hollowed…

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Money Circus
20 Apr 2025 | 5:02 pm

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2. Russia Seeks To Pry U.S. from Europe

Russia's foreign intelligence agency seeks to drive wedge between EU and the U.S.
Says Europe has a tendency to totalitarianism and periodic global war
EU warns leaders of punishment if they attend 80th WW2 parade in Moscow
Danger of a new conflict follows on the heels of Europe's economic collapse
Tariff war is a symptom of the offshoring that has hollowed out nations
Russia and China didn't cause that - it was Western hyper-financialisation

The question is not whether countries proceed to a more centralised form of world government; nor is it whether the U.S. under Trump is in suddenly in the hands of oligarchs -- as if either is new.

The issue is whether financial cartels control government, or whether government defends the common good against private special interests.

Factions and syndicates have always run the world. The issue is the nature or character of society.

It is up to the people of Europe and the West to decide what they want their society to be; and if we don't make that choice, we can't complain if someone else decides for us.

Related:
Philanthropy Is The Third Pillar Of Fascism (May 7, 2022)
Fabians, Milner Group And War - Britain commits to Ukraine, cuts pensions, announces austerity (Jul 29, 2024)

(2,100 words or 10 minutes of your company)

It is up to the people of Europe and the West to decide the future of our society

Apr 20, 2025

Europe has a totalitarian tendency which periodically leads to world war, according to an article by Russia's foreign intelligence service (SVR).

A remarkable statement coming from the country of Bolshevism and yet historical perspective reveals a few uncomfortable truths, not least that the Americans, British and Germans hosted and helped install the Bolsheviks in the first place.

See Herbert Hoover and the Russian Famine Relief Act of 1921, and professor Antony Sutton's trilogy Wall Street And The Bolshevik Revolution, Wall Street and FDR, Wall Street and the rise of Hitler (1974-1976) which can be found online as PDFs.

It echoes the statement of Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov that the U.S. must distance itself from the governments of Europe.

"They (the Europeans) have literally gone haywire in their frenzy, primarily the leaders of France, Britain and the Baltics... Unlike the Europeans Donald Trump's administration has tried to get to the bottom of this issue."

The SVR broadside — hard hitting or head-scratching, depending on your view — is published weeks before the anniversary of Victory in Europe day, or what Russians call The Great Patriotic War on May 9th. [1]

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The European Commission directorate in Brussels has instructed EU leaders not to attend the commemorations in Moscow.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has said he'll be there. He's already attracted NATO-EC ire for not imposing sanctions on Russia.

Former Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt said Serbia's EU membership application must be placed on hold.

Behind the boycott of a military parade is a bigger issue. Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán opposes not just the war but Ukrainian membership of the EU.

Manfred Weber, the German leader of the European People's party in the European parliament, is corralling the opposition to Hungary. [2]

The pro-war faction among European politicians even targets the U.S. — French MEP Raphaël Glucksmann said Americans "have chosen to side with the tyrants" and should give back the Statue of Liberty to France.

Moscow's foreign intelligence agency is clearly seeking to drive a wedge between Europe and the U.S.

False binary

But the narrative in Europe and the West also gets twisted.

The legacy media push theories like Trump is captured by Putin, or the Americans are leaving the job of fighting Russia to the Europeans, while they take on China.

Beware false paradigms that the Russians, Chinese, Europeans and Americans are all on the same side, and the war is a distraction while they prepare us for a one-world government of digital slavery.

The question is not whether countries proceed to a more centralised form of world government; nor is it whether the U.S. under Trump is in suddenly in the hands of oligarchs — as if either is news.

The issue is whether the economy must be based on forever war, as described by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) or upon a productive development and security architecture.

The issue is whether governments remain in the hands of financial cartels or defend the common good against private special interests.

As we said of money, it's not that paper money is bad, it's whether it is used to create a hyper-financialised casino or a productive economy in which people can live from their labour.

By misframing the question, and posing a false binary, much of the alternative media is serving what Orwell called the oligarchical collectivists. You may know them as the European elite with their (post) imperial aspirations, or the corporate-run governments.

Factions and syndicates have always run the world. The issue is the nature or character of society.

