***** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)
Economic and Market Fare:
........... Though not yet fully realized, it is also increasingly being realized that the United States' role as the world's biggest consumer of manufactured goods and greatest producer of debt assets to finance its over-consumption is unsustainable, so assuming that one can sell and lend to the U.S. and get paid back with hard (i.e. not devalued) dollars on their U.S. debt holdings is naive thinking, so other plans have to be made.
Said more simply, enormous trade and capital imbalances are creating unsustainable conditions and major risks of being cut off, so they must come down -i.e., excessive imbalances + deglobalization = smaller trade and capital imbalances.
More broadly, what I am saying is that, based on many of my indicators, it appears that:
1) we are on the brink of the monetary order, the domestic political and the international world orders breaking down due to unsustainable, bad fundamentals that can be easily seen and measured, ............
But There’s a Better Way to Fix It Than a Reckless Tariff Regime
The sweeping tariffs announced by U.S. President Donald Trump on April 2, along with the subsequent postponements and retaliations, have unleashed an enormous amount of global uncertainty. Much of the world’s attention is on the chaotic, short-term consequences of these policies: wild stock market fluctuations, concerns about the U.S. bond market, fears of a recession, and speculation about how different countries will negotiate or react.
But whatever happens in the near term, this much is clear: Trump’s policies reflect a transformation of the global trade and capital regime that had already started. One way or another, a dramatic change of some kind was necessary to address imbalances in the global economy that have been decades in the making. Current trade tensions are the result of a disconnect between the needs of individual economies and the needs of the global system. Although the global system benefits from rising wages, which push up demand for producers everywhere, tensions arise when individual countries can grow more quickly by boosting their manufacturing sectors at the expense of wage growth—for example, by directly and indirectly suppressing growth in household income relative to growth in worker productivity. The result is a global trading system in which, to their collective detriment, countries compete by keeping wages down.
The tariff regime Trump announced earlier this month is unlikely to solve this problem. To be effective, American trade policy must either reverse the savings imbalance in the rest of the world, or it must limit Washington’s role in accommodating it. Bilateral tariffs do neither.
But because something must replace the current system, policymakers would be wise to start crafting a sensible alternative. The best outcome would be a new global trade agreement among economies that commit to managing their domestic economic imbalances rather than externalizing them in the form of trade surpluses. The result would be a customs union like the one proposed by the economist John Maynard Keynes at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944. Parties to this agreement would be required to roughly balance their exports and imports while restricting trade surpluses from countries outside the trade agreement. Such a union could gradually expand to the entire world, leading to both higher global wages and better economic growth. ..............
The ‘User’s Guide’ plan from White House chief economist Stephen Miran has taken some big hits.
User’s Guide 2.0
The great boxer Mike Tyson and once said that everyone has a plan until they’re punched in the face. Similarly, the Trump administration had one for rebuilding the world economy with tariffs. It’s been a rough first round.
The plan was Stephen Miran’s A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System, which must have been the most-viewed document by the financial world over the last six months. Stunningly ambitious, it helped earn its author a gig as chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, birthed the concept of the “Mar-a-Lago Accord,” and was widely taken as the road map for Trump 2.0’s bid to reshape the world using tariffs.
It’s hard to think, so most people avoid it.
It’s much easier to grab a stat that confirms your bias, reinforce your confidence, and move on.
Over time, that builds a thick callous toward opposing views, creating a tribal stance on issues and ideas. ..................................
As I’ve written extensively over the past two months:
Market bottoms require two things. Capitulation and Follow-through.
We’ve seen plenty of capitulation.
Follow-through? Until recently, it’s been weak.
This week, though, we got several breadth thrusts.
It’s obviously not bearish to see an acceleration in stocks going up.
BUT — here’s the nuance:
We had breadth thrusts this week that typically show up near or at market bottoms. True.
Breadth is still bad overall, with the majority of stocks below their 50-day and 200-day moving averages. Also true. ............
No need to rush.
Let price and evidence do the talking.
