Trump is waging war on financiers

July 12-18, 2025

Big news. Donald Trump signed three laws passed by Congress: the Genius Act, the Clarity Act, and the Anti-CBD for stablecoins. Without going into details that are clearly not related to macroeconomics, we should note that these laws are not intended to improve the health of the US financial system. This is impossible. They are aimed at weakening the US financial elite as much as possible and, in fact, making the Treasury (the source of federal debt) an alternative issuer of funds for US economic entities.

In fact, money surrogates have been legalized, which means that the role of the dollar is automatically reduced. Which is what we see in practice (see the last section of the Review). In reality, this reduction will be temporary (since taxes in the US will still have to be paid in dollars), but part of the domestic turnover will be replaced by the aforementioned stablecoins. That is, the domestic demand for dollars will decrease.

Macroeconomics. Once again, a large portion of information about the state of affairs in China has arrived. The data for June is ambiguous, but overall it came out better than expected.

The annual GDP dynamics also worsened, to +5.2%:

Fixed capital investment slowed to a record low (excluding Covid) of +2.8% per year. The real estate sector is primarily to blame (-11.2%):

The absolute value of investments in the first half of the year fell to the level of 2014:

In contrast, industrial production accelerated from +5.8% to +6.8% (expected +5.6%) thanks to almost all extractive and manufacturing industries:

At the same time, capacity utilization slowed to one of the worst values in 9 years, 74.0%:

How this happened at the same time requires special study. But it is quite possible that the trick is that the statistical methods are different and not consistent with each other.

Retail sales growth has shrunk from +6.4% to +4.8% per year, and monthly it was even -0.18%, the worst dynamics since November 2022:

Housing prices are falling at the lowest rate in 14 months (-3.2% per year). However, the negative trend remains, as monthly indicators have not been able to go into positive territory for 2 years now:

Finally, China’s annual loan debt growth remains record weak (+7.1% per year):

It is quite difficult to imagine the combination of all the above indicators. So, most likely, this is the result of attempts by statistical agencies to improve the indicators a little. At the same time, it was not possible to agree on all the parameters (a common thing in a situation of a structural crisis).

Canada’s net CPI (consumer inflation index) (+2.7% per year) at its peak in 1.5 years:

As is the UK’s overall CPI (+3.6% p.a.):

The number of employees in Britain receiving wages fell by 41 thousand per month. This is the 5th minus in a row and the worst dynamics in the history of observations, if we exclude the Covid surges:

And the unemployment rate is at its highest since January 2017 (again, without taking into account Covid):

Australia’s unemployment rate (4.3%) is at its highest in 3.5 years:

Japan’s 10-year government bond yields at their highest since 2008 ahead of parliamentary elections (this Sunday):

There are no elections planned in Germany, but that hasn’t stopped the yield on 30-year government bonds from reaching a 14-year high:

Indonesia’s central bank cuts rate by 0.25% to 5.25% (as expected) –

Main conclusions. Mistrust of the dollar has grown, including due to Trump’s crypto laws. As a result, the price of platinum and silver have updated 11- and 14-year peaks, respectively:

The same reasons are pushing Bitcoin to rise in price, it has already reached $123,000:

It should be noted that the hints of growth in real inflation in the US that appeared in the press are not so fundamental. The fluctuations of this indicator are within the usual norm and do not carry any special information. By the way, as well as data on the entire volume of industrial goods:

Let’s note two more circumstances. The first is the prices for electricity for the main developed countries of the world:

The rise in prices is obvious and only the US is trying with titanic efforts to prevent their increase. Which is understandable – the industry is not growing anyway, and if electricity prices go up…

The second chart is one of the US stock indices, companies with “small” capitalization. It speaks for itself, there is no need to even comment on anything:

Small companies cannot get their share of the issue – and here is the result. It is already worse than it was during the Covid crisis.

But there is one good news. Judging by indirect political moments, the collapse of financial markets will not happen until autumn. And this means that our readers not only have additional time to prepare for the crisis, but also have the opportunity to enjoy the summer and holidays! Which is what we wish for them!