Rubber Futures Plunge In Response To BYD Price Cuts
Prices of natural rubber have fallen in response to Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer BYD’s significant price cuts fueling fears of a price war that could hurt tire prices, according to Nikkei.
“Price cuts by BYD, the largest manufacturer, ‘have spread concerns that a full-scale price war may begin,’” said Marketedge CEO Tsutomu Kosuge. Tires consume roughly 70% of natural rubber output.
BYD announced price reductions of up to 34% on 22 models from its main brand. In May, BYD’s new-vehicle sales rose 15% year-on-year to 382,476 units, though this growth was slower than April’s increase of over 20%.
Nikkei writes that despite a 9.8% year-on-year rise in Chinese new-vehicle sales (including exports) in April, worries about overproduction remain, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers.
The drop in natural rubber prices comes amid speculation that reduced prices for EVs and plug-in hybrids will lead to lower demand for tires, thereby hitting natural rubber demand. On June 3, benchmark rubber futures on the Osaka Exchange fell 4% to 280 yen ($2) per kilogram, marking the lowest price since February 2024.
Earlier this year, natural rubber prices fell after former U.S. President Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs in early April. Though prices later rebounded as tensions between Washington and Beijing eased, they have since resumed their decline.
In Asia—home to the world’s main natural rubber production and trading—Shanghai’s rubber futures are the most actively traded globally. Recently, the sharp drop in Shanghai’s futures market has triggered selling pressure on Osaka’s exchange. On Wednesday, Shanghai futures temporarily dropped below 13,300 yuan ($1,850) per metric ton.
Meanwhile, the U.S. new-car market is cooling after a surge in demand leading up to Trump’s tariff announcement. According to MarkLines, U.S. new-vehicle sales in May rose 1.4% year-on-year, slowing from 9.1% and 9.9% gains in March and April, respectively. Analysts are now watching to see how consumer spending will shift, given the economic uncertainty.
According to a chief at the corporate sales department at Japan’s Yutaka Trusty Securities, the next move in prices “will be determined by the outcome of the U.S.-China negotiations.” Natural rubber remains around $2 per kilogram.
With so much else going on, not enough writers have been able to focus on the complexities of immigration issues enough to comment competently on them, much less with a historical perspective.
Within my knowledge base, which is admittedly incomplete, I will attempt this here, recognizing the existence of many mitigating factors that I cannot possibly present in a small piece.
For most of the postwar period, the United States has had a wink-and-nudge approach to undocumented workers. So long as they don’t claim permanent residency, do jobs that Americans can’t or won’t do, and don’t burden the community with welfare and infrastructure demands, they are fine. They come and go through porous borders. Both parties celebrated immigration and wanted it liberalized.
This was true for a good part of my own life. I spent my early years in El Paso, Texas, where these complexities were obvious to all of us. That region had always been mixed in ethnicity and religion owing to its deeply contested national loyalties. Even so, a peace had been achieved. Many workers in town freely moved from the United States to Mexico and back again, as did travelers.
My family would go to Mexico often. The border consisted mostly of a hi and a wave of the hand. There were no fights, no rushes, no blockades, and not many worries. Everyone was aware of undocumented workers on all sides, but there was little enforcement provided everyone obeyed the unstated rules above: work hard, don’t stay, and don’t commit crimes.
I would never say there were no tensions. There were. But they revolved themselves in normal political ways. A national anti-immigrant movement did not exist on any large scale. Even Republicans courted the immigrant vote and wanted more inward migration.
That all changed after Sept. 11, 2001. The suicide attacks in New York City and at the Pentagon caused a new focus on closing borders. They were sealed and monitored in the name of policing for terrorism. For the first time, passports were required to travel to and from Mexico and Canada.
This caused a dramatic shift in incentives. Migrant workers and their families began a scramble to find ways to stay once here. The new path required acting as permanent residents, thus breaking the deal and antagonizing communities and inflaming U.S. politics.
After the many wars in the Middle East sent refugee populations on the run looking for new homes, the United States dealt with a wave of migration regardless, legal and illegal. The aspiration was always to stay. The implicit deal was that if they worked hard and long, eventually amnesty would arrive, just as it had in the past.
At home, however, it was all too much. As any serious historian will tell you, mass disturbance of national demographics, especially that which threatens to result in foundational political change, will cause populist uprising. They always have. No exceptions of which I’m aware.
