PPCC: Pisitófilos Creditófagos. Primavera 2025

[Derby]

https://www.ft.com/content/eeae389b-c27c-4fa8-8c39-bed60161fcd7

Chinese renminbi hits 18-year low as it becomes trade war flashpoint

PBoC has allowed weakening in ‘fixing’ rate for the onshore currency for six consecutive sessions

[Derby]

https://www.ft.com/content/74ab6753-6183-44e2-93ee-65fcbd29742a

US inflation falls more than expected to 2.4% in March

Drop comes as Fed grapples with how to respond to Donald Trump’s tariff U-turns

[Derby]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/10/business/economy/china-tariffs-145-percent.html

Trump Has Added 145% Tariff to China, White House Clarifies

White House officials clarified on Thursday that the 125 percent tariff the president announced on Wednesday was in addition to a 20 percent added to the country since President Trump returned to office.

[Derby]

https://news-pravda.com/world/2025/04/10/1225316.html

‘President Xi is a very smart guy, and I think we'll end up making a very good deal for both’ – Trump

“We have weaponry that nobody has any idea what it is. And it is the most powerful weapons in the world that we have. More powerful than anybody even — not even close,” Trump BOASTED.

[Zugzwang]

Hoy el algoritmo me ha referenciado un par de videos que creo interesantes para compartir de la televisión alemana en Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEQi-HzZh-M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNGP0rpMMgM

Y otro respecto a la necesidad de mano de obra extranjera:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBSSTkAv9HI&t=1s

Hay muchísimos más. Lo importante es que abiertamente se está hablando de cambios que son necesarios de forma muy gráfica.

[Derby]

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-04-10/private-equity-s-indigestion-hurts-more-and-more

Private Equity’s Indigestion Hurts More and More

As moribund IPO and M&A markets defer asset realizations yet again, the challenge for buyout firms shifts further to value preservation.

What can private equity firms do in this volatile market? Seemingly nothing. Even with a tariff reprieve, barriers to buying and selling assets remain. But buyout barons have their work cut out just operating the portfolio companies they’re sitting on. As investment realizations get pushed back yet again, the risk of business damage at their stuck-on-ice holdings increases.

The industry’s reversal of fortune has been stunning. Shares in the listed private equity firms were already weak. Last week’s shock US tariff announcement then sent Blackstone Inc. stock down nearly 20% before markets turned higher yesterday. EQT AB and Bridgepoint Group Ltd. were the two worst performers of the entire Stoxx Europe 600 index. CVC Capital Partners Plc dipped below the price of last year’s initial public offering — a deal that was priced to fly at the time.

The issues are plain to see and not new. Capital market volatility has put paid to plans to sell investments through IPOs. Trade sales to corporations are off the agenda — gyrating stocks are the enemy of board-room confidence. Finding buyers remains hard work, let alone running a dual-track process or an auction.

Sales to continuation funds have previously offered an alternative exit route. These are investment vehicles set up by the industry to buy stuck assets. The idea is that investors who missed out on previous private equity fundraisings get a second bite of the cherry by buying a discounted slice of a fund or company in return for cashing out the existing holders. Whether there will be enough catch-up interest to satisfy the increasing demand for liquidity is debatable. As public market stock values fall, so the appetite to “rebalance” portfolios with more private assets diminishes.



Leveraged buyout deals struck in the pandemic using then-cheap financing are approaching their natural maturity point now. That vintage, with prices paid after heated competitive bidding, has become a real headache.

This is a buyer’s market for putting money to work, and the private capital industry still has a lot of dry powder. Even with banks withdrawing, borrowing for new deals may yet be available from the private credit sector. The question is whether the cost of that financing will be viable for making the math stack up. Uncertainty over the outlook makes the standard evaluation of any purchase harder to nail down. Targets that would previously have been too boring to consider — like domestically focused companies in low-growth European markets — may now look relatively more attractive, sheltered from the direct impact of tariffs.



The purchases that are still happening look idiosyncratic. Funds run by KKR & Co. and Stonepeak Partners LP agreed to buy a UK health-care landlord on Wednesday. The rental income is solid and the leverage will likely be unaggressive. KKR funds also bought the Swedish consumer health-care firm behind E45 cream from EQT; that’s clearly a defensive asset.

