“We just completed a massive Deal with Japan, perhaps the largest Deal ever made,” dictated president deals to his tweeter. “Japan will invest, at my direction, $550 Billion Dollars into the United States, which will receive 90% of the Profits…Perhaps most importantly, Japan will open their Country to Trade including Cars and Trucks, Rice and certain other Agricultural Products, and other things.”
“And other things” really drives home how big and serious and totally real this “largest Deal ever made” is. Jeffrey Epstein’s buddy certainly convinced the big brains at the Financial Times who noted that he announced this deal “without providing details of who would make the investment and over what timeframe.” So much of covering Trump is having to look at a 79-year-old man like he is a ten-year-old boy because that is the intellectual level that his bullshitting rises to.
Japan played this well. Threatening their nuclear option over the bond market that birthed TACO Trump and then being the first major trade partner to negotiate a deal takes some uncertainty off the table for their economy and gives them a head start in this new tariff-driven world. Trump’s tariffs on China, Canada, Mexico and steel, combined with relaxing tariffs on Japan, are a boon for the Japanese auto market, much more so than for ours. Don’t believe me? Toyota is up over 13 percent right now. GM, who just announced that Trump’s tariffs fueled the 35 percent decline in their net income during a quarter where they beat expectations, is up 6 percent. You do the math on who’s coming out ahead in this deal.
This is exhausting. There is a scoreboard for the trade war that we can point to in the distorted market, and while Trump and his acolytes will point to the third, soon to be second, most expensive stock market in history, the bond market–currently warped with an inversion in years 1 through 3 while long-term yields recently breached the TACO Trump number of 5 percent and still sit above 4.9 percent–does not suggest the most important market in the world is taking the Trump economy well. Tesla is proof that stocks can stay irrational longer than shorters like me can stay solvent, but as the bond market has proven time and time again, the Illuminati are real, they hold US Treasuries, and they are not looking too comfortable right now–particularly when it comes to long-term government debt, partially because no one wants to take on that kind of duration risk while trying to figure out what this numbskull is liable to do on any given day.
Trump reiterated his shambolic lie today that “Japan is, for the first time ever, OPENING ITS MARKET TO THE USA, even to cars, SUV’s, Trucks, -and everything else, even agriculture and RICE, which was always a complete NO, NO.” Again, I am tapping the sign here, because the old crazy coot doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. We exported nearly $300 million in rice to Japan in 2024. We have exported $33.6 billion in goods to Japan this year. What the fuck is he talking about?
This is a ten-year-old boy’s conception of the world. Japan is a faraway land, forever stuck as the boogeyman of Trump’s flattened 1980s worldview. Pearl Harbor is still a fresh memory in the culture, and the concept of trading with our…*checks notes*…7th largest exporter, is utterly foreign to his melting brain. We export more goods to Japan than we do to Germany or South Korea. We export more goods to Japan than we do to France and Spain combined. What in the ever-living fuck is grandpa deals talking about?
Expect more “deals” like this on the horizon ahead of Trump’s new deadline of August 1st unless he caves again. “Deals” where some sort of concrete agreement on the tariff rate is made along the contours of each country’s key industries, all while they say “yeah sure whatever” to when Trump demands they make him their God of Deals and Being a Very Good Boy Whose Daddy Loves Him. Again, I would like to reiterate, maybe there’s a reason this is all so crazy, but this is pretty crazy–agreeing to a world with Smoot-Hawley-esque tariffs all so president deals can make up deals that no one believes actually exist.
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