The politician who broke the taboo on this topic was Donald Trump in 2015. His frank discussion of these issues contributed to his victory in 2016. New methods of border control were being constructed, and enforcement seemed to be working. The fix did not last, however.
The election of 2020 was in substantial part conducted without in-person voting, mostly by order of federal and state public-health agencies. Another thing everyone knows: Mail-in voting is the least secure form, which is why it is banned or highly regulated in most countries. It was inevitable that the results (Trump lost, despite a higher total number of votes than the previous election) would be questioned. Many observers said the numbers simply did not add up.
Further investigation revealed that whoever was in charge of immigration enforcement after 2020 embarked on emergency use of immigration demographics, massively liberalizing policies. The widespread perception was that an old strategy was in play. The purpose was to game electoral outcomes, bringing in as many people as possible in preparation for a repeat of the previous balloting fiasco.
The result was an uncountable number of new people migrating to the United States (maybe 9 million to 12 million, but no one knows for sure), giving them generous welfare benefits including hotels, phones, food, and more. It became so bad that the mayor of New York City protested what was happening to his city.
The use of immigration as a political weapon broke the deal and shattered everything. Even if it was exaggerated, and I’m not offering an opinion either way, it was deeply cynical and dark.
The result was another wave of political outrage that bolstered Trump’s reemergence in 2024, with the pledge to crack down on them. The reasons are economic but mainly pertain to an aspiration to renew the very idea of citizenship itself: A nation without clarity on this point has no meaning.
In short, we are not global citizens because there is no global plebiscite. If we take democracy seriously, and truly believe that the people are the final rulers of themselves, the problem of who is and is not a citizen must be clarified.
This is what the second Trump term has promised. Immigration authorities have been unleashed to do their jobs. But once the crackdown began, there was a problem. Most of the people shipped in under the previous administration were difficult to find, hiding in sanctuary cities and otherwise escaping notice from authorities.
Faced with political pressure to show high deportation numbers, authorities started raiding towns where they had never been and entering workplaces where they usually had never been active, thus targeting the very people whom the United States used to tolerate in the old system.
For Americans to have the feds raiding local businesses and civic institutions is in tension with the civic ethos of liberty and rights that Americans have traditionally expected, and this became a highly charged environment particularly among activists determined to resist what they call Trump’s authoritarianism. And now we have the National Guard in an American city, perhaps the first of many. It’s not a good look to see the military on the streets of American cities. No one would favor such a thing in absence of a perceived emergency.
My point is simply this: We cannot look at the present moment in isolation from all the previous missteps and abuses that have led to it, one step at a time. Yes, the trajectory is dangerous. Yes, it seems like a slippery slope to martial law. Is there any alternative and politically viable solution today? If there is an obvious one in the present moment, I’m not seeing it.
Long-term, we need a calm and reasoned discussion about a strict distinction between worker visas and voting rights, between residency permits and welfare benefits, between entitlements and earned privileges. It’s possible to have a welcoming country that is not simultaneously inflaming and abusing its citizens’ liberality and generosity. Sadly, the moment for that conversation is not now.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.
Condoms for Kindergarteners — this is the priority of @mddems. Rather than supplying the grid with more power and lowering electric bills, or giving children stuck in failed schools a better option, Annapolis Democrats want to put condoms in kindergarten classrooms. Sad. pic.twitter.com/rpBog5jkgd
Their chronic mismanagement, with far-left Governor Wes Moore at the helm, has steered Maryland straight into a power crisis, like the Titanic blindly drifting through an iceberg minefield. The state’s fragile grid is now teetering on the edge of crisis, paving the way for ‘net-zero‘ blackouts that could soon rival those seen in Spain or California.
It’s time to ditch the Green New Scam. “There’s an acute misalignment between supply and demand for electricity in Maryland,” said BGE spokesperson Nick Alexopulos. “In short, we don’t have enough power plants to meet the energy demand.” pic.twitter.com/surcWmHcK7
A top official at Baltimore Gas and Electric (BGE), a local utility with 1.3 million electric customers and 700,000 natural gas customers, warned that rolling power blackouts could soon become a regular feature in the state due to a rapidly alarming mismatch between total power capacity on the grid and soaring demand.