Sustainable adjustments to trade imbalances require supportive monetary and fiscal policies — not just currency intervention
Economics is largely a worthless discipline. Its axioms, like humans being rational utility maximizers, are simply wrong and everything built on top of them is thus flawed. It reminds me of pre-Copernican astronomy, which was based on the idea that the sun and planets revolved around the Earth. The difference is that pre-Copernican astronomy more or less worked and economics mostly doesn’t. ..............
............... If America and the West are ever to be competitive again, we must make markets competitive and where they can’t be, in natural monopolies like energy and water and so on, we must have regulations that directly control prices, as we did in the 50s and 60s, where utilities were basically guaranteed a 5% profit, and forced to reinvest in infrastructure (no California fires because PG&E would rather pay dividends then replace century old power lines and poles).
Charts:
This isn’t really a hard problem, conceptually. We know how to create competitive markets, and regulate non-competitive markets. We’ve done it before. It is entirely a political issue, because incumbents with tons of money also have tons of political power. ........
Charts:
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
The Man Who Cut Through the Noise
In the 14th century, a Franciscan friar named William of Ockham wielded an intellectual tool so sharp it still slices through modern delusions: Ockham’s Razor. His principle—“Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity”—was a rebellion against medieval scholasticism’s tangled webs of abstraction. As the Church fractured under rival popes—each justifying their authority with layers of theological jargon—Ockham’s Razor would have cut through the pretense, like so: “If God is truly omnipotent, why does He need your bureaucracy?” (His defiance would cost him; he was excommunicated in 1328, but history would prove his blade sharper than their dogma.) Born during the chaotic aftermath of the Black Death, which wiped out a third of Europe’s population, Ockham developed his philosophy in an era when grand institutions clung to complexity while failing their people. Feudal lords enforced labyrinthine land laws to squeeze starving peasants; Ockham’s insistence on minimal assumptions would have retorted: “When the plague renders your contracts void, what survives but the simplest truth—that men must eat?” Seven centuries later, we face a parallel evasion of reality: as of April 2025, NOAA data reveals atmospheric CO₂ concentrations surged at a record-breaking rate in 2024—3.75 parts per million, the highest annual jump ever recorded. Yet the Trump administration suppressed the findings, burying them in social media posts instead of the agency’s usual press releases. Here, Ockham’s Razor cuts through the noise: the simplest truth—that we are losing the fight against climate collapse—is being obscured by institutional cowardice and bureaucratic sleight-of-hand (Environmental Integrity Project 2025; Friedman 2025).
Our current predicament reveals an even deeper irony: we now spend trillions subsidizing fossil fuels while pouring billions into “high-tech renewables” that, according to J.P. Morgan’s Heliocentrism report, have increased global solar capacity without displacing fossil fuel dependence. The renewable energy revolution has become its own kind of scholasticism—a complex theology of lithium batteries, rare earth minerals, and solar panels made in coal-fired factories. These technologies, while reducing direct emissions, simply replace one form of extraction with another:
- Cobalt mines where children work in toxic pits to power electric vehicles
- Lithium extraction that drains Andean groundwater for grid-scale batteries
- “Green” hydrogen projects that consume more electricity than they produce
Ockham would see this as the same old pattern: multiplying entities (new mines, new supply chains, new waste streams) rather than addressing the root problem—our refusal to reduce consumption. The J.P. Morgan report confirms this: despite $9 trillion spent on renewables since 2010, the renewable share of final energy consumption crawls forward at 0.3%-0.6% annually, while fossil fuels still power 80%-85% of industrial production (Cembalest 2025). The razor’s judgment is clear: no technology can sustain infinite growth on a finite planet.
The Jevons Paradox: Efficiency as a Trojan Horse
The report’s data exposes a brutal truth: the Jevons Paradox is alive and well. As solar and wind become cheaper, energy demand grows, swallowing efficiency gains. For example:
- Solar capacity doubled from 2021–2024, yet fossil fuel consumption rose in absolute terms.
