Colombia: For The Archives -- January 27, 2025

Locator: 48403COLOMBIA.

Tag: recession.

Media: Fox News broke the story on Colombia first.  

The New York Times didn't report the story until several hours later.

The story broke just before the Kansas City Chiefs took the field; Fox News appeared to be the first major news outlet that reported the story.

About a half hour later The NYT reported the story -- the story that Colombia was standing up to Trump.

By the end of the game -- the Chiefs won, 32 - 29 -- Colombia had backed off; Trump won.

Fox News reported it immediately; perhaps even before it was confirmed by a second source.

Incredibly -- well, maybe not so incredibly -- The New York Times did not mention that Colombia had backed off until several hours later, and all TNYT did was change the headline. The NYT story linked to the headline remained the same, except a paragraph was added deep inside the story mentioning in passing that Colombia had backed down.

Recession: 

This is really, really cool.

Finally, I can agree with all of those folks predicting a recession for the past four years. We're finally going to see it. It? A recession.

Well, at least we're going to start hearing the word "recession" this week, and, of course, "sticky inflation," which has never gone away.

The US won't actually have a recession this year -- if recession is defined by two consecutive quarters of negative growth -- a negative GDP -- as with a "minus sign" in front of "1% GDP," for example.

But we will have a marked decrease in GDP.

GDPNow was forecasting a wonderful 3% GDP for Biden's last quarter. By the end of the year, GDPNow will be forecasting a 1% GDP growth -- that's not negative but going from 3% to 1% is going to feel like a recession. Price of eggs? Don't even get me started. 

The market is ready to sell off; it already has in some sectors. We're going to be told it's all about the Chinese LLM DeepSeek. Okay. But what really got the market spooked over the weekend was the tariff story.

It looks like Trump is serious.

It looks like Trump is sticking to his 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada. His advisors (and he himself) may want tariffs delayed until we see what Mexico and Canada will do with regard to cross-border fentanyl and human trafficking but in the big scheme of things, that's just the flag leading the troops. Fentanyl and human trafficking are the flags leading this "economic war." Does anyone really think the guy who wrote the book on "the art of the deal" is really worried about fentanyl and human trafficking?

The real story is exactly what Trump has been saying for years: he's tired of jobs going to Mexico and he's tired of the trade imbalance with Canada, especially when it comes to cars.

We had three hours of "high anxiety" yesterday when Trump slapped 25% tariffs on Colombia -- say what? Colombia? I can't even identify where Colombia is on a South American map -- I know it's near Central America -- I think it's to the left of Venezuela (politically as well as geographically) — it may be the last SA country bordering Central America -- where the soon-to-be-US-owned Panama Canal is -- going north from the rest of the banana republics -- but a trade war with Colombia? Wow, I hope folks can "diagram" that sentence. 

Colombia shot back with 50% tariffs on coffee and flowers.

That's what really spooked investors. Traders weren't spooked. They love this. Buy low, sell high. But I digress.

Back to tariffs.

AOC made it really, really, really worse and really, really, really scary for investors when she said that tariffs on Colombia would increase the cost of coffee at Starbucks and .... drum roll .... the cost of flowers. Wedding season is coming up in June. [One day later, Starbucks reported a great quarter. I have not heard how Dutch tulips are doing.]

The tariffs on Colombia may still be in place -- that was a bit hazy by the end of Trump's round of golf early Sunday evening. I can't make this up. On the third hole Trump got word that Colombia would not allow US military a/c to land in his country carrying hard-working Colombians back to their home country; by the eighth hole the Colombian president said he would send his own "presidential" plane to America to pick up the outcasts -- what was I saying?

Oh, yes, the tariffs on Colombia may still be in place, that was a bit hazy last evening -- SecState Rubio will sort that out this morning, I'm sure -- but to traders and investors that was just a foreshadowing -- my favorite word used in college literature courses -- no, not a foreshadowing of what 25% tariffs on Canada or Mexico would do -- no one really knows what that would do to Canada (I guess Trudeau knows -- that's why he stepped down) -- but the fact that Trump had tariffs on Colombia in less than a New York minute told traders, investors, Xi, Trudeau, and anyone else who was listening now know that he's serious. If Trump wakes up on February 1, 2025, on the bad side of bed: wham! 25% tariffs on Canada. 25% tariffs on Mexico. Add 10% more on Chinese tariffs.

So far he's kept all his campaign promises, except the one about ending the war in Europe, but Putin is eager to talk and Zelenskyy knows he's on borrowed time. The last of Biden's money will run out by the end of the month. By the way, Putin and Trump are up to something big -- really, really big -- and Denmark is worried that Greenland might be collateral damage. LOL.

So, from DeepSeek to Greenland, that's where we are today.

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Disclaimer
Brief Reminder 

• I am inappropriately exuberant about the Bakken and I am often well out front of my headlights. I am often appropriately accused of hyperbole when it comes to the Bakken.
  
• I am inappropriately exuberant about the US economy and the US market.
• I am also inappropriately exuberant about all things Apple. 
• See disclaimer. This is not an investment site. 
• Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment, financial, job, career, travel, or relationship decisions based on what you read here or think you may have read here. All my posts are done quickly: there will be content and typographical errors. If something appears wrong, it probably is. Feel free to fact check everything.
  