Of course, indigestion and constipation were private equity’s ailments before the shock of US President Donald Trump’s tariff announcement. Conditions for IPOs and mergers and acquisitions were already bad. The silver lining is that the financing environment was red hot until recently. Buyout firms have had ample opportunity to nudge out debt maturities on their existing assets on attractive terms.

Time lowers annualized investment returns absent a compensating increase in valuations. But private equity’s problem with jettisoning assets goes beyond payback arithmetic and financial engineering. Six months here, six months there, the longer exits are postponed, the greater the operational challenges. As the hoped-for payday is delayed, morale in the portfolio company falls — especially if trading is also getting tougher. Talent is more susceptible to being poached. The risk of atrophy rises.

First, buyout firms’ challenge shifted from generating double-digit returns to just giving investors some cash back. Now the challenge of value preservation is growing every time exits get pushed out.

[asustadísimos]

['President Xi' vivó en un cueva. Tú, no, hortera.

Tú, a tu cama solar de rayos UV, con tu tripón y tu bahorrina del 'eyeliner' jaleándote:
https://v45.tiktokcdn-eu.com/1fae81191ae6a797428353005cccc038/67f9442c/video/tos/maliva/tos-maliva-ve-0068c799-us/oAxaPgDWNcHnh4e2CZLIAYGpINAjfRyIQJeakm/

Xi no te va a vender TikTok.]

[Derby]

https://www.cityam.com/deutsche-bank-the-market-has-lost-faith-in-us-assets/

Deutsche Bank: The market has ‘lost faith’ in US assets


Deutsche Bank analysts have questioned whether the dollar will retain its reserve status (Photo by Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images)

A “remarkable” sell-off in the dollar and US Treasuries suggests global markets have lost faith in American assets, and risks sparking an “outright financial war” that could force the Federal Reserve into another round of quantitative easing, Deutsche Bank’s top FX analyst has warned.

In a wide-ranging note on Wednesday, George Saravelos said that the speed of the concurrent falls in the dollar, US equities and government bonds was unprecedented and there was little to suggest it would remain orderly.

“We are witnessing a simultaneous collapse in the price of all US assets including equities, the dollar versus alternative reserve FX and the bond market,” he wrote.

“We are entering unchart[ed] territory in the global financial system.”

Saravelos, Deutsche Bank’s global head of FX research, argued that equities falling in parallel to the dollar and the US government bonds suggested that global markets had “lost faith in US assets” and were seeking refuge from the fallout elsewhere.

“It remains to be seen how orderly this process can remain,” he added.

Since 3 April the America’s blue-chip index, the S&P 500, has fallen as much as 12 per cent, with more losses expected when US markets open on Wednesday.

Unusually, US Treasury yields, which move inversely to the price of the bonds, have been climbing at the same time, suffering their biggest three-day jump since 2020.

The strategist added that the rout across all US asset classes could compel the country’s central bank, the Federal Reserve, to take drastic action to stem the across-the-board collapses up to and including another round of quantitative easing.

The monetary policy tool—whereby central banks buy government bonds to keep the asset class’s price up and yields down—would be applied in a way redolent of the Bank of England in 2022. Then, the UK’s central bank launched an ‘asset purchase facility’ to prevent the worst fallout from the Liz Truss-induced LDI crisis of 2022.

Saravelos, who in a note before so-called ‘Liberation Day’ warned the dollar risked losing its safe haven status, wrote: “While we suspect the Fed could be successful in stabilising the market in the short-term, we would argue there is only one thing that can stabilise some of the more medium-term financial market shifts that have been unleashed: a reversal in the policies of the Trump administration itself.”

The strategist added the Fed would be more likely to deploy the emergency measure if the trade war shifted to an “outright financial war” between China and the US because the two countries can’t erect much higher trade barriers.

Both countries have rapidly ramped up levies on commerce between each other in the past 24 hours, crippling the feasibility of trade between the two countries. Tariffs on trade between China and the US are currently at 104 per cent and 84 per cent, respectively.