- Battery storage additions (38 GW by 2027 in the U.S.) are outpaced by data center and AI energy demand, forcing utilities to add more natural gas capacity (Cembalest 2025).
This paradox undermines the core promise of renewables: that they will replace fossil fuels. Instead, they enable greater energy use, reinforcing the status quo. Ockham’s Razor demands we ask: Why layer complexity (renewables + storage + grid overhauls) when the simplest solution is to consume less? .........
I have been promising/threatening for a while to cover degrowth, and thanks to a United States Society for Ecological Economics book club, now I will. In Less is More, economic anthropologist Jason Hickel identifies capitalism as the cause of our problems—the sort of criticism that makes many people really uncomfortable. Fortunately, he is an eloquent and charismatic spokesman who patiently but firmly walks you through the history of capitalism, exposes flaws of proposed fixes, and then lays out a litany of sensible solutions. It quickly confirms that sinking feeling most of us will have: that the economy is not working for us. What is perhaps eye-opening is that this is not by accident, but by design. ..............
Before Pope Francis, climate change was seen primarily as either a political or a scientific issue. His encyclical reframed it as a spiritual issue. As the spiritual leader of 1.4 billion Catholics around the world, Pope Francis presented climate activism as a moral and spiritual duty for true believers, and he made climate one of the defining issues of his papacy.
Over his 12 years as head of the Catholic Church, Francis repeatedly raised concerns about human-caused global warming resulting from the burning of fossil fuels. He urged people—including world leaders—to take meaningful action.
When Argentina’s Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected pope in 2013, his vision for human justice and equality was so closely linked to nature that he chose the papal name Francis, honoring the patron saint of ecology. That belief, and the passion with which he advocated for it, helped influence the direction of global climate and energy policy—most notably the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Francis’s 2015 papal letter, or encyclical, Laudato Si’ (“Praise Be to You”), was the first devoted entirely to the issue of global warming. It wove together climate science, wealth inequality, overconsumption (which he criticized as part of a “throwaway culture”), and the ethical use of technology in a 40,000-word message addressed to more than 1 billion Catholics around the world. ............
The international expansion of Chinese electric vehicles
The Great Insect Apocalypse: Why Are Bugs Vanishing?
A new paper highlights over 500 interconnected factors contributing to the global decline of insect populations.
A new paper highlights over 500 interconnected factors contributing to the global decline of insect populations.
Five months ago I would have said, and did say, that the Conservatives would form the next government, with Poilievre (a Trump figure) as Prime Minister.
Fortunately, Trump truly is a Christ-like figure, and raised the Liberal party from the dead. Poilievre mishandled Trump’s threats, saying that Trump had a point and so on. Living in an right wing echo chamber he thought that Canadians aren’t patriotic, and most are. This was an unforced error. Ontario Premier Ford did the opposite: he ran against Trump, called a surprise election and won handily. I despise Ford, but he’s a smart politician. Poilievre, on the other hand, is just an attack dog, and a true believer in Trumpist style right wing politics.
This isn’t to say I like the Liberals or Carney. Carney was has the dubious honor of being in charge of Canada and Britain’s central bank, and is the only central banker to blow housing bubbles in two countries. As for the Liberals, they were a terrible government and the only good things they did were forced on them by the NDP, whose support they needed to stay in government.
Trudeau’s liberals let in record numbers of immigrants and the result was massive increases in rent and a smother of wage gains.
The mistake that Canadian Conservative voters made, which Trump saved Canada from, was the assumption that Poilievre would be better. He would have been far, far worse. There was even talk of creating a Canadian “DOGE.”
Canada, much like America, needs a proportional vote system, so that the two and a half party monopoly can be broken up and a Trump-like figure locked out of government unless they can achieve a genuine majority.
... We’ll see how Carney does. Though I don’t like his record, he has said some very sensible things about re-industrialization in Canada, including proper vertical integration. There’s almost no mineral resource Canada doesn’t have, if we want we can easily re-industrialize. He’s also talked some sense about the housing market.
