Tag: economy

China Is In Economic Dire Straits And They’re No Longer Able To Hide It

Official economic data from any government is always treated with suspicion by anyone with common sense.  The US, for example, witnessed some of the most egregious statistical tinkering imaginable under the Biden Administration, not to mention outright lies and propaganda from the establishment media on the health of the economy.  To this day no one has been fired (or tarred and feathered) for hiding the reality of the stagflation crisis.  Any government or corporate economist that called the threat “transitory” should be stripped of their financial prestige and banished to a cash register at Arby’s.

And let’s not forget Biden’s misrepresentation of the labor market, portraying millions of new jobs for illegal migrants and visa holders as if they were jobs benefiting American citizens.  In the US and across the western world, lying about the economy is generally seen by politicians as a temporary solution to secure reelection.  However, in China, lying about the economy is treated as a national security imperative.  If there’s anything in the world that gives communists a feeling of existential dread, it’s the fear that their ideological enemies will discover proof that communism doesn’t work.

The Trump Administration’s tariffs on China are not the initiator of the nation’s troubles, they are more a bookend to a process of decline that has been ongoing for years. 

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DHL to suspend global shipments of over $1,000 to US consumers

DHL Express, a division of Germany’s Deutsche Post, said it would suspend global business-to-consumer shipments worth over US$800 (S$1,000) to individuals in the United States from April 21, as US customs regulatory changes have lengthened clearance.

The notice on the company website was not dated, but its metadata showed it was compiled on April 19.

DHL blamed the halt on new US customs rules that require formal entry processing on all shipments worth over US$800. The minimum had been US$2,500 until a change on April 5.

DHL said business-to-business shipments would not be suspended but could face delays.

Shipments under US$800 to either businesses or consumers were not affected by the changes.

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The Myth of Biden’s “Roaring” Economy

Claims that President Trump inherited a thriving economy from President Biden are not just misleading—they’re dishonest. The Biden supporters measure economic “growth” from the lowest point of the COVID lockdowns in 2020, when businesses were shuttered and unemployment was artificially high. This makes even mediocre recovery look like booming progress. But if we compare Biden’s economy to 2019—the last full year before the pandemic—many key indicators show not a robust rebound but an economy weighed down by inflation, debt, and diminished purchasing power.

Real wages are down. From January 2021 to May 2024, average hourly earnings for private-sector workers fell by 2.24% when adjusted for inflation. Even broader comparisons with 2019 show only marginal gains. According to the House Budget Committee, inflation-adjusted household net worth was still down 4.7% as of early 2025. Meanwhile, inflation surged 15.5% cumulatively from January 2021 through December 2024, with a peak annual rate of 9.1% in June 2022—the highest in more than four decades. President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, along with the $740 billion Inflation Reduction Act—two of the largest spending and money-creation programs in U.S. history—helped sustain inflationary pressure rather than curbing it.

Employment numbers tell a similarly deceptive story. Biden often boasts of adding 16.6 million jobs, but much of that reflects people simply returning to work after pandemic shutdowns. Job growth also leaned heavily on part-time and public-sector positions. Of the jobs Biden claims to have created, about half, 8.3 million were part-time, and 1.2 million were government jobs—positions effectively created by executive action, shifting money from taxpayers to government payrolls.

Americans were also borrowing more just to get by. Total household debt hit a record $17.9 trillion in the third quarter of 2024, up 26% from $14.15 trillion in 2019. Credit card debt alone exceeded $1.14 trillion, up nearly 15% when adjusted for inflation. Delinquencies have surged—9.1% of credit card accounts were delinquent as of Q3 2024, the highest rate since 2011. Auto repossessions rose by 23% in 2023, with an estimated 1.5–2 million vehicles repossessed, a jump from 1.3 million in 2019. Foreclosure activity followed a similar path: filings rose to 357,000 in 2023, still below the 493,000 in 2019 but climbing as post-pandemic protections ended.