The impasse could lead Donald Trump and Chinese Premier Xi Jinping to reach for other financial levers, Saravellos warned, adding: “With a 100 per cent plus tariff on China, there is little room now left for an escalation on the trade front.

“The next phase risks being an outright financial war involving Chinese ownership of US assets, both on the official and private sector front.”

[asustadísimos]

[Leemos: «Donald Trump se enfrenta a acusaciones de manipulación del mercado tras publicar en redes sociales que era “un gran momento para comprar” pocas horas antes de anunciar un giro total en su guerra comercial, lo que trajo consigo fuertes subidas en las bolsas de valores de todo el mundo.

Poco después de la apertura de los mercados estadounidenses el miércoles por la mañana, Trump escribió en su red social Truth Social: '¡¡¡ESTE ES UN GRAN MOMENTO PARA COMPRAR!!! DJT'.

Menos de cuatro horas después, sorprendió a los inversores al anunciar una pausa de 90 días en la imposición de nuevos aranceles comerciales a la mayoría de los países, salvo China, lo que hizo disparar los índices bursátiles».]

[asustadísimos]

[Las facturas falsas tienen redes de distribución, obviamente.]

[Betancourt]

Impresionante las matemáticas especiales de la bolsa.
A saber lo que descubren con una caida del 60%

[Raf909]

Hoy el algoritmo me ha referenciado un par de videos que creo interesantes para compartir de la televisión alemana en Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEQi-HzZh-M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNGP0rpMMgM

Y otro respecto a la necesidad de mano de obra extranjera:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBSSTkAv9HI&t=1s

Hay muchísimos más. Lo importante es que abiertamente se está hablando de cambios que son necesarios de forma muy gráfica.

Des de que es Vox Populi, hasta que los covardes de los políticos empiezan tomar medidas, y estas medidas surgen efecto, puede pasar una década.

Obviamente, es positivo que se esté hablando de esto, pero vamos muy tarde. No estamos en el tiempo de descuento de un partido. Ni tan siquiera estamos en la prórroga.... estamos en muerte súbita de los penalti.... y estas decisiones son para la temporada que viene.

[muyuu]

Voy a poner los primeros mitutos de la entrevista de Bannon, ideólogo de Trump, que se ve claro que piensa como él.

En realidad merece la pena escucharla toda pero el principio trata más la perspectiva de los aranceles y lo que pretenden. Y como el tío se trastabilla bastante me da bastante curro adecentar un poco la gramática para que se entienda bien.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEBtXFhpwO4

Steve Bannon: And if they steal 2028 or for some reason we don't prevail — which will be them stealing it — they're going to put Trump back on trial for prison. They're going to put me back in prison. Every day I said, "Hey, this thing's all or nothing." Just because we had this tremendous victory in November — I told everyone, they were all partying, "Oh this is great," and everybody's running around with a MAGA hat now — I said, "Hey, that's fine, but understand: we're at war."

Steven Edgington: Will Trump’s tariff Liberation Day harm the US economy? Is Elon Musk leaving the administration? And is the President deporting enough illegal immigrants? My name is Steven Edgington and I'm GBN News’s US correspondent. Joining me to answer those questions and many more is the former White House Chief Strategist, Steven K. Bannon. Thank you so much, Steve, for joining us.

Steve Bannon: Thank you for having me.


Steven Edgington: We just had Liberation Day, but many Americans are concerned that prices are going to go up.
 Americans are worried...

Steve Bannon: Okay, stop. This is just — the only reason people have any concern at all is because the running dog for the capitalists on Wall Street and the lords of easy money media continues to go on with this false narrative: that prices are going to go up, the stock market's going to crash, everything’s going to happen — over and over and over again — without looking at any evidence.

We put some of the strictest tariffs ever on China in ’17 and ’18, and prices didn’t go up at all on Chinese product. This is just another false narrative put out by the media. It's the same as all the lies they told about the pandemic, all the lies they told about Ukraine, all the lies they told about the 2020 election. I could go on and on.

Did the market crash today? No, it did not. We had a sorting out of things. I didn’t say there was not going to be any turbulence — there’s always going to be turbulence. But there was no crash, gold didn’t blow through the roof — nothing that was prophesied yesterday happened.

