The Trump 2.0 era has officially begun, and it’s off to a fast-paced start. In just a few days, we’ve seen sweeping changes, executive orders, and policy shifts that are already making waves. While political discussions abound, my focus here is on what really matters to traders and investors: the markets. Specifically, how will this new administration’s fiscal priorities impact market movements in the months and years ahead?
Setting the Stage: A Bull Market in Transition
As we stand today, markets are on the edge of all-time highs. This follows nearly two years of a relentless bull market that has pushed asset prices steadily higher. The key question is whether this momentum will continue in the Trump 2.0 environment, or whether we’re about to see a shift.
To answer that, we need to focus on the primary driver of markets over the past several years: fiscal flows. The fundamental idea here, rooted in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), is that government spending adds financial assets to the private sector. Those assets, whether saved or spent, ultimately funnel into financial markets, driving asset prices higher.
In short, fiscal flows are the lifeblood of the markets. When government spending accelerates, markets tend to follow suit. Conversely, when spending slows, so do markets.
If seeing the new world order sitting in the front row of Donald Trump’s inauguration didn’t send a chill down your spine then there may not be a lot of point reading beyond this line.
Much has been said about the oligarchy threatening America’s democracy. But this is not an oligarchy we are facing. It’s a plutocracy.
The difference is money. An oligarchy is a small group of people who have amassed power, while a plutocracy is a small group of wealthy people who have amassed power.
And you might think it is just semantics, but in this case, it matters.
These plutocrats own the public square. We carry around their devices in our pockets, they own our personal information, they know who we talk to, and who we listen to. We drive their cars, we fill our homes with their products, we shop on their platforms. American journalist Ken Klippenstein calls them the ‘appistocracy’ and they now have the ear of the ‘leader of the free world’ because their apps helped support his path to power.
Elon Musk has since turned his attention to UK politics, laying the groundwork through his ownership of one of the biggest social media platforms in the world to elevate his own beliefs and sew the seeds of discontent. No democracy is immune from the immense reach of the richest people on earth who are currently in a race to become the world’s first trillionaire, without care of who or what they crush to do it.
Allowing public hearings whenever in the public interest
The NACC can only hold public hearings in “exceptional circumstances” and when “it is in the public interest to do so”. The Hon Robert Redlich was the head of the Victorian anti-corruption watchdog, which is also only permitted to hold public hearings in “exceptional circumstances”. Redlich argues there is no need “to require ‘exceptional circumstances’”.
The NACC should instead be allowed to hold public hearings whenever it is in the public interest, regardless of whether the circumstances are exceptional or not. Public hearings would build trust and allow the commission to demonstrate that it is investigating corruption effectively and appropriately. They would also discourage corruption by showing the consequences for such behaviour.
In states across the country, left-wing academics and major educational establishments are hijacking the review process for K-12 history and civics curricula. Educators and radicals, in league with one another, are conspiring to turn students against America’s traditional cultural and political institutions.
Now that Critical Race Theory (CRT) is being exposed as ahistorical indoctrination, a new permutation of neo-Marxist theory is gaining currency in our schools. It’s called postcolonialism. Its stated mission is to fight “settler colonialism,” a term used to describe any society supposedly built upon the oppression and genocide of indigenous people. Examples of “settler societies” include Israel, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Canada, and the United States. The recentstudentactivism against Israel, which denied the country’s right to exist and celebrated terrorist attacks against it, demonstrated the true nature of postcolonialism and its power to inspire hatred on campus.
A transgender immigrant is suing over the mistreatment she suffered in a federal detention center, which includes being forced to undress in front of male prisoners.
Research from The Australia Institute has found the introduction of a government-funded cultural pass could revitalise Australia’s struggling live music sector.
The proposal, discussed in a recent inquiry into the challenges facing the Australian live music industry, aims to subsidise concert ticket costs for young people, encouraging greater participation in cultural events.
Key Findings:
80% of young Australians would attend more live music events if a $200 government-funded voucher were available.
European countries (including France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland) have successfully implemented similar initiatives, offering youth vouchers for cultural events.
Evidence from France shows that 66% of pass holders discovered new cultural venues, which more than 55% revisited after their pass expired.
The Australian live music industry is still recovering from the devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, with many venues and festivals facing ongoing financial challenges.
Investing in cultural passes could provide a much-needed boost to the sector, supporting Australian artists and increasing access to live music for young Australians.
“The evidence from Europe shows that cultural passes are an effective way of getting young people to engage with the arts,” said Morgan Harrington, Research Manager at The Australia Institute.
“For a small investment, the Commonwealth could give live music a huge boost.
While it is state laws that impose these draconian penalties, the Federal Government could secure the freedom to protest by legislating federal protections for peaceful protest, in line with Australia’s obligations under international agreements.
