By Michael Every of Rabobank
"All-You-Can-Eat Shrimp"
“My view is that the United States could take all the seafood Greenland could produce, and cut out the middleman, and keep it from China — and you could bring back all-you-can-eat shrimp at Red Lobster.” That’s a recent quote from a Trump official in The New Yorker arguing for the annexation of that territory. As the magazine notes, the plans are both “ludicrous” and “deadly serious.” Well, loosen your belts, folks, because there’s an all-you-eat buffet of such news.
Yesterday, South Korea’s KOSPI -- in an OECD economy with top chips, consumer goods, plastic surgery, and boy- and girl-bands-- slumped 9.99%. At time of writing it was up 3.6% after news of a share buy-back by a chaebol. In Taiwan, home to cutting-edge TSMC (and geopolitical tensions) Bloomberg notes a 26-year-old unemployed man invested $60,000 in tech stocks after being advised, “buy any stock and you will make money,” as teenagers are opening brokerage accounts and trading volumes are crashing websites. This is apparently ‘the way things are.’
The EU, and Germany, the Netherlands, and Greece just joined the US Pax Silica ‘no China’ AI tech supply chain initiative alongside Finland, Norway, Sweden, and the UK; Israel, Qatar, and the UAE; Argentina, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, and Panama; and Australia, India, Japan (which has seen China choke its supply of rare earths), Kazakhstan, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. That’s the deadly serious part. What’s ludicrous is thinking that under this Pax there will be normal trade with China, when decoupling is the design, and that inside it anybody but the US will dominate due to economies of scale and first-mover advantage. As the US Deputy Secretary of War argues in ‘The Digital Sovereignty Trap’ that while, “The UN wants every nation to build its own AI stack,” that is “the surest way to stay a generation behind.”
Meanwhile, ‘The copper crunch: inside the US-China battle for a critical global supply chain’, underlines that frothy Asian tech and geoeconomic alliances ultimately require that metal – and there isn’t enough for everyone. That this zero-sum equation is not front and center of current market discussions, rather than the electronic/’paper’ price of assets that simply assume supplies of this key metal into existence, is the epitome of ludicrousness and deadly seriousness. Then again, we went through the same process with oil, and markets think they won that battle.
Yet Iran and Oman say they will control Hormuz and charge for it; the US says they can’t. Tehran insists it won’t let IAEA inspectors in; the US says they will. There’s no agreement on what they’d do there – watch a down-blending of highly-enriched uranium to a safe 0.7% or be shown Potemkin villages? Iran’s president stated without missiles, the country would be “just like Gaza”; a former Israeli PM said he’d smuggled Starlink systems into Iran to support an uprising, but this had been curtailed by PM Netanyahu (as a Kurdish uprising and on-the-ground drone strikes vs. Basij militia were by somebody). Israeli is reportedly behind a cyber attack now hitting Iranian banks.
Lebanon’s president rejected Israeli occupation and foreign interference, meaning Iran and Hezbollah, as Israeli and Lebanese delegations met in the US. The Israelis call the emerging deal there a “train wreck.” It will be for someone. Relatedly, the Trump Gaza Board of Peace is to ‘recalibrate’ at a Cyprus resort after a rocky first six months.
In the background, it’s reported China plans to offer postwar aid for Iran, with an eye on its energy supply. Can you join the dots there?
In the US, the Senate passed a resolution directing Trump to end hostilities with Iran, which is performative given: (1) he has; and (2) Trump can veto it even if the Supreme Court doesn’t. Then again, the entire US-Iran MoU can be seen as performative and subject to a Trump veto.
The EU’s Von der Leyen plans to visit Armenia, firmly in the former-Soviet Russian orbit, to show support for the pro-EU government there; that’s as Germany announced it will scrap plans to build its biggest warship since WW2, showing again that ambitious defense spending plans are not producing impressive results for the battlefield or oceans. Indeed, commentators are noting that Ukraine is set to be the military leader within the EU, as its accession process begins, a major shift in relative power in a very short period of time.
Besides the volatility in tech, the 10-year anniversary of Brexit shows the City of London fearing “Trump’s America may win the race,” according to Politico. That’s as the BoE has diluted its new stablecoin rules with plans for a £40bn issuer limit but no longer restricting holdings by individuals and companies. In other words, the market will be open for business – but unlike in the US, no big player will be able to dominate it, keeping everything ‘niche’. Then again, few expect any currency other than the US dollar, and its big players --except perhaps the Chinese renminbi-- to be able to dominate emerging crypto architecture.
On that front, Bloomberg notes ‘China Crackdown Rattles the Rich in World’s Top Offshore Hub’, which doesn’t seem to support the case for an alternative FX infrastructure on the financial side at least (though trade commodity finance may be a different story). And in Europe, “an historic day” was declared as the European Parliament backed a digital Euro. What role that will play in the global crypto ecosystem --with its emerging, stacked layers of: defence to provide copper, etc.; to provide AI; to provide industry and defence; to get the power to back the digital asset-- remains to be seen but it’s going to be (another) major realpolitik struggle.
In real politics, Trump is pushing the Senate to pass the SAVE America Act, to save Republicans, who don’t want to pass it; acting DNI head Pulte is rattling cages in D.C.; Marjorie Taylor Greene joined Tucker Carlson in officially ditching the GOP (to form a ‘space lasers’ party?); and Reuters frames it that New York Mayor Mamdani’s political endorsements are testing the Democrats' appetite for far-left candidates – and it seems Democratic Socialism sells well within the primary electorate in New York at least based on the results. That, and the White House is pushing back on speculation that Trump got early access to a new obesity drug for “compassionate use.” Like I said, it’s all-you-can eat right now in many areas that are simultaneously ludicrous and deadly serious.
In the UK, King of the North and PM-in-waiting Andy Burnham is being advised to borrow new billions for infrastructure; and he says he’ll boost the defense budget; and that he will stick to the fiscal rules. Is that all-you-can-tax-and-spend, or something new in political-economy? Markets will have to wait and see.
Now back to sensibly frivolous coverage of the KOPSI, whose recent 9.99% daily decline ironically occurred the day after former Fed Chair Alan “I never met a bubble that I didn’t like” (really, that was his view) Greenspan passed away at 100.