The bond market is flashing a warning sign for the global economy

New York —  Take it from President Donald Trump himself: Stocks and commodities can throw easily ignored tantrums, but when the bond market gets “yippy,” you pay attention.

Ultimately, it took a sharp bond market selloff in April of 2025 to get Trump to pump the brakes on his sweeping “reciprocal” tariff agenda.

Once again, the bond traders are barking. But this time, it’s not clear whether Trump can do much to calm the market anytime soon.

“The bond market is basically reacting to the uncertainty created by oil prices, and (Trump) seems not to know how to get out of the problem he’s put us in,” said Daniel Alpert, managing partner at investing firm Westwood Capital, in an interview.

Put another way: Bond traders are starting to think that the recent inflation spike — largely a result of the war shutting off oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz — may not be as “short-term” as Trump has claimed. And that will likely depress bond prices even more.

Read the rest here.

Amateurs obsess over the stock market. Professionals watch the bond market.

McConnell slams Blanche over ‘slush fund to pay people who assault cops’

Former Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) on Thursday slammed acting Attorney General Todd Blanche for accepting the Trump administration’s proposal to establish a $1.8 billion legal compensation fund for people who claim they were wrongfully prosecuted by the Justice Department.

The fund has sparked criticism in both parties, particularly those who believe it could be used for claims from those convicted of assaulting U.S. Capitol Police officers on Jan. 6, 2021. Blanche has not ruled out such claims.

“So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong – Take your pick,” McConnell said in a strongly worded statement after Blanche met with Republican senators to justify the administration’s push to establish the fund.

Read the rest here.

That's all very nice Mitch. But where were you when the country needed your vote to bar Trump from ever running for office again? You had a chance to prevent this by voting to convict him in his second impeachment trial. You called him "morally guilty" but chose to vote not guilty on the specious grounds that he had left office. In doing so you gave cover for the other cowards in your party (no longer mine since 2016). You bear a very large degree of moral responsibility for where we are today as a country. History is not going to be kind in its judgement of you and your fellow enablers of the current junta. 

Fox News: Disapproval of Trump hits new high

Voters are increasingly pessimistic about the economy and President Trump’s handling of key issues, while a majority opposes continued U.S. military involvement in Iran even as most believe the U.S. is winning the war. That’s according to a new Fox News national survey.

Affordability continues to dominate the political landscape.

Fifty-eight percent flag the cost of living as their top economic worry, up from 50% in February. This eclipses other issues, such as government spending (16%), jobs (8%) and tariffs (8%).

More than three-quarters also say the economy is in bad shape (77%), worse than last month (73%) and a year ago (71%). Only 23% rate it positively, the lowest in more than a year. 

The pessimism is personal too. A slim majority of voters (51%) say their family’s finances are worse now than two years ago. Before the 2022 midterm elections, 44% said the same. 

Read the rest here.

See also...

Trump approval among Republicans at new low

The SpaceX IPO

See also...

Report: SpaceX IPO gives Musk unchecked power and forbids investor lawsuits

SpaceX insiders will get to sell shares earlier than usual after the IPO

A direct quote from the prospectus...

“We believe the next paradigm shift for humanity is the creation of a resilient, perpetually expanding spacefaring civilization that drives continuous innovation across new frontiers, ultimately propelling us to Kardashev Type II status—we believe we are capable of unlocking an era of unprecedented economic expansion, while also contributing to the safeguards of humanity’s future against existential risk.”

This sounds like a bad imitation of a Star Trek novel.

The United States is Now a Banana Republic

America is in the middle of the most serious constitutional crisis since the Civil War. It is time for a non-violent revolution. The people need to demand the resignation or removal from office by impeachment of this corrupt junta. We may getting close to the point where we will need to consider extreme measures like a national strike. Especially if Trump attempts to directly interfere with the November elections as some of his more rabid supporters are urging. 

DOJ Grants Sweeping Tax Immunity to Trump

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed an agreement Tuesday declaring the federal government will not seek any sort of audit or payment from the president, his family members and companies as part of Donald Trump’s settlement agreement with the Internal Revenue Service.

In a sweeping one-page addendum to Monday’s settlement agreement establishing a nearly $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, Blanche agreed that the U.S. is “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing, any and all claims” including “monetary relief” that “have been or could have been” asserted by the IRS against Trump, his family or his businesses.

Read the rest here.

A Third Vatican Council?

 I'm not even Catholic and I shudder at the thought.