Whether he carries thru remains to be seen. He won’t be fantastically successful, he’s still a neoliberal and committed to policies like low taxes on the rich, but as neoliberals go, he may turn out not too bad.
Fingers crossed.
.......... Now as Canada’s future: it’s going to depend on whether Carney can actually deliver. If he can make Canadians better off and win another election, Poilievre is toast and Trump style conservatism will be discredited in Canada. If he doesn’t deliver: if effective wages don’t rise and if rent and housing prices don’t go down, then Poilievre’s Conservative party WILL win the next election, just based on disgruntled voters.
Carney’s talked a fair bit of sense: doubling building housing, pivoting to new trade partners and creating vertically integrated industries within Canada. If he can pull it off, he’ll go down as one of Canada’s greatest Prime Ministers. But, at the end of the day, Carney is a neoliberal, and his impulse to always cut taxes on the rich and so on is going to hold him back.
He also needs a full term to pull it off. A lot of pain is coming down the pike and the next couple years will be ugly. ...........
Geopolitical Fare:
Hitchens: 'They Lied To Us About Iraq's WMDs, But They've Taken It To Another Level With Ukraine...'
In my trade I have long grown used to the way governments lie and get others to lie for them.
It is what they do.
But I have seldom seen such a cloud of lies as we face now. Hardly anyone in this country knows the truth about Ukraine.
There has been nothing like it since we were all lied to about the Iraq invasion, with bilge about fictional ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’. The liars were caught out.
And they learned from it. They learned to lie more skillfully.
Meanwhile, many of those in our society who knew how to challenge such lies died off or retired and were not replaced. ............
The main reason more people don’t just go all in with opposing the US empire and rejecting all its propaganda about enemy states is because they can’t handle working through the heavy cognitive dissonance which comes with recognizing that everything you’ve been taught is a lie.
Most people recognize to some extent that the US and its allies do bad things, but those who take it all the way into a clear understanding that this power structure is responsible for most of our world’s ills are a small minority in the west. Even the relatively awake ones will try to cling on to this or that imperial propaganda narrative about nations like China, North Korea, Iran and/or Russia. Most try to at least keep a foot in the door of their imperial indoctrination, so they don’t have to experience the psychological discomfort of letting it close completely.
But that’s where the truth is. Coming to a lucid understanding of the world necessarily means abandoning all untruths for truth on every level. If you can work up the courage to really do this, the entire mainstream western worldview gets flushed right down the toilet.
We really need a name for the mental illness that comes with obscene amounts of wealth. ...........
....... As billionaires take more and more control over our world, we are finding ourselves increasingly led by those least qualified to lead us. We are trapped in a dystopia that is ruled by lunatics. We should probably do something about that.
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A Palestine supporter witnesses new footage every day of children being mutilated, shredded and burned to death by Israel. An Israel supporter spends every day avoiding looking at that same footage. This one fact tells you very clearly who is on the wrong side of history here.
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When you witness an injustice you can either oppose it, look away, or make up some reason why the injustice is okay. Only the first option can lead to the cessation of the injustice. Ignoring the Gaza holocaust looks different from justifying it, but both yield the same result. .........
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I keep meaning to mention that watching or listening to Dave DeCamp’s half-hour show for Antiwar News every day is the easiest way to cultivate a lucid understanding of what’s going on in the world. Just put it on over breakfast or on your way to work or whatever and you’ll always understand what the empire is up to from day to day.
Other good resources include: .........
Sci Fare:
Other Fare:
Doctorow: The enshittification of tech jobs
Pics of the Week:
Pics of the Week:
The Iberian Peninsula… wiped off the map of lights. This is how it looked from orbit last night after a massive blackout hit Spain and Portugal. Cosmic silence over the region.”#Blackout #IberianPeninsula #Spain #Portugal #PowerOutage #SatelliteView #EarthAtNight… pic.twitter.com/0HyA7tN8m0
— David Sobolewski (@buzzyrobot) April 29, 2025
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