Month: February 2025

Donald Trump’s career is littered with the wreckage of small contractors he has stiffed after they did legitimate, good faith work for him.

Donald Trump wants the US government to violate contracts as freely as he has always done over his career. In particular so far, the reneging has centered on obligations of the US AID program, and the IRA, the centerpiece of Joe Biden’s climate action and infrastructure building.

The difference is that Trump has paid no price for swindling others over the years. If the Faith and Credit of the US government is compromised, we will all pay a huge price going forward.

ABC News:

The Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development is stiffing American businesses on hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid bills for work that has already been done, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday.

The administration’s abrupt freeze on foreign aid also is forcing mass layoffs by U.S. suppliers and contractors for USAID, including 750 furloughs at one company, Washington-based Chemonics International, the lawsuit says. 

“One cannot overstate the impact of that unlawful course of conduct: on businesses large and small forced to shut down their programs and let employees go; on hungry children across the globe who will go without; on populations around the world facing deadly disease; and on our constitutional order,” the U.S. businesses and organizations said.

An organization representing 170 small U.S. businesses, major suppliers, an American Jewish group aiding displaced people abroad, the American Bar Association and others joined the court challenge.

Heatmap:

These skirmishes will have economic consequences — and while these might be small in the context of America’s $29 trillion economy, they will gradually deepen. By refusing to honor its contracts, the Trump administration is forcing private companies to bear public costs. Those companies will delay hiring employees and investing in new equipment as they await repayment; some will furlough workers and go bankrupt. The burden will become more and more significant every day that the Trump administration continues its spending freeze. 

Continue reading “US Credibility at Stake as Trump Stiffs Farmers, Workers”

The Bonneville Power Administration is the Northwest’s version of TVA.
They’ve been hit by Trump administration personnel cuts, which some knowledgeable observers claim could lead to blackouts.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell testified on the state of the economy before the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, February 11, 2025.

He might have added that some of those places include the most populace states in the country – California, Florida, and Texas.
Democratic Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota noted correctly that her own state had seen a 40 percent rise in home insurance prices in recent years, due to extreme storms, tornadoes, hailstorms and flooding.

Yahoo Finance:

The growing crisis in the insurance industry may make it hard to get a mortgage in parts of the country in the coming decades, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said on Tuesday.

“If you fast-forward 10 or 15 years, there are going to be regions of the country where you can’t get a mortgage,” he said during his semiannual testimony to Congress, noting that banks and insurance companies have been pulling out of coastal and fire-prone areas they deem too high risk.

Insurers have been canceling policies across the country as climate change intensifies natural disasters, saddling them with multibillion-dollar losses. State Farm, for example, canceled thousands of policies in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles months before it was devastated by wildfires.

Because mortgage lenders typically require homeowners insurance as a condition of making a loan, prospective buyers with few alternatives are increasingly purchasing coverage from state-designed insurers of last resort, which can have higher premiums and skimpier coverage than traditional alternatives.

Banks and insurers won’t keep making loans or providing coverage when faced with evidence of disasters, Powell said in response to a question from Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith.

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Video below has insights from Atmospheric expert Andrew Dessler, and a Wichita, Kansas report indicating locals are feeling the insurance pinch there as well.

Continue reading “Fed Reserve Chair: There Will Be Places “You Can’t Get a Mortgage””

Good thoughtful piece here, and to my eyes, factually accurate.

As I’ve posted here, China’s oil demand may be peaking right now, some years earlier than predictions of not long ago. Additionally, China’s exports of affordable, very capable EVs are destroying demand in the developing world.
US producers, while robust in recent years, rely, according to this, on a relatively high price for oil, which may not be sustainable in light of mounting oil surpluses globally.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the oil tycoons who supported Donald Trump’s campaign were not thinking of a “Drill Baby Drill” future. They know that raising production will crash prices, profits, and their stock holdings.
The game, according to the Journal, is “shoring up demand for their products—not pumping more fossil fuels, which they have little incentive to do.”
The MAGA faithful, who were told gas prices would drop in half on day one, will be disappointed in the short term.
In the longer term, gas prices may come down as global, but may bring a lot of American Industry and jobs down with them.

Video Description:

The cost to produce a barrel of oil is far higher in North America and Europe, than across oil-producing countries in the Middle East, and Russia. And for oil producers in the United States to make profits on new wells, oil prices need to average over $70 per barrel for the lifetime of the well.

Global oil demand, however, is now falling, and oil producers are pumping a million barrels of surplus oil, every single day, at current prices. Oil analysts expect oil prices to fall well below $70 a barrel over the next two years.

Driving prices lower is collapsing oil demand from China. Households in China prefer electric vehicles to gasoline-fueled cars, and Chinese carmakers export EV’s to dozens of countries, wrecking oil demand across the world.

The new BRICS bloc will be supplied by friendly sources in Russia, the Middle East, and Africa, where producers can still make profits at ever-lower price points compared to companies in North America or Europe.

