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The Michigan consumer sentiment report tells you everything you need to know about the utter lack of success of the Trump administration. Straight into the golden toilet. The Fed is going to speak at 2 Eastern today. Because consumers are unhappy, the economy is very likely to follow. Remember the Fed only has two jobs; keep inflation and unemployment low. My bet is that they're much more concerned about the economy faltering again this quarter than they are concerned about either inflation or employment. If that's true, they may lower rates or at least hint that rates are coming down. If that happens, this is not the market top even though it looks to me like it should be. There are good reasons I'm not investing or trading this market.
Don't forget Keynes saying: The markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent
This year so far, China’s trade surplus with the world is nearly $500 billion — a more than a 40 percent increase from the same period last year.
As President Trump’s tariffs close off the U.S. market, Chinese goods are flooding countries from Southeast Asia to Europe to Latin America.
“China has loads of things that it needs to export, and whether or not the U.S. puts tariffs on China, it’s pretty much impossible to stop the shifts in flows,” said Leah Fahy, a China economist at Capital Economics.
To soften the blow of a real estate crisis that reduced the wealth of millions of households, Beijing has for several years been shoveling money into its manufacturing sectors, which are making far more things than there is demand for at home.
China’s global market share for all categories of goods has risen sharply, according to an analysis by Ms. Fahy. This will continue despite the tariffs because Beijing is unlikely to change the course of its export-oriented policies.
Some nations have been able to reship some Chinese goods by exporting them to the United States. But if they cannot negotiate the tariffs much lower, homegrown companies in countries facing severe U.S. tariffs in Southeast Asia and elsewhere could be crushed by competition from Chinese companies.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/business/tariffs-china-exports.html
India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani has joined the ranks of foreign developers pouring money into President Trump’s real-estate firm, as the first family ramps up dealmaking after years of aversion to mixing business with global politics.
Investors planning Trump-branded projects in Vietnam, Dubai and Saudi Arabia and elsewhere paid the Trump Organization $44.6 million in foreign licensing and development fees in 2024, up from $8.2 million in 2023 and $9.4 million in 2022, according to the president’s annual financial disclosure report.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/trump-familys-new-business-partner-is-indias-richest-man-6846bcfe
While most of the money relates to previously announced deals, the disclosure report included a $10 million “development fee” from Reliance 4IR Realty Development, a unit of a company controlled by multibillionaire Mukesh Ambani, licensing the Trump name in Mumbai.
It is unclear what project Ambani has planned: his Reliance Industries
is a vast family-run conglomerate with an enormous petrochemicals business and interests in retail and telecom—and his companies have lobbied U.S. officials on tariffs, sanctions and policies about oil, lobbying reports show. Real-estate development hasn’t historically been a Reliance focus, but in recent years the conglomerate has taken on large projects including redevelopment of a more than 4,000-acre area in Mumbai.
Ambani attended Trump’s inauguration in Washington, D.C., in January, and was a guest last month at a state dinner in Doha, in which the Qatar emir hosted the U.S. president.
Taken with a set of real-estate projects announced this year in Qatar and elsewhere in India, the burst of foreign Trump deals stands as a highly visible display of the family strategy to steam ahead with expansion plans across the president’s businesses while he sits in the White House.
His growing reach spans an array of sectors—including golf, cryptocurrency and a recently announced Trump mobile phone—marking a major break from previous administrations that sought to keep the presidency separated from potential conflicts of interest. While the deals have sparked criticism from Democratic lawmakers and governance advocates, there has been little public resistance from the Republicans who control Congress.
In the first term, the Trump Organization pledged a halt to foreign dealmaking while he was in office—essentially putting a stop to any new real-estate projects from the company. Donald Trump Jr, a company executive who oversees the president’s assets with his brother, Eric Trump, said at a Qatar-based conference in May that recusal from deals didn’t stop criticism, so this time the family has lowered the self-imposed guardrails—vowing only to avoid direct deals with foreign governments.
“We said we’re going to play by the rules, but we’re not going to go so far as to stymie our business forever,” Donald Trump Jr. said.
A White House spokeswoman said the president is working to secure good “deals for the American people, not for himself,” and said there were no conflicts of interest.
Representatives of Reliance didn’t respond to requests for comment. A Trump Organization spokeswoman declined to comment on the tie-up with Ambani.
Among the concerns from critics: The nature of real-estate development—where government approvals are crucial—makes it difficult to avoid getting tangled up with foreign politics.
