Markets Roiled As Trump Imposes 'Shock Tariff' of 5% Up To 25% On All Mexican Goods Over Immigration

Via tweet Trump tanked the markets by imposing a 'shock tariff' on all Mexico goods of 5%, increasing to 25% until Mexico does something to halt illegal immigration from their country.

Someone is taking the imperial presidency out for a test drive.

The China Manufacturing PMI came out tonight with a miss of estimates at 49.4.

The Treasury yield curve is doing some interesting things tonight.  

The world wonders where such shock tariffs as an instrument of US policy objectives as determined by the Imperial President may be imposed next.

Germany better start working on a cure for male pattern baldness.

Bloomberg
Trump to Impose Tariff as High as 25% on Mexico Over Immigration
By John Harney and Peggy Collins
May 30, 2019

President Donald Trump said that he would impose a 5% tariff on Mexican goods until that country stops immigrants from entering the U.S. illegally.

The tariff would take effect on June 10, “until such time as illegal migrants coming through Mexico, and into our country, STOP,” Trump said in a Twitter post on Thursday night.

He warned that the levy “would gradually increase until the illegal immigration problem is remedied at which time the tariff will be removed.” The tariffs could rise as high as 25% on Oct. 1, Trump said in a statement released by the White House.

“Mexico must step up and help solve this problem,” Trump said in the statement...

Read the entire story here.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - It is for this that I was born - Gold Moves Higher In Options Expiry

“In a democracy dissent is an act of faith. Like medicine, the test of its value is not its taste but its effect, not how it makes people feel at the moment but how it makes them feel and moves them to act in the long run.  Criticism may embarrass the country’s leaders in the short run but strengthen their hand in the long run; it may destroy a consensus on policy while expressing a consensus of values.  There is, or ought to be, such a thing as being too confident to conform, too strong to be silent in the face of apparent error.

Criticism, in short, is more than a right; it is an act of patriotism, a higher form of patriotism, I believe, than the familiar rituals of national adulation.  If nonetheless the critic is charged with a lack of patriotism, he can reply with Camus, 'No, I didn’t love my country, if pointing out what is unjust in what we love amounts to not loving, if insisting that what we love should measure up to the finest image we have of her amounts to not loving.'...

Throughout our history two strands have coexisted uneasily; a dominant strand of democratic humanism and a lesser but durable strand of intolerant Puritanism.  There has been a tendency through the years for reason and moderation to prevail as long as things are going tolerably well or as long as our problems seem clear and finite and manageable.  But when some event or leader of opinion has aroused the people to a state of high emotion, our Puritan spirit has tended to break through, leading us to look at the world through the distorting prism of a harsh and angry moralism.”

J. William Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power


"Joan [of Arc] was a being so uplifted from the ordinary run of mankind that she finds no equal in a thousand years. She embodied the natural goodness and valour of the human race in unexampled perfection. Unconquerable courage, infinite compassion, the virtue of the simple, the wisdom of the just, shone forth in her. She glorifies as she freed the soil from which she sprang."

Winston Churchill


"I do not know what love or hatred God may have for the English. But I do know that they will all be thrown out of France, except for those who die there.

Even the little children say that people are hung sometimes for speaking the truth to power.

But I do not fear the soldiers, for my road is made open to me.   And if the soldiers come, I have God, my Lord, who will know how to clear the road that leads to the Dauphin.  It is for this that I was born."

Joan of Arc

Today was the May option expiration for the precious metals on the Comex.

Gold moved decisively higher as silver folloed back into the black for the week.

The Dollar finished largely unchanged.

Stocks were struggling after a failed rally attempt this morning, but managed to bounce out of the red into the close.

Malaysia is proposing a common Asian trading currency backed by gold.

Gold is coiled for a move.  Let's see which way it goes.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - An Idolatry of Mammon and Mars

"The normalization of war can be just as detrimental to a republic as war itself.  The barbarians are not at the gates, folks.  War is not a foregone conclusion or a national necessity.  Each successive occupant of the White House only needs you to believe that in order to centralize the power of an increasingly imperial presidency, stifle dissent, and chip away at what remains of civil liberties.

Seen in its proper context, Pence’s speech would have raised alarm bells in a healthy, functioning republic.  But America in 2019 is far from that.  Instead, the VP’s staggeringly absurd speech registered as barely a blip on the media’s 24-hour news cycle. 

After eighteen years of perpetual conflict, members of the military, and the populace at large, have grown immune to the inertia of war.  As such, the republic’s bleeding is internal, as American Democracy dies a slow, opaque death from the inside out.  It may be too late to reverse course, and one wonders if a distracted and apathetic public even notices."

