In which the bromancer, our Henry and Killer jostle for attention ....

 

Greetings from Footscray, strip of Phở and sensitive ethnic tributes.

Travel limits the pond''s reptile coverage. 

Yesterday saw Dame Groan heave a sigh of relief at the Donald briefly stopping a little of his relentless war mongering, while Lloydie of the Amazon briefly sang in praise of Ted.

The pond says briefly because it was mainly snaps and less than two minutes of verbiage, though on the matter of nuclear it was sublime, with Lloydie asking rhetorically of punters ...

...whether they think the Coalition is capable of delivering a staged transition involving longer coal, more gas on the way to nuclear.
Mr O’Brien did well in calling out his opponent’s refusal to actually voice the cost of Labor’s plan. And in exposing the fact that the high cost that Labor puts on the Coalition’s nuclear plan comes from a highly partisan protest group.

Remarkable really, that dinkum sweet virginal "beautiful" Oz coal and gas are now the staged transition... while nuking the country disappears off into the sunset (though it's really cheep, cheep)...

As usual, the infallible Pope summed it up nicely ...

As for Dame Groan, there's plenty more groaning today, as the pond starts with a little comic relief ...

It's an old routine, but it never fails to amuse: MADE IN...WHERE?, We Found a Shop Trump’s China Tariffs Will Clobber. It’s Trump’s, The Trump store in Trump Tower is facing a new threat: Trump tariffs. (archive link).

As it dawns on US markets that there's a really big trade war in the making, it's the pond's duty to ignore all the interesting coverage, and feature instead the lizards of Oz dealing with the jitters as best they can ...

Over on the extreme far right of the digital edition, all the talk was of chaos ...

Such an abundance of riches, with three pond favs, the bromancer, Killer and our Henry, pushing Joe, lesser member of the Kelly gang, out of contention ...

The bromancer offered a decidedly Catholic take on matters King Donald I. 

Guilt is a big business for tykes, and so it was all our fault, we're the biggest problem, the Cantaloupe Caligula just has to be pleased, rather like pandering to that malignant, obsessive, narcissistic, decidedly nasty and overbearing long absent lord in the old Testament.

The reptiles thought so highly of the approach they gave it the full graphic treatment ...

For those troubled by small print, The truth is we are our own biggest problem in US relationship, It’s a rollercoaster ride with Donald Trump at the best of times. But while he’s President, and after he’s left office, we want our relationship with the US to remain intact.

For those who've spent too long on Mars with Uncle Leon, the text reminded them it was a snap of US President Donald Trump in the White House on Thursday (AEST). Picture: AP

For those who enjoy weird reptile incantations, This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there.

So here we are ... with the bromancer showing he still had the 1970s spirit ...

The revolution has been cancelled. It certainly won’t be televised.

Gil Scott-Heron must be rolling in his grave, because the current mayhem isn't just being televised, it's being streamed, Tik-Tok'd and whatevered ... but it was obviously the best opening flourish the bromancer could manage. Tough times for reptiles ...

Donald Trump has decided that the huge tariffs he was going to levy on almost every territory in the world, including the menacing mercantilist penguins of Heard Island, have now been postponed for 90 days, while the Trump administration can negotiate “beautiful” deals with all those nations.

Ah, the penguins ...

Sorry the pond should try to look po-faced and solemn ...

Meanwhile, US tariffs on China are now an eye watering 125 per cent. And Chinese tariffs on the US are not far behind.
The two biggest economies in the world are duking it out in a deeply old-fashioned, unsophisticated trade war.
But strangely, the world’s stockmarkets have recovered most of the losses they sustained after Trump’s “Liberation Day” worldwide tariffs.
No human being in the history of the planet has destroyed so much wealth in a single day – trillions and trillions of dollars in stocks all over the world – as Trump did on Liberation Day. And surely no human being has created so much wealth in a single day when he suspended the wild tariffs.
Of course, if there is a longstanding and genuine trade war between the world’s biggest economy, the US, and its second biggest economy, China, that would have the potential to devastate world trade and global economic growth as well. A reduction in Chinese economic activity would obviously diminish Chinese demand for our exports.