And whether a hundred years of women securing equal rights ends with them being fed into a meat grinder.

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Money Circus
18 Apr 2025 | 4:46 pm

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3. Audio: Readying The Digital Chains

U.S. lawmakers imposing programmable currency by stealth
Applied with velvet gloves through Stable and Genius Acts
Tariffs will onshore military-tech-financial complex
Canada's new PM a champion of CBDC, central banks, carbon tax

You can access the original text and footnotes here.

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, …

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Money Circus
17 Apr 2025 | 6:58 pm

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4. Audio: Trump & Russiagate A Clinton-FBI Plot

'Trump is Russia' hoax grew out of oppositional research
MI6 fabulists created Russiagate, using media foghorn
Reporters with knowledge on the ground were suppressed

You can access the original text and footnotes here.

Audio versions available. The Spotify link is not working properly. I haven't a clue what the Substack app on the phone actually does. So be…

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Money Circus
15 Apr 2025 | 6:20 pm

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5. Readying The Digital Chains

U.S. lawmakers imposing programmable currency by stealth
Applied with velvet gloves through Stable and Genius Acts
Tariffs will onshore military-tech-financial complex
Canada's new PM a champion of CBDC, central banks, carbon tax

(2,000 words or 10 minutes of your company.)

Apr 15, 2025

"One people, one realm, one leader" is tweaked, a century later into universalism.

Former nations now merged by open borders into one world, the strong leader redundant as digital currency is readied to enforce behaviours.

They're supposed to be opposites yet this is inversion: a mirror image of the past is simpler than a truly new world.

It's even easier than manufacturing consent. Cleaner than the business of corralling the people to vote for a leader, speaking from a script written by the political technologists of the owner-investors.

It was no accident: political scientists like Karl Popper thought such a system had less chance of an extremist seizing power but there's the rub: more risk of authoritarian control.

Technocrats thought it more efficient than the short-termism of politicians facing re-election every four or five years — yet as Aldous Huxley warned, a scientific dictatorship is permanent!

See 3 Crises - Xi-Putin, Bank Runs, New World Religion - Complexities not resolved, inverted; not solved, weaponised (Mar 24, 2023)

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At the moment in the United States this structure of control is being implemented without jackboots.

Granted, the police have been militarized, the FBI acts as a political police force, free speech can get you deported, Germany's meme police are out in full force, prosecuting any criticism of politicians; in Britain you can get the 3 a.m. knock for a Facebook post, and all the banks watched as Canada froze truckers' bank accounts back in 2022 over vaccine mandates.

So far, however, the spectre of central bank digital currency (CBDC) has been lifted. Or has it?

Digital 'old bill'

President Donald Trump was elected in part on his promise to ban CBDC (Executive Order 14178, January 23, 2025). Yet two bills embed surveillance in digital currency, and reveal that money is already on the path to programmable or penal rationing.

The STABLE Act (House, February 6, 2025) and the GENIUS Act (Senate, February 4, 2025) restrict stablecoin issuance in effect to big banks rather than the Federal Reserve central bank.

The first determines who can issue, the second bans unapproved, stablecoins. Anti-Money Laundering (AML) rules will follow. Know Your Customer (KYC) has already been used to penalise "politically exposed persons."

Thus control is retained by the banks directly rather than through the Fed (which they happen to own). That may be moot or a quirk but it does not change the reality of surveillance.

This aligns with the PATRIOT Act, PREP Act, Bank Secrecy Act, CARES Act, and the laws introducing pre-crime as Philip K. Dick described in his 1956 novel "Minority Report."

Attorney General John Ashcroft said preventing terrorist acts had become more important than punishing crimes after the event, extending to "spitting on the sidewalk."

An extra 87,000 Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agents are poised to audit the average John or Jane.

National suicide

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) are at the heart of these plans for cybernetic control through finance.

BRICS and European CBDC or the U.S. may only remain a rival until such time as the BIS and IMF agree on one system. But that's probably an over simplification.

For centuries governments and central banks exerted centralised control over money, and through regulations and tariffs, upon the economic system.