Maryland Democrats’ excessive, targeted taxation on in-state fossil fuel energy producers has forced multiple plants to shut down, and we are left paying the price.
High energy bills and the expected rolling blackouts are a policy choice by Democrats. Marylanders need to choose… pic.twitter.com/6O41EDFN8j
Regular rolling blackouts could become reality for Baltimore-area residents if a lack of energy supplied to the power grid remains unaddressed, Baltimore Gas and Electric Company Vice President Electric Operations Steven Singh warned.
BGE has worked during the last two decades to lessen the number of short-term loads shed events, Singh said, but rolling blackouts — during which power is disconnected from some segments of the community when the grid remains viable — could be implemented if power demand continues to exceed supply.
“It’s a huge concern,” Singh said. “It’s a clear and present issue.”
At a recent round table at the University of Maryland … We have a supply and demand issue.”
Singh also shared larger concerns with energy shortages that may result as the energy transition away from coal-fired power plants continues, and electric vehicle ownership grows. He said one factor that impacts the region is an increase in data centers — reliant on huge, power-hungry server infrastructure.
Regular rolling blackouts could become a reality for Baltimore-area residents, Baltimore Gas and Electric Company Vice President of Electric Operations Steven Singh said.
Storms and other large-scale weather events are the main reason for outages, while blackouts are caused by a… pic.twitter.com/O0nmbpxXFQ
At the heart of the crisis is the Democratic leadership in the state, consisting of activists who masquerade as efficient managers. Yet they’re far from efficient while wearing climate crisis blinders and pushing through disastrous “green” policies—shuttering coal-fired power plants without bringing sufficient new capacity online. All this comes amid surging power demand driven by AI data centers (read here), EV adoption, and re-shoring of industrial operations in the region.
And because of this epic mismanagement by far-left lawmakers, Marylanders are suffering from the worst power bill crisis in a generation, with 25% of Maryland households unable to pay an energy bill in the past 12 months.
But let’s not wrap this up just yet…
To capture the growing discontent among Maryland residents, we’re turning to the comment section of The Baltimore Sun’s Facebook post featuring the article.
Here’s what people had to say…
For those living in Maryland. Welcome to California. Just wait for the exodus of residents, it’s already beginning. We’ve informed readers multiple times that a large asset manager in the state has instructed its clients not to buy Maryland muni bonds and to leave the state.
The House of Representatives passed two bills on June 10 to repeal District of Columbia laws on policing and noncitizen voting.
The first would prohibit noncitizens from voting in local District of Columbia elections.
It passed with 266 members voting in favor of it, 148 voting against, and one member voting “present.”
The second would give Washington police officers collective bargaining rights and restore the statute of limitations for police disciplinary cases.
It passed with 235 votes in favor, 178 against, and one “present.”
Under the “home rule,” Congress has ultimate authority to review laws made by the District of Columbia’s local government.
The voting-related bill would repeal the Local Resident Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2022, which allowed noncitizens to cast their ballots in local elections in the nation’s capital.
Introduced by Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas), 56 Democrats voted for it. All Republicans voted for it.
“It’s common sense: Only American citizens should be able to vote in U.S. elections!” Pfluger wrote on X.
However, Rep. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) said that the bill is misguided.
“Republicans introduced 26 bills or amendments to change local D.C. voting laws, including 14 to prohibit noncitizens from voting in D.C. or to repeal, nullify or prohibit the carrying out of the local D.C. law that allows residents who are not citizens to vote in local elections last Congress,” she said in a statement.
“Yet Republicans refuse to make the only election law change D.C. has requested: making D.C. a state so that it can hold elections for voting members of the House and Senate.”
Meanwhile, 30 Democrats voted in favor of the police bill. Four Republicans—Reps. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.), Tom McClintock (R-Calif.), Scott Perry (R-Pa.), and Chip Roy (R-Texas)—voted against it.
“The Metropolitan Police Department is facing a public safety crisis brought on by reckless policies that have stripped officers of basic protections and left the force dangerously understaffed,” the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.), said in a statement.
“This legislation helps right that wrong by giving MPD the tools and support they need to recruit, retain, and protect.
“Congress has a duty to ensure our nation’s capital is safe, and today’s vote sends a clear message: we back the badge, and we refuse to let violent crime take over D.C.”