Trump went hard. And it shows you — I think to the world — he’s not a maximalist. I was always for the reciprocity, but reciprocity has a maximalist side where you just go and match whatever your analysis shows.

There was tension around President Trump to just do tiered 20%. But he did do reciprocity, which I thought was very important — to show the American people how people have abused the United States of America and American companies.

This narrative that’s out there — by the vested interests in this country who don’t want to see the end of the globalist system — the globalists are sitting here in panic mode. Because now Trump has gone large. And he’s not going to back off.


If you noticed today — I thought this was very important — there was a lot of commentary out there, including from his Secretary of Commerce, and even me, saying, “Hey, Trump will be negotiating between now and the end of his current term — before his third term.”

But he put out the word: no negotiations. They are what they are.

So I think you can see how he’s stepped into this decision. This is core Trump. This is something he’s been thinking about for 40 years — but especially deeply since the election was stolen, down at Mar-a-Lago, with his advisers.

So this narrative — and it goes on and on — particularly from people on the Left who want to be populists, or who are trying to understand why they lost... They’ve abandoned the working class in this country. That’s why they lost. And that working class won't support them or vote for them anymore.

You’d think they would at least try to understand populist, economic nationalist policy — bringing a massive amount of capital investment in plant and equipment back to the US, bringing high value-added jobs home.

Steven Edgington: But that’s the key point, isn’t it? And isn’t it more honest to say: “Look, we know this is going to have an impact on prices”? If you impose even a 10% tariff — in some cases more — surely that has consequences?

Steve Bannon: It doesn't mean there’s going to be an impact on prices. It doesn't mean that increased costs flow through to the consumer. Let me repeat that.

We put — you can add up everybody combined, and we still don’t buy from them what we buy from China. I think the net trade deficit with China is five or six hundred billion dollars.

We are, essentially, to the Chinese what the American colonies used to be to Great Britain at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. We’re just shipping raw materials. We send very little finished product, because they’ve gutted all our factories and sent them to China.

So in buying that $500–600 billion worth of finished goods from China — and it's actually more, because that’s the net deficit — prices did not go up in 2018 and 2019. They just didn’t.

At Christmas in 2019, we had virtually no inflation. We had the lowest interest rates we’ve ever had. Exploding growth. Three-and-a-half percent GDP growth. Blue-collar wages were rising faster than white-collar. Non–college graduates’ wages were rising faster than those of college graduates.

That’s the economic nationalist model of Trump.

And we were restricting immigration at the time. Since then, Biden has exploded the borders — inviting in 10 million illegal alien invaders — to drive down wage costs among unskilled workers.

But there’s no evidence that when Trump did this the first time, there was even a scintilla of evidence of price increase from the largest partner we buy from, uh... on finished goods that there was any price increase.



There was no price increase we could see when we put the steel tariffs in — so they tried to use this to scare people.

The two reasons for tariffs: Number one — and this is something people in Great Britain need to understand — is that the United States is a premium market. So what President Trump says is, “Hey, it’s like buying a skybox at a sporting event, or front-row seats at a concert. To get into this market, you’re going to have to pay a premium. To get access to the biggest, deepest consumer market in the world.”

There are two ways to do that. You can stay outside and manufacture your finished products — and you’re going to pay a tolling fee to get in here. I think the reciprocal tariff on Great Britain is 10%, if memory serves me correctly.

Or — you have an option. You can move your manufacturing to the United States. I think Trump would prefer that.

But if not, we now have an External Revenue Service. Peter Navarro says that the auto tariffs alone will bring in $100 billion.

Just think about this for a second. We sell essentially $800 billion worth of cars in the United States a year. Of that, only about $500 billion are made overseas — Germany, Japan, etc.

Even of the remaining $300 billion manufactured here, they’re not really manufactured — they’re assembled. The high-value-added finishes — the drivetrain, the engine — come from Mexico or Germany. In Mexico, we’re making it for the Germans or the Japanese. That all has to stop.

This is about bringing high-value-added manufacturing jobs to the United States. And sure, it's going to cause a little turbulence.