Surveying the condition of Europe, you might think the traditional nation state is lost to the mists of history. However, not all nations are keen on suicide, so CBDCs must be pegged to the national currency.

Central banks are working out how to shift to wholly digital money without losing control to decentralised digital currencies.

Digital ledger

CBDCs work in various ways but have one thing in common: a digital ledger that records all transactions. It would be like blockchain, but not decentralised, there being a single central authority or syndicate holding and managing the ledger.

What Aaron Day calls in his article for Brownstone Institute, a "permissioned, government-approved digital system." [1]

The question is to what extent these systems can be CBDC or stable coins... national or integrated... and yet still constitute a centralised digital ledger. This would tally all assets to offset energy or its shadow, carbon, as the unit of rationing.

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Money Circus
11 Apr 2025 | 6:02 pm

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6. Trump & Russiagate A Clinton-FBI Plot

'Trump is Russia' hoax grew out of oppositional research
MI6 fabulists created Russiagate, using media foghorn
Reporters with knowledge on the ground were suppressed

(The usual 2,000 words and a 10-minute quotient of your time).

Apr 11, 2025

The release of FBI documents about Russiagate help to answer one of the lingering mysteries: the involvement of the British.

It would always seem strange that London's spies should be involved — why care either way about Donald Trump — and why should British media and academia be whipped into a near hysterical hatred of a politician almost 6,000 kilometres away.

On the other side of the pond, the most aggressive proponent of "Russia, Russia" — to this day — is MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, like Hillary Clinton a product of the British Rhodes Scholarship.

Russiagate, aka Crossfire Hurricane, was the failed attempt to prove a connection between Trump's close associates and the Russian government.

One element of the smear campaign was the Steele Dossier, written by former British spy Christopher Steele, which alleged Trump had cavorted with prostitutes in a hotel overlooking the Kremlin.

It turns out that Russiagate grew out of the "opposition research" that U.S. and British intelligence agencies, the international arm of U.S. law enforcement, and strategic intelligence firms were doing in a variety of countries.

This includes helping "friendly" politicians into power, where we have strategic interests in their country; and also monitoring attempts of foreign governments to do the same to us. Politicians such as then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would be warned of foreign "influence operations."

… As if the Clintons were not already involved in the sale of assests such as uranium deposits to Russia or Bill Clinton's campaign finance scandal with China.

This evolved into a network of people, out of control, drunk on power.

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The dark side

Thus the hard power of oil pipelines and geopolitics would intersect with the soft power of media, and defamatory narratives designed to influence elections.

We see in this latest trove of documents: the focus in 2014 on ousting Bashar al-Assad from Syria — which came to pass 10 years later — and the desire of Turkey to stop Washington aiding the Kurds, and the curious case of a New York field office counter terrorism special agent being convicted for aiding Albania.

How can issues so distant and seemingly abstruse connect with Clinton's attempt to tar Trump as a Russian asset?

Well, that's the art of intelligence.

Refresher

The Steele Dossier was financed by Hillary Clinton's campaign and was initially ignored by all news outlets until trash-peddler Buzzfeed finally published the lurid details.

Once planted in the media, and taking root, the FBI pretended to take an interest in the revelations — concealing its role in creating them in the first place.

The narrative dominated Trump's first administration. Trump would fire Lt Gen Michael Flynn after only 22 days as National Security Adviser.

Yet in January 2017, as Trump was about to take office, the FBI agents had exhausted all leads in the Flynn case, and the agents were prepared to shut down the probe. They were overruled by superiors. The FBI had been politicised.

For four years the media talked about almost nothing else, insisting "the walls are closing in" on Trump.

Mueller rice

Special counsel Robert Mueller, who had been director of the FBI during the detonation of the World Trade Center in 2001, conducted an investigation into Trump from May 2017 to March 2019.

He failed to establish a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

His findings were as interesting as mushed rice but that did not stop the legacy media, the Anglo-American establishment foundations, and academia insisting that Russiagate was real — still championed by MSNBC host and Rhodes Scholar Maddow to this day.

Circle of darkness

Crossfire Hurricane began with the framing of an innocent man, George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign adviser, as someone with connections to alleged Russian efforts to damaging Hillary Clinton's campaign.