Norton said in a statement that the bill “overrides the longstanding wishes of the D.C. police department” as “for at least a quarter century, the D.C. police department had requested increased authority to discipline officers for misconduct.”
On June 11, the House will vote on another D.C.-related bill, the District of Columbia Federal Immigration Compliance Act, which would eliminate the district’s status as a sanctuary city and therefore require it to comply with federal immigration officials when it comes to dealing with those in the United States illegally.
An exception is made for illegal immigrants who come forward as victims of, or witnesses to, criminal offenses or report someone to the Department of Homeland Security who is in the country illegally.
Zelensky’s Refusal To Compromise Will Lead To More Territorial Losses: Russian Negotiator
While this should come as no surprise to observers of the Russia-Ukraine war, the Kremlin has put Kiev on notice that its continued unwillingness to compromise at the negotiating table will only lead to more and permanent territorial losses.
This was the latest warning conveyed by Russian Presidential Aide Vladimir Medinsky, who has been leading the Russian delegation in Istanbul talks.
He actually spoke to The Wall Street Journal, conveying the warning, while making clear that Russia will never relent until Putin’s war aims are achieved, and defense of Russia’s sovereignty and stability can be assured.
Now, Vladimir Medinsky is drawing on his view of history again as he tries to convince Ukraine that it would be better off unwinding its integration with the West and embracing Moscow’s terms for peace.
“With Russia, it’s impossible to fight a long war,” Medinsky said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, citing Russia’s 21-year war with Sweden in the 18th century as evidence that the country prevails in protracted fights.
“We want peace,” he continued. “But if Ukraine keeps being driven by the national interests of others, then we will be simply forced to respond,” he added.
That’s when Medinsky also “warned that a lack of compromise from Kiev would only lead to more territorial losses,” WSJ wrote.
As yet, Ukraine’s President Zelensky hasn’t so much as offered recognition of Crimea as Russian territory, and certainly he’s far away from saying the same of the annexed territories in the Donbass, where some fighting still exists.
This week it’s become clear that Russian forces are advancing into Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region, which is a first in the three-year-plus long war, marking a significant territorial escalation amid stalled peace talks.
Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said the advance serves as a warning to the Zelensky government to accept “realities on the ground.” Medinsky’s words given to a major American publication are clearly another major warning along the same lines.
“In the future there will be only one occupation: managing one’s wealth.
…and most people are going to be unemployed.” — Mark E. Jeftovic, ‘The Great Bifurcation’
It’s been a minute since I last wrote anything here, owing to a combination of a slightly heavier than usual travel schedule, and frankly, burnout, after that last Canadian election.
I’ve truly underestimated the gullibility of the Canadian public – after being predictably on-track for a massive pendulum swing to a Conservative super-majority from 10 years of Liberal policies demolishing Canada, the entire dynamic reversed and was nullified within a few short weeks by the entire “Elbows Up” mind-fuck.
The irony behind all this is that the public largely switched their vote for the candidate DonaldTrump wanted to win because of their own Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Watching it from the outside was demoralizing.
(Steve Bannon told me before the election that Trump’s “51st State” riffs were done on purpose to get the libs re-elected and Trump himself took a victory lap afterwards – Canadians were had. Why? Because the Americans want Alberta, and they think they’ll get it through de facto economic or political integration within a few years after #WEXIT happens).
The number of Canadians who now feel politically homeless is at an all-time high. The rapidly waning productive class of society watches, unable to intervene – as insular technocrats implement overtly destructive policies (i.e 865,000 new immigrants admitted YTD into an economy that squeaked out 8,800 new jobs) and seem to be intentionally cultivating divisiveness and polarization.
We’re moving from the top-down, centralized model of a hierarchical Industrial Age and transitioning into an amorphous and mercurial, rapidly shifting, network topology that blurs the lines between sovereigns and systems, crowns and corporations, that serves as a super-conductor for data, information, and memetic constructs – not to mention: disinfo, bad news and mass formation psychosis.
Add to this mix, AI – the third major technological disruption of this century after the internet (decentralized non-state communications) and Bitcoin (decentralized non-state money).
Now we have decentralized, non-state intelligence and I mean intelligence in a number of ways, including:
access to the sum total of human knowledge, instantly and at effectively zero marginal cost.
each individual possessing the means, motive and opportunity to create their own personal think-tanks, advisory boards and even “spycraft”-style intelligence services using osint and agentic AI that can act strategically and agentically on anybody’s behalf (servitor swarms, if you will).
every node, device, piece of software and network connected “thing” having the ability to access and act on information from everything else.
