Odds and Ends — 13 May 2025

Cryptocurrency, Investing, Money, Economy, Business, AI, and Debt:

Coronavirus and Public Health:

Politics:

Under a federal law, the attorney general can appoint an interim U.S. attorney for up to 120 days. But soon after taking office in January, the Trump administration installed a Republican lawyer and political activist, Ed Martin, in that role.
The question is whether presidents are limited to one 120-day window for interim U.S. attorneys, or whether they can continue unilaterally installing such appointees in succession — indefinitely bypassing Senate confirmation as a check on their appointment power.

House Republicans have unveiled a proposal to find the savings necessary to pay for Trump’s tax cuts bill. As we (and many others) predicted, much of those savings will come from the one place Trump and his allies swore they would leave untouched: Medicaid. Under the House GOP’s plan, millions would lose Medicaid coverage and millions more would pay higher fees. That would save at least $715 billion over the next decade, the Congressional Budget Office estimates, by reducing the number of people with health insurance “by at least 8.6 million.”

The corruption bothers me a great deal, but I want to talk today about a different reason the gift boggles the mind: The national security risk.
To put the president of the United States on a plane built and owned by a foreign country for over a decade is the definition of insanity, the assumption of catastrophic and literally unquantifiable risk in an arena where the U.S. devotes billions of dollars a year to mitigating even the slightest, remotest risk to presidential security and communication.

Small packages from China are still subject to tariffs of 120%, a White House official confirmed Monday — a major blow for U.S. consumers seeking cheap goods from e-commerce retailers like Shein and Temu.
Trump previously ended a loophole that allowed low-value goods into the country tariff-free — and while high retaliatory tariffs on most other Chinese imports were eased, these levies appear to be the new normal.

There is a lesson here for anyone Trump threatens…
When President Donald Trump launched his trade war on the world, he issued a stern warning: ‘Do not retaliate and you will be rewarded.’ China ignored the warning. It was rewarded anyway. This morning, Trump largely suspended his trade war in return for nothing but promises of ongoing discussions. There is a lesson here for everybody Trump threatens, whether countries or businesses or universities.
The unveiling of the Trump global tariff regime was accompanied by a distinct form of dominance theater. The president and his gang assured his targets that if they submitted to his tariffs, he would repay their compliance. Any country that dared defy him would suffer terribly.
Most of the world accepted this advice, only to discover the difficulty of making global trade deals with a president who doesn’t seem to understand how trade works. Foreign diplomats expressed repeated frustration as they failed to ascertain what Trump even wanted from them, let alone what he was prepared to offer in return.

He is stupid. He is incompetent. He is cruel. He is sinister. And people will die because of what he’s done.

Signs of a DOGE recession are flashing in D.C. — rising unemployment, less credit card spending and jitters about more federal cuts.
A local ‘mild recession’ is expected as the Trump administration downsizes the capital city’s big factory — the federal government, employer to 17% of the region’s workforce.
Even before most of the federal job cuts, the number of unemployed residents in D.C. increased 12.2% in February over last year, city stats show.

During President Trump’s first term, the idea that special interests and governments were buying meals and booking rooms at his hotels set off legal and ethical alarms about the potential for corruption.
Mr. Trump’s second term is making those concerns look trivial.

Serendipity: