Here's a statement of the obvious: The opinions expressed here are those of the participants, not those of the Mutual Fund Observer. We cannot vouch for the accuracy or appropriateness of any of it, though we do encourage civility and good humor.
Support MFO
Donate through PayPal
Will the latest outrage be the one that the market takes seriously?
He shouts out tariffs now whenever he doesn’t get his way. I guess that’s better than attacking our (former) allies. But wait,,,, that will be next if they don’t go along with his agenda. And the markets don’t open till Tuesday. What could possibly go wrong between now and then?
We will continue to get the Alfred E. Neuman "What me worry?" treatment from the markets until we don't. I keep wondering if any such market revelations will happen before the mid-term elections and how it plays out.
How did you go bankrupt? Very slowly, then all at once. ("The Sun Also Rises.")
I understand there's to be a new iteration of the film version coming soon. The 1950s version was a thing I tried to enjoy, but the actors were mis-cast. Notably, an over-the-hill Errol Flynn, portraying a much younger man.....
Gradually then suddenly applies to a huge number of processes and events and even as a teenager I was surprised that Hemingway was thought clever because of it
What could possibly go wrong between now and then?
mmm...What could possibly go wrong under Biden? The highest inflation and cost of living in four decades. The worst one-year bond losses in forty years. The largest number of criminals entering the country. The biggest expansion of useless DEI jobs. That wasn’t theoretical. That was real.
Europe’s dependence on the United States for NATO security limits its options. Its strongest response would be a trade “bazooka,” and other options are possible.
In a single post on Saturday night, President Trump upended months of progress on trade negotiations with an ultimatum that puts Europe on a crash course with the United States — long its closest ally and suddenly one of its biggest threats. In the Truth Social post, Mr. Trump demanded a deal to buy Greenland, saying that otherwise he would slap tariffs on a group of European nations, first 10 percent in February, then 25 percent in June.
It appeared to leave little room for Europe to maneuver or negotiate in a harsh and combative era of geopolitics. It also left Europe with few options to counter Mr. Trump without repercussions. European leaders are loath to accept the forced takeover of an autonomous territory that is controlled by Denmark, a member of both NATO and the European Union.
Officials and outside analysts increasingly argue that Europe will need to respond to Mr. Trump with force — namely by hitting back on trade. But doing so could come at a heavy cost to both the bloc’s economy and its security, since Europe remains heavily reliant on the United States for support through NATO and in Russia’s war with Ukraine. “We either fight a trade war, or we’re in a real war,” said Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at Bruegel, a research institute in Brussels.
Europeans have spent more than a year insisting that Greenland is not for sale and have constantly repeated that the fate of the massive northern island must be decided by its people and by Denmark. Last week, a group of European nations sent personnel to Greenland for military exercises — a show of solidarity that may have triggered Mr. Trump, since the same nations are the ones to be slapped with tariffs.
The exercises were intended to reinforce Europe’s commitment to policing the Arctic. Mr. Trump has insisted that the United States needs to own Greenland to improve security in the region. In that sense, the display was part of an ongoing effort to placate Mr. Trump. For weeks, officials across Europe had dismissed Mr. Trump’s threats to take Greenland, even by military force, as unlikely. Many saw them more as negotiating tactics and hoped that they could satisfy the American president with a willingness to beef up defense and spending on Greenland.
But Mr. Trump’s fixation on owning the island and his escalating rhetoric is crushing European hopes that appeasement and dialogue will work. Scott Bessent, the American Treasury secretary, doubled down on that message in a Sunday morning interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” American ownership of Greenland would be “best for Greenland, best for Europe and best for the United States,” Mr. Bessent said, suggesting that would be the case even if Greenland were taken by military force. “The European leaders will come around,” he added.
There is little sign of that. Facing the reality that a negotiated compromise is less and less likely, Europeans are now racing to figure out how to respond to Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign. Within hours of the post, members of the European Parliament announced that they would freeze the ratification of the trade deal that Mr. Trump and Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, struck last summer. And members of European Parliament are openly calling for trade retaliation.
Europe has a trade weapon specifically created to defend against political coercion quickly and forcefully, and as Mr. Trump’s threats sank in, policymakers argued that this is the time to wield it. The tool — officially called the “anti-coercion instrument,” unofficially called Europe’s trade “bazooka” — could be used to slap limitations on big American technology companies or other service providers that do large amounts of business on the continent. Some leaders, including President Emmanuel Macron of France, overtly called for its use.
