Rather than kissing, global bond markets have begun kicking Trump's ass. In an unprecedented attack on America's global financial dominance, US government bonds were abandoned, sending interest rates sharply higher and signalling that the world was losing faith in America and that the US would pay the price. In the space of weeks, Donald Trump had up-ended a financial system his country had helped to design, and which had taken 80 years to build.
Roundly defeated, Trump is now levying a "baseline" ten per cent tariff on all trading partners except China, rather than the additional rates he had announced at "Liberation Day" last week.
Instead of constantly peddling the lie that other countries will pay for those tariffs, why doesn't he come clean and admit that this is no more and no less than the imposition of a 10 per cent national sales tax on the American people that will raise as much as $600 billion a year?
As for America's trade deficit -the last time the US had a trade balance was in the 1970s - if the United States wants to buy more things from overseas and consume more than it sells, there's nothing the exporting countries can do about it. Perhaps Trump ought to preach austerity to his own citizens and set an example by starting at Mar-a-Lago.