The cost of living soared, especially in housing. Average mortgage payments doubled from $1,300 to $2,600 between 2021 and 2024, pushing many Americans out of homeownership, while rents rose 40%. At the same time, the personal savings rate fell to 4%—down from 7.5% in 2019—signaling that households were draining savings just to cover basic expenses.

Supporters of Biden’s economy often point to headline GDP numbers and international comparisons. In 2023, the U.S. posted a real GDP growth rate of 2.5%, outperforming peers like Japan (1.9%), Canada (1.1%), and the Euro area (0.5%). That resilience, however, is nothing new. In 2019, the U.S. grew at 2.3% while Germany grew just 1.1%. The U.S. economy has long outperformed other G7 nations thanks to a large consumer base, a dynamic private sector, and global tech leadership. Nominal GDP reached $27 trillion in 2023, dwarfing Japan’s $4.2 trillion and Germany’s $4.5 trillion. But these structural advantages are not new and cannot be credited to Biden. They are the result of decades of American economic dominance—not the product of any one administration’s policy.

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Trilateral Commission: China Achieves the ‘New International Economic Order’

In writing How the World Adopted Beijing’s Economic Playbook, Michael Froman is no Zbigniew Brzezinski. As a member of the Trilateral Commission and President of the subversive Council on Foreign Relations, Froman argues that China Has Already Remade the International System. His declaration is a day late and a dollar short and thoroughly disingenuous.

In 2001, an article appeared in Time Magazine where another Trilateral, Hedley Donovan, was a founding member of the Trilateral Commission, and his publication was one of several media outlets that collaborated with Trilateral initiatives. The article, Made in China: The Revenge of the Nerds , accurately and plainly revealed what had taken place during the prior 20 years:

The nerds are run­ning the show in today’s China. In the twenty years since Deng Xiaoping’s reforms kicked in, the com­po­si­tion of the Chi­nese lead­er­ship has shifted markedly in favor of tech­nocrats. …It’s no exag­ger­a­tion to describe the cur­rent regime as a tech­noc­racy.

After the Maoist mad­ness abated and Deng Xiaoping inau­gu­rated the opening and reforms that began in late 1978, sci­en­tific and tech­nical intel­lec­tuals were among the first to be reha­bil­i­tated. Real­izing that they were the key to the Four Mod­ern­iza­tions embraced by the reformers, con­certed efforts were made to bring the “experts” back into the fold.

During the 1980s, tech­noc­racy as a con­cept was much talked about, espe­cially in the con­text of so-called “Neo-Authoritarianism” — the prin­ciple at the heart of the “Asian Devel­op­mental Model” that South Korea, Sin­ga­pore, and Taiwan had pur­sued with apparent suc­cess. The basic beliefs and assump­tions of the tech­nocrats were laid out quite plainly: Social and eco­nomic prob­lems were akin to engi­neering prob­lems and could be under­stood, addressed, and even­tu­ally solved as such.

The open hos­tility to reli­gion that Bei­jing exhibits at times — most notably in its obses­sive drive to stamp out the “evil cult” of Falun Gong — has pre-Marxist roots. Sci­en­tism under­lies the post-Mao tech­noc­racy, and it is the ortho­doxy against which here­sies are mea­sured. [Emphasis added]

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Repeal Government Regulators. Improve Safety and Quality, End Inflation

Voluntary cooperation is robust, multiply-protected, and loss-limiting, and brings healthy deflation. A government regulator makes a system fragile, fraught with a single point of failure, and loss-compounding, and brings sickening inflation.

Donald Trump and his unity team members Robert Kennedy and Elon Musk promise to limit cronyism and slash waste.

Both approaches deny that state-government and national-government administrative states are themselves peak cronyism. If government people stop hosting business-crony socialists but still host activist-crony socialists, that’s still tyranny. Also, it’s unconstitutional.Thomas J. DiLorenzoBuy New $11.57(as of 10:36 UTC – Details)

The only adequate approaches are to fully executively close and legislatively repeal.

When there are no government regulators, that doesn’t mean that there’s a vacuum. Instead, people naturally take care of themselves and one another.

Voluntary Cooperation Increases Safety and Quality

Many people take advantage of the considerable information they have available and use it to make the choices that they expect to be the best for them. In doing so, they self-regulate.