At this point, the reptiles dropped in an AV distraction, China’s top leaders rushed into emergency talks after Donald Trump’s shock decision to impose a 125 per cent tariff on Chinese imports, deepening the rupture between the world’s two biggest economies. As Beijing scrambles to shore up its economy and markets, Xi Jinping shows no sign of backing down, setting the stage for a prolonged and dangerous trade war.

Note that the reptiles weren't interested in the mango Mussolini backing down ... as the bromancer continued to lacerate himself in approved Opus Dei style ...

But here’s a tip. My guess would be that the markets expect there will be some kind of deal or accommodation between Trump and China’s Xi Jinping, probably sooner rather than later.
Trump is genuinely impossible to predict. However, there are some patterns in his conduct which recur. He’s not an ideologue. He has attitudes in his head rather than detailed policies. But when he tries a policy and it not only doesn’t work but plainly hurts his political position, and his friends, he adjusts, often quite ­radically.
Trump’s way of dealing with policy failure is to declare victory and reverse direction. He doesn’t die in a ditch defending a policy that plainly isn’t working.
He won’t have an endless ­tolerance for pain with China, notwithstanding his valid belief that China both games the trading rules and is America’s chief strategic competitor. Nonetheless, the situation is still full of uncertainty.
We don’t know what will happen in 90 days, and we don’t know what will happen between Washington and Beijing. And the baseline 10 per cent US general tariffs, as well as some specific sectoral tariffs, remain in place.
Both Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton, both the government generally and the opposition generally, have responded fairly well to the Trump disruptions.

So many don't knows, and it was left to an AV distraction to carry on the bromancer's war with China, Sky News contributor Gary Hardgrave says China “wants to run the world” as US President Donald Trump imposes fresh tariffs. “China wants to run the world, and America says only through us can you get that particular reality,” Mr Hardgrave said. “China has been aggressively destroying great parts of American industry. “The price of electricity is killing everybody – and yet China, it’s building coal-fired power stations, nuclear power stations, it’s doing all the stuff we should be doing to get the price of electricity down to make stuff, and when they make stuff, they sell stuff.”

Then it was on to the bromancer deciding it was all our fault, we're the biggest problem ...

It was smart and right that Australia not retaliate to the Trump 10 per cent tariff on Australia, the equal lowest level imposed on any nation. The US accounts for less than 5 per cent of our exports. It’s right that we keep arguing for a better deal but it would be crazy to make futile gestures which can only provoke Trump or some of those around him.
Similarly, while both Albanese and Dutton rightly criticised the US tariffs, they also sensibly kept their comments moderate, non-inflammatory and avoided any personal criticism of Trump.
That was absolutely the best way to react. It’s a rollercoaster ride with Trump at the best of times. But while he’s President, and after he’s left office, we want our relationship with the US to remain intact.
What should we do?
Richard Marles and Penny Wong both spoke of trade diversification. This means finding other customers than China. Frankly, we’ve been hopeless at this. India wanted to become a major part of our resources industry. That would have been real diversification. Instead, with our insane ­environmental regulation, green lawfare and endless political equivocation, we effectively made that impossible.
What else should we do?
Obviously we should build up our fiscal reserves strongly so that we have the resources to withstand unforeseen crises. Instead, we’ve just budgeted for a $1 trillion debt next year and increasing national debt for the decade ahead.
And, of course, we should rapidly build up our defence capabilities, as the Europeans are doing, as the Japanese and the British are doing. Even New Zealand is doubling its defence budget. But we’re doing almost nothing that hasn’t been planned already for years. In fact we’re reducing existing capabilities while setting aside money for platforms that won’t begin to arrive for another decade.
Donald Trump, notwithstanding all the disruption of recent days, is not really our biggest ­problem.
We are our own biggest problem.

Might the pond suggest that the biggest problem is the current captain of the ship?

And so to what's always the pond's biggest Friday treat, Henry of 'mend the hole in the bucket' fame, and he really doesn't like the current ship's captain ... Donald Trump’s tariff chaos a case of power without purpose, As Trump backflips, the hollowness of the feeble excuses that have been mounted for his tariffs becomes ever clearer.

The reptiles clocked it at a five minute read, and the opening snap seemed designed to set Henry off, President Donald Trump holds an executive order in the Oval Office.

