April 9, 2025

Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.

The Dollar Could Be Under Attack And The Fed Might Need To Get On Wartime Footing  

By Robert Romano 

“This would be a PERFECT time for Fed Chairman Jerome Powell to cut Interest Rates. He is always ‘late,’ but he could now change his image, and quickly.” 

That was President Donald Trump on Truth Social on April 4 urging Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to begin the process of cutting interest rates, something the central bank usually undertakes towards the end of the economic cycle after peak inflation and as unemployment is rising.  

Trump said that inflation was in the rear-view mirror, noting recent drops in energy and food prices, and also interest rates, arguing, “Energy prices are down, Interest Rates are down, Inflation is down, even Eggs are down 69%, and Jobs are UP, all within two months - A BIG WIN for America. CUT INTEREST RATES, JEROME, AND STOP PLAYING POLITICS!” 

Here, Trump has a point. Since his April 2 announcement of reciprocal tariffs against trade partners around the world, the price of oil has plummeted from $72 to about $57, a 22 percent drop. 

Eggs are down, too, from more than $8 a dozen to just $3.26 a dozen, nearly a 60 percent drop, according to the latest data compiled by the Department of Agriculture. 

On interest rates, at the time of the President’s April 4 post, it was certainly true that interest rates were dropping amid the flight to safety last week, with 10-year U.S. treasuries briefly dropping below 4 percent. However, the trend has reversed as certain institutional investors have been selling off bonds at the same time equities and commodities contracts were selling off, with 10-year treasuries hitting 4.44 percent as of this writing.   

There is usually an inverse relationship between that of equities and commodities and that of bonds. When interest rates are high, it can discourage investment in the economy via traditional vehicles like stocks. The rationale is that investors can get a better rate of return by lending money than investing — that was certainly true in the 1970s amid high inflation and interest rates — but also because the cost of borrowing can become cost prohibitive. 

However, when equities and commodities then take a hit, as they are now, the traditional response is for markets to buy bonds, particularly treasuries, a practice that usually has the near-term impact of lowering interest rates. It is therefore very curious to see stocks, commodities and bonds all selling off simultaneously.  

Bloomberg.com’s Alice Atkins wrote on April 8 the bond selloff could in part be fueled by China selling treasuries in response to the U.S. tariffs. But also that hedge fund “basis trading” could be having a major impact: “[t]he basis trade — a popular hedge fund strategy that profits from the difference between cash Treasuries and futures — may be unwinding and causing yields to surge.” 

Whatever the cause, foreigners dumping treasuries or hedge funds, the impact of higher interest rates when the economy is taking a hit could be a double whammy. Unemployment is already up since Jan. 2023 by about 1.3 million as inflation has slowed. When that starts happening, that is usually a signal for the Fed to begin cutting interest rates, as Trump has been suggesting. 

In 2020, when a selloff in treasuries happened amid the Covid economic lockdowns and the basis trade unwinding — unemployment was also going to the moon — it was also a signal that the Fed needed to intervene in bond markets to purchase treasuries. That could very well be the case here as well.   

As it is, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has articulated that the U.S. policy at the moment is for a strong dollar, which will help bring costs down for Main Street. And so it might be concerning that these movements in bond and currency markets have cause the dollar to temporarily weaken.  

As it relates to China, if the U.S. were potentially skidding into kinetic conflict — certainly one hopes that can be avoided but the U.S. must prepare for the worst — one thing to anticipate would be an all-out assault on the dollar with higher rates being weaponized, which would undermine for example America’s ability to finance military production. It is certainly a national security risk that shouldn’t be discounted. 

Powell may not be a wartime consigliere but for now, the U.S. is stuck with him, and we might need to get on a wartime footing very quickly. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln had to resort to self-financing with greenbacks when foreign lending dried up and was cost prohibitive. Trump clearly hopes to engage in peaceful trade negotiations to rebalance the U.S. economic relationship with the world, but Beijing might not see it that way. 

The Fed doesn’t get to set fiscal and trade policy, which falls upon our elected leaders, any more so than it could have wished the Covid economic lockdowns away. Trump could be right, it might indeed be time for the Fed to begin cutting rates and buying bonds again. Whatever disagreement there is with the President’s policies, the treasuries market should be defended at all costs from any selloff, especially if the dollar is being attacked. Whatever prior schedule Powell was on might be out the window. 

Robert Romano is the Executive Director of Americans for Limited Government Foundation.  

To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2025/04/the-dollar-could-be-under-attack-and-the-fed-might-need-to-get-on-wartime-footing/ 

Democrats Launch New Anti-Trump ‘War Room’ To Push Propaganda Into Digital Spaces  

By Manzanita Miller  

In their latest effort to combat President Donald Trump’s America First policy initiatives, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is launching a “war room”, which appears to be nothing more than a propaganda machine aimed at criticizing and undermining the Trump Administration online.   