Their choices affect others, creating a network of interactions. In this network, people’s interactions with others regulate the others.

So then when people are free, they increase safety and quality by taking decentralized, interdependent actions:

  • Product raters compete to find and play up even small advantages and disadvantages.
  • Media people spread bad news very quickly.
  • Customers stop buying harmful products very quickly.
  • Retailers and distributors stop carrying harmful products.
  • Civil complainants can eliminate product lines and companies.
  • Insurers work to prevent and limit losses.
  • Producers anticipate problems and prevent them.

The resulting system is robust and resilient, and the people in it select naturally for improved performance. This is why freeing people to take care of themselves in the Dutch Republic, England, and the USA enabled people to create dramatic gains in how much value they added, bringing modern material comforts to the world.

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Trump Unleashes 10% Baseline Tariff on All U.S. Trading Partners Starting April 5 — Hits ‘Worst Offenders’ with Even Tougher Measures April 9 — Here is the List of Countries and Their Corresponding Tariffs

President Donald Trump announced today the implementation of a 10% baseline tariff on all imports, effective April 5, 2025. This decisive action aims to correct decades of unfair trade practices that have disadvantaged American workers and industries.

Speaking from the White House Rose Garden, President Trump proclaimed April 2 as “Liberation Day,” marking a new era of economic independence. He emphasized that this measure is essential to protect American jobs and revitalize domestic manufacturing.

“For too long, other nations have taken advantage of our open markets while imposing barriers to our products. Those days are over,” the President asserted.

Trump added via Fox News:

“American steel workers, auto workers, farmers and skilled craftsmen,” Trump said from the White House Rose Garden Wednesday afternoon. “We have a lot of them here with us today. They really suffered, gravely. They watched in anguish as foreign leaders have stolen our jobs, foreign cheaters have ransacked our factories, and foreign scavengers have torn apart our once beautiful American dream. We had an American dream that you don’t hear so much about. You did four years ago, and you are now. But you don’t too often.”

“Now it’s our turn to prosper, and in so doing, use trillions and trillions of dollars to reduce our taxes and pay down our national debt,” he said. “And it will all happen very quickly. With today’s action, we are finally going to be able to make America great again, greater than ever before or. Jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country and you see it happening already. We will supercharge our domestic industrial base.”

“For nations that treat us badly, we will calculate the combined rate of all their tariffs, nonmonetary barriers and other forms of cheating. And because we are being very kind, we will charge them approximately half of what they are and have been charging us. So the tariffs will be not a full reciprocal. I could have done that. Yes. But it would have been tough for a lot of countries,” he said.

“For decades, the United States slashed trade barriers on other countries, while those nations placed massive tariffs on our products and created outrageous non-monetary barriers to decimate our industries,” Trump said. “And in many cases, the non-monetary barriers were worse than the monetary ones. They manipulated their currencies, subsidized their exports, stole our intellectual property, imposed exorbitant taxes to disadvantage our products, adopted unfair rules and technical standards, and created filthy pollution havens.”

“From 1789 to 1913, we were a tariff-backed nation. And the United States was proportionately the wealthiest it has ever been,” he said. “So wealthy, in fact, that in the 1880s they established a commission to decide what they were going to do with the vast sums of money they were collecting. We were collecting so much money so fast, we didn’t know what to do with it. Isn’t that a nice problem to have?”

“And my answer is very simple. If they complain, if you want your tariff rate to be zero, then you build your product right here in America. Because there is no tariff. If you build your plant, your product in America. And we’ve seen companies coming in like we’ve never seen before,” he said.

The White House released a detailed chart showing how badly many countries have been ripping off American workers, charging high tariffs on U.S. goods while benefiting from America’s generosity in return.

The White House fact sheet released today clarified that Canada is exempt from the reciprocal tariff announcement.