This week's trove is arguably more revelatory than the underwhelming release of documents on President John F Kennedy 's assassination.

You can find the Russiagate documents on SCRIBD for example via Newsweek.

We had only to wait for such an admission form the deep state — for the intelligence agencies, law enforcement, politicians and media almost cannot help themselves from conspiring!

The way this works is that "you know what I know about you, therefore I need you to participate."

It is a circle of influence tuned to the dark side.

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Money Circus
10 Apr 2025 | 5:28 pm

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7. Audio: Trump Plays Jenga On The Precipice

Will the tariffs topple and what will they strike on the way down? There are signs of concession from Iran and Russia, but China's leaders appear defiant.

By their calculation they have less to lose in a trade confrontation with the U.S.

Tariffs alone cannot rebuild America's industry. It must first fix the banking and credit system.

In these early days o…

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Money Circus
9 Apr 2025 | 5:28 pm

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8. Trump Plays Jenga On The Precipice

China will 'fight to the end' over tariffs, says trade with US 'roughly in balance'
Iran-U.S. talks scheduled for Saturday in Oman
Russia-U.S. talks on Thursday in Istanbul

Related:
Canada's Unelected PM Takes Power - Globalism as a front for corporate might (Mar 14, 2025)
3 Crises: War Flares, Harris Snorts, Soldiers Flee - Israel, Ukraine, Hollywood, Starmer-Maxwell, Geoengineering (Sep 27, 2024)
All Smiles As EU Gears Up For War - Borrowing to fund rearmament (Mar 07, 2025)
Rethinking Left & Right - Deindustrialisation and the worker's ruin (Aug 22, 2024)
Germany Votes For The World - An eye on Europe's entrapment (Feb 22, 2025)

See also:
Occult Capitalism Or Last Exit To Utopia (Nov 02, 2021)

(2,200 words or 11 minutes of your company.)

************** AUDIO VERSION AVAILABLE TO PAID SUBSCRIBERS **************

Apr 9, 2025

Will the tariffs topple and what will they strike on the way down? There are signs of concession from Iran and Russia, but China's leaders appear defiant.

By their calculation they have less to lose in a trade confrontation with the U.S. China is the second-largest lender to the U.S. government, holding about $760 billion in U.S. Treasuries as of the end of January.

A bond selloff raises interest rates, making it more expensive for the U.S. government to borrow and that's the opposite that president Donald Trump's administration intends with trillions of dollars of bonds to refinance this year.

Memories

There are traders for whom the fraud-and-flunk of 2008 is prehistory, let alone the pump-and-dump of the Dot Com bezzle.

Granted, it doesn't make one feel any better to be older.

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However the 2008 banking crisis was never addressed. The banks were bailed out, interest rates were reduced to zero to inflate the apparent value of bank assets, so that banks did not have to mark to market and realize their insolvency, and thus the can was kicked down the road.

Trump was allowed — give or take a couple of pot shots — back into power but the greater objective remains: how to solve the monetary crisis and to bring down the debt.

One way is to launch a world war and then default. The other is to try some risky economic experiments.

But can Trump's tariffs solve issues like de-industrialisation, an indebted government, an insolvent banking system, and a growing part of the population living paycheck to paycheck, drowning in a tsunami of credit?

Is it even the right tool — like DOGE, desperately trying to cut the cost of government — and is the objective feasible?

Product

Trade imbalances are a symptom not the cause.

Paper money is not the problem. It is that when banks create loans (out of thin air) they had better be used for productive investment (turning air into stuff) instead of buying fast fashion from the lowest-cost labour to be found on the planet.

Creating money is something that profits bankers unfairly but it's better that we at least end up with infrastructure and factories in our home towns that allow us to earn a living wage.

Our trading rivals are not the problem. The trade imbalance has been inherent since the economy shifted from industry, infrastructure and agriculture to the pursuit of paper profit.

The consumer economy was once based on improved productivity, so that the people could buy more product from the companies for which they worked.

Each step of deregulation has unleashed hyper financialisation which ran rings first around people and then around nation states.

The severance from gold was accompanied after 1971 by a shift to monetarism and a service economy.