In Vietnam, the government accelerated approvals for a Trump project at the same time it was lobbying heavily to reduce its 46% tariff rate set by Trump. Qatari officials hosted Eric Trump for an event launching a new Trump-branded golf resort two weeks before the president visited the country for trade and investment talks. Another project in Serbia—where a fund run by the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is planning a trio of towers—has become a rallying point for opponents of the country’s president, who has doubled down on support for the project.
The burst of payments on the president’s 2024 disclosures are likely precursors for more money set to flow when the projects are completed.
Details in the disclosures filed Friday are sparse, but the 2024 payments are similar to past upfront fees that are often part of Trump’s licensing deals in which third-party developers build and own hotels and condos branded as Trump properties. For years, such deals have been Trump’s bread and butter in real estate, allowing him to profit without plowing money into buildings. The Trump Organization typically receives a mix of set fees and a portion of sales.
The most active developer was Dar al Arkan, a Saudi company that accounted for $22 million of the foreign license fees last year for Trump-branded projects planned in Saudi Arabia, Oman and Dubai, according to the disclosure report. Other fees included $5 million from the Vietnamese developer, Hung Yen Hospitality, and $5.2 million from another Dubai developer, Damac.
As you've so often told us, Republicans you know are so angry they're ready and even eager to use their guns and stockpiles of ammo to start shooting their friends, neighbors and and government officials who don't agree with their political views
Bringing angry and violent Hungarian politics here to America to celebrate Donald Trump's birthday.
I think you're going to come to regret this.
Private Bonespurs is ready for his upcoming military victory parade
Europe re-arms with European defense products as America becomes an unreliable source of defense products due to political interference
How An Unassuming Geologist Cracked The Global Fertilizer Cartel
Michigan is sitting on a motherlode of potash and Ted Pagano is using $1.3 billion in government funds to mine it and grab market share away from Canada and Russia.
The eureka moment came in 2012, when professor emeritus William Harrison of the University of Western Michigan invited Ted Pagano, then a 35-year-old freelance geologist, to his 27,000-square-foot geological repository in Kalamazoo. A rock nerd’s heaven, the warehouse’s heavy-duty shelves feature crates of minerals from across the state. But Pagano was there to see something specific: the 80 pallets of rock cores donated in 2008 by the Mosaic Company, a large ($11.1 billion in 2024 sales) NYSE-listed potash specialist. Cores are standardized cylinders of rock, three feet long and four inches in diameter. These were recovered from some 75 wells drilled back in the early 1980s to depths 8,000 feet beneath Osceola and Mecosta counties, a sparsely populated swath of central Michigan, into a layer of rock rich in minerals deposited by an ocean that evaporated millions of years ago. Those minerals include salt (sodium chloride) and potash (mostly potassium oxide), which farmers prize as a fertilizer. It’s a critical mineral—the U.S. uses 5.3 million tons annually and imports 95% of it, mostly from Canada.
Pagano was excited to see these cores because he hoped they would prove his hunch: that Mosaic had been sitting on a potash motherlode in Michigan far bigger than anyone realized. He suspected that the deposit, if properly developed, could provide 1 million tons of fertilizer per year for American farmers. That would be nearly seven times the volume that Mosaic’s little 150,000-ton-per-year plant in Hersey, Michigan, was producing. Putting up $70,000 of his own money, Pagano had formed Michigan Potash & Salt Company and was already leasing up mineral rights from ranchers and farmers in the area. Even so, Pagano says, “I went to the core lab with skepticism.”
Harrison and Pagano cut open sealed plastic bags to extract rock wrapped in newspapers from 1984. Testing revealed thick deposits of some of the highest-purity potash deposits ever discovered. They were especially excited when they opened the cores from a well called Stein 1-7. It had been drilled miles from the area considered the sweet spot, so Pagano thought the odds were high that these cores would show low concentrations of potash. Instead, they were just as good. This was proof that the actual extent of the Michigan potash deposit was considerably larger than even experts like Harrison had expected. Pagano began leasing like crazy: Soon he had a position covering 15,500 acres (about 24 square miles) of what has proven to be one of the biggest potash deposits in the United States.
“I was certain the Stein well would be a poor showing. Seeing it was just as good as the best well was astounding,” says Pagano, now 49. His Michigan Potash is on the cusp of closing on $1.8 billion of financing for a new mine, including a $1.3 billion loan from the Department of Energy and $500 million in equity being arranged by JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs. If all goes well, the mine will be churning out 1 million tons per year of potash (worth $350 million) and 1.3 million tons of salt (worth $80 million) by the end of the decade. With a resource base proven to be 130 million tons, they could keep that up for a century or more—and make Pagano, who owns 65%, very rich. Even now his stake is worth at least $300 million.