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Seattle Economic Crisis: Proof That Democrat Wealth Taxes Lead To Disaster

To look at the Pacific Northwest today one would never know that 25 years ago the region was an economic powerhouse at the forefront of technology and business innovation.  At the time Portland and Seattle were known for constant rain as well as raining cash, and the “millionaire density” of the Seattle area was at historic highs.  The tech boom and international trade with Asia had created a Silicon Valley of the northern coast.  

Companies like Nike, Starbucks, Microsoft and Amazon established corporate offices and generated tens of thousands of jobs, and many of those jobs were considered high income.  People can debate the overall effects of the population surge to the region; there are many who would argue that Washington and Oregon were better off when they were considered backwoods fishing and lumber states.  That said, it’s undeniable that for a time the Northwest was one of the most desirable and lucrative places to live in the US.  

That’s all gone now.  The wealthy are leaving Seattle like it’s a leper colony and all that’s left are millions of broke activists, poverty stricken residents and illegal immigrants.  Some blame the constant riots or the steady stream of welfare recipients. Others say that the draconian covid mandates caused people to jump ship.  However, a primary factor in businesses (and money) leaving the city was the institution of a progressive “Payroll Expense Tax”.  

The PET is a quarterly tax approved by the Seattle City Council in 2020 in the middle of the Covid hysteria.  It increases taxes on businesses depending on how many employees they hire and how much their employees get paid.  In other words, it punishes companies that hire more people and pay them a good salary.  The conditions of the PET are very similar to what Democrats say they want for their “Wealth Tax” – An extra tax on top earners and large companies beyond the income tax.  

Democrats were high on their own supply in the early 2020s and in their fervor to destroy conservatives they instituted every suicidal policy imaginable, from defunding police to near-zero prosecution for property theft under $1000.  It’s not surprising that wealth taxes were established at the same time to “stick it to the capitalists”.  What they seem to have forgotten, though, is that communist tactics don’t work if people and businesses are able to walk away, and that’s exactly what has happened in Seattle.

Larger businesses are packing up and leaving the Northwest as quickly as they arrived.  Amazon, Meta, Google and Expedia are the most prominent examples of companies exiting the Seattle labor market and hiring elsewhere to avoid the Payroll Tax, but there are numerous others. 

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WINNING: Trump’s “Reciprocal Tariffs” Trigger Global Response — Multiple Nations Slash Import Duties on U.S. Goods

​Several countries have announced plans to reduce or eliminate tariffs on U.S. imports in response to President Donald Trump’s “reciprocal tariffs” policy, set to take effect on April 2, 2025.

This policy aims to match the tariffs that other nations impose on U.S. products.

The White House released a detailed chart showing how badly many countries have been ripping off American workers, charging high tariffs on U.S. goods while benefiting from America’s generosity in return.

The White House fact sheet released today clarified that Canada is exempt from the reciprocal tariff announcement.

This exemption comes after a series of trade tensions between the U.S. and Canada. In February 2025, the U.S. imposed a 10% tariff on Canadian energy imports and a 25% tariff on other Canadian goods, prompting Canada to respond with its own tariffs on American imports. Subsequent negotiations led to temporary suspensions and adjustments of these tariffs.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford proposed that Canada eliminate tariffs on U.S. imports if President Trump reciprocates. Ford emphasized that mutual tariff removal would benefit both economies and urged cooperation for greater prosperity and safety.

However, according to the New York Post, Ford lacks the federal authority to enact such policy changes.

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How Trump’s Tariffs Are Fueling U.S. Jobs, Manufacturing, and Tax Relief — Despite Democrat Outrage

Democrats have criticized President Trump’s tariffs, arguing that they lead to price increases that disadvantage American workers. While tariffs can contribute to higher prices, they also offer benefits to American workers.

Firstly, revenue generated from tariffs contributes to the government’s operating fund, potentially offsetting expenses that would otherwise be covered by income taxes. This additional revenue has opened discussions about tax relief measures, such as removing income tax from overtime pay or tips.

Moreover, tariffs serve to encourage domestic manufacturing and attract foreign direct investment (FDI).

Foreign companies aiming to maintain access to the U.S. market may choose to establish manufacturing facilities within the United States to circumvent import tariffs.

