Wry & Dry: a cynical and irreverent review of the week in politics, economics and life. For intelligent Readers who disdain the trivial.
But firstly, a snapshot of this week’s Investment Matters:
- Trumpster’s tariffs: yesterday, today and tomorrow
- Challenger Limited – 15% stake taken by massive Japanese life company
To read Investment Matters, just click on the link at the bottom of this week’s Wry & Dry. Or here.
Wry & Dry’s rant
[Opening scene] Clips of presidents, prime ministers, emperors, business leaders, etc. all over the globe (overlay time zones, images of identifiable icons: Kremlin, Eiffel Tower, etc.), watching CNBC, BBC, Truth Social, etc. with breath bated. Each with an expression asking, “What will Mr. Trump be thinking when he awakes this day?”
[Trumpster’s bedroom] Zoom on Trumpster, wearing matching MAGA hat and nightshirt; hair in disarray. He is stirring from a deep sleep. (Bedside clock shows 11.30am). He looks across at two spinning wheels. Zoom onto the first, which shows different-sized country-named wedges. ‘China’ is by far the largest. He arises and spins the wheel. ‘China’ lands on the pointer.
Zoom onto the second wheel, which has wedges of numbers in multiples of 5% up 400%. He arises and spins the wheel. ‘145%’ lands on the pointer. He smiles. Makes a phone call. And goes back to bed.
Fade to black.
1. Trumpster: the art of the U-turn
Trumpster has refined reality-television-government to that of the highest art. Drama every day (share market down, then up, then down). Personality clashes (Musk and anybody). National security breaches (N, where N is a large number). Lawyers (ditto). Revenge (anyone that ever offended Trumpster). Only romance/lust is missing, but it will come.
Trump’s administration is the new Renaissance; the new black of narcissistic incompetence. Not since Stalin implemented the Soviet Union’s disastrous collectivisation of agriculture has megalomaniacal government and idiotic economics been blended so successfully.1
Optimists have been searching for a consistent logic behind Trumpster’s impressive facade of chaos. Surely, there must be a cunning strategy? But this week the curtain has been drawn back to reveal that there is no tariff strategy beyond his whims.
Trumpster delights in keeping the entire world on its toes, whilst his acolytes fawn like bemedalled North Korean generals before Kim Jong-Un. In the real world, only the reality of the tanking US government bond market (not the US stock markets) caused someone to tap Trumpster on the shoulder and suggest a pause.
‘Reciprocal’ tariffs on 75 countries being paused for 90 days is window dressing. Trade negotiators are masters at delay and bureaucracy. Success comes to the patient. Trumpsters is not patient.
But no pause for Emperor Eleven Empire. In a sand-pit fight with Trumpster, his empire is now facing 145% tariffs on exports to the US, whilst imposing 82% on imports from the US.
This is absurd. Only a fool would predict what happens next. Whose head will rise above the parapet?
1 Agricultural production dropped massively between 1928 and 1939. Some 7 million people, mostly Ukrainians, starved from the food shortages.
2. Green economics
Wry & Dry imagines that there are many who vote for the Greens in the belief that it is a party in pursuit environmental causes.
Green’s leader Adam Bandt on Wednesday tossed such a virtuous position OTD2 in his demands to Albo for the Green’s support in case of a hung parliament. Amongst the pot pourri of taxation policies was the keynote policy: a residential rental freeze backdated to 1 January 2023.
Ignoring the economic idiocy (and not to ask who pays for increases in rates, land tax, etc?), why the focus on renters?
Self-interest, of course. Nothing wrong with that, this is politics. But Readers might consider the percentage of rented dwellings in Greens-held or want-to-hold seats:
The Greens’ target seats might be out of reach, especially Macnamara (very high Jewish vote). The interest there is if the Labor Party has the gonads to place the Greens last on the ballot, in view of the Greens’ anti-Semetic stance. But gonads are in short supply at this election.
The Greens is at risk in both its Queensland seats: Ryan (back to Liberals) and Brisbane (back to either Labor or Liberals).
2 Out The Door.
3. At last, a policy
Top Gun Pete has taken until the second week of the campaign to release a major policy.
The policy is that 80% of any windfall revenue gains on commodity price increases would not be spent, but instead invested in either of two national development funds.
This is smart politics but poor economics.
Firstly, smart politics: it directly contrasts the $400bn of windfall revenue gains that Albo has spent in the last three years, whilst also massively increasing government debt.
Secondly, poor economics: it doesn’t actually pay down government debt. It allocates the windfall gains to one fund that will invest in infrastructure, etc. and to another that will be a pork barrelling fund.
The former is nothing more than any one of the plethora of virtuous funds that Albo has established over the past three years. The latter has Barnaby Joyce written all over it.
But for TGP, he’s playing catch-up football. And although this is a policy to run up the flag pole, it’s not going to make up for his foolish yes, no-WFH; no, yes-WFH policy.
That policy resembled Geoff Boycott’s (former English batsman) calling for a run, “Yes. Yes. No. Wait. Go back. Sorry.”3
3 Boycott being Boycott, it was always the other batsman who was run out. Except for the time that Ian Botham deliberately ran him out.
4. USA trading fairly? Err, no.
Trumpster, somewhere in his ravings, has oft repeated a mantra that the US is disadvantaged by other countries restrictive trade policies.
Pot calling kettle back?