There’s a sub-cult of Bitcoin maxis who actually welcome outcomes like the aforementioned Canadian election because they think having nations run by the most out-of-touch, behind the curve technocrats will hasten the collapse of the fiat money era and bring about a Bitcoin Standard. They are awaiting a kind of monetary eschaton – and they are called accelerationists.
I am not an accelerationist, but you may have noticed I have been writing a lot about this but find the word itself being inadequate to the task – what’s happening now is beyond acceleration. In physics, there is a derivative order and their ascension forms a kind of kinematic spectrum:
I’ve been trying to come up with a word that captures this accelerating acceleration that’s a bit sexier than “jerk” – and this exponentially intensifying derivative expansion beyond “snap”, “crackle” and “pop” (oh those nerd physicists) – so far I can really only make something up (actually, it was the best chatGPT could think of): tachyosis (tachy- = fast, -osis = condition/process), to wit:
Tachyosis(n.) A state of recursively compounding acceleration — where systems evolve faster than they can stabilize, perception fragments, and causality begins to blur. Considered the experiential threshold of the kinematic continuum.
“Civilizations in tachyosis cease to distinguish between signal and noise — they become pure velocity.”
This seems to fit the bill, and I like it because the word is reminiscent of “psychosis”, which is what a society undergoing this induces at a mass level.
What tachyosis does to society
While we know what happens during hyper-inflations, technological quantum leaps or breakdowns in the social contract – as separate phenomenons. If you follow Ray Dalio, he’ll tell you that the USA is following a template outlined his own research putting squarely on the path to Civil War –
“That template led me to believe that there was a high chance of a convergent breakdown of the monetary order, the domestic political order, and the international geopolitical order. Unfortunately, events are transpiring consistent with that template. “
But with all due respect to Mr. Dali, his framework only covers two of the three drivers we’re looking at here: it’s missing compounding affects of technological overclocking, and there are no history books to describe all three of these forces hitting an inflection point at the same time and all over the world.
The Rise of Tribalism
As societal institutions break down the economy enters a state of perpetual disruption, people start forming associations with like-minded individuals and families, both in their own communities and remotely.
Tribes may overlap with geopolitical boundaries but their center of gravity is what it stands for, not the political unit they may (for a moment) intersect with.
Woke, MAGA, AnCaps, BLM, Proud Boys, MS-13, Bitcoin, and Scientology are all examples of tribes now, regardless of what they started out as. Some with more staying power than others. But they will all acquire more relevance and gravitas in their members’ lives than their nation state citizenship. Why? Because no nation state can keep up with the process of tachyosis, while tribes are informed by it.
(To that end, there’s a new tribe forming for politically homeless Canadians over at Ready.ca)
Neo-Feudalism & The Vise of Technology
By this, I mean the effect this technological hyper-acceleration is having at both ends of your own personal lifespan.
If you have kids under the age of 30, especially if they’re under the age of 20 – their path forward will be very different from all those who came before.
Put bluntly: they probably won’t have jobs, much less careers. The time for each generation accumulating their own wealth and building personal fortunes will be – for most participants – over.
Your kids, your grandchildren and beyond, (hold that thought) would do better to be raised in preparation for maintaining the wealth and managing any assets you leave to them. Anybody who doesn’t inherit anything faces a real risk of being permanently priced out of the asset acquisition game in perpetuity.
Especially if they follow the path laid out in Industrial Age textbooks: go to school, then university, then go find a job with a big company and parlay that into a series of mid-management posts that culminate in a career and a payday. Most of those positions will have been automated away and the majority of younger generations are looking at UBI and endless leisure – so long as they spend most of their time confined to a metaverse-connected pod stacked somewhere in a 15-minute city and take up as little space and oxygen in the real world as possible.
Meanwhile, if you have managed to amass assets and a non-negative net worth, be prepared to live longer – a lot longer. 150, 160 will probably be normal for anybody under 60 or so now. That’s how fast biotech – and soon nanotech – is moving.
A number of my peer group – mostly technology and business operators in their mid-50’s to late-60’s are looking to take their chips off the table, sell the businesses they founded and retire, assuming they’ll need to clear enough money to last them another 20 or 30 years.