Whether it is women’s suffrage, the eight-hour workday or saving the Franklin River from being dammed, protest movements have been responsible for some of Australia’s most significant advances in human rights and environmental protection.
Una inmigrante transgénero está demandando por el maltrato que sufrió en un centro de detención federal, que incluye ser obligada a desvestirse frente a prisioneros varones.
The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.
Explore this case study of how a union campaign engaged with influencers on TikTok to amplify their message and build support.
These key insights are based on a presentation by Maddie Lucre, NSWNMA Campaigns and Communications Coordinator, at FWD+Organise, a conference held by Australian Progress in Narrm/Melbourne in December 2024.
The NSW Nurses and Midwives Association (NSWNMA) is campaigning to get fair and equal pay for nurses and midwives in NSW to be equivalent with other states around Australia. This campaign included two strikes and other protests and is still ongoing at the time of this piece being published. Find out more about the campaign.
Background
For 12 years, the Liberal-National Government in New South Wales, Australia enforced a restrictive industrial landscape for public sector workers. This was characterised by the implementation of a public sector wages cap, which was in place for 10-years between 2011 to 2022. This cap limited wage increases for public sector employees to 2.5% per year.
Join me tomorrow on my YouTube channel for a live Q&A at 4pm PT / 7pm ET. I will pull questions from the comments of this post, my X, and live on YouTube. We will discuss the future of Palestine under Trump. With the recent ceasefire and a new administration seemingly dedicated to the Zionist state, there is much context to be discussed and questions to answer. To post your questions here, you must be a paid subscriber to my Substack. Please attempt to keep your questions direct and relatively brief, as I cannot read entire paragraphs during the show.
Claremont Institute scholars, including me, Ed Erler, Tom West, John Marini, and Michael Anton, President Trump’s incoming Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, have been contending for years—decades, really—that the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause does not provide automatic citizenship for everyone born on U.S. soil, no matter the circumstances. Other prominent scholars, such as the late University of Texas law Professor Lino Graglia, University of Pennsylvania Professor Rogers Smith, and Yale Law Professor Emeritus Peter Schuck, have come to the same conclusion based on their own extensive scholarly research.
On this episode of Follow the Money, Australia Institute Executive Director Richard Denniss joins Ebony Bennett to examine the year ahead in federal politics and how the Trump presidency could impact Australia.
This discussion was recorded on Tuesday 21 January 2025 and things may have changed since recording.
Mary Shelley, in the preface to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, writes, “Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.” In the chaos of war and inequity, cartoonist Joe Sacco pioneered the first graphic illustration journalism. Sacco has covered some of the most devastating warzones such as in Bosnia, which gave birth to his book, “Safe Area Gorazde,” and Gaza, which inspired “Footnotes in Gaza,” a book host Chris Hedges calls, “A masterpiece… one of the finest books done on the Palestine-Israel conflict, hands down.”
Insiders say Pamela Paul is soon to be out of the New York Times’ Opinion section… so let’s talk about all of the awful stuff she wrote about trans people!
President Trump’s second term thrusts the question of birthright citizenship to the forefront of American politics: should the United States automatically grant citizenship to any child who happens to be born on U.S. soil? Neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution requires doing such a thing. Yet defenders of birthright shut down any debate by framing opposition as cruel and racist—and obviously wrong as a legal matter.
But there is a strong constitutional and moral case for limiting birthright citizenship. It’s the argument that led the Trump Administration to issue an executive order that defines a new status quo: going forward, children of illegal aliens won’t receive recognition of their citizenship by the U.S. Department of State or any other executive agency.
Start with the Constitution. The question of birthright citizenship goes back to the 14th Amendment, one of the three ratified in the immediate wake of the Civil War. The relevant portion reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The phrase at issue is “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” (known as the jurisdiction clause). Proponents of birthright maintain that the phrase merely means subject to the laws and courts of the United States.
The old World War II idiom certainly appears to ring true regarding President Trump’s plan to begin the much needed process of refocusing America’s foreign engagements. The subsequent tranche of articles decrying the alleged return of “American isolationism” by defenders of the crumbling American-led liberal international order should therefore not come as a surprise.
They tell us that failing to maintain a sprawling military-industrial framework of permanent alliances, defense guarantees, and logistical entanglements is akin to weakness—appeasement even—that will undermine U.S. national security.
Senator Mitch McConnell makes this exact argument in the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. The Republican senator’s lengthy article, “The Price of American Retreat,” is thorough and well-written. It articulates current challenges to U.S. hegemony on the world stage and identifies economic, political, and doctrinal elements of the U.S. force posture that are inadequate to the task of meeting those challenges.
