The Gilt Trip: Tariffs, Baby Bonds, and the Return of the Robber Baron-in-Chief
Gilded Age Meets Golden Age
Tariffs set the tempo, cradle subsidies sweeten the chorus, and Wall Street parties like it’s 1899 while the rest of the world pays the cover charge.
America is gilding itself again. The White House tweets read like bond-market telegrams, the Dow pops champagne at every executive order, and even Pittsburgh’s old smokestacks are being reborn as crypto-mines. Donald Trump’s encore performance is equal parts Mar-a-Lago glitz and Carnegie-era muscle—only this time the spreadsheets are cloud-native and the algorithms trade faster than a gilded-age telegraph.
Policy Pulse — Deregulation on Demand
Trump’s first fortnight unleashed a blizzard of directives: environmental permitting trimmed to 120 days, AI sandbox rules that let start-ups test without lawyers, and a capital-flow green light that reads like a love letter to private equity. GDP printed a glittering +3 % in Q2, but peel back the headline and first-half core growth sits at 1.25 %. Labor’s slice of national income is now thinner than anything seen since Vanderbilt’s heyday, yet investors can’t hear the complaints over the ringing of cash registers.
Tariff Dominance — Pay the Toll, Praise the Toll-Keeper
The EU’s “Reciprocity Compact” is less treaty, more term sheet: two-year tariff exemptions for steel and batteries in exchange for farm access and tech blueprints. Tokyo and Seoul, keen to keep F-35s in the hangar, rubber-stamp similar deals. Beijing plays pragmatic ping-pong—buying Midwest soy while piloting another digital-yuan test open to U.S. tech. At the WTO, delegates half-joke that “rules-based order” now translates to “Washington-approved exceptions.” Multilateralism has never felt so bilateral.
Labor Watch — Tepid Prints in a Trumpian Boom
Nonfarm payrolls for July are projected to rise by just 115,000—anemic by any historical standard, but downright surreal given the market’s risk-on euphoria. It’s the kind of print that screams “soft landing” while quietly flagging structural cracks. Wall Street shrugs, of course—buybacks, rate-cut dreams, and deregulation headlines have all but sedated the bond vigilantes. But under the hood, labor’s pulse is slowing. If Trump’s gilded age redux is supposed to roar, it may be running low on workers before it even gets out of third gear.
The Newborn Race — Baby Bonds vs. Birth Bounties
Demography is destiny again. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act seeds every U.S. newborn from 2025-28 with a $1 000 “Trump Account,” matched up to $5 000 a year and parked in low-volatility ETFs or tokenised Treasuries until age 21. The pitch: turn cribs into capital stacks and bankroll future home down-payments.
China, sensing an existential population crunch, counters with subsidies that can crest $14 000 per child, plus paid leave and corporate kick-ins to local “birth funds.” Europe experiments, but without the fireworks. 2025 marks the year fertility became a macro lever as important as chips or rare earths.
Diplomatic Calculus — A Detour for Taipei
Hardball on tariffs, soft edges on geopolitics. U.S. authorities quietly deny Taiwan’s prime minister a New York layover en route to Paraguay, citing “logistics.” Markets see the real script: a nod to Xi Jinping to keep trade talks tidy. TSMC stock wobbles, then settles on whispers of easier mainland licensing. Washington’s signal: economic détente first, symbolism later.
Data Deluge — Numbers with Teeth
Microsoft and Meta smash AI-inflated earnings forecasts; Apple performs, tariffs be damned; Amazon falls short.
ADP jobs blow past expectations, emboldening Fed hawks who suddenly have two dissenters at the table.
Consumer confidence torpedoes the “vibes recession” meme, yet core PCE drifts lower and housing looks queasy.
Traders keep buying dips—algorithms are programmed that way.
Bottom Line
Trump’s second term isn’t governance; it’s orchestration. Tariffs set the tempo, baby bonds keep the chorus hopeful, and every diplomatic card is another chip on a sprawling negotiation table. Gilded eras glimmer, but they also corrode. Keep one eye on the shine, the other on the fault lines.
In The Markets
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