I mean, I think we essentially went to economic war with the Chinese Communist Party yesterday. Xi’s entire economic revival project is in bad straits, and these tariffs could put him out of business.

So this is both geoeconomic — a resetting of the postwar international rules-based order — and geostrategic.

Steven Edgington: A lot of companies tried to outsource their manufacturing away from China and into other Southeast Asian countries — ...

Steve Bannon: Vietnam, ... Cambodia. Cambodia had a bad day yesterday.

Steven Edgington: Exactly. So is putting 50% tariffs on countries like Vietnam strategically a smart thing to do, when you’re trying to decouple from China — trying to encourage people to stop building in China?

Steve Bannon: Well, decoupling from China means bringing those jobs back to the United States. Yes, there will still be some product made in Cambodia and other places — but why?...

It’s just reciprocity. Remember, President Trump is adamant: If you bring the tariffs down — and especially the non-tariff barriers, which is really where the juice is — then we’ll let bygones be bygones.

Steven Edgington: But it’s not reciprocal, though. The data they’re relying on is the trade deficit — not specific tariffs or non-tariff barriers. The White House admitted that: the policy is based on the trade deficit in goods with the US.

So how is that reciprocal?

Steve Bannon: What's reciprocal is: that country has to work with us to decrease the deficit. That’s what reciprocity means here.

You have to do whatever it takes to make sure we address that deficit.

Everyone talks about our debt — $37 trillion. But we’re also going to have a near–trillion-dollar trade deficit, just under Biden.

And we have a cumulative trade deficit, I believe, of $25 trillion. That’s also debt — but no one talks about it. The globalists never want to talk about trade deficits. They say, “Oh, it doesn’t matter.”

It matters tremendously. That’s American wages going overseas. It’s the monetization of our assets to pay for imports.

So no — each country will, in its own way, work out an individual deal.

President Trump says there are no negotiations right now — and I think that’s because he wants them to realise he’s serious.

And he is serious. His primary focus is the economic rejuvenation of the United States.

That’s a powerful message. And it’s been eye-opening for the American people.

Remember: one reason we’re $37 trillion in debt is that we have a $1 trillion defence budget. Why?

Because we’re underwriting the security of Western Europe, the Persian Gulf and Emirates, the South China Sea, the Straits of Malacca, and northeast Asia — Japan, Korea.

That has to stop.

We’re upside down. We have trade deficits with every region along the Eurasian landmass.

We have trade deficits anywhere, we can't continue.

Trump is trying to reduce the financial deficit and the trade deficit. This is the first time in American history — even with Reagan — that a president has said:

“My first priority is the American worker. And I’m going to show you how. I’m going to lay out a new economic model for the world.”

And the world can think about it, react, adjust, and come talk to us.

Steven Edgington: You mentioned Ronald Reagan. Let me quote him — back when he was president, and opposing the tariffs of the 1930s.

He said: “You see, at first, when someone says, ‘Let’s impose tariffs on foreign imports,’ it looks like they are doing the  patriotic thing — by protecting American products and jobs. And sometimes that works for a short while. But what eventually occurs, is that homegrown industries start relying on government protection in the form of high tariffs. They stop competing and making innovative management and technological changes they need to succeed in world markets. [...] Then comes retaliation from abroad. More tariffs. Higher trade barriers. Less competition.”

Steve Bannon: Okay, Thatcher — I don’t need the lecture. I get it.

Reagan and Thatcher were neoliberal neocons. At that time, they were trying to take on the Soviet Union — I appreciate that.

But also remember: Ronald Reagan came in at the beginning of our decline. We had been a manufacturing superpower. Carter started to chip away at that.

As soon as we started running trade deficits, and stopped protecting American industries from mercantilist systems, things went downhill.

This isn’t that. That’s a fantasy. It comes out of National Review–style conservatism — and Tory intellectuals — who helped create this mess. They gutted England. They gutted the United States.

They believed in this fantasy of “fair trade.” But fair trade doesn’t exist. This is a mercantilist system.

Reciprocity just showed the American people that all these tariffs and trade barriers were already up — even from our so-called allies.

Europe, for example — we’ve been underwriting your defence since World War II. And we're kind of underwriting your prosperity.

That’s going to end.