The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was replaced by the ideologically globalist World Trade Organisation, in 1995, which encouraged outsourcing.

At the time, as a business editor in network news, I had been trained to think of global trade as nothing but good and the protesters as unhinged.

The good of mutual benefit and greater efficiency overall, however, has been replaced by narrower aims of corporations seeking an extra sliver of profit at any cost — to the disbenefit of societies on each end of the trade.

See Canada's Unelected PM Takes Power - Globalism as a front for corporate might (Mar 14, 2025)

Initially Western nations rode on the wave of historic wealth, with an industrial base and a better-educated, healthier workforce. Even displaced workers could find employers who needed them.

However integrated transport and, especially, Internet communications, removed the barriers to using workers abroad — or bringing them "here" physically or virtually. The Western worker was fungible with the outsourced worker who came without theosts of health care or retirement plans. [1]

To fix this would take at least one generation, if we first fix the banking and credit system, to rebuild the layers of skilled factory workers and the engineers to support them.

Advanced tooling no longer exists on the scale required to make the iPhone in the U.S. the late co-founder of Apple Steve Jobs told president Barack Obama in 2010.

Apple had 700,000 factory workers employed in China, he said, and it required 30,000 engineers on-site to support those workers. "You can't find that many in America to hire." (Walter Isaacson's biography, Steve Jobs, 2011)

Bear in mind the toll that factory closures have had in America's "rust belt." Charlie Kirk summed it up last year:

"And then we call the people that are still there in Springfield, Ohio, racist after their factories have closed, their sons died in Iraq, and they're addicted to opioids, and their local school is being over run..."

See 3 Crises: War Flares, Harris Snorts, Soldiers Flee - Israel, Ukraine, Hollywood, Starmer-Maxwell, Geoengineering (Sep 27, 2024)

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Money Circus
7 Apr 2025 | 8:48 pm

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9. Tariffs Herald Great Reset Or War

Trump's tariffs could raise $300-600 billion
Almost balance the budget and help reduce interest payments
But tariff war is a real war, and targets will retaliate

(3,000 words or about a quarter hour of your company).

The image used by French channel France 24

Apr 7, 2025

The tariffs are no less than a war. The legacy media is not telling you for whom the bell tolls.

How does this fit into world conflict? The enemies are not disclosed.

The question is not who is right or wrong, better or worse, but who serves whose interest.

The economics is always more complicated than estimating the size of rival armies.

That's why you're here.

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A stock market plunge is a tactic long expected from the City of London and Chatham House and its doppelgänger the Council on Foreign Relations who expressed their opposition to a second Trump presidency.

"Trump Is Fighting a Trade War He Can't Win. The Stock Market Is the Loser," blares the financial journal Barron's.

The Economist says "Trump's Tariffs Have Exposed America's Leading Corporations To Retaliation."

President of France Emmanuel Macron calls for Europe to halt investment into the U.S. which of course fits neatly with the plan to militarize the European economy.

The European press is openly calling Trump crazy, while rolling out flame-throwing biographer Michael Wolff.

It almost sounds like they want a crisis.

Synchronisation

Tellingly, the globalist response to tariffs is synchronised with their policies on pollution and migration.

Western countries require health and safety regulations that raise the cost of doing business, so it's good to place your factory in a developing country that employs labour in slave conditions.

Western countries require carbon taxes and energy rationing, and shutting down uninterruptable energy sources, but invest in developing countries that use oil, coal and nuclear.

For those jobs which the owners cannot move abroad work that must be done at home — the answer has been to bring the cheap labour to the West through open borders.

In each case the investor class has decided it can make more money if it does not have to share the profits with the native population; so it shifts production to an emerging market and its cheap labour, that live with lower environmental and safety standards.

But shifting production abroad means the Western countries must have low tariffs so that the relocated factories can funnel that outsourced product back to a West now hollowed out, starved of energy, and dependent on credit.

As the economist Bob Lighthizer explains the fact that the U.S. has a large trade deficit, for a long period of time, is evidence of the problem.

Statism

The U.S. has transferred $20 trillion of wealth, and the future income that such wealth could have produced, in return for present consumption, according to the international investment position of a country.