• If anything on any of my posts is important to you, go to the source. If/when I find typographical / content errors, I will correct them. 
• Reminder: I am inappropriately exuberant about the Bakken, US economy, and the US market.
• I am also inappropriately exuberant about all things Apple. 
• And now, Nvidia, also. I am also inappropriately exuberant about all things Nvidia. Nvidia is a metonym for AI and/or the sixth industrial revolution.
• I've now added Broadcom to the disclaimer. I am also inappropriately exuberant about all things Broadcom.
• Longer version here.   
  

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Monday Reading 

I'm finally getting around to reading some back-issues of The New Yorker. I'm starting with a very recent one, but not the current issue; the one I'm reading is dated January 20, 2025. 

I see I've completed the crossword puzzle, described as "moderately challenging," so there's that.

The opening essay -- always political -- is always a must-read. 

This one, again,in the January 20, 2025, issue, is as good as it gets. Really, really good writing. 

David Remnick on Trump. 

Every bad thing that could be said about Trump was said in this one-and-a-half page essay on The Donald. LOL.

My favorite paragraph:

[Trump] will return to the Oval Office with a résumé enhanced by two impeachments, one judgment of liability for sexual abuse, and a plump cluster of felony convictions. He will take the oath of office next week at the scene of his gravest transgression, his incitement of an insurrection on Capitol Hill. 

And with all of that, Trump still defeated Kamala Harris and a war chest of more than one billion dollars and the army of mainstream media, stalwarts of legitimacy, credibility, and fact-checking.

And there's now talk that Ms Harris might run for president again. Okay.

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Wow, this is really, really sad. The second essay was on the southern California fires, at the time of the essay, just beginning. I don't think the writer had any idea how bad it would get and it was already really, really bad when he was writing his essay. 

This is truly amazing.

All the water in the world would not have solved the problem -- even with all the water in the world, the brush has never been cleared adequately in decades; no roads up and down the valleys for fire trucks; the fire department's budget had been underfunded for decades, and so on -- but it did not help when the hydrants had no water pressure. It turns out that one of three -- yes, one of three -- water reservoirs for the sole purpose of fighting fires had not been filled for years. The mayor made it sound like the reservoir had recently been emptied for repairs. How do you spell obfuscation?

I haven't finished the article but my hunch is Emily Witt won't mention any of these things. 

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50 Year Anniversary
SNL
Debuted in 1975

Wow, wow, wow.

Even by The New Yorker's standards this is a long, long essay: "Make Him Laugh: How Lorne Michael's Sensibility Governs 'Saturday Night Live.'"

I've only read the first four pages. It's so good I don't want to race through it. I will save the rest when I can relax and really, really enjoy it. Thank you, Susan Morrison. The essay is in The New Yorker section called "Profiles." "Profiles" is always one of The New Yorker's strengths. 

Later: this evening -- the same day I started reading the above article -- I'm watching three hours of "50 Years of SNL Music" on NBC. Truly amazing. The three-hour "documentary" dovetails nicely with the The New Yorker article on Lorne Michaels. If you missed this "documentary" you missed a most amazing "event." Seeing some clips, it's amazing SNL survived fifty years.

1975: I turned 24 that summer. I had completed two years of medical school and not married yet; I had not yet met my future wife. I would meet her in January, 1977. A lot of water has gone under that bridge in the last fifty years. Wow.

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Trying to Write a History of the Jews

An almost-six-page essay on Zora Neal Huston and her long-unpublished novel about her magnificent obsession. 

The essay is amazing, and her bio, over at Wiki, is even more amazing. 

Oh, and now I see why The New Yorker article is so good. It was written by Louis Menand. Wow, how long has he been writing for The New Yorker.

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And Finally This

A review of "Severance," on Apple TV+.

Sounds very, very intriguing. Entering its second season.  From the essay:

Bloomberg (the business media outlet) reported that its ten episodes cost upward of twenty million dollars apiece, which would make it one of the priciest TV shows ever produced. Based on the lavish visuals (and on the accounts of rewrites and reshoots), i's a believable figure, though [Ben] Stiller told my colleague Rachel Syme that "any numbers out there are totally inacurate." The result is expansive and aesthetically ambitious: the encroachment of the surreal reaches Lynchian proportions while new subplots take the ensemble -- and the audience -- farther and farther from the nondescript office they've known.

We canceled our Apple TV+ subscription some years ago but I'm tempted to re-subscribe. And it's now easier than ever to subscribe: one can do it through Amazon Prime, if I recall correctly. Yes, that's accurate: I just checked. $9.99 after the free trial. When we last subscribed, it was $6.99. Cancel anytime.

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Southern Surge

Hindsight is 20 / 20. 

Handled the right way starting fifty years ago, this whole "southern surge" could have been avoided. 

Biden made things worse, and is probably to blame for everything that follows.

How Trump handles this will "determine" whether this turns out badly. Or not. It could be his "Nixon goes to China" moment. I'm not hopeful.