That could be a huge mistake because there’s a real possibility they find themselves facing the prospect of heading into their 90’s and early 100’s having outlived their retirement funds.
The old model was (again, bluntly), “Die before your money runs out.” Now, it’s not just about planning for 30 years post-retirement. Plan for a century.
Meanwhile, you’re kids won’t have careers, neither will theirs – and you’ll still probably be around to see your great- and great-great-grandchildren be born into the same post-bifurcation world.
This is the neo-Feudal aspect. Your fortune will have to be subdivided across each generation, like the fiefdoms of yore – and the only way to keep everybody living in the real world (instead of being tucked away in those pods, being intravenously fed liquid crickets and soy protein) will be to leave them with a vastly larger fortune than the one you thought was enough to get just you through retirement.
I wish I had better news than this, because the world we’re headed into – while technologically fantastic – will also be economically bleak for too many people. It’s not fair, it’s not egalitarian and there is no stopping it – short of a Tower of Babel 2.0 type event, which will be a total buzzkill in even less preferable ways.
I’ve called this scenario “The Great Bifurcation” – where the world’s middle class disintegrates and we head into a hellscape of mind-boggling wealth disparity.
Lately I’ve come to suspect that this will play out beyond the economic sphere and also occur at the level of mental abstraction (see my earlier notes about W R Clemens)– and by this I don’t mean that the “haves” will have brain chips and poors won’t (probably the other way around, if anything) – but that the underclass will be operating at a cognitive disadvantage that resembles a different species entirely.
One of the things we endeavour to do here at the Bitcoin Capitalist is to help you build the generational wealth that can last the rest of your own life and setup your descendants – take a one month trial today »
Mark E. Jeftovic is the founder of Bombthrower Media and CEO of easyDNS.com, a company he co-founded in 1998 which has been operating along the lines described within these pages.
Inflation Highest In Democrat States, Lowest In Republican Deep South
For much of 2025 we have been mocking the University of Michigan survey, and especially its short and long-term inflation expectation question, for the simple reason that the divergence between republican and democrat respondents is no longer merely grotesque but is a caricature of Goebbelsian propaganda, meant to spark fear that runaway inflation is coming and crash markets (even as today’s CPI showed – again – it isn’t).
But maybe we were wrong all along, and Democrats – who by definition live mostly in Democratic states – are indeed experiencing higher inflation.
According to a geographic analysis of price trends from Bloomberg, while the overall US inflation rate rose 2.4% in May from a year earlier, sharp geographic divergences remain. Indeed, bicoastal inflation in the predominantly Democratic states along the East and the West coasts of the country were generally above the US average, and far above Republicans strongholds like flyover states and the deep south.
The inflation rate in West Coast states was at 2.8% in May: in the illegal-alien bastion of Los Angeles metro area the rate was 3%, and it was even higher, at 3.8%, in San Diego. The rate fell to 3.4% in the Democratic stronghold that is New York City from 3.9% in April but is still among the highest by metro area.
Meanwhile, in mid-Atlantic states along with New England states, inflation was at 2.8% in May. East Coast prices are being driven largely by housing and rent. Meanwhile, the lowest rate in the country – by a relatively wide margin at 1.4% – was in the West South Central region, which includes Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas. Inflation between the regions with the highest inflation is twice as high as the parts of the country with the lowest price growth, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics figures.
In other words, another fringe benefit of voting in Democrats every election is having to pay much higher prices for, well, everything.
Musk Spoke With Trump Before Public ‘Regret’ Post On X: Report
Update (1400ET):
Following the Wall Street Journal’s report on Musk-Trump tensions easing. The New York Times further explains that Musk called President Trump late Monday night to apologize for last week’s X posts, following private discussions with Vice President JD Vance and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles about brokering a truce on Friday.
The outreach led to an X post by Musk earlier, in which he expressed regret, saying his comments about Trump “went too far.”
Neither Musk’s nor Trump’s media teams have publicly confirmed the reconciliation. The reports rely solely on unnamed sources “briefed on the call,” meaning either one of them could just as easily take to X or Truth Social and dismiss the entire story as ‘fake news.’
* * *
Update (1250ET):
A new Wall Street Journal report offers insight into why Elon Musk abruptly reversed course after last week’s scathing tweets targeting President Trump, following their fallout over the “Big Beautiful Bill.”