Competitor countries have an industrial policy that is not based on lifting their citizens' standard of living but statism: to acquire technology, and enrich and empower the state.

To put that in plain language, for the 19th and 20th centuries the U.S. became increasingly rich because it owned more abroad than foreigners owned of America. [1]

As Tucker Carlson ventures, it seems that this has not been an accident; it has been guided, by calculation and ideology. Equally it may have been directed by shareholder value, the fiduciary duty to maximise profits, as opposed to optimising profits and consumption, the logic of Henry Ford.

Perspective

Using the tool of historical perspective, Britain's owners invested their excess capital in the Americas and found that Carnegie replaced their own dark Satanic mills.

Germany so far has avoided that fate by maintaining high tariffs and undervaluing its currency through the creation of the European Union and the euro.

The U.S. tolerated EU tariffs because of the latter's claim to virtue, that the EU exists to ensure the continent never again goes to war. The U.S. for decades rode the advantage of the world's biggest consumer market and the purchasing power of the world's reserve currency.

But like compound interest, the debt eventually becomes unsupportable. The goods that you buy at unbelievably low prices, that you can't find on main street or the high street, are unbelievably low for a reason: the sticker price was not the only price you paid.

Just as Trump's first term revealed the deep state, the interconnection of corporate power with the permanent bureaucracy, his second administration began during the election campaign, when the dockworkers or longshoremen attended his rallies, complaining of the rigging of the economic system.

Most professional economists will not agree; but in the U.S. most burnish their resume with a stint at the Federal Reserve and thus reflect the opinion of the money power. The legacy media will not agree, but it is owned by five or six corporations.

A Greek chorus of academic and media propagandists pushed free trade, that was not at all liberated. Like the Rules Based International Order, it means whatever the stronger party and their lawyers, benefiting from the system, want it to mean.

Regardless of your view on Trump, the message the consumer hears is simply berating Trump. Without saying which reality on balance is good or bad, it creates a lot of uncertainty. See George Gammon's commentary, Will Trump's Tariffs Cause A Recession, [2]

That's why you're here.

Anyone who claims to know what will happen is a fool. Let's scope it out.

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Money Circus
5 Apr 2025 | 2:43 pm

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10. Trump Tariffs: Blessing Or Curse

Nixon imposed tariffs when he severed the dollar from gold - something coming?
Nixon's backers were architects of the 'opening' of China
So far, China plays the game: slaps 34 per cent on U.S. goods
High stakes or a premeditated step to the quotas of a technocratic world order?
In the event of war, tariffs could become basis for breakdown in trade
The following is not prediction but the mulling of possible outcomes

(2,900 words or a quarter hour of cautionary tales).

President Donald Trump with commerce secretary Howard Lutnick

Apr 5, 2025

Foreword

Writing about Trump's tariffs, they seem a defensive play. That depends on how the opposition responds, risking trade war, while several countries are itching for kinetic conflict.

When we look at what's happening across the globe it is hard not to see it being partitioned into landmasses, assigning a destiny to what we might call lumpen territories (from the German Lumpenproletariat) — former nations, their people dispossessed, individuals uprooted and incised from the social class and lifestyle to which they would once have belonged.

Trump appeals to voters who perceive or experience disinheritance. Thus his approach to tariffs finds a ready audience. But is it to their advantage or is it another step towards globalism?

Recall our distinction: globalisation is the organic process of people travelling among and selling to each other. Globalism is the political ideology of cybernetics, of humans as resources.

Crude

As an opening gambit that quickly pressures rivals to cut their tariffs, president Donald Trump's ploy may work.

If it leads to a global tit-for-tat then we could have a trade war. Trump is letting go of the brakes when the world is approaching the top of the roller coaster, and not just in the stock market.

There is already evidence that Washington estimated tariffs in a crude and approximate manner, which penalises countries unfairly while failing to target the worst offenders.

Shooting from the hip might cheer a weary populace but it risks stray bullets and innocent victims, which seems to be how governments do things nowadays.

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Trump said trade-weighted tariffs would mean stronger competition and lower prices for consumers. Economists have little faith in Trump's claim that tariffs will re-industrialise the United States or bring back jobs.