CNBC:

• Cocoa prices hit record highs in 2024 amid a global supply shortage.
• Officials at companies like Barry Callebaut, Hershey, Lindt & Sprüngli Group and Mondelez have alluded to the challenge higher cocoa prices put on their chocolate business.
• Expect to pay about 10% to 20% more for chocolate this Valentine’s Day than last year, one agricultural economist said.

West Africa — predominantly Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana — account for about 80% of world cocoa production, according to a recent JPMorgan research note.

Disease pressures, climate change and bad weather “ravaged” crops in West Africa, fueling a global cocoa shortage that has persisted since early 2024, JPMorgan said.

Cocoa prices “skyrocketed” as its availability hit historic lows, according to JPMorgan.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright:

America is blessed with abundant energy resources – we are the world’s top oil and gas producer and a net energy exporter for the first time in decades. Our energy abundance is an asset, not a liability. On January 20, the Department resumed consideration of pending applications to export American liquefied natural gas (LNG) to countries without a free trade agreement (FTA) with the U.S. in accordance with the Natural Gas Act. Proper consideration of LNG export applications is required by law and shall proceed accordingly.

The long-awaited American nuclear renaissance must launch during President Trump’s administration. As global energy demand continues to grow, America must lead the commercialization of affordable and abundant nuclear energy. As such, the Department will work diligently and creatively to enable the rapid deployment and export of next-generation nuclear technology.

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If building new energy is an emergency, then, rationally, we should be building the energy sources that are quickest to get up and running on the grid, no?

Financial Times(paywall):

A coalition of 31 countries has set an ambition of tripling the world’s nuclear energy capacity by 2050. There is particularly intense interest in the sector as a potential source of power for the fast-growing data centre industry. The steam that drives electric turbines in a nuclear power station can also be used for a range of other purposes, including heating nearby housing, running chemical plants, generating hydrogen or even potentially making steel.

There are especially high hopes that a new breed of reactors produced on assembly lines in factories, known as small modular reactors, might make replication easier in the future. Some countries, including Russia, China, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates, claim to have far better records on cost control and delivery.

An IEA report published in January said that two recent projects in South Korea — Saeul 1 and 2 — were delivered only two and five years late and only 30 per cent over budget. 

Continue reading “If There is an Energy “Emergency” – We Need Renewables”

Farmers in Huron County, Michigan wanted wind turbines on their land, but they didn’t want developers to pit one against the other. So they came up with a formula for “Community Payments” – that would compensate farmers who might not get a turbine, or as may turbines, due to engineering or other constraints.

“Community Payments” are a common feature of the most successful clean energy projects, insuring that local residents see a tangible return on the new project in their community. There are different formulas and flavors, but I recently heard of a developer nearby offering residents in the project footprint a $3500 annual payment, with an inflation escalator clause.

No coincidence that the new Secretary of Energy is a Fracking executive.
No coincidence that his climate non-denial denial is state of the art.
No coincidence that Mr Wright, (who I have already taken to task in a video) has a twisted and self serving take on the energy transition.

Dan Gearino in Inside Climate News:

In his speech, he touched on his views of climate change and his belief in the importance of increasing U.S. energy production. He is a skilled communicator, weaving his personal story of growing up in Colorado and taking an early interest in the science of energy with larger themes about the role of government.

“The energy dialogue, I would say, has been altered, I would say corrupted, because of climate change,” he said. “Climate change is a real thing. I’ve studied, spoken, written on it for 25 years. It is a very real thing.”

The corruption, he said, occurs when the idea of climate change is used “to pursue agendas that may or may not be at all related to what we actually know about climate change.”

He used this idea as a frame for his thoughts on Germany.

“German people are smart, enterprising and hard-working and wonderful, but they decided about 15 years ago that they were just going to change their energy system,” he said.

Continue reading “New DOE Sec Chris Wright is Wrong – Again”

If someone had designed an AI program to dismantle US Industry and the US economy, they could hardly do as well as what the Trump administration has planned.

New York Times:

Ford Motor could be forced to lay off employees if the Trump administration ends subsidies and other financial support for electric vehicle manufacturing, the company’s chief executive said on Tuesday.

Ford has invested heavily in factories to produce batteries and electric vehicles in Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky and Tennessee, Jim Farley, the Ford chief executive, said at a conference in New York. If Republicans repeal Biden-era legislation that allocated billions of dollars in subsidies and loans for the projects, Mr. Farley said, “many of those jobs will be at risk.”

Mr. Farley was also sharply critical of President Trump’s threat to impose tariffs on cars and components from Mexico and Canada. Ford makes several vehicles in Mexico, including the Maverick pickup and Mustang Mach-E electric S.U.V., and engines in Canada.

“A 25 percent tariff across the Mexico and Canadian border will blow a hole in the U.S. industry that we have never seen,” Mr. Farley said, according to a transcript of his remarks provided by Ford. “It gives free rein to South Korean and Japanese and European companies that are bringing one and a half to two million vehicles into the U.S. that wouldn’t be subject to those Mexican and Canadian tariffs.”

Continue reading “Ford CEO: Trump Trade Policies Will “Blow a Hole” in US Auto Industry”