But tapping it would sharply ratchet up trans-Atlantic tensions. Europe has spent the past year avoiding such escalation, and for a reason. The continent remains deeply reliant on the United States for NATO protection and for support against Russia in the war on Ukraine, so a full-on trade war could have consequences on other fronts. “I don’t think the issue here is to create an escalation,” Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister of Italy, told reporters on Sunday in a televised news conference. “I believe it is rather to try to engage in dialogue.”
European officials are also entertaining the possibility of allowing a list of retaliatory tariffs worth 93 billion euros, or $107 billion — drawn up during last year’s trade war — to snap into place in February. That would put levies on American goods, a less drastic move than the trade bazooka but still an effort to stand up to the United States. António Costa, the president of the European Council, which gives the European Union political direction, announced on Sunday that he had “decided to convene an extraordinary meeting” of European leaders in the coming days. An E.U. official added that the meeting might be in person, and could take place on Thursday.
That would allow prime ministers and presidents from across the bloc to discuss how they will respond to Mr. Trump. It would also come just as, or before, many European policymakers head to Davos, Switzerland for the annual World Economic Forum meetings. Mr. Trump will also be attending — creating a chance for conversation.
While many European leaders are still hoping that they might be able to talk things out, discussions have been all but futile so far. Foreign policy officials from Denmark and Greenland met with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance in Washington last week. Afterward, the Danes and Greenlanders acknowledged that the two sides remained at an impasse, but expressed hope.
The two sides, they noted, had agreed to set up a high-level working group to work through their issues. That optimism was quickly snuffed out when the White House said that the group was meant to work on America’s “acquisition” of Greenland. “This is just all brute force,” said Penny Naas, an expert on European public policy at the German Marshall Fund, a research institution. “The president really wants Greenland, and he’s not backing off of it.”
As Mr. Trump takes on a more aggressive posture, European leaders have been growing blunter about the need to fight back. Mr. Macron, of France, wrote on social media on Saturday night that “no intimidation nor threat will influence us.” Ulf Kristersson, the prime minister of Sweden, wrote that “we will not let ourselves be blackmailed.”
Even Keir Starmer, the prime minister of Britain — which, like Norway, is not in the European Union, but was listed among the countries that will be slapped with tariffs — has pushed back. Mr. Starmer has carefully cultivated a positive relationship with the White House. He was one of several officials who spoke to Mr. Trump on Sunday afternoon. He told him that “applying tariffs on allies for pursuing the collective security of NATO allies is wrong,” Mr. Starmer’s spokesman said.
Comment: Just when you think that he can't cause any more damage he shows that he indeed can.
US President Donald Trump's apparently coercive threat to force Western allies not to oppose his proposed annexation of Greenland, or face further damage to their trade with the US, is without both parallel and precedent. We've had some unusual and unexpected economic threats from President Trump over the past year, but I think it is safe to say this exceeds all of them, and takes us into both surreal and utterly dangerous territory.
If taken at face value, it is a form of economic war being levied by the White House on its closest allies. That's because it targets allies at incredibly short notice and for a cause that essentially could break up Nato and the western alliance. This will be leaving officials from those countries absolutely baffled. In fact, it's so outlandish that they may indeed be more baffled than angry.
Nobody in the world would assume that a threat like this - based on acquiring the land of your ally - would ever actually happen. Does Trump really have the backing in the US, in Congress, even in his own administration to do this?
Is this, as some trade officials have to assume, the biggest TACO (Trump will Chicken Out) of all time? These things can come and go and, economically, these countries have handled the damage so far.
Think of Canada. It has seen its trade with the US slump. But its prime minister Mark Carney's strategy has seen Canada's trade surge with the rest of the world by 14% - which amazingly is worth more than was needed to cover its trade lost with the US. Carney has been in China this week pushing "a new world order" and pursuing more trade with China, not the detachment sought by some US administration officials.
"This is China versus the world," the Trump administration was trying to persuade the rest of the world just three months ago. Carney is showing up this approach, something which is perhaps notable background context for the timing of today's intervention.
If, however, we do take Trump's latest threats seriously, they are extremely troubling. Not so much because of the 10% tariff, but because of its rationale - taking land from an ally, and the act of publicly trying to coerce your allies. How would the world react if China or Russia had sent a threat like this to some of their allies?
The basis of the threat is clearly deeply worrying. Many in capitals around the world will read Trump's social media announcement and question the functioning of American decision making. President Trump arrives to meet leaders of the allied countries whose economies he has just threatened at the World Economic Forum on Wednesday.
Most of the world will hope that, by that time, this unparalleled threat will have somehow disappeared.