In Donald Trump's hands the Power of the Pardon is a dagger aimed at the constitution and the rule of law

...The pardon power raises more profound concerns, however, when wielded as a tool of managerial control—one that can negate the basic criminal-law constraints that apply to public officials.

Whatever the merits of the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision holding that a president is immune from criminal prosecution for actions within the office’s “conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority,” it shields only one actor: the president. In practice, presidents act through political appointees and career staff, all of whom remain subject to criminal law. But President Trump has reportedly promised pardons to many in his administration—by one account, to “everyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval.” If the president is willing to pardon large swaths of his administration, government operations could be significantly transformed. 

To what extent? Consider the laws that could effectively cease to apply: the criminal statutes governing executive branch employees cover, among other things, bribery, conflicts of interest, classified information disclosure, political activity interference, destruction of public property, and records falsification. Relevant generally applicable criminal laws include those prohibiting perjury, false statements, obstruction of congressional proceedings, witness tampering, destruction or falsification of records in federal investigations, and the deprivation of rights under color of law. 

Read the rest here.

Some good reads from Reason

Trump Settles His Own Lawsuit Against the IRS for $1.8 Billion of Your Money

How bad is California's 'squatters rights?" Furious property owners are turning to vigilantism.

Donald Trump, Thomas Massie, and the Long, Slow Death of the Tea Party

Trump wants to admit more refugees to the US. But only White South Africans

The Trump administration is proposing increasing the refugee admissions ceiling for fiscal year 2026 to 17,500 for White South Africans, according to an emergency determination sent to Congress and obtained by CNN.

Last year, the administration restricted the number of refugees allowed to enter the country annually to 7,500, with a focus on White South Africans, slashing the previous year’s ceiling of 125,000 and excluding some of the world’s most vulnerable populations.

Read the rest here.

Since October of 2025 the US has admitted 4,499 refugees. Of those, exactly three were not White South Africans. 

You would have to go back to Woodrow Wilson to find a president and administration that was as nakedly racist as the current one. 

Donald Trump is a Pathological Liar and the World is Starting to Notice

President Lyndon Johnson’s lies about the Vietnam War created what came to be called a “credibility gap” when millions of people stopped believing him. Today, a credibility gap plagues President Trump because of his whoppers about the war with Iran and much more.

Trump’s credibility gap endangers our national security. His hyperbolic rants are so absurd — and his policy flip-flops so extreme — that our foreign allies and adversaries don’t believe much of what he says and no longer take him seriously. It’s as if the proverbial boy who cried wolf moved into the Oval Office.

Trump has alienated our allies with his lies, insults, temper tantrums, tariffs, aid cuts to Ukraine and other nations, and threats to withdraw from NATO and annex Canada and Greenland. Our adversaries don’t fear his threats because he often fails to carry them out. This has generated the insult of TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out).

Growing numbers of people now view Trump’s absurd claims as calculated lies at best — or the delusions of a 79-year-old man with declining mental health at worst.

A poll for the Washington Post and ABC News published May 3 found an extraordinary 59 percent of Americans believe Trump doesn’t have the mental sharpness to serve effectively as president. A total of 71 percent believe he isn’t honest and trustworthy, and only 37 percent approve of how he is handling his job.

Read the rest here.

Bill Maher on Anti-Semitism (PG 13)

Ok...a word of caution for the benefit of anyone who may have just arrived from Neptune and immediately stumbled on my blog. This is Bill Maher. So yeah; if vulgar language offends you just move on. I have my disagreements with BM. Quite a few to be frank. But I think he pretty much nailed this one, language and all. The comments over on YT are worth perusing. And yeah, I too noticed the deafening silence that his closing monologue got. 

A Deep Dive Into Sino-American Trade

Survey Gives Mixed Report on the Russian Orthodox Church

The proportion of Russians identifying as Orthodox has fallen from 78% to 65% in the past 15 years, according to a new survey.

The survey, conducted by Russia’s Public Opinion Foundation on behalf of St. Tikhon’s University in Moscow, also concluded that the proportion of Orthodox Christians who never attend services has risen from 28% to 32% in the same period.

The findings, reported May 14 by the Vedomosti newspaper, are significant because the Russian Orthodox Church is the largest of the 14 universally recognized self-governing Eastern Orthodox Churches. Estimates of its membership vary, with some counts suggesting there are 110 million Russian Orthodox Christians worldwide, including 95 million in Russia. But the number of active believers is considered to be far lower.

The new research, based on a survey of 1,501 adults in February and March, also sheds light on the state of Russian Orthodoxy amid Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which was launched in 2022 with the support of Patriarch Kirill of Moscow.