As the below chart shows, the US is ranked 69th globally on a measure of ‘trade freedom’. Australia, although not without sin, is pleasingly ranked. But would be wise not to cast the first retaliatory stone.
Ironically, the compiler of the index is the Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based, conservative (i.e. right-wing) think tank. The Heritage Foundation published Project 2025, a blueprint for Trumpster to follow as president.
So far, it seems that Trumpster takes it to bed with him. For Melania to read to him.
5. Hamas: “don’t call us terrorists”
Those souls that call themselves Hamas are very grumpy. Y’see, the UK government decided to designate it as a terrorist group.
Nasty stuff. So, Hamas did what any self-respecting terrorist organisation would do: lawyer-up.
It has appealed to the UK Home Secretary (sort-of an Interior Minister, the remit includes law enforcement, national security, immigration) because it considers that the ruling breaches the European Convention on Human Rights. It also hinders peace efforts.
A 106-page legal filing has been delivered.
Of course, if the appeal is rejected, it will be claimed that the rejection itself is a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Go figure.
Trumpster’s World This Week
A. Trumpster’s insider
Seven minutes after the NYSE’s opening bell (i.e. 9.37am) on Wednesday (New York Time), Trumpster posted on Truth Social (his social media mouthpiece) that “this is a great time to buy.”
Why would he do that?
At 1.18pm he again posted. This time with the tariff news that sent the S&P 500 up almost 10%.
So, all of his insiders bought before lunch. Then went to lunch. And probably didn’t come back from lunch.
Material non-public information made public? Insider trading? Who said that?
B. Trumpster’s sandpit fight
Elon Musk is Trumpster’s self-titled Secretary of Department of Government Efficiency (Doge). He also owns a great deal of, and runs, Tesla. He also has thin skin.
Y’see, Peter Navarro is Trumpster’s ‘Senior Counsellor for Trade’ and the person who has most influenced Trumpster on his tariff voyage. He dared to suggest that Tesla is a vehicle assembler, not a manufacturer.
In response, Muskovite chose his words carefully. And went nutzo. And nasty. And called Mr. Navarro “dumber than a sack of bricks” and that he was “truly a moron.” Ouch.
The point of the above observation is not that Muskovite has a glass jaw (although he has). Or that Navarro is a genius on tariffs (although he’s not). It’s that Muskovite’s work for Trumpster will be forever compromised by his conflict of interest.
But that’s okay. This is Trumpster’s world.
PS Wanna a share market tip?
C. The first rebellion against tariffs
What would Trumpster think of the so-called Boston Tea Party?
Readers will know that the famous tea party was not only the first step to the independence of a collective of colonialists from the UK, but also a revolt against Britain’s mercantilist Tea Act of 1773. That legislation essentially imposed tariffs on tea imports into the colonies.
And Readers know how all of that ended. Well, maybe not. What happened was that in protest to the tea tariff, ‘Sons of Liberty’ activists boarded a ship in Boston Harbour. The ship carried 342 chests of tea (valued today at about A$3m), which ended up in the bottom of the harbour.
Relations between the colonialists and the British government went rapidly downhill over tea and tariffs. It took only three more years for Lord North, the British prime minister, to lose the 13 colonies.
The Brits didn’t learn the lesson about tariffs in 1773. It seems that neither has Trumpster in 2025.
Snippets from all over
1. Prada buys Versace
Prada, an Italian luxury house, will buy Versace, another Italian seller of pricey clobber, for €1.25bn ($1.4bn). (Economist)
Wry & Dry comments: Versace’s owner paid $2.1bn for the firm in 2019. That’s the fashion business.
2. Tsar Vlad releases $51.80 donor to Ukraine
Russia released Ksenia Karelina, a Russian-American ballet dancer who had been serving a 12-year sentence for treason after she donated $51.80 to a pro-Ukraine charity. (UK Telegraph)
Wry & Dry comments: Tsar Vlad is really focusing on the big issue: controlling his people.
3. Iran to talk to Trumpster
Iran’s foreign minister said his country is ready to “seal a deal” with America over its nuclear programme, but would “never accept coercion”. (The Times)
Wry & Dry comments: “Never accept coercion” is code for “don’t threaten to bomb Tehran.”
4. Chinese soldiers in Ukraine
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said that his country’s forces captured two Chinese nationals fighting with the Russian army in eastern Ukraine. (UK Telegraph)
Wry & Dry comments: The pay would have to be good.
5. Rats to the rescue
Ronin, a giant African pouched rat, set a new landmine-sniffing record, uncovering more than 100 mines in Cambodia. Landmines from consecutive wars in the country have killed tens of thousands of people there in the past four decades. (Economist)
Wry & Dry comments: Send the rat to Washington. To sniff out killers of other kinds.
It figures
- 2.4%: USA. Inflation in year to end March. Lower than expected.
- 6%: Arctic. Sea ice coverage below previous March average record low. It’s the fourth consecutive month of record lows.
And to soothe your troubled mind…
“Tariffs are the death rattle of a society in decline.”
Paul Keating, forming Australian Prime Minister and chronic sufferer of RDS, speaking a journalist yesterday.
Wry & Dry comments: The man is always good for a good quote, even if it is nonsense.
Disclaimer
The comments in Wry & Dry do not necessarily reflect those of First Samuel, its Directors or Associates.
Cheers!