Charles W.L. Hill

The time to deal with him was five years ago. It’s going to be much harder now.

True.

WSJ is on a roll here. Ironic that a conservative paper is doing some pretty good reporting on the dysfunction in the Trump Administration.

Trump isn’t capable of making this connection, but his tariffs are screwing over American exporters like Cat.

60% of imports are intermediate goods. The final producer may not have the pricing power to fully pass through cost increases, particularly if they compete in international markets. Example: Price of steel goes up 50%, but Caterpillar can’t pass that since it faces tough competition.

As expected. The importer of record pays the tariff and then passes on the cost to consumers in the form of higher prices. This is particularly true for large retailers such as Walmart and Costco because their margins are so small (around 3%) that they lack the capacity to absorb the cost.

Senate Republicans rally behind USMCA even as Trump’s support wavers Senate Finance Chair Mike Crapo called for a "timely conclusion to the review and extension of the agreement" the U.S. inked with Canada and Mexico during Trump's first term.

It’s beginning to look as if some Republicans in the Senate are starting to develop a degree of testicular fortitude when it comes to to trade in general, and the USMCA in particular. About time; better late than never I suppose. www.politico.com/live-updates...

Navarro Sees ‘Significant’ USMCA Flaws, Sidesteps Talk of Exit White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said the North American trade pact has “significant flaws” ahead of negotiations over the deal, expressing worries about China shipping goods through Mexico and...

Most goods from Mexico and Canada are still entering the US tariff free under the USMCA, but the mandatory review in July is giving Trump an opportunity to spike the agreement. Doing so would cause significant harm to all three countries. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Job growth in January beats expectations, keeping Fed on hold One downside for the president: An improving labor market likely ratifies the Federal Reserve’s posture of holding interest rates steady for now.

Almost all January job growth was in health care and education. Also, 2025 employment data was revised down. US actually lost 1 million jobs last year (83,000 lost in manufacturing where we are told there will be a renaissance). At best, tea leaves here are mixed.. www.politico.com/news/2026/02...

US debt forecast to hit $64T in a decade as Trump policies widen deficit Congress’ nonpartisan scorekeeper predicts that the annual deficit will grow to $3.1 trillion by 2036.

A reminder that current “prosperity” in the US is built on a foundation of fiscal excess that is unsustainable in the long run. The ratio of debt to GDP is already the highest since WW II and it going to get worse very fast. www.politico.com/news/2026/02...

Don the delusional destroyer, the King of chaos. Hard to comprehend how one man can do so much damage.

He’s insane. Lives in a fantasy world of his own construction.

Johnson moves to again block House from voting on Trump tariffs Opposition from as few as two Republicans could derail the effort.

The party that once advocated free markets and constitutional conservatism is now the party of protectionism and the imperial Presidency, and Mike Johnson seems to want to keep it that way, at the request of King Donald of course. www.politico.com/live-updates...

AI could read through all of them in the blink of an eye, and with the right prompts, get some good answer back to any questions you might have.

Initial estimates suggest that 134 million people watched Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl half time show, and 4.7 million watched the Turning Point USA alternate. Enough said.

Immigration Raids in South Texas Are Starting to Hit the Economy Trade groups are raising alarms about aggressive immigration enforcement hurting businesses in the region.

Who would have thought? Undocumented immigrants represent a significant proportion of the work force in hospitality, construction, agriculture, food processing, landscaping and home help. The impact of Trump’s immigration policies on prices will be significant. www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

Bitcoin fails as a store of value, unit of account or means of exchange. Only crypto that has some utility are stable coins, such as Tether, which is basically a proxy for the dollar and used in some international payments.

This was a terrific source for generations of my students who were studying international business. Heck I often consulted it to quickly learn more about a particular country. While there are other private sources for such information, they sit behind paywalls. Big loss for educators.

A New Crypto Winter Is Here and Even the Biggest Bulls Aren’t Certain Why Some of crypto’s biggest champions can’t put their finger on what went wrong.

The real problem here is that Bitcoin has no intrinsic value and no use case outside of (perhaps) money laundering, and perhaps speculators are finally waking up to that fact. www.wsj.com/finance/curr...

One small addition, he views it as “his” real estate.

Ugh, sounds nasty. flu, Covid, RSV, had em all and they all fell like that. RSV was the worst by far. Get well soon.

Is this the Arc de Trump to celebrate his forthcoming conquest of Greenland?

North of 5% growth, WTF is he talking about. The Government’s own figures say it’s half of that. Lying with a smile.

Yeah the WSJ didn’t need the study, they have been writing editorials against tariffs stating exactly that point for the last year. I guess they reported on this study because there still are people dumb enough to believe the ridiculous assertion that exporters pay import tariffs.

ICE’s impunity is a formula for more violence Is America’s president building his own paramilitary militia?

Of course Trump is building his own version of the Nazi brownshirts, and of course they will do his bidding when the time comes. The GOP is complicit in this, and the Democrats are too compromised by their own ideological ditheting to do much about it. www.economist.com/leaders/2026...

How about putting the faces of those ICE agents who murdered innocent people on TV?

Not enough. Noem needs to go too, then shut down ICE.

There are an estimated 130,000 undocumented immigrants in Minnesota, compared to 2.1 million in Texas and 1.6 million in Florida. The ICE surge in Minnesota is not about immigration enforcement, it’s about political optics and retribution.