But some Russian Orthodox commentators have cast doubt on the survey’s findings. Fr. Alexey Volkov, a priest in Ulyanovsk, western Russia, told the country’s National News Service that he saw no decline in practice.

He said: “I view these figures with skepticism, because what I see at the church where I serve, and at other churches, suggests exactly the opposite. The number of parishioners is growing, and the number of people attending services is not declining. There is no decline in people’s faith or in Orthodoxy.”

He added: “Participating in the Church’s liturgical life is one of the most important attributes of faith. However, no one requires a certain number of services attended per year. There are no such quotas. Not everyone who doesn’t go to church on Sundays fails to be Orthodox. They simply have their own personal rhythm of Church life.”

The new survey also explored how intensively Russia’s Orthodox Christians practice their faith, providing detailed figures about how often they receive Holy Communion. Broadly speaking, Orthodox Christians tend to receive Communion less frequently than Catholics because of more detailed requirements concerning fasting and recent confession.

Read the rest here.

HT: Dr. Tighe

Pentagon officials stunned by Hegseth decision on troops in Poland

Pete Hegseth’s last-minute decision to cancel the deployment of 4,000 troops to Poland caught Pentagon staff and European allies by surprise — the latest example of an abrupt personnel move from the Defense secretary that blindsided both sides of the Atlantic.

It wasn’t clear exactly why Hegseth issued the order, according to three defense officials familiar with the matter. President Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed anger and frustration with European allies for their failure to help with the Iran war, although Trump has labeled Poland a “model ally” for its high defense spending.

The decision was even more surprising because troops and equipment had already started to arrive in the country. It sent fresh waves of anxiety through European capitals and inside the Pentagon on Thursday about whether such moves could embolden Russia — and which ally might turn into the next target.

“We had no idea this was coming,” said one of the U.S. officials, adding that European and American officials have spent the last 24 hours on the phone trying to understand the decision and figure out if more surprises are coming.

The move follows Hegseth’s announcement this month that the Pentagon would withdraw 5,000 troops from bases in Germany. But that decision followed through on a threat Trump made after German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said the U.S. was “humiliating” itself with the conflict in Iran.

The 4,000 Texas-based troops were preparing to leave on a long-planned nine month rotation to Poland that includes training with NATO allies when the order to halt came through. The cancellation of this routine mission is especially unusual given that American troops stationed on the continent are a key deterrent to Russia. Trump has insisted that Europe will have to fend for itself — even as he’s railed against allies’ opposition to the Iran conflict — and this latest order suggests the president is serious about reducing the American footprint on the continent.

The Army’s role in Europe “is all about deterring the Russians, protecting America’s strategic interests and assuring allies,” said the Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, the former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe. “And now a very important asset that was coming to be part of that deterrence is gone.”

Read the rest here.

Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice leaves Democratic Party over antisemitism concerns

A Pennsylvania state Supreme Court justice said Monday he is leaving the Democratic Party over what he sees as a rise in antisemitism from mainstream party figures.

Justice David Wecht, who was elected to the court as a Democrat in 2015, said in a statement he is switching his party affiliation to independent due to an “acquiescence to Jew-hatred” becoming “disturbingly common among activists, leaders and even many elected officials in the Democratic Party.”

“I can no longer abide this. So, I won’t,” Wecht said. “I am no longer registered within any political party.”

Read the rest here.

China Increasingly Views Trump’s America as an Empire in Decline

When President Trump visited China in late 2017, Xi Jinping welcomed him with a grand display of Chinese history and culture: a four-hour private tour of the Forbidden City culminating in a performance by the Peking Opera.

Eight years, a pandemic and two trade wars later, Mr. Trump is returning to Beijing, where the theme of future dominance, not ancient majesty, has filled domestic and international headlines with articles about dancing robots, drone swarms and the quiet hum of electric vehicles.

China increasingly casts itself not as a fading civilization trying to catch up to the West but as a superpower poised to surpass it. Chinese nationalists and state-linked commentators say they have Mr. Trump to thank. America under his rule, they say, validates Mr. Xi’s worldview centered on “the rise of the East and decline of the West.”

For decades, many Chinese viewed the United States with a mix of admiration, envy and resentment. America represented wealth, technological sophistication and institutional confidence. Even critics of Washington who reviled the American system often assumed that it worked.

Mr. Trump’s ascent and his volatile second term shattered that image.

In January, a nationalistic Beijing think tank affiliated with Renmin University published a triumphant report about Mr. Trump’s first year back in office. The report argued that his tariffs, attacks on allies, anti-immigration policies and assaults on the American political establishment had inadvertently strengthened China while weakening the United States. Its title: “Thank Trump.”

