Venezuela’s constitutional clock starts ticking

In a ruling issued Sunday, the country's rubber-stamp Supreme Tribunal of Justice decided to treat Maduro's current absence as a temporary forced absence. This means the current government stays in place, but a constitutional clock starts ticking until elections are held.

Under this plan,

Equity futures sink, gold rises after Trump imposes tariffs

• Gold gains ground on safe-haven flows
• Treasury yields fall while U.S. dollar loses ground
• Trading choppy after Trump tariff announcements
• 
  

Equity futures fell on Wednesday after the U.S. market close while safe-haven gold and bond prices rose as investors worried about U.S. President Donald Trump's announcement of 10% tariffs on all imports, with much higher rates for some trading partners.

S&P 500 E-minis stock futures initially rose after Wall Street indexes closed the regular session higher, but then lost ground as Trump went into detail about his tariff plans in a White House Rose Garden event.

S&P 500 futures ES1! fell 1.6% as Trump spoke while Nasdaq futures NQ1! fell 2.4%.

Trump, who has referred to Wednesday as "Liberation Day", outlined a range of levies for different countries including

The ‘Barbenheimer’ Election | Niall Ferguson

Exactly! 

Niall Ferguson says, While Kamala Harris runs a campaign of unsurpassed vacuousness, on the other screen we have the dark, fissile energy of Donald Trump.

Niall FergusonWednesday, August 21, 2024

Barbie and Oppenheimer exemplify the twin poles of America's mood swings. Who knows what next week's vibe shift will be? (Photo illustration by The Free Press, images via Getty)

I am sorry. I've seen this movie before. Or rather, both of these movies. Last year.

On one side, it's:

I'm a Barbie girl in a Barbie world

Life in plastic, it's fantastic

. . . Imagination, life is your creation

Come on Barbie, let's go party.

And on the other, it's:

Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

Except that this isn't Barbie versus Oppenheimer, the great moviegoers' dilemma of 2023. It's the presidential election of 2024, the nationwide executive search for the leader of what we once called the free world. 

Since Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee for the presidency, the architects of the Harris campaign have managed to create their own Dream House. This one isn't bubblegum pink, but it has the policy equivalents of a pool party.

Niall Ferguson warns, “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes,”—Beware of Greeks bearing gifts

Niall Ferguson warns, "Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes," aka, "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts."

Here are some excerpts from his piece on Bloomberg this week.

Joe Biden Could End Up Being a Wartime President

Notwithstanding his pledges of uplift and healing, history suggests post-pandemic peace is rare, and Democratic wars are not.

Successful Democratic candidates for the presidency of the United States invariably campaign with promises of domestic largesse and moral uplift. They nearly always end up taking their country to war. Can Joe Biden be a rare exception to that rule, if he succeeds in defeating Donald Trump on November 3? That will depend not just on how well he and his national security team conduct U.S. foreign policy. It will also depend on how stable the world around them is. The bad news is that post-pandemic peace is another historical rarity.

...

Joe Biden's speech on Thursday night was the continuation of a very long tradition in lofty Democratic rhetoric, traceable all the way back to Thomas Jefferson. "If you entrust me with the presidency," declared Biden, "I will draw on the best of us not the worst. I will be an ally of the light not of the darkness. It's time for us, for We the People, to come together. For make no mistake. United we can, and will, overcome this season of darkness in America. We will choose hope over fear, facts over fiction, fairness over privilege." Whoever wrote that speech had done their homework.  At times I wondered if an algorithm had mashed it up on the basis of all previous Democratic acceptance speeches.

...

One disaster begets another.

“#Trump is replacing formal relations among nations in several cases with family-to-family relationship, or crony-to-crony relationships,” a la #Erdogan

"#Trump is replacing formal relations among nations in several cases with family-to-family relationship, or crony-to-crony relationships," a la #Erdogan who "runs a crony capitalist regime of his own," Mr. Edelman said. "But it ought to be a matter of concern to all Americans."

Behind Trump's Dealings With Turkey: Sons-in-Law Married to Power
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/12/us/politics/trump-erdogan-family-turkey.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

#Trump Reelection #Campaign #Ads Is "A Supercar Racing A Little VW Bug." Guess Who's The Volkswagen...

PhotoCredit: Brian Stauffer

Great article from The NY Times on how Democrats don't seem to have gotten the memo on online advertising. 

As a prime example, upon an onslaught of targeted online ads ("Learn the truth. Watch Now!") about former VP and Ukraine, Biden campaign proceeded to slash its online advertising budget in favor of more television ads.!!!  

Talk about clueless!!  

Trump Campaign Floods Web With Ads, Raking In Cash as Democrats Struggle

By Matthew Rosenberg and Kevin Roose

"That campaigns are now being fought largely online is hardly a revelation, yet only one political party seems to have gotten the message."

Democratic establishment is "too focused on winning over imagined moderates"

Read the whole article online here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/20/us/elections/trump-campaign-ads-democrats.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

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