GiddyGono

The S&P 500 is at an all-time high while Consumer Sentiment is at an all-time low. We've never seen a gap this wide between Wall Street and Main Street.

Some people suggest that Trump's China strategy is hard to spot and foreign officials can't detect it. I don’t know what they’re looking at, because the strategy has been stated openly and repeatedly. It’s not subtle. It’s a full stack industrial plan to unwind US dependence on China across every chokepoint supply chain, starting with critical minerals and rare earths. Read the administration’s speeches from the Critical Minerals Ministerial last month because it makes the logic explicit. The minerals market isn't a normal market. It's been systematically distorted by subsidies for years. Projects get years into development, financing nearly in place, and then foreign supply floods in, prices collapse, and the project dies. It's a price weapon. And as long as that weapon exists, private capital can't solve the problem, no investor will commit to a decade long project if China can always dump and destroy your economics. So the administration is doing the only thing that actually works. Direct investment, offtakes, stockpiles, and enforceable price floors. Public balance sheets underwriting long duration capacity. A preferential trade zone where strategic dumping becomes a sanctionable offense. A national strategic reserve as an offtake signal so projects can finally clear financing. They announced two primary rare earth smelters last month, the first built in this country since 1980. Also read Jamieson Greer's Davos speech to see the intellectual logic underneath it all. He frames the entire strategy as a return to the American System (Hamilton, Clay, Carey, Lincoln) and argues that hyperglobalization was the historical aberration. Every major industrial power learned the Hamiltonian playbook from us and never stopped using it. We forgot it for thirty years but we're finally remembering. Countering China and reducing US supply chain dependence isnt just a part of the administrations economic and security strategy it IS the strategy. When you realize that a lot of things that look like noise stop looking like noise and you can see it fits into a coherent strategy. The administration is instituting an investment growth model, which is a set of policies that incentivizes production relative to consumption, and ensures that higher savings (savings = production - consumption) gets recycled into fixed investment. One of those tools are tariffs. And every investment growth model in history has used them. Tariffs are certainly disruptive, but that disruption serves the vital purpose of forcing companies to rebuild resilient, secure supply chains before a crisis makes orderly transition impossible. The administration's defense reindustrialization push is the capex engine. It forces factories to get built, it anchors demand, and it creates export demand from allies who are rearming. They are also attempting to redesign the global trading and capital flow system that has been defined by mercantilist policies and created structural capital inflows into dollar assets that kept currencies from clearing properly, and resulted in persistent current account deficits and industrial hollowing out. The entire stablecoin push is an attempt to build a payments rail so they can price foreign hoarding of US assets without blowing up the dollar payments system. The goal is to keep the dollar as the world's transaction rail without agreeing to absorb unlimited foreign savings into Treasuries, and the structural trade deficit that comes attached. Stablecoins separate these two functions. Dollar denominated tokens circulate globally for payments but carry no yield and accumulate no claims on US assets. So the dollar maintains its position as a medium of exchange but without the burden of being the financial asset held to balance trade. The fight over Fed comes back to China as well. The entire point is to coordinate monetary and fiscal policy. You can’t run this shift if monetary policy is acting like it operates in a vacuum while fiscal and industrial policy are trying to redirect the economy’s demand mix. Meanwhile they need Fed cooperation on financial deregulation in order to free private balance sheets help fund the buildout. This isn’t just an economic program. The administration continuously touts the slogan that economic security is national security. The entire US military strategy is organized around the central objective of countering China and denying them regional hegemony in Asia. That requires allies who can defend their own regions, a home base that isn't strategically exposed, and the industrial depth to sustain a long conflict. Defense and economic vulnerability aren’t separate problems. They’re the same problem viewed from two angles. The US is strategically vulnerable because it offshored the upstream capacity that underwrites both economic resilience and military power. The administration is moving to rectify that across every dimension simultaneously. Every piece points at the same objective. Rebuild the defense industrial base so that deterrence rests on actual production capacity, not platforms we can't replace. Massive military buildout. Make long duration projects financeable through price support and demand guarantees. Shift spending from consumption to investment. Shrink the external deficit. Eliminate China's leverage over the chokepoints. This is an economic and military reorganization two centuries in the making that was interrupted for thirty years and is now being resumed. The China strategy is the industrial policy is the defense strategy. If you can’t detect the strategy, that says more about you than it does about the administration.

Global demand for US assets remained undiminished in 2025, with net inflows up almost 30% from the year before:

RIP globalization: Radical de-globalization of supply chains & international relations has started. Geopolitical implications are historic & financial costs are already incalculable.

The death of iRobot (due to PRC dumping) and the transfer of its technology and user data to China is a canary in the coal mine. Do we want America to win the technologies of the future? Do we want American data to be protected? If so, now is the time to act.

When the TBTF banks were doing stuff like this prior to the GFC, they knew at some level they would get bailed out when the sh*t hit the fan. Please time stamp this: If/when the below goes pear-shaped, the hyperscalers will get Federal bailouts just like the TBTF banks did.