Please recommend an institutional subscription to your academic library or employer (details here)
The debt ceiling was unsuspended January 1st of this year which means the debt ceiling is back. According to now-former Treasury secretary Janet Yellen, they began using “extraordinary measures” to avoid hitting the debt ceiling as of today. As regular readers know, I’ve long commented on the absurd political economy of the debt ceiling. I’ve lodged successfully FOIAs and released multiple memos related to the topic. In fact, I’ve written so much about the debt ceiling. that I think it's worthwhile to simply provide a chronological list of all the previous pieces I’ve written in recent years. To start with, The Guardian piece is my most basic primer on the Debt Ceiling and the recurrent concerns about debt ceiling driven default. But all the pieces, especially my Politico Op Ed, are worth a look.
On this episode of After America, Allan Behm and Dr Emma Shortis discuss Trump’s inauguration, his radical agenda to reshape American life and the United States’ role in the world, and how Australia can respond.
This discussion was recorded on Tuesday 21 January 2025 and things may have changed since recording.
Today, Donald Trump is inaugurated for his second term as President of the United States of America. It’s important that we acknowledge and remember who Republican lawmakers and the incoming President have marked as their greatest enemy: the transgender community.
It is the night before the second inauguration of Donald Trump as the President of the United States. I thought I would be agitated, but I am not. I am resolved. I feel a steely calm. I expect the coming Trump regime to be very bad, and I expect it will be worse than I can even anticipate. Yet I am as prepared for it as I can be: I fought hard as hell to avoid this, which means I have no regrets about my own role so far; I have been gathering as much reliable information as I can about what the Republican Fascists have in store for the country and the world; I have been slowly finding some organizations to follow and support because they seem to appreciate the gravity of the current moment and to be taking some concrete steps to fight back; I have been gathering my inner circle close to me and have been expanding my local activities and ties. I have also begun to figure out how to write some scholarship about legal topics without hiding or understating the precariousness of rule of law in the United States now and for the foreseeable future.
Tonight, I found myself remembering the hard times and serious challenges I have overcome in my own life, personal, professional, and political. This reminds me of my own values and the strength and courage I have to draw upon. I have also been thinking about those who have endured and struggled against dark political and social circumstances in the United States and elsewhere, historically and today. I am thankful for their examples and for a feeling of camaraderie and solidarity with them, across time and space.
At 12:01 pm today, Democracy Forward and CREW filed a lawsuit, seeking a halt to DOGE unless and until it comes into compliance with law regulating “federal advisory committees.” Here’s the complaint. Democracy Forward spearheads legal actions for a consortium of pro-democracy groups, several of whom are named plaintiffs along with CREW. The suit shows the value of sophisticated pro-democracy legal actions, though of course with the federal judiciary and Supreme Court riddled with Trump minions, we can’t know if rule of law will hold.
At the heart of the complaint is the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), a 1972 law Congress passed to curb Executive Branch use of secretive and unnecessary “advisory committees.” Congress wanted to make sure that industry and special interests couldn’t unduly make or influence executive policy and operations. FACA imposes procedural and substantive requirements to ensure advisory committees are kept to a minimum; have a balanced membership reflecting all those likely to be affected by any agency working with a committee; and have defined and public objectives, budgets, and operations. By law, advisory committees must provide for public input and make their own records publicly available.
One of the most critical questions of our time is whether the Westphalian system in which sovereign nation states remain the primary form of societal and political organization or if it will be replaced by some form of global government. The U.N. was formed to establish the latter, and unsurprisingly, it has devolved into a trade association for corrupt Third World governments. The time has come for the United States to reassert its status as a sovereign and independent nation and consider withdrawing from the U.N.
Essentially an attempt to revive the failed League of Nations under a new name, the U.N. was founded in June 1945 to prevent war by establishing a deliberative body which could resolve disputes in a peaceful manner. This was based on the belief that it was both feasible and desirable to establish a system where individual nations would depend on multilateral organizations instead of protecting their own national interests.
The adoption of the U.N. Charter was followed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which breathlessly declares it to be “a milestone document in the history of human rights.” It lays out “a common standard of achievements for all people and all nations,” including a list of “fundamental human rights to be universally protected.” Whoever wrote this platitudinous drivel was apparently unaware of Magna Carta or the U.S. Constitution.
The changes would double the tax on super balances of $3m and over, from 15% to 30%.
The vast majority of Australians can only dream of retiring with a super balance of $3 million. Most people end their working lives with just a fraction of that.
While the superannuation system has enabled the likes of farmers and small business owners to place assets such as farms and properties into their super, the number of those who do that is small and most – if not all – do so as a way of reducing the amount of tax they pay.
This is not what the superannuation system was designed to do.
