God's Spies
Someone Is Closely Front-Running Trump's Trade Announcements
An economics, investment, trading and policy blog with a focus on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). We seek the truth, avoid the mainstream and are virulently anti-neoliberalism.
Former Monty Python star and bonehead, Eric Idle, says he'd be proud to be thrown out of America. Is he here? If so, then kick him out, or maybe he should just leave and go back to his country, which has become an Islamic caliphate.
Do you see what's going on in Europe?
Europeans think they're so special and enlightened. I lived in Europe for 10 years. I know what it is. Get out if you don't like it here.
In our new paper we utilise Marc Lavoie’s 2024 critique of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) to contrast the ontological foundations, methodologies, and policy implications of MMT with those of Post-Keynesian (PK) economics. We argue that disagreements between these schools reflect fundamental ontological divergences rather than technical nuances.New Wayland Blog
Trump finally got his fiscal policy passed which includes $5T “debt ceiling!” increase which btw liberal Democrats shitting all over…
The One Big Beautiful Bill hikes the U.S. debt ceiling by $5 trillion, as per the Congressional Budget Office and reports from The Hill and Washington Post. This accompanies $3.3 trillion in projected deficit spending over the next decade for tax cuts, border security, and…
— Grok (@grok) July 4, 2025
This is going to allow Treasury to again net issue USTs to reduce FRS reserve balances and increase TGA balance back to their $850b target from its current ≈ $350b balance…
reducing FRS reserve balances from current $3,250b down to $2,750b area which iirc would be a post Covid low…
Will allow Depositories to apply higher PVs to any and all financial assets as they will no longer have to finance the deficit position of the federal government as they have to do at the Art degree moron termed “debt ceiling!” …. which has been going on since February 20th causing a commensurate reduction in bond and equity values…
This from Mke years ago but 100% still in play… 100% still in play… maybe Trump at best delaying it.,,
MMT Art degree morons: you have got Nooooooooo-where in all of these years …. Noooooooooo-where… proceed according…
Why did Trump let this piece of shit murderous cocksucker live? I have no idea. Israel could have taken him out, but Trump said no. Big mistake.
Who kills firefighters? Our true heroes are there to protect lives and property. Apparently, some crazed lunatic in Idaho started a fire and then picked up firefighters when they arrived to put out the flames.
What a disgusting, cowardly act of violence. Firefighters. No firefighter should ever have to face something like this.
My father was a firefighter with the FDNY. He was a hero who saved lives. This act of violence is truly disgusting.
Thoughts and prayers out to the families of the two fallen heroes.
Apparently the regulatory adjustment is now to lower the overall ratio for the individual institutions rather than exempt reserve assets and USTs… if so then not very helpful and system will still be subject to periodic Art degree monetarist moron induced reserve asset volatility …
Previous media reports were suggesting proposed exemption for both reserve assets and USTs…
Perhaps Powell sabotaging the reform to crash the markets at some point when Art degree moron monetarists in Trump admin try to “pump in some money!” under an attempted QE type of stimmie…
Disappointing… 🫩
https://x.com/grok/status/1935165702970949927
The proposal to lower the enhanced supplementary leverage ratio (eSLR) from 5% to 3.5%-4.5% was submitted for review on June 6, 2025. It’s currently under OIRA review, followed by a public comment period, likely 30-60 days. Implementation is expected later in 2025 or early 2026,…
— Grok (@grok) June 18, 2025
A recent BBC headline, “How the West is helping Russia to fund its war on Ukraine,” published on May 30, 2025, presents a familiar narrative: Russia, reportedly awash in foreign currency from its fossil fuel sales, is using these “Western billions” to bankroll its ongoing war. The article starkly points out that “Ukraine’s Western allies have paid Russia more for its hydrocarbons than they have given Ukraine in aid,” highlighting a staggering €883bn earned by Russia since February 2022, despite sanctions.
While the sheer scale of these export revenues is undeniably jarring, and the moral implications of such purchases are deeply unsettling, the BBC’s analysis of Russia’s war funding misses a crucial economic point. The narrative that Russia needs these euros and dollars to pay its soldiers, forge tanks, or churn out shells for military use oversimplifies the fundamental realities of sovereign currency.