How about the European Union collectively flip this doofus a giant bird. They should also tariff the snot on the largest American firms that have knelt at the altar of gobshit (a play on Anna's godship) and revoke any agreements that let those companies set up tax evasion strategies in their countries. Nothing gets his attention like money.
How about the European Union collectively flip this doofus a giant bird. They should also tariff the snot on the largest American firms that have knelt at the altar of gobshit (a play on Anna's godship) and revoke any agreements that let those companies set up tax evasion strategies in their countries. Nothing gets his attention like money.
How many countries officially, if only on paper--- moved their HQ to Ireland to get in on that 12.5% corporate tax? Too many. And I can't imagine everything connected to that fact can be undone. It was, at the beginning of that reduced tax offering many years ago, a chickenshit thing to do, in my estimation, and I'm an Irishman. Undercutting the rest of Europe. Offering sweetheart deals. Companies like Johnson Controls and other big corporations ought to be paying more, not less.
Anyhow, I have just read here that an Agreement b/w Orange and van der Leyen has been frozen over the talk about owning Greenland, and the escalating aggressiveness, his insistence on having it.
Is this going to be more TACO, in the end? When will the military tell him, at last, to go fuck himself? And why are we even talking about this?
1) Epstein Epstein Epstein. 2) he's tearing NATO apart in such a way that he can't be legally accused of working for the enemy, namely, his uncle Vlad. Someday, we'll find out just what was the kompromat that Vlad's got on the Orange Filth.
.....Anyhow, it looks like some Repugnants on The Hill actually will oppose him on this thing.
By Alain Berset Mr. Berset is the secretary general of the Council of Europe.
When I took my post as secretary general of the Council of Europe just over a year ago, I did not think that I would ever have to write about the possibility of the United States taking military action against a member state.
Yet here we are.
President Trump has vowed to make Greenland — a semiautonomous territory of Denmark, which is a member of the Council of Europe and a founding member of NATO — part of the United States, and that he will do so “the easy way” or “the hard way.” His statements about the territory have strained relations between states and called into question the rights, consent and democratic choices of Greenland’s people. For now, this remains talk. But recent events in Venezuela show how quickly words can harden into action.
Mr. Trump has also said that he is constrained only by his “own morality,” not international law, brushing aside the legal order established in the aftermath of World War II.
The Council of Europe, with its 46 member states, including non-E.U. countries like Britain and Turkey, was born out of that war. It was founded on the idea that law, not raw power, must guarantee the dignity and rights of individuals and the sovereign equality of states. When a major power central to the creation of the postwar legal order openly questions the necessity of international law, it shakes the foundations we’ve worked for decades to reinforce.
Democracy, multilateralism and accountability once defined the postwar order. These words are increasingly dismissed as elitist, woke or dead. We need to ask ourselves, on both sides of the Atlantic, if we want to live in a world where democracy is recast as weakness, truth as opinion and justice as an option.
Denmark’s sovereignty over Greenland, accompanied by extensive Greenlandic self-government, is settled law. It rests on the inviolability of the territorial integrity of Denmark under international law. Its purpose is to guarantee stability and legality while preserving, not constraining, Greenland’s democratic right to shape its own future.
The Trump administration’s main argument for acquiring Greenland rests on legitimate national security concerns. But the United States already maintains military capabilities in Greenland at Pituffik Space Base and, under existing agreements, could expand cooperation significantly without threatening Danish sovereignty or seeking approval from either Copenhagen or Nuuk, and without any transfer of territory.
This suggests that something else is at work. We are witnessing the return of an old strategic reflex: a Cold War mind-set in which geography is treated as destiny and influence as zero-sum, and independence is seen as a strategic risk rather than a democratic choice. The fear is that an independent Greenland might one day drift toward Russia’s or China’s orbit, placing their weapons at America’s doorstep. It would be an Arctic repeat of the Bay of Pigs.
This is the logic of spheres of influence, an echo of the Monroe Doctrine, now visible in legislation proposed last week by a member of Congress that frames Greenland’s annexation in national security terms tied to China and Russia. The same logic is reflected in the 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy, released in December, which makes America’s sovereignty and strategic interests a priority over multilateral norms and collective security.
Europe must act to protect its legal framework, and the Council of Europe is ready to play its part. The right of peoples to determine their own future, the protection of international law, and accountability for violations of sovereign rights are the foundation of our security and our values.