Sources say Vice President JD Vance and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles convinced Musk to repair his relationship with the president.
In a call last Friday, the two urged Musk to de-escalate tensions, which he did earlier in a tweet, expressing regret for his postings on X from the previous week.
“I regret some of my posts about President @realDonaldTrump last week. They went too far,” Musk said on X.
Vance, who maintained a neutral public stance, played a behind-the-scenes role in brokering what could be a peace deal between the two.
How long until Musk denies the WSJ report?
* * *
Elon Musk publicly expressed regret over his recent X post attacks on President Donald Trump, admitting that his posts on X — particularly the one linking Trump to Jeffrey Epstein — “went too far.”
“I regret some of my posts about President @realDonaldTrump last week. They went too far,” Musk wrote in an early morning X post.
I regret some of my posts about President @realDonaldTrump last week. They went too far.
The fallout stemmed from last week’s blowout after Musk opposed Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” prompting Trump to hint at cutting off government contracts. In response, Musk unleashed a series of now-deleted X posts, including a claim that Trump was “in the Epstein files.”
Thursday morning, Trump was asked about Musk’s opposition to the bill, telling reporters on Thursday that he’s ‘very disappointed in Elon,’ and that Musk only opposes the bill because they eliminated electric vehicle tax credits from it.
Trump then suggested he might pull government funding from Musk’s companies such as SpaceX, which owns the only operational US spacecraft capable of transporting astronauts to and from the International Space Station. “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!” -President Donald Trump via Truth Social
Musk went ballistic – announcing he would ‘immediately‘ decommission the Dragon program (which he later walked back Thursday night), proposed a new political party (that’s still his pinned post on X), endorsed another Trump impeachment, and said in a now-deleted post Trump is ‘in the Epstein files,’ which is why they haven’t been released.
Now that the dust has settled in the Trump-Musk feud, the president stated there would be consequences for Musk if he supports Democratic candidates opposing the tax and spending bill.
Musk stated in a CBS interview that BBB “undermines” the work of DOGE… The Trump administration has refuted this point.
On Monday, Trump said he had no plans to discontinue Starlink service at the White House but hinted he might have his Tesla Model S removed from the White House grounds.
“I may move the Tesla around a little bit, but I don’t think we’ll be doing that with Starlink. It’s a good service,” Trump told reporters.
Trump also said that he would not have a problem if Musk called him: “We had a good relationship, and I just wish him well.”
Musk’s actions over the past several days suggest his anger has subsided and that he may be seeking to repair his relationship with the president.
As we noted last week…
For better or worse, the BBB will pass. Instead of clashing over what is autopilot spending to satisfy legacy obligations, focus on how to generate the biggest GDP growth https://t.co/bw6DQ4pBVa
However, we do agree with Musk on codifying DOGE cuts—after all, it’s a clear mandate from the American people for the president to rein in a bloated federal government long captured by deep-state swamp creatures.
US Collected A Record $22BN In Tariffs In May… Which Was Just 3% Of Total Government Spending
First the good news. One month after April recorded the second biggest budget surplus on record (at $258BN), a total which was boosted by generous customs duties collected as a result of Trump’s aggressive tariff and trade war escalation, in May the amount of tariff receipts was off the charts, soaring to a record $22.2 billion…
… or more than triple the amount of customs duties collected during any month of the Trump 1.0 trade war.
As for the bad news… well, you probably know where we’re going with this. Unfortunately, that record $22.2 Billion in tariffs is a drop in the pool compared to all the US government spending, which there was a lot of in May, $687.2 Billion to be precise (up 2.5% from a year ago) so the tariffs covered precisely… 3% of US government spending.
To smooth out the chart, here is the same spending data on a 6 month moving average basis. With the exception of the covid panic, the US government has never spent more!
Of course, it wasn’t just tariffs, and in May total government tax receipts rose 15% to $371.2 Billion (which includes the surge in tariffs) from $323.6 Billion last year. Not bad, until one realizes that total monthly tax revenue is basically flat for the past 4 years, while spending has continued to grow exponentially higher.
Naturally, the difference between government tax receipts and spending is known as the deficit, and in May it was $316BN, a modest improvement to the $347BN deficit one year ago, if just above the $314BN estimate.