Was that the order to increase the pressure in showers?

It's beyond a banana republic these days, and perhaps it was making America's showers great again that sent our Henry off to Mein Gott, and to a wander through history in his patented way ...

Every day seems to bring a new excuse for Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again, tariffs. The latest, however, is a very old one: that the US bears the burden – or depending on the formulation, the privilege – of providing the world with a reserve currency.
Echoed earlier this week on these pages by Robert Gottliebsen, who sourced it to sometime Trump adviser Stephen Miran, the theory in fact dates to the early 1950s. Having emerged in the immediate post-war debates about the global “dollar shortage”, it was elaborated into a coherent model by economist Robert Triffin in 1959.
Since then, the theory has gone through countless reformulations, but its essence has remained broadly unchanged. The international monetary system, it argues, relies on the US dollar both as a store of value – notably as a reserve currency held by central banks – and as a medium of exchange. As the world economy grows, it therefore demands an ever increasing supply of dollars, which can only be met by the US running a current account deficit: that is, by other countries selling more to the US than they buy from it, leaving them with the surplus dollars they require.

The reptiles interrupted with an AV distraction, Curtin University’s Dean of Global Futures Joe Siracusa claims the US is in an “economic war” with China. US President Donald Trump has announced a 90 day pause on tariffs but raised China’s tariff to 125 per cent. “There’s no bullets and there’s no smoke, but we’re clearly at war,” Mr Siracusa told Sky News Digital Presenter Gabriella Power. “These tariffs and sanctions poison the atmosphere for other more important things.”

Our Henry wasn't for interrupting, and continued in a state of high agitation ...

To achieve that outcome, the US dollar must be overvalued relative to the level that would balance the current account. But the dollar’s high valuation undermines the competitiveness of the trade-exposed parts of the American economy, including large segments of manufacturing.
As a result, the benefits the US obtains from the dollar’s role – of being able to buy more than it sells – are offset, to a greater or lesser extent, by the damage the dollar’s overvaluation does to its trade-exposed industries and possibly to its long-term economic growth.
That theory undoubtedly contains an element of truth; but its empirical relevance – its ability to explain the behaviour of the international monetary system – has become ever more limited. It was very much a product of the Bretton Woods era: that is, of a fixed exchange rate regime based on the dollar and ultimately gold. Once that regime fell apart in 1971, and international capital flows were liberalised, the theory’s explanatory power collapsed.
It is therefore of little use in explaining what has recently happened to the dollar, whose value, compared to the currencies of America’s trading partners, has been 17 per cent higher over the past five years than in the preceding decade.
Nor can that appreciation be explained by currency manipulation. As the US Treasury’s latest assessment, which examines world currency markets through to June 2024, concludes, “no major trading partner has manipulated the rate of exchange between their currency and the United States dollar for purposes of preventing effective balance of payments adjustment or gaining unfair competitive advantage in international trade”.
The appreciation is instead partly due to the extraordinary success of firms such as Amazon and Google, which has boosted the worldwide demand for US equities – a sign not of the American economy’s weakness but of its enduring strength. However, the main factor at work is the US’s budget deficit that, having reached 7.6 per cent of GDP in 2024 (compared to our own 1.7 per cent of GDP), is optimistically forecast to average 6.5 per cent of GDP over the next five years.

Dragging the Bolter into the fray in an attempted AV distraction didn't help matters, Sky News host Andrew Bolt discusses President Donald Trump’s “embarrassing” backflip on his tariff war. “What a stunning, embarrassing, humiliating backflip from Donald Trump, suspending his tariffs after just one day,” Mr Bolt said. “No wonder the Chinese ambassador was gloating today.”

That just got our Henry going harder. 

How soon before he landed on Hume and Burke?

