Friday News Roundup
Donald Blinks on Tariffs
Mark Carney, the current interim Prime Minister of Canada, is an extremely strategically shrewd banker. He served as the governor of the Bank of Canada from 2008 to 2013 and as governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020. Carney has just recently used his experience as a banker to force Donald Trump to back down from his aggressive tariff policy.
According to a March 12, 2025 post on the Canadian government’s own website, dated about three weeks before the announcement of Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, Canada launched a 5-year global bond denominated in US dollars that was worth $3.5 billion.
After quietly increasing holdings in U.S. Treasury bonds, Canada met with Japan and several EU members to determine how they could collectively flex their economic muscles by selling off Treasury bonds at the right time. On April 9, Canadian Prime Minister Carney finally implemented his “slow bleed” strategy, which involved Canada, Japan, and the UK gradually selling off their U.S. bond holdings. Since Canada, Japan, and the UK hold more than $2.5 trillion collectively in U.S. Treasury bonds, the slow sell-off signals to U.S. policy makers that it could get a lot worse before it gets better. One consequence is that the interest rates on 30-year mortgages will now increase, which constrains housing supply even more, exacerbates inflations, and may make it impossible for the Fed to cut interest rates later.
Canada’s strategic play certainly got Wall Street to take notice. The bond sell-off led American financial markets to worry that the United States is losing safe-haven status among international investors. Even after Trump announced a 90-day pause in tariffs (with the “pause” mostly directed at countries involved in the bond sell-off), it still wasn’t enough to stop the slow bleeding in the bond markets, which investors referred to as a complete “rout.”
Meanwhile, in a recent G7 phone conference, Canada and Japan pledged to EU members present that they would work jointly together in stabilizing global financial markets. Under previous administrations, the United States would usually be present as a senior partner on such a call, but for this conference, the United States was not even present for the call.
DOGE Watch
The AFL-CIO raised concerns that Elon Musk’s DOGE operatives have access to databases at the Department of Labor that would expose whistleblowers at Musk’s factories to retaliation. One of the DOGE employees with potential access to whistleblower info is Marco Elez, the Elon operative rehired despite a history of both security breaches and racist social media posts. Safety conditions at Musk’s factories have previously been so bad that at least one worker at a Tesla factory in Austin was fatally electrocuted.
Although Elon Musk had previously claimed that DOGE employees would not cost U.S. taxpayers any money, a recent unsigned agreement between DOGE and the U.S. Department of Labor shows that to be a lie. The agreement represents a contract to pay out $1.3 million to four DOGE employees over 3 years. This works out to a pay rate of $217,000 for the DOGE employees, even though the pay range for elite, experienced civil servants tops out at $195K. One of Elon’s operatives at the Department of Labor is Miles B. Collins, a startup founder tied to the pronatalist movement who also co-owns the Pacific Fertility Center of Los Angeles with his wife. According to a least one source, Collins is responsible for wage theft of his employees at the fertility center.
One rationale for DOGE is that it’s all about efficiency and budget-cutting. This is a lie. According to recent research posted by political scientist Adam Bonica, DOGE has primarily limited its targets to government agencies perceived as liberal, rather than looking for improved efficiency across the board. As Bonica stated, “The hardest hit agencies are those that regulate industry, protect public health, and expand access to education. Meanwhile, conservative-leaning agencies remain largely untouched. If this were about efficiency, we’d expect an even spread. Instead, we see clear ideological bias.”