We’re going to get prosperous here.


Present trade is just wrong. The system that worked — when we broke off from the monopolistic power of the British Crown — was not just about political freedom. It was about economic freedom.

What drove the revolutionary generation, as much as the suppression of free speech — where we couldn’t even do cartoons of the king in pamphlets without being shut down — was what the Crown and the aristocracy were doing: corrupting the Commons, giving monopolistic power to entities like the British East India Company and other industrial combines.

What England had become back then is kind of what the United States is now — oligarchic power merged with state power. That’s the system our revolution broke away from.

And what followed is a document just as dear to economic populists and nationalists as the Declaration of Independence — which, let’s be clear, was a declaration of war against an empire. Alongside the Constitution, which came later to organise things, there’s also The Report on Manufactures by Alexander Hamilton. That’s the third founding document of the United States. Hamilton was a true economic nationalist.

From the American Plan after the Revolution, all the way to the early 20th century — especially under McKinley — we protected our industries. Some of the greatest protectionists in American history were Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, and McKinley. They understood that while the Industrial Revolution may have started in England, we became an industrial superpower. Why? because of a smart system of tariffs.

Free trade is a masturbatory fantasy. It doesn’t exist in the real world. Everyone, always, they're gaming the system. The Chinese Communist Party, quite frankly — and this began under Thatcher and Reagan, who laid the groundwork — benefitted. The globalists who followed — like Bush — shipped high-value-added jobs from the US and the UK to China so they could exploit slave labour of Laos-Beijing.

These people have been called out now.

What I love so much about Reciprocity — of all President Trump’s original ideas: build the wall, deportations, all of it — is that everything he promised, he's done. The southern border is now totally secure, just 65 days into his presidency. That shows how corrupt the imperial capital — Washington, D.C. — really is.

But the trade deficit has been his obsession since the 1980s. Go back and watch the interviews — Lou Dobbs on CNN, talking about trade with Japan, but ultimately China. They’ve been ripping off the U.S. and taking our jobs. This has driven him for decades.

Yesterday, I couldn't have been prouder. For those of you who haven’t seen the speech, take time and watch it. It’s one of the two or three most powerful speeches Trump has ever given. Totally on point. The stagecraft — perfect. They transformed the Rose Garden with flags between each column. It was powerful. The message was on point — delivered with authority, and it inspired.

He brought up union workers to speak about how much they loved it, and how much this is going to rejuvenate the automotive industry.



Steven Edgington: You talk about declaring economic war on the Chinese Communist Party — but these tariffs may have also declared economic war on our own allies: the European Union, Britain…


Steve Bannon: Give me the allies again — who are the allies?

I’m insulted by your use of the term “allies.” An ally is supposed to be someone you’re in it with — together. The European elites are total and complete deadbeats.

I was the guy on point in the first administration, and I had to go, like a supplicant, to ask: “Would you please consider getting up to the 2–2.5% of GDP for defence?” That’s what you committed to — after you forced your way into Ukraine in 2014, realising you were going to have a fight on your hands.

But you didn’t do it. Only the Brits came close. Later, the Poles.

If you look at the Germans, the Italians — some of these people are horrible. The French? If you look at their defence budgets, they’re not going to combined-arms operations, or manoeuvres. They’re going to pensions, women’s healthcare, climate change — that’s the big one. It’s all phony. It’s all fake.

You haven’t been allies for years. If you removed the U.S. from Western Europe today militarily, the whole thing would collapse. We are the infrastructure and the backbone of everything. It’s completely unacceptable.

This is why they praise Joe Biden. Read the new books coming out about his chief of staff — they had to tell him, “You’re not the president of NATO.” Because he kept saying, “The NATO guys love me.” Of course they do! You’re giving them everything.

The Western European people must understand that their elites have not been allies to the United States.

You look at the burden of everything — of manpower, right? of Defence. In the Red Sea right now, we’ve got two carrier battle groups — that's about 24,000 sailors — conducting air strikes on the Houthis to keep the Red Sea and Suez Canal open. To keep trade flowing to Europe, so your prices don’t explode.

And what do you have down there? Last I saw: one British destroyer, one French frigate, one Italian corvette.