Danny Surjen, Mike Pence's West Point Address Should Keep Us Awake at Night


"As prophet, Reinhold Niebuhr warned that what he called 'our dreams of managing history' — dreams borne out of a peculiar combination of arrogance, hypocrisy, and self-delusion — posed a large and potentially mortal threat to the United States. Today we ignore that warning at our peril.

Such humility is in particularly short supply in present-day Washington. There, especially among neoconservatives and neoliberals, the conviction persists that Americans are called up on to serve, in Niebuhr's most memorable phrase, 'as tutors of mankind in its pilgrimage to perfection.'"

Andrew J. Bacevich, 15 August 2008


"This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily through economic manipulation, through cheating, through fraud, through seducing people."

John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hitman


“Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort.”

Edward W. Said


"Thus the elements are in place: a weak legislative body, a legal system that is both compliant and repressive, a party system in which one party, whether in opposition or in the majority, is bent upon reconstituting the existing system so as to permanently favor a ruling class of the wealthy, the well-connected and the corporate, while leaving the poorer citizens with a sense of helplessness and political despair, and, at the same time, keeping the middle classes dangling between fear of unemployment and expectations of fantastic rewards once the new economy recovers."

Sheldon Wolin, Inverted Totalitarianism, 2003 essay


"A [military] transformation strategy that solely pursued capabilities for projecting force from the United States, for example, and sacrificed forward basing and presence, would be at odds with larger American policy goals and would trouble American allies.

Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor."

Project for a New American Century, September 2000

Stocks came in weakly this morning, and went out with a loss despite an attempt at a bounce in the late afternoon.

Gold and silver were up slightly along with a stronger dollar.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Lift Up Your Hearts, But Keep Your Heads Down

"The suspicions that the system is rigged in favor of the largest banks and their elites, so they play by their own set of rules to the disfavor of the taxpayers who funded their bailout, are true. It really happened. These suspicions are valid.”

Neil Barofsky, TARP Inspector General


"We didn't truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market," says Brooksley Born, the head of an obscure federal regulatory agency — the Commodity Futures Trading Commission [CFTC] — who not only warned of the potential for economic meltdown in the late 1990s, but also tried to convince the country's key economic powerbrokers to take actions that could have helped avert the crisis.  'They were totally opposed to it,' Born says.  'That puzzled me. What was it that was in this market that had to be hidden?'"

PBS Frontine, The Warning

What was hidden in the markets was the massive mispricing of risk in a pervasive fraud.

And it was wrapped in a massive web of lies and shrouded by deception by those who profited from it, and from the silence of their enablers in privileged positions.   As Jamie Galbraith said of economics, it was shown to be a 'disgraced profession'.  But it was surely not alone among the professionals who sold themselves.

It will be a hard judgement for any who abuse their oaths of office and positions of authority in order to gain some advantages, by deception or indifference, for themselves.

Stocks attempted to rally early today, but ended going out on the lows of the day.

The bond market continues to move higher in what appears to be a clear 'flight to safety.'

The Dollar also rallied today.

The muppets and spokesmodels were overtaken by confusion this afternoon, given the high customer confidence report this morning, and the wonderful economic conditions that they seem to be enjoying.   Why were stocks not celebrating this wonderful economy?

Consumer confidence does not lead— it lags. And in times of general deceit and delusion, it can lag rather badly.  But when the realization of the truth comes, then the bottom can fall out quickly.

Gold did not join in the flight to safety today, and silver was also driven lower.

The paper market in NY continues to set the price for the world, or at least heavily influence it during its time of the day.   And they tend to shove the price of gold around to suit their trading like any other currency or financial asset which they manipulation for short term profits.

A discerning eye notes that the number of ounces of gold declared to be deliverable on the Comex at these prices has dropped below 200,000 ounces.  It has not been that low in quite some time.

Today was the end of trading and the settlement for gold and silver options for May.

June is an active contract month for gold. So after the Non-Farm Payrolls report we may wish to hold on to our hats, if the yellow metal is indeed coiling on the chart. 

People seem to embrace their delusions every more tightly, as they slip closer into an abyss of consequence.  They become ever more defiantly stubborn and belligerent.  

Please do not allow yourself to be blinded by some ideology, or misplaced loyalty to some corrupted popular figure or belief.

I realize this will fall largely on deaf ears, and I just do not have the words it appears.     My lack of ability weighs on me at times.  But we have to make some sort of effort even if it seems so ineffective.

Have a pleasant evening.