Putting it all together, the cumulative deficit for fiscal 2015 is now $1.365 trillion. This is a substantial improvement to the trendline that was in place before Trump came into the white house (as of January, the cumulative 2025 fiscal deficit was the highest ever), but it is higher compared to the $1.202 trillion cumulative deficit in 2024, and it is certainly higher on a cumulative basis as of May – with just 4 more months left in the fiscal year – than any other year on record except the outliers of 2020 and 2021.
And while all of that is a good start, and certainly a big improvement in the US fiscal picture in the first three months of Trump’s regime, the big picture sadly remains a dismal one, largely because the US debt picture remains completely unsustainable, manifesting itself in $92.2 billion in interest payments in May…
… and a cumulative $1.2 trillion in gross interest expense per year, just $300 billion shy of the biggest spending category of them all: Social Security Spending.
That said, April’s bumper revenue aside, all five main spending categories are growing much faster than revenue, and something drastically has to change for this big picture to become viable. Unfortunately, we have now seen the wholsesale pushback Trump has faced when doing just that – trying to restructure a broken status quo – which is why unless Trump magically succeeds in this undertaking, the US is pretty much doomed (while DOGE’s achievements have been admirable, they are a drop in the bucket in the context of overall spending) as nobody else will ever come close to Trump’s intended overhaul of the US fiscal picture.
Abbott Deploys National Guard To San Antonio Ahead Of Wednesday Night ICE Protest
Setting himself in stark contrast to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has ordered a contingent of National Guard soldiers to San Antonio ahead of protests against the apprehensions of illegal aliens planned for Wednesday night and Saturday.
“Peaceful protests are part of the fabric of our nation, but Texas will not tolerate the lawlessness we have seen in Los Angeles,” Abbott’s press secretary said in a Tuesday night statement. “Anyone engaging in acts of violence or damaging property will be swiftly held accountable to the full extent of the law.”
News of the deployment of National Guard soldiers comes after lawless conduct by demonstrators in Austin on Monday night. Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) officers aided local police in managing a response that kept the theft and destruction to a minimum. “During Monday evening’s response, DPS personnel deployed tear gas and pepper ball projectiles to ensure officer safety and maintain order,” said DPS in a statement. Five arrests were made, with charges including felony criminal mischief and resisting arrest. Here’s video of the tear-gas deployment:
🚨UNLAWFUL ASSEMBLY:
Police declare the protest in Austin Texas an unlawful assembly‼️
Watch as police launch tear gas at Antifa / Anti ICE / Trans / LGBT protesters 🇺🇸
The Wednesday protest at City Hall in San Antonio promises to be just a warm-up for Saturday, when leftists are planning “No Kings Day Nationwide Day of Defiance” protests in cities all across the country — coinciding with a military parade in Washington to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the US Army (which also happens to be Trump’s 79th birthday). Saturday’s uprising is receiving organizational backing — or, at the very least, logistical support — from a web of nearly 200 groups, including a wide range of NGOs.
As Abbott deploys soldiers as a preventative measure, Newsom has filed for an emergency restraining order blocking Trump from dispatching troops to patrol Los Angeles, following four days of burning and looting and attacks on police. Abbott has aggressively deployed the National Guard before — to fend off invasions of Texas by illegal immigrants. In defiance of then-President Biden, he deployed troops to the Rio Grande border city of Eagle Pass, where the pace of illegal crossings reached a jaw-dropping 4,000 in a single day. Abbott even built a new, permanent military base in the vicinity — Forward Operating Base Eagle — to support his long-running, border-focused Operation Lone Star, which is a joint undertaking of the National Guard and DPS.
“The State of Texas stands ready to deploy all necessary personnel and resources to uphold law and order across our state,” said Abbott’s press secretary on Tuesday. “Texas National Guard soldiers are on standby in areas where mass demonstrations are planned in case they are needed.” Note that, while it’s certainly a “blue city,” San Antonio has a different culture than ultra-leftist Austin. Criminality like what was seen in Austin on Monday night is certain to provoke a public backlash and widespread endorsement of whatever counter-action Abbott’s soldiers and Texas DPS use to bring the hammer down:
Rioters in Austin, Texas steal chairs, tables, and signs from businesses, and dump them in the streets (most likely to help deter police) along with rental scooters, cones, street signs, barricades….