Those deficits are far too large to be financed by US domestic savings alone. American bond rates have therefore been 60 per cent higher than those in Germany (and the gap is even greater compared to bond rates in Japan or Switzerland), attracting an influx of foreign savings that both funds the deficit and pushes up the value of the dollar.
That influx’s mirror image is the current account deficit, which reflects the dollars the rest of the world spends purchasing financial assets, rather than goods and services, from the United States. Thus, if the rest of the world earns $100 through its exports to the US, and only spends $70 of those dollars on American goods and services, using the remaining $30 to buy Treasury bonds and other American financial instruments, the US will record a current account deficit of $30, as its imports (of $100) exceed its exports (of $70) by that amount.
Trump’s claim that he wants the US to run a surplus with every country in the world, or at least prevent any deficits, is consequently nonsensical: the deficit must persist for at least as long as the US needs foreign savings to cover its fiscal shortfall. And if the goal is nonsensical, pursuing it by means of tariffs is even worse, all the more so as the revenues they secure are, it seems, intended to fund income tax reductions, leaving the budget deficit (and hence the US’s net financing requirements) largely unchanged.
Faced with that nonsense – and with Trump’s statement on Tuesday, at a black-tie dinner in Washington, that “They’ve ripped us off left and right, but now it’s our turn to do the ripping”, while boasting that countries were “calling us up, kissing my ass” – it is hard not to be reminded of an essay David Hume wrote nearly three centuries ago.
Taking aim at what he called “jealousy of trade”, Hume lamented the growing tendency of “states to look on the progress of their neighbours with a suspicious eye, consider all trading states as their rivals, and suppose that it is impossible for them to flourish, but at their expense”.

Just to make sure everyone knew the right royal burke in question, the reptiles dug deep into the archive to produce ... Edmund Burke

Whenever the reptiles pull that trick, the pond wonders why our Henry doesn't seek inspiration from the likes of the tremendously informed Ron Vara ...

Not to worry, Henry had finally started to wind down, with only a few more Enlightenment notes ...

The immediate consequence of that “narrow and malignant opinion” had been to cause a proliferation of trade barriers: between 1690 and 1705, English tariffs had increased from a low 5 per cent to 15, 20, or even 50 per cent – and those increases were matched by France, Austria, Denmark, Prussia, Russia and Sweden.
That not only deprived “nations of that exchange which the author of the world has intended by giving them soils, climates, and geniuses, so different from each other”; it also sparked a contagion of “fear and jealousy”, poisoning relationships between states.
As the great Enlightenment thinker Pietro Verri put it, trade degenerated into “a veritable war fought by the various peoples of Europe” who, in the process, came to believe “their interest lies in beggaring their neighbours” – first by “robbery”, then, once resentments festered into hatreds, even by violence.
And it was with those fatal spirals in mind that Edmund Burke, writing in the same period, warned that “rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years”.
None of that is to deny there are serious problems in the world trading system that desperately need fixing, including American and European agricultural protectionism, along with China’s array of trade-distorting subsidies. But solving those problems requires clarity, not confusion, statecraft, not stagecraft, and power with, rather than without, deliberate purpose. Until the Trump administration starts acting in a manner worthy of the great country it leads, its policies will continue to veer from arrogance to humiliation and crisis to catastrophe.

Like many others in the Murdochian camp, our Henry seems to be completely unaware of the magic mirror that helps feed the syndrome ...

It must be awkward for our Henry to share space with Killer, what with our Henry having given Killer a bit of a bagging last week,  but here was Killer coming up the rear with Donald Trump’s MAGA voters ‘really don’t care’ about stockmarket shocks, If Trump’s tariffs don’t work to restore the economic prospects of ordinary Americans, it should be back to the drawing board for supporters of economic and political freedom.

Ah freedumb, and a fancy image to set Killer on his way, A trader works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange next to a photograph of Donald Trump. Picture: AFP

Killer is, of course, at one with JD's peasants, and scorns the 'leets, no doubt helped by him being one of Gina's IPA stooges ...

