On Saturday, I spoke with Fredricka Whitfield at CNN. She asked me about the $5,000 checks. If you missed it, Trump promised that if Republicans win the midterms, he’ll send checks out to every American — and now Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is defending the plan on the basis that it won’t cost taxpayer money. I wrote a little about this before, here:
My response to Fredricka was that I just love the fact that the Commerce Secretary has discovered a secret money tree. A tree that can’t be used for paying down the deficit, or the debt, but apparently can be used to pay for a 1.2 trillion election bribe.
We talked about it in more depth here:
Next, I went on CBC to talk to Canadians about American debt (and other things). Host Peter Armstrong asked me about bonds. Specifically, why is the mess in the American bond market showing up in Canadian interest rates?
In my answer I talked about apples. If a lot of people want a lot more apples, the price of apples goes up. A bond is a fancy word for a loan. If a lot of people want a lot of loans, the price of loans (which we call the interest rate) goes up.
How does that affect Canadian rates? If the price of a green apple goes up, people are going to go buy red apples, because they’re a good deal. Here, red apples are money lent to Canadians and green apples are money lent to Americans. What happens in the American bonds matters in Canadian markets, and if you’re Canadian you’re going to see it in your own rates — car, home, all those interest rates.
That conversation is here:
And then, of course, there’s diesel, which just hit a new high of $6.16 a gallon due to the ongoing war in Iran and the sometimes-open-and-also-closed Strait of Hormuz. This was back on CNN, where Omar Jimenez asked me: how will consumers feel this high fuel price in their daily lives?
Think of throwing a stone in a pond. The first ripple is what you see in the pump. Next, you see airline prices rise. Third, fourth, and fifth is what happens when the local supermarket notices their costs increase. If they think it’s only a temporary rise, they might not raise their prices, but this in-and-out four-week war is now at the six-month mark. So now businesses are starting to pass those costs on to consumers.
And that script is very similar to one we’ve read before — it’s what happened with tariffs.
If you’d like more, you can check that out below:
Actually, a bond is a misleading word for a swap.