Backroom

The man in charge of Trump's tariff policy is commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, chairman of Cantor Fitzgerald.

Reuters news agency reported last year that Lutnick is playing a role in the City of London expanding into U.S. Treasuries. That could give it control in a default scenario, senator John Cornyn said at the confirmation hearing of treasury secretary Scott Bessent.

See Ghosts Stalk Trump Investiture - London In Bid To Hijack U.S. Treasury Market (Jan 20, 2025)

Trump imposed across-the-board tariffs, specifically, a baseline rate of 10 per cent for all countries.

Formula

Reciprocal tariffs apply to those who have the greatest barriers to the import of American goods.

But the supposed tariffs imposed against the U.S. were calculated by dividing the U.S.'s trade deficit in goods with a given country, by that country's total exports to the U.S. The result is then halved — graciously, according to Trump — to give the applicable tariff.

Journalist James Surowiecki discovered the formula, and a U.S. trade representative confirmed it was a short cut that ignores the impact of each country's trade policies —which may include currency controls, managed exchange rates, quotas and sales tax as well as tariffs.

It did not account for the specific industries that tariffs may protect, vulnerable communities or native resources, nor barriers to trade that are not tariffs.

For example, the U.S. has a $235 billion trade deficit with the European Union, which exports a total $605 billion to the U.S. Dividing the former by the latter gives 0.388 or roughly 40 per cent. Halved, according to Trump's formula for reciprocal tariffs, that gives a 20 per cent rate.

Those hit with the highest reciprocal tariff rates were countries that enjoy the largest trade surplus with the U.S., not necessarily who have the most trade barriers. You might sell coffee or cacao.

Escalation

China responded by imposing an additional 34 per cent tariff on imports of American goods. As for its exports, the Chinese currency is 40 per cent undervalued on a purchasing power parity (PPP) basis according to the World Bank.

China's trade policy is aggressive. However it has 1.4 billion people or about 17 per cent of the world population to employ and feed. You cannot argue if it puts its own interest first.

Furthermore, it is not correct to blame China for other countries' industrial woes. Jobs were outsourced long before China became the world's leading manufacturer.

From the middle of the 20th century manufacturers hopped, skipped and jumped from one country to another, seeking the lowest possible labour costs.

However outsourcing since the 1990s has been closely tied to the apparent globalist desire to make China's role, as the world's manufacturing hub, structural.

This is where we must reconsider motives behind Trump's "Liberation Day" as he termed the battle with tariffs.

It may be, as he says, a strategy of America first. But it may also serve the proponents of stratification, structuralisation and calcification.

Imagine a world in which the U.S. controls intellectual property, China controls manufacturing — "Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China" — and Europe's servant class services the holiday homes by Lake Como.

Reset

The press presents us with a false contest of dollar versus the BRICS, the unipolar hegemon versus a multipolar free-for-all.

If the half decade since the Covid response has taught us anything, it is not to trust the conventional rhetoric of the "reds and the blues."

The same press that distracts you with a Punch and Judy show dismisses the centralising tendency — whether you call it late-stage capitalism, over powerful banks and corporations, hyper financialistation, cybernetics or technocracy.

The action takes place offstage. It is better described as a tripartite concept that draws from corporativism in which key interest groups are represented.

Looks like the recycling symbol - it's the Trilateral Commission.

The Great Reset, to which everyone from King Charles to Pope Benedict, from Lynn Forrester de Rothschild to Klaus Schwab attest, is dismissed in most of the media. The Guardian declared it "implausible" and the BBC sneered: there are several books of that title but they got "hijacked by conspiracy theories."

Such dismissals mean nothing against their avowed intent.

See War & Peace - Ukraine Talks; Dresden's Anniversary - Eurasia note #106 - On the normalisation of brutality (Feb 13, 2025)

When The Great Reset Is Complete - A future retrospective (Nov 23, 2021)

Tariffs are not the reason the U.S. has been losing jobs to outsourcing. It was the removal of tariffs under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 that saw jobs flow abroad. In 2020 it was replaced with the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA).

Editor: That's 1,000 words of analysis for free; 2,000 more follow.

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