For instance, Hyundai Motor Group announced a $21 billion investment in U.S. operations, including a new $5.8 billion steel plant in Louisiana, to avoid potential tariffs and bolster its American manufacturing presence.

Similarly, Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC is set to invest $100 billion in a U.S.-based semiconductor plant.

Tariffs can reduce the need for subsidies by leveling the playing field for American producers competing against heavily subsidized foreign imports. A good example is agriculture.

The media criticized President Trump for placing a 25% tariff on Canadian food imports, claiming it would raise grocery prices and hurt American families. But the reality is more complex, and the tariffs make sense in context.

The United States is food-independent and typically a net exporter of agricultural products—it produces more food than it consumes and doesn’t rely on imports to feed its population.

Still, in 2023, the U.S. imported $40.5 billion worth of agricultural goods from Canada, about 20.6% of total agricultural imports. These imports aren’t driven by necessity but by factors like seasonality, economic efficiency, and consumer demand.

Some products—like fruits, vegetables, and certain animal goods—are simply cheaper to import due to Canada’s climate, harvest cycles, or subsidies. The two countries also have deeply integrated food supply chains, with items often crossing the border multiple times for processing.

While these imports provide variety and affordability, they also undermine American farmers—who already receive tens of billions in subsidies each year. In 2023 alone, agricultural subsidies totaled $10.97 billion.

Programs like the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) pay farmers to take land out of production for environmental reasons, but have been criticized for reducing the total food supply.

On top of that, the American Relief Act of 2025 added another $31 billion in aid to farmers and ranchers.

Democrats are fond of isolating facts when it suits them—especially when it paints President Trump’s policies in a negative light. When it comes to tariffs, they focus only on the short-term price increases and ignore the broader economic goals.

Yes, tariffs can raise prices on certain goods, but they also create jobs, generate government revenue, and reduce the need for taxes and subsidies.

Tariffs on agricultural imports—like those from Canada—help ensure American-grown food reaches consumers instead of being destroyed or left unharvested.

That means less waste, less need for subsidies, and more support for American workers and producers.

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Transactional Weakness Tips the Balance of Power – ‘Hold to No Illusions; There Is Nothing Beyond This Reality’

A U.S. economic ‘re-balancing’ is coming. Putin is right. The post-WWII economic order ‘is gone’

The post-WWII geo-political outcome effectively determined the post-war global economic structure. Both are now undergoing huge change. What remains stuck fast however, is the general (Western) weltanschauung that everything must ‘change’ only for it to stay the same. Things financial will continue as before; do not disturb the slumber. The assumption is that the oligarch/donor class will see to it that things remain the same.

However, the power distribution of the post-war era was unique. There is nothing ‘forever’ about it; nothing inherently permanent.

At a recent conference of Russian industrialists and entrepreneurs, President Putin highlighted both the global fracture, and set out an alternate vision which is likely to be adopted by BRICS and many beyond. His address was, metaphorically speaking, the financial counterpart to his 2007 Munich Security Forum speech, at which he accepted the military défie posed by ‘collective NATO’.

Putin is now hinting that Russia has accepted the challenge posed by the post-war financial order. Russia has persevered against the financial war, and is prevailing in that too.

Putin’s address last week was, in one sense, nothing really new: It reflected the classic doctrine of the former premier, Yevgeny Primakov. No romantic about the West, Primakov understood its hegemonic world order would always treat Russia as a subordinate. So he proposed a different model – the multipolar order – where Moscow balances power blocs, but does not join them.

At its heart, the Primakov Doctrine was the avoidance of binary alignments; the preservation of sovereignty; the cultivation of ties with other great powers, and the rejection of ideology in favour of a Russian nationalist vision.

Today’s negotiations with Washington (now narrowly centred on Ukraine) reflect this logic. Russia isn’t begging for sanctions relief or threatening anything specific. It is conducting strategic procrastination: waiting out electoral cycles, testing Western unity, and keeping all doors ajar. Yet Putin is not adverse either to exerting a little pressure of his own – the window for accepting Russian sovereignty of the four eastern oblasts is not forever: “This point can also move”, he said.

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