Financial, Economic and Social Mood Update (June 1, 2025)
Financial, Economic and Social Mood Update (June 1, 2025) The tariffs on retail consumer goods from Mainland China for sale on Amazon have added 17.46 percent to the total purchase price compared to the end of March 2025 before any tariffs were in place. The tariffs were a sky-high 70 percent for a few weeks in April and May before the “agreement” with China. It looks like goods from Europe (the European Union) may now be subject to very high 50 percent tariffs – they have been postponed only until early July 2025 pending talks and negotiations. The bond markets tell us that interest rates will rise largely because the US federal budget deficit continues to rise into the stratosphere as it has done for the past quarter century. Even the “balanced budget” of 25 years ago was not really balanced – it merely “removed” the major entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare from the official calculation which is not an honest representation of the truth. The last true “balanced budget” would take us back more than 50 years in time. In any case, we are in one hell of mess. The geopolitical shenanigans of the American empire over the past years, decades and even centuries have finally motivated most of the rest of the world to move away from using the US Dollar as the primary means of monetary trade and from using the currency as the primary reserve currency just as the British Pound Sterling lost its status toward the end of World War Two with Bretton Woods in July 1944. The rest of the world led by the BRICS, the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organisation) and the Chinese BRI (Belt Road Initiative) are already well underway in abandoning the American Dollar. They represent about 86 percent…