“I don’t really care, Margaret,” JD Vance told Margaret Brennan in an interview in January, when the CBS anchor expressed concern that illegal immigrants might have been radicalised within the US before committing crimes.
The Vice-President’s quip went viral, becoming a go-to retort among Donald Trump supporters.
The attitude couldn’t be more apt amid the elite furore over Trump’s spectacular rollout of tariffs across allies and adversaries alike.
Lower-income Americans, who overwhelmingly supported Trump at the election last year, couldn’t give two hoots about the stockmarket. One can’t understand what’s happening without appreciating this critical point.
The fury in the mainstream media, from left and right, created by the wild gyrations in financial market prices since Trump announced his so-called “Liberation” tariffs on April 2 gives a misleading impression.
Much of the media is written by those who have stocks for those who have stocks, which is quite a small proportion of the population in the US. By the way, it doesn’t force its citizens to invest in the stockmarket as we do here.
“The top 10 per cent of Americans own 88 per cent of equities … The next 40 owns 12 per cent and the bottom 50 per cent has debt. They have credit card bills, they rent their homes, they have auto loans,” US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Tucker Carlson in a recent interview.

Actually, if the pond might be so bold ...

About 60% of Americans have stock market investments, either directly or through retirement accounts, according to Gallup.
Stock ownership is skewed towards higher earners, older workers and skilled professionals, but that rate is relatively high among developed countries – driven in part by the popularity of 401(k) retirement accounts.
Named after a subclause of tax law, these accounts are an easy tax-free way to save – and often include significant stock market holdings. About 35% of working Americans choose to invest a portion of their pay checks into a 401(k) retirement account. (Beeb)

Perhaps because the reptiles are operating on smoke and mirrors, sump oil and rancid budgets, they decided to repeat that earlier noted AV distraction,  Curtin University’s Dean of Global Futures Joe Siracusa claims the US is in an “economic war” with China. US President Donald Trump has announced a 90 day pause on tariffs but raised China’s tariff to 125 per cent. “There’s no bullets and there’s no smoke, but we’re clearly at war,” Mr Siracusa told Sky News Digital Presenter Gabriella Power. “These tariffs and sanctions poison the atmosphere for other more important things.”

Oh yes, more important things, like watching toddlers at play...

See how skilfully Killer skews the toddler with the remote into classic verbiage ...

That the non-housing wealth of the richest Americans was briefly down 10 per cent, on paper, from the start of the year is of little importance for the vast bulk of Americans, and especially those who voted for the very well telegraphed Trump tariff agenda.
Both Australian and American share prices, by the way, remain significantly overvalued on traditional measures.
Until recently, typical Australians had enjoyed strong real wages growth for decades. This hasn’t been true in the US. Rising GDP per capita has obscured a very lopsided distribution of the spoils. Between 1999 and 2014, real median household income in the US fell from $US70,210 to $US67,350, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, while the incomes and wealth of those in higher socio-economic brackets reached extraordinary levels.
Whether Trump’s tariffs are the answer to crippling economic stagnation and soaring inequality remains to be seen, but the political rage underpinning the policy isn’t hard to understand.

The pond would like to pause to admire that line: Whether Trump’s tariffs are the answer to crippling economic stagnation and soaring inequality remains to be seen...

Remains to be seen is so much better than a billy goat butt when a worm is wriggling on the hook ...

It remains to be seen if Killer has anything sensible to say ...

For young men the trends have been even worse. Those aged 25 to 29 had lower real median annual earnings in 2022, around $US40,000, than they did in 1972, according to research by Scott Winship of the American Enterprise Institute.
“This is an absolute catastrophe; you can’t believe you’re going to maintain a healthy society on that basis,” said Oren Cass, chief economist at American Compass, a conservative think tank that’s become influential in Trump republican circles.

How to make the pond tune out? 

Simple ... quote a conservative think tank that’s become influential in Trump republican circles.

It's on them ... while the reptiles tried to distract with a snap of vulgar youff ... The biggest swing towards Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election was among young men under 30.Picture: AFP

The beards, oh the beards, they blind, they hurt the eyes ... (not to mention that tat, which should see at least one of them shipped off to a prison in El Salvador).