In moments of crisis, Europe often speaks through national capitals rather than in a single political voice, as the recent joint statement by several E.U. member states on Greenland illustrates. This is a political reality that highlights why legal institutions with a collective mandate matter. The Council of Europe’s work on accountability mechanisms for Ukraine, including the Register of Damage and the International Claims Commission, shows that law can still structure international action at a time of political fragmentation.
The same approach applies in the Arctic. The Council of Europe stands ready to support Denmark and Greenland through concrete legal and institutional cooperation. If Europe fails to articulate a legal and political vision, others will fill the vacuum, shifting security from law to strategic leverage. What’s at stake is not only Greenland’s sovereignty, but also trust. Alliances rest on predictability and on the expectation that power, especially allied power, remains bound by law. If international law can be set aside when it becomes inconvenient, trust is gone. If strategic calculations lead to a disregard for sovereignty in Greenland, how will Europe continue to believe in U.S. commitments elsewhere?
When Europe insists on sovereignty and accountability, it is not posturing. It is defending what makes both America and Europe strong. To ignore this is to set a dangerous precedent, one that could unravel the trans-Atlantic bond and weaken the foundations that keep us standing.
International law is either universal or meaningless. Greenland will show which one we choose.
Note: Text emphasis in the above report was added.
Europe will fold, the show of unity is nonsense. When it really comes down to it, each country will prioritize their self interest over anything else. And Europe is incapable of defending itself against Russia or China.
This is what happens when you assume that Uncle Sam will defend Europe forever and therefore no need to spend appropriately on defense.
Greenland is the price of decades of under-spend by Europe. Cheeto has effectively stated this and EU knows it. The rest is just posturing.
I too am waiting to see what tomorrow and the week brings. Since this thread started the leader of the regime has exhibited more disturbing behavior . Sometimes it’s better to do nothing.
In case I wasn't clear, my plans were not related to the new chaos. Just a reaction to a perceived rotation. I want to lighten large growth and gain exposure to small and INTL.
This new wrinkle could cause some unsettled markets IMO. Where do folks rush to protect or capitalize is yet to be seen. Or how that may affect my plans, in the short term.
no, the gop damage is not short term, which is 99% the active part of the market. the passive part , in indexes, still has supply&demand automated 401k flows, propping it up but bringing its own fragility.
plus, the market has adapted to the fact that if there is any grift for trump&friends possible, he can and will revert any policy as soon as convenient.
take a look at the stock price manipulation in 2 weeks by trump threats on credit, defense, and homebuilding corps. now tell me how many gop want to investigate...far less than want to participate !!
Comments
Very slowly, then all at once.
("The Sun Also Rises.")
I understand there's to be a new iteration of the film version coming soon. The 1950s version was a thing I tried to enjoy, but the actors were mis-cast. Notably, an over-the-hill Errol Flynn, portraying a much younger man.....
The highest inflation and cost of living in four decades.
The worst one-year bond losses in forty years.
The largest number of criminals entering the country.
The biggest expansion of useless DEI jobs.
That wasn’t theoretical. That was real.
Old_Joe
Anyhow, I have just read here that an Agreement b/w Orange and van der Leyen has been frozen over the talk about owning Greenland, and the escalating aggressiveness, his insistence on having it.
Is this going to be more TACO, in the end? When will the military tell him, at last, to go fuck himself? And why are we even talking about this?
1) Epstein Epstein Epstein.
2) he's tearing NATO apart in such a way that he can't be legally accused of working for the enemy, namely, his uncle Vlad. Someday, we'll find out just what was the kompromat that Vlad's got on the Orange Filth.
.....Anyhow, it looks like some Repugnants on The Hill actually will oppose him on this thing.
This is what happens when you assume that Uncle Sam will defend Europe forever and therefore no need to spend appropriately on defense.
Greenland is the price of decades of under-spend by Europe. Cheeto has effectively stated this and EU knows it. The rest is just posturing.
I was planning to do some fund exchanges in the coming days/weeks. I now may park funds in MMF first, see what happens.
Funds that I may lower in allocation are mainly large cap growth.
Funds that I may buy anew include EM Europe and small cap growth.
Very interested in what tomorrow and this week brings.
This new wrinkle could cause some unsettled markets IMO. Where do folks rush to protect or capitalize is yet to be seen. Or how that may affect my plans, in the short term.
the passive part , in indexes, still has supply&demand automated 401k flows, propping it up but bringing its own fragility.
plus, the market has adapted to the fact that if there is any grift for trump&friends possible, he can and will revert any policy as soon as convenient.
take a look at the stock price manipulation in 2 weeks by trump threats on credit, defense, and homebuilding corps. now tell me how many gop want to investigate...far less than want to participate !!