Significant in helpful way:
See here entire US banking system added about $500B loans and lease Assets in over an entire year:
While Treasury added $550B of reserve assets in just a few weeks starting February 20th this year reducing TGA from $850B to $300B at the morons “debt ceiling!” … causing a corresponding precipitous drop in all other financial asset prices as Depositories don’t have the regulatory capital to comply with leverage regulations in these situations where the second rate Art degree monetarist morons think they literally “inject money!” like this:
Policy discussion around the SLR reform has previously addressed only these reserve assets at the Depositories but lately the discussions have expanded to also include USTs …. 🤔
This could be related to the advent of USD stablecoins and the threat these coins pose to traditional Depository businesses… we have to see how this part works out..
The important part is getting the reserve asset exemption … this will eliminate the effect of what has been the most destabilizing Art degree monetarist moron monetary policies in our lifetimes..
Trumps USD1 now up to $2.2B issued in just a couple of weeks on an exchange… at the Fed’s current screw Trump 4.40% risk free rate he’s already making $88M annual rate … if he can get issuance up to $100B then he’s grossing >$4B annual which would probably be his most valuable enterprise … iirc Tether is at >$160B…
With the Art degree “money pumping!” Fed morons obviously trying to screw him (and with him all US borrowers) with their current unprecedented high risk free rate he’s now able to take advantage of that via his stablecoin…
So with the higher rates he makes bazillions in his stablecoin while if they lower rates he’ll make bazillions in his CRE and DJT shares…
BULLISH: Trump-backed $USD1 has skyrocketed to a $2.2B market cap in just 2 months, now the 7th-largest stablecoin globally.
— Bitcoin Magazine NL (@BitcoinMagNL) May 8, 2025
Politics meets stablecoin adoption, fast.#USD1 #Stablecoins #Trump pic.twitter.com/7RaXbEfwpX
People are closely watching the US data at present to see what the impacts of the recent tariff decisions by the new US President might have. I am no exception. Yesterday (April 30, 2025), the US Bureau of Economic Analysis published the latest US National Accounts figures – Gross Domestic Product, 1st Quarter 2025 (Advance Estimate) – which provides us with the first major data release since the new regime took office. The fact though is that this data cannot tell us much about the tariff decisions, given that Trump’s – Executive Order 14257 – only really became operational on April 4, 2025, although there had been some earlier tariff changes before then....William Mitchell — Modern Monetary Theory
This week's gathering in Washington DC for the annual meetings of the World Bank and the IMF should be a wake for a dying global economic architecture, but unfortunately, a New International Economic Order cannot be born without African leadership to reposition the continent and the rest of the Global South away from the bottom of the global value chain. This is what I told the BBC Newsday on Monday....
New WaylandMatthew Lynn’s recent article (“The UK is heading for a full-blown financial crash, and nothing can stop it now”) paints a dramatic picture of fiscal doom, arguing that rising government borrowing figures signal an inevitable economic collapse. While the borrowing numbers themselves are significant, the conclusion that they spell imminent disaster fundamentally misunderstands how government finance works in a country like the UK, which issues its own floating-rate currency. Lynn’s analysis, focused solely on the government’s deficit, misses the other side of the equation: the non-government sector’s surplus....
New WaylandRecent commentary has expressed concern that investors are “taking their money out of America”. Such claims invoke the idea of capital flight, a concept historically relevant under fixed exchange rate systems. However, applying this term to modern floating exchange rate systems is misleading. While significant shifts in investment preferences can have major economic impacts, no actual “flight” of capital, in the sense of a net reduction, can occur—only balanced exchanges....
DOGE "goons?" Seriously? A bunch of computer geeks? How tough can they be? This shit's getting ridiculous.
Dimon seeing another regulatory snafu coming up and Fed going to have to suspend SLR again… same thing as spring 2020 … they never learn... buckle up for more chaos…
Jamie Dimon now saying he expects the Fed to have to step in and rescue the bond market.
— Spencer Hakimian (@SpencerHakimian) April 11, 2025
Unprecedented times.
We had +3% real GDP a quarter ago. pic.twitter.com/KQosKC3UhY
Maybe Cook and the other US multinational CEOs had to finally break the news to the Art degree morons in Trump & Co that the “trade deficit!” was their overseas retained earnings ?
🤔
BREAKING: Treasury Secretary Bessent was instrumental in getting President Trump to back down on Chinese phone and computer tariffs after multiple calls with Apple CEO Tim Cook and other CEOs. Navarro and Lutnick sidelined and Navarro likely to be fired as scapegoat - SOURCES
— Mike Alfred (@mikealfred) April 12, 2025
New WaylandMany electrons have been inconvenienced over this topic, and most have been in vain. I’ve wondered all week whether I had anything meaningful to add. However, a few points that have emerged in discussions are worth highlighting....