So, it shouldn’t be a surprise that many young men turn to drugs, crime and welfare, and choose to revolt against the economic system, especially when they can see daily on social media that other groups have had a very good 50 years indeed.
Amid all this, around 70,000 mainly young Americans – well over the number of Americans that died in total in the Vietnam War – die of fentanyl poisoning every year, no doubt partly driven by the socio-economic despair.
No wonder the biggest swing towards Trump in the 2024 presidential election was among young men under 30. In 2020, Joe Biden, as Democrats typically have done among young people, won young men by 15 percentage points; in 2024 Trump won the same group by 14 percentage points, an incredible turnaround, according to AP VoteCast data.
In 2017, economist Raj Chetty and his co-authors concluded that for the first time Americans were growing up poorer than their parents. About 90 per cent of Americans born in the 1940s earned more than their parents adjusting for inflation, a share that had fallen to around 50 per cent for those born in the 1980s.
What’s scary is this analysis was undertaken almost a decade ago, before younger and lower-socio-economic Americans endured the devastating and lingering response to Covid-19, which supercharged and entrenched inequality like no other set of policies in modern history. For example, the measures might have lifted but used cars and homes 

Not Covid again. Can't Killer at least do a Dr Strangelove routine and explain how fluoride is the real cause of what's wrong in America, and is the cause of autism, and possibly susceptibility to measles, and so on and so forth.

Shouldn't he be celebrating with RFK Jr., as in RFK Jr. says he plans to tell CDC to stop recommending fluoride in drinking water, The addition of low levels of fluoride to drinking water was long considered one of the greatest public health achievements of the last century.

Not any more, not since the inmates took over the asylum, and speaking of inmates, US President Donald Trump alongside Vice President JD Vance.

Good old JD, he shot, he scored ...

Among the Hot Search-worthy hashtags, one of them stands out because it looks as though it was lost in translation but maybe everyone in the English-speaking world understands the gravity of the outrage: “Foreign Ministry responds to US Vice President calling Chinese people peasants” reached number 2 on the Hot Search list with 44.06 million views. This refers to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Lin Jian responding to JD Vance saying the globalised economy was borrowing money from Chinese peasants to buy things manufactured by Chinese peasants. A huge outrage ensued in the comments as people agreed with Lin, calling Vance ignorant and lacking in respect.
Of course, the word “peasant” from Vance is considered derogatory in English, but it needs to be pointed out that Chinese media and the Ministry and Foreign Affairs translated the term to “乡巴佬”, a more distinctively prerogative word that is equivalent to “hicks” or “hillbillies”. Some Chinese netizens used ad hominem attacks on Vance, his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy and upbringing, like: “We’re not peasants, you are a hillbilly”. Before Vance, the word “peasant” historically referred to Chinese tenant farmers (佃农) in the days of class struggle and bore little negative connotation. Perhaps that is why they translated it with a more offensive Chinese word.

Completely clueless ... how to give dictator Xi a free kick... while Killer rambled on ...

A large part of the explanation has been the decline in better-paid industrial jobs that evaporated in the US from the late 1990s, when the US and other nations lowered their tariff and non-tariff barriers. China, which was meant to become more democratic as a result, became a huge beneficiary.
American consumers have enjoyed a boon of cheap consumer, especially electronic, goods but it’s not been enough to compensate for the loss of dignity and hope for the future. Witness the rise of populism and the secular decline in voting shares of major parties throughout the developed world.
Trump has given a voice to a massive chunk of the US population for whom the American Dream has become practically unattainable.
The relentless focus on the impact of Trump’s tariffs on the sharemarket, which is an increasingly poor indicator of underlying economic health in any case, has obscured the political forces behind Trump’s tariffs.

Oh indeed, indeed, a valiant warrior for the American dream, and so much obscuring, the veil only lifted by Killer's IPA insights...

Go on Killer, keep kissing the arse celebrating the American dream ... gold on the walls, gold everywhere the eye can see ...

The Sun King in his natural habitat ...

And so to Killer attempting a feeble redemption for the bomb thrower ...

It’s been a wild month so far. Trump, often accused of being too close to moneyed interests, has just spent a fortnight smashing those interests. His political opponents on the so-called left, once opposed to the economic order, have been fretting about its possible demise.
If Trump’s tariffs don’t work to restore the economic prospects of ordinary Americans, it should be back to the drawing board for supporters of economic and political freedom. If ordinary people lose faith in democracy, then many will be seduced by policies far more damaging than tariffs.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.

It's tough times for Gina lickspittles wanting to kiss the Cantaloupe Caligula's arse ...but what fodder it's provided for cartoonists, with a mention of arse inevitably bringing out the anal in the immortal Rowe ...