You don’t even take your own security seriously. So how can we take you seriously?

You’re not allies. You don’t act like allies. What you do is you bitch and you moan when the United States says, “look, we just can’t do this forever.” We have a $1 trillion defence budget. We’ve got to cut spending. We have a $2 trillion deficit every year.

People should understand, the signal that President Trump is sending every day about Greenland, is about the defence of Europe.

To wit: the Russian army is your problem. The Russian navy is our problem.

We get some sort of partnership or alliance or something with Greenland — maybe even they become a territory? Whatever that form is. We get those naval bases — that I believe Trump wants to set them up — and we block the Greenland–Iceland–UK gap. That way, no Russian submarine gets through without being tracked one on one.

It would also take pressure off the nuclear base at Clyde (Faslane) in Scotland — which has always been controversial with Scottish nationalism.

That’s the necessity. It’s not about rare earths or minerals in Greenland — it’s strategic. It sends a strong message: that 80 years after WWII, we’re now going to think about hemispheric defence of the United States.

This has massive implications for Europe. But what did the EU do? They were the first to start bitching and moaning about the tariffs. Look at how these countries treat us. They don’t treat us as allies — not even as partners who’ve underwritten their defence for 80 years. Number one: we delivered freedom — twice. World War I and World War II. Number two: we’ve basically paid 80% of it [their defence?] ongoing.

Let me give you a story.

When the Germans came in 2017, I was assigned to sit down with their national security adviser. I said, “By the way, you’re not meeting your 2% target. Here’s how far you’re missing it.”

And we'd done numbers — because President Trump’s a real estate guy. Think “back rent.” I said, “You're four years in arrears. The number you owe us $50 billion.”

He almost had a heart attack in the room. He started spouting, speaking German again. "Why can you do this? I can't believe what you say" and I said, “Hey, you want to be an ally?”

Then he throws up to mee, “Oh, you don’t understand. We can’t do that — our constitution requires a balanced budget.”

I go, “Dude. I know you wrote that part of your constitution later but let's be blunt, until we bombed you into, you know, the Stone Age there wouldn't have been any constitution. You can’t pitch to me that, a country that has $2 trillion deficit and at that time $32T or $33T in face-amount of debt that we can't afford to pay, please don't come and make the argument that your constitution is so pristine that you can’t have budget deficits.”

And, duly noted — just a week ago, they changed it. Now they can run deficits. These deadbeats haven’t paid for their defence in 80 years.

So... don’t throw “ally” at me. They’re not allies. They’re coalition partners — and NATO will only continue if the European elites step up.

They need to say: “We’re going to put real money into this. We’re going to field more than two combat divisions.”

The British have been extraordinary — although your military is small now, the quality is unmatched. But it’s small because you haven’t invested in defence.

But the rest of the people? They’ve just let the thing go.

[Derby]

[Leemos: «Donald Trump se enfrenta a acusaciones de manipulación del mercado tras publicar en redes sociales que era “un gran momento para comprar” pocas horas antes de anunciar un giro total en su guerra comercial, lo que trajo consigo fuertes subidas en las bolsas de valores de todo el mundo.

Poco después de la apertura de los mercados estadounidenses el miércoles por la mañana, Trump escribió en su red social Truth Social: '¡¡¡ESTE ES UN GRAN MOMENTO PARA COMPRAR!!! DJT'.

Menos de cuatro horas después, sorprendió a los inversores al anunciar una pausa de 90 días en la imposición de nuevos aranceles comerciales a la mayoría de los países, salvo China, lo que hizo disparar los índices bursátiles».]

https://www.axios.com/2025/04/10/trump-tariff-pause-market-manipulation

[Derby]

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/eu-china-start-talks-lifting-eu-tariffs-chinese-electric-vehicles-handelsblatt-2025-04-10/

EU, China will look into setting minimum prices on electric vehicles, EU says

BERLIN, April 10 (Reuters) - The European Union and China have agreed to look into setting minimum prices of Chinese-made electric vehicles instead of tariffs imposed by the EU last year, a European Commission spokesperson said on Thursday.

German newspaper Handelsblatt reported earlier on Thursday that negotiations had begun.(...)