The report called Mr. Trump an “accelerator of American political decay,” with the United States sliding toward polarization, institutional dysfunction and even “Latin American-style instability.” His hostility toward China, the authors argued, was a “reverse booster” that unified the country and helped bring about its strategic self-reliance.

Read the rest here.

US National Debt Surpasses GDP

The U.S. government learned last week that it may have reached an unfortunate milestone: The size of its debt surpassed the nation’s total economic output.

It was a striking imbalance, according to early estimates, one that the country has experienced only in rare circumstances — briefly during the pandemic, and in the aftermath of World War II. But the development barely seemed to register in the nation’s capital, where few policymakers bothered to acknowledge the latest warning sign about the government’s poor fiscal health.

The root of the problem is well-documented and widely known. U.S. debt has soared in recent years because of a mismatch between federal spending and tax revenue, one complicated by a rapidly aging population, which has driven up costs across government.

For economists, the fear is that these conditions are inching the United States toward a fiscal crisis, one in which its debt is so great that the country can’t easily afford to pay the rising interest on it. But their warnings have long gone unheeded in Washington, calcifying the strains on the government’s balance sheet in ways that President Trump’s agenda is expected to exacerbate.

Despite winning a congressional majority, Republicans have cut little in spending over the past year. With the few savings they did achieve, they put that money toward offsetting a fraction of the cost of Mr. Trump’s tax cuts, which are still expected to add more than $4 trillion to the debt in the coming years.

Those fiscal risks aren’t yet fully realized in the total federal debt held by the public, which topped about $31.26 trillion in March, federal records show. By comparison, the nation’s nominal gross domestic product, a measure of its output using current dollars, reached $31.21 trillion in the 12-month period ending in March, according to data released last Thursday and analyzed by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which supports deficit reduction.

As a result, the ratio of debt to G.D.P. — a widely regarded metric for assessing the government’s fiscal health — slightly exceeded 100 percent in the committee’s calculations. That last occurred for a short period in 2020, as the pandemic clobbered the economy and government shelled out trillions in emergency relief, the group found.

Read the rest here.

Why Trump's "Trade Deals" are Worthless

When President Donald Trump struck a trade deal with the European Union in July, officials on both sides stressed how it would ensure long-term stability to trans-Atlantic trade.

The Trump administration called the deal a "generational modernization of the transatlantic alliance." European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said it "restores stability and predictability" by locking in 15 percent tariffs on most European goods exported to the U.S., while most American imports to Europe would be exempt from tariffs.

In other words, Trump got what he wanted out of that deal: A reduction in tariffs on American exports and the establishment of a new, permanent baseline tariff on European goods. European leaders also felt like they'd won something: the 15 percent tariff was lower than the 25 percent tariff Trump had threatened, and the deal would stop Trump from hiking tariffs the next time he was in a bad mood.

So much for that.

On Friday, Trump announced that he would raise tariffs on European-made cars to 25 percent. (Those tariffs are authorized by Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, so they are not affected by the Supreme Court's ruling in February that limited some of the president's power to impose tariffs unilaterally.)

Those higher tariffs could cost automakers $4 billion this year.

Read the rest here.

1896: People Leaving Mass at Cologne Cathedral

Trump has lost control of the conspiracy theories

Conspiracy theories have been central to Donald Trump’s political rise. He was a leading promoter of the “birther” conspiracy theory targeting then-President Barack Obama, embraced outlandish theories about a “deep state” in the government and still pushes false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

But conspiracy theories, and the people who support them, are unpredictable and hard to control. Now, Trump is increasingly the subject of conspiracy theories on both the left and the right, with many of his onetime supporters viewing him with growing skepticism.

This new dynamic played out immediately after Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner with conspiracy theories and false claims flooding social media, questioning whether the assassination attempt was “staged” for Trump’s benefit. There is no evidence suggesting that is the case.

Some of those who circulated that idea were once among Trump’s most vocal backers.

“Was The Trump Whitehouse Corespondents Dinner Shooting Staged??” posted the right-wing conspiracist Alex Jones, who has recently broken with Trump over the war with Iran. Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who similarly broke with Trump over Iran and his handling of the release of information about the late disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, questioned why the suspect’s writing was released “almost immediately.” On the left, prominent progressive podcasters Jennifer Welch and Angie Sullivan released an episode on Monday headlined: “Major False Flags Revealed In Trump Shooting Aftermath, He’s Hiding From the Public?”

Read the rest here.