Pagano grew up in Greeley, Colorado, the son of a tax preparer and an assistant librarian. After graduating from Notre Dame in 1997, he earned a master’s degree in petroleum engineering from the Colorado School of Mines. He got his start in the oil industry as a roustabout in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, then worked as a geologist for Alaska’s Bristol Bay Native Corporation. (He is part Aleut, the indigenous people of the Aleutian Islands.) From there he worked at Texaco, Chevron and Anadarko drilling shale oil wells in Colorado. In 2008, at age 33, he struck out on his own, initially planning to lease prospective oilfields in North Dakota’s Bakken shale region, but land prices—which reached thousands of dollars per acre with a 20% royalty and five-year term—were too steep. Looking at other mineral trends in the northern Midwest, Pagano became fascinated with potash and puzzled by Mosaic’s little Hersey operation. Why hadn’t it expanded?[IMAGE]
Despite being based in Florida, Mosaic mines nearly all its potash in Saskatchewan, and sells it via Canpotex (Canadian Potash Exporters) through its 50/50 partnership with Canadian fertilizer giant Nutrien (2024 sales: $26 billion). Canpotex, alongside Belarusalki of Belarus and Russia’s Uralki, make up an oligopoly that controls more than 70% of global supply.
After exhausting his own funds, Pagano raised $250,000 more from friends and family in exchange for 13% of his company. Since then, the only outside money Michigan Potash has taken is a $50 million grant from Michigan’s state agriculture department in 2023 and a new $80 million grant from the USDA, crucial to getting through permitting.
When Pagano initially approached the U.S. Department of Energy for funding in 2021, he got the cold shoulder. Michigan Potash was tiny and unproven. But he and his team persisted—and in 2025, as the war in Ukraine dragged on, the DOE agreed to a 15-year, $1.3 billion loan. But it came with conditions: Pagano must raise $500 million in equity, and to reduce risk Michigan Potash will outsource construction under a lump-sum, turnkey contract. “Now [the DOE] look like geniuses,” says Cory Christofferson, Michigan Potash’s chief development officer.
What if we run short of potassium or phosphorus? That would be bad news for farmers and, by extension, the human race. It’s an element—two elements—of the coming environmental doom postulated by the accomplished, but perhaps too pessimistic, money manager Jeremy Grantham. If you share his pessimism, it would make sense to acquire a stake in a potash and phosphate producer. Two of the big ones are Nutrien and Mosaic, both trading on the Big Board and both paying above-market yields. They are priced, respectively, at 23 and 19 times what Value Line sees for earnings this year.
To extract the potash, Pagano will use a form of “in-situ,” or solution mining. He’ll drill 8,000-foot-deep wells in pairs. One is the injection well, down which Michigan Potash will send hot water to dissolve potash and salt in place. The second is the production well; the solution travels up that well to the processing plant for separation and drying. The water is reclaimed, heated and sent back down the hole. From the surface the mine will hardly be noticeable and should be eligible for green tax credits. “There’s no hair on this project that we’re ashamed of,” says chief operating officer Aric Glasser.
In all, Forbes estimates that costs should come to about $140 per ton; potash sells for about $350 a ton today. Global giant Mosaic can produce potash for less—about $80 a ton—but Midwestern farmers are still on the hook for another $80 per ton in rail shipping costs from Saskatchewan, 1,200 miles away, plus any tariffs that President Trump might choose to impose (currently 10% on Canadian potash). Agricultural giant ADM has already agreed to buy nearly all of Pagano’s yearly potash production.
Mosaic rejected Pagano’s offers to buy some or all of its remaining Hersey plant and, citing high costs, shut down its potash operation there in 2013. It sold the remaining salt processing operation to Cargill for $55 million. “They thought they didn’t have to worry about competition,” Christofferson says.
Vladimir Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine changed that thinking. The EU banned the import or even transit of Russian and Belarussian fertilizers. China banned potash exports to conserve supply for its domestic market. Prices soared to $1,200 per ton. To keep a lid on costs, neither President Biden nor Trump has banned or sanctioned imported Russian potash.
Every ton Pagano can supply domestically should make more potash available outside the U.S. in international markets including sub-Saharan Africa, whose farmers desperately need fertilizer. “It takes a crisis to wake people up out of complacency,” Pagano says. And it takes an intrepid contrarian to challenge an oligopoly.
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