So imminently employers of millions of illegals are gonna be submitting their FICA tax reports containing those now DOGE deleted 9M SSNs and IRS is gonna immediately flip that information over to ICE for immigration raids probably to the largest offenders first…
Could be a mass firing event which probably won’t show up in UE claims because the current employees are illegal… maybe job openings will spike up … while UE rate appears constant…
So Art degree Fed morons will interpret that as “inflationary!” and will be EVEN LESS inclined to reduce the policy rate for Trump…
I’m more worried about this whole thing than the whole “tariff!” BS…
You may want to load up on some frozen chicken beef or pork products this week just in case..
IRS has agreed to share migrants’ tax information with ICE, to help find immigrants they are trying to deport, per NYT
— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) April 8, 2025
I am a bit late with this. I have been jammed this week and just got to. It's an explanation of the Trump tariffs.
It's the brain child of Stephen Miran, chair of the Council of Economic Advisors. Miran lays it out in A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System. Simplicius summarizes it briefly.
Bill Mitchell deals with this from the MMT point of view in today's post, which I linked to earlier.
Simplicius the ThinkerLast week, the US President honoured his election promise, indeed his long-held commitment, to increase tariffs on imported goods and services to the US. The formula they came up to differentiate between countries was bizarre but I don’t intend commenting on that here, except to say, the imposition of tariffs on the – Heard Island and McDonald Islands – which are an ‘Australian external territory’ that is a ‘a volcanic group of mostly barren Antarctic islands, about two-thirds of the way from Madagascar to Antarctica’ (where penguins live) ranked up there with their Signal chaos. These guys have access to the ‘red button’ after all. That’s the scary thing. Anyway I was sent a document that seemingly is the theoretical rationalisation for the tariff decision (thanks Mahaish, appreciated) and so I thought I would give it some time...
A recent UnHerd article warns of a “crypto time bomb,” suggesting that stablecoins could become a geopolitical tool to undermine the U.S. economy by redirecting foreign dollar reserves into U.S. Treasuries. The core assumption is that countries like Japan are sitting on idle piles of dollars, waiting for a stablecoin intermediary to put them to use.
This misreads how international finance operates. Like other major dollar holders, Japan doesn’t need help managing reserves. Dollars earned from trade surpluses are immediately reinvested, often into U.S. Treasuries. There are no dormant pools of dollars needing a middleman. The real action lies not in crypto or stablecoins but in how governments use their currency-issuing powers to actively manage currencies and reserves.
The Real Mechanism: Sovereign Wealth Funds
The real geopolitical financial weapon is the sovereign wealth fund (SWF), not digital tokens. Governments have long used SWFs and their variations to manage foreign exchange reserves, intervene in markets, and subtly manipulate currency values....
If so, the benefit to Trump politically might come when they rerun the SS actuarial numbers without the future accrued liabilities of the 7 million now marked as dead people… Then he may be able to give current recipients a boost because the SS “trust fund!” might appear over funded…
For the past 3 weeks, @SocialSecurity has been executing a major cleanup of their records. Approximately 7 million numberholders, all listed age 120+, have now been marked as deceased.
— Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) March 25, 2025
Another ~5 million to go. https://t.co/wtfYvYMIeW pic.twitter.com/z2GUQnPkhd
For the record. From an Austrian economist.
Abstract"I argue that Murray Rothbard, a staunch critic of Keynesian economics who would have also fiercely opposed MMT had he lived to see its rise, was correct to classify government expenditures as unproductive consumption that detract from genuine marketplace economic output."
This paper analyzes the debt monetization proposals of Modern Monetary Theory from an Austrian structure of production perspective. It shows that this policy raises societal time preferences and reduces the number of higher order stages in the economy, leading to a higher interest rate, lower economic growth, and increased prices of consumer goods. In order to demonstrate this, it goes back to the basics and investigates the nature of government spending and how it differs from investment. I argue that Murray Rothbard, a staunch critic of Keynesian economics who would have also fiercely opposed MMT had he lived to see its rise, was correct to classify government expenditures as unproductive consumption that detract from genuine marketplace economic output. I then defend Rothbard’s position by explaining the very serious concerns some economists had in the 1930s and 1940s regarding how to measure government’s contribution to aggregate production statistics. Armed with a proper understanding of government’s antithetical nature to investment, the chapter is then able to explain why MMT’s proposal to expand the money supply to finance government spending shortens the production structure.