In the most recent financial year, the Treasury Department estimated the concessions of superannuation earnings and contributions cost the government $51.7bn in foregone revenue. This compares to the cost of the Age Pension of $58.9b.
How can direct action campaigners use social media? Here are 2 case studies from Australia – Blockade Australia and Disrupt Burrup Hub. This article is the second installment in a two-part series focussing on the role of media in the strategies of Australian direct action climate groups. Read part one on traditional media here.
In the 21st century, social media has been utilised for political ends by a diverse range of actors. For example, progressive activists used Twitter to organise and network during the Arab Spring uprisings and Occupy protests of the early 2010s.
More than a decade later, tech billionaire Elon Musk bought the same platform and renamed it as X. He transformed it into a key component of a right-wing online media ecosystem that was a key contributor to Donald Trump’s 2024 reelection. Clearly, social media platforms can be both powerful and volatile.
If these companies were adequately taxed, federal and state governments would have more money to spend on healthcare, education, infrastructure and more money to spend on the arts.
When a local author publishes a book, they sign an agreement with a company for their work to be edited, designed and published, then sold to readers.
For each book sold, the author is entitled to a royalty or a share of the total revenue the publisher received for selling the book.
If they’re lucky, the rights will sell internationally, and the book will be available around the world. In each territory, on each sale, the author will receive a small cut.
When Australia allows fossil fuel companies to extract resources without paying royalties or even any tax, it would be like local authors giving their finished manuscripts to companies such as Penguin Random House or Allen & Unwin and not expecting to see any money from the sales of books sold locally.
It would be like those companies, who profited off local book sales not paying any tax.
Aside from failing to collect adequate tax, Australia also offers generous subsidies – including over $14 billion in fossil fuel subsidies across state and territory governments in 2023.
Meanwhile, Australia provides a fraction of the funding which organisations and individuals need to make art.
How should direct action campaigners use mainstream media? Here are 2 case studies from Australia – Blockade Australia and Disrupt Burrup Hub. This article is part one of two on the role of media in the strategies of Australian direct action climate groups. Read Part 2 – How Disruptive Climate Campaigners use Social Media.
If no one reports on your blockade of fossil fuel infrastructure, was your disruption effective?
The grassroots of the climate movement often deploy nonviolent direct action as a tactic. Activists target fossil fuel companies and projects in order to reduce emissions and cause cost and delay for big polluters. But it’s not just about material disruption. Most of the time, direct action practitioners are also trying to spread a message. For that, they rely on traditional media, including newspapers, radio, television, and online news websites.
Activists often use the amount and sentiment of media coverage they receive as key metrics of an action’s success –
Treasury yields have been climbing steadily, particularly on the long end of the curve, sparking renewed chatter from macro bears who see this as the harbinger of an impending crisis. If you’ve followed my content for a while, you won’t be surprised when I say: this isn’t the disaster they’re hoping for. Let’s break down why yields are rising, debunk some common macro bear arguments, and explore the dynamics behind this shift.
Why Are Yields Rising?
At its core, rising yields boil down to one thing: investor expectations. Specifically, expectations for future growth and inflation are now higher than they were just months ago. As markets anticipate stronger economic performance, this is being priced into the long end of the yield curve.
But there’s more to it than just investor sentiment. Understanding this phenomenon requires addressing two pervasive myths propagated by those forecasting doom: the “debt crisis” narrative and the “lack of demand for treasuries” argument.
Debunking the Debt Crisis Myth
One popular theory among macro bears is that the U.S. is on the brink of a debt crisis, fueled by the notion that our national debt is unsustainable. This view ignores some fundamental principles of monetary and fiscal policy in the United States.
Mr. Assange was released from custody in June following a 14-year legal battle which only ended when he was forced to plead guilty to a charge of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified documents.
The signatories to the letter say Mr. Assange’s conviction should be set aside, and he should be granted a Presidential pardon, a power often exercised by US Presidents in their final days in office.
“Mr. Assange’s recent conviction under the United States Espionage Act sets a deeply troubling precedent for press freedom globally,” the letter states, adding that the deal which forced him to plead guilty in exchange for his freedom sets a “dangerous precedent (and) endangers journalists worldwide, whilst simultaneously undermining both Australia and the United States’ longstanding commitment to press freedom and democratic accountability.”
The signatories include independent MPs Zoe Daniel, Helen Haines, Monique Ryan, David Pocock, Kylea Tink and Andrew Wilkie, as well as senior members of the Human Rights Law Centre, the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance and The Australia Institute.
Last year, the Biden administration brought the pursuit of Julian Assange to an end. But his prosecution still sets a dangerous precedent for press freedom globally,” said Dr Emma Shortis, Director of the International & Security Affairs Program at The Australia Institute and a signatory to the open letter to President Biden.