According to a statement from newly anointed DNC Chair Ken Martin  the “war room” will be “updating people in real time and around the clock” to combat the Trump administration’s “reckless agenda.”       

Democrats using their mouthpieces in the mainstream media to misrepresent the facts and undermine conservatives is certainly nothing new – but what is telling about the DNC’s new “war room” is its focus on combatting conservative messaging in digital spaces like podcasts and TikTok.  

The DNC is apparently waking up to the fact that Democrats have lost control of the cultural narrative, and a large part of why is because conservatives have been using decentralized digital spaces to share information in an increasingly successful way.   

To regain control of the culture and recoup losses among young and independent voters – who largely distrust mainstream news – Democrats are launching their new “war room” to combat conservative voices in online spaces.  

Party officials will be using “creative opposition tactics” and “aggressive daily messaging to counter the Trump administration” in digital spaces, according to an article from The Hill.    

The fact that Democrats are launching a digital “war room” to attack Trump from a third angle – after bludgeoning him in the mainstream media and mainstream academia since 2015 – says a lot about the party’s plans to regain power.  

Democrats are finally becoming aware of the dwindling power the mainstream media has over an increasing swathe of the American public, and they are realizing that dismissing conservative views on the nightly news is not an effective strategy any longer.   

Not only are less Americans tuning in to traditional news, but trust in the mainstream media is at an all-time low. A Gallup poll from February found that trust in television news is second from the bottom in a list of seventeen institutions, with only Congress coming in lower in terms of trust. Americans mistrust the mainstream news by 44 points – 56 percent to 12 percent – according to the survey.      

Polling has also consistently shown that the very groups Democrats were utterly shocked to relinquish to Republicans in 2024 – young people and minorities as well as independent voters – are the groups who are tuning out of mainstream news and finding their information in decentralized digital spaces.       

Among young people, trust in mainstream news has plummeted over the past two decades according to the February Gallup poll, with a sharp decline after President Trump’s first term. Today, 31 percent of young Democrats and Democratic leaning independents hold a great deal or fair amount of trust in mainstream media, down from 50 percent in 2003. Among young Republicans, a mere 20 percent hold a fair or great deal of trust in mainstream media, down from 50 percent in 2003.   

According to a 2024 survey from the American Press Institute and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, young people and minorities are more likely to get their news from decentralized sources including social media. The poll found that young people, Black voters, and Latino voters, are more likely to express a great deal of confidence in the reliability of social media as a source of election news, according to the Associated Press.  

Given the Democratic Party’s catastrophic losses in the 2024 election among groups who seek their news from decentralized online spaces, and the decline in overall trust in the mainstream media, it is no wonder the DNC is hoping to insert itself into digital spaces with an anti-Trump narrative.  

Whether Democrats are able to successfully message in decentralized digital spaces is difficult to predict. A few well-placed left-wing podcasts could certainly take off with the right angle, but generally speaking decentralized media ends up churning out more independent and conservative viewpoints. That is one reason Democrats are often crying to tech giants to implement censorship on their platforms, because conservative views are being elevated.  

Take into account data scientist David Shor’s deep dive into the aftermath of the 2024 election that found a correlation between use of TikTok – the decentralized social networking app popular among Millennials and Gen Z – and voters moving toward conservatives.    

Shor’s research, based on analysis of 26 million survey respondents from 8 million people found that users who cited TikTok as their news source swung nearly six percentage points away from Democrats in 2024, nearly three times the number of points Broadcast and local TV watchers swung.   

While that is one study of app usage and political movement it does lend credence to the concept that decentralized digital spaces, free from top-down institutional narratives, are more likely to give birth to a healthy critique of mainstream culture.   

Whether the DNC is able to successfully insert it’s anti-Trump agenda into digital spaces remains to be seen, but the entire premise of digital media is that it is decentralized. The voices of citizen-journalists carry just as much weight as those of institutional figureheads, and the people decide which ideas get shared and elevated.  

Manzanita Miller is the senior political analyst at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.  

To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2025/04/democrats-launch-new-anti-trump-war-room-to-push-propaganda-into-digital-spaces/  

ALG Urges House To Disapprove CFPB Overdraft Price Control Midnight Rulemaking 

April 9, 2025, Fairfax, Va.—Americans for Limited Government Executive Director Robert Romano today issued the following statement urging the House to enact S.J. Res. 18 that disapproves of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Dec. 30, 2024 midnight rulemaking on overdraft fees: 

“On its way out the door the Biden administration enacted a number of midnight regulations, one of them being the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s rushed rulemaking imposing price controls on overdraft fees. Overdraft fees serve an important function in banking when bank customers need to cover transactions that exceed their current balance, acting as a temporary loan to the customer as the transactions are covered. Without the fees, banks might not be able to broadly provide overdraft services, which serve as a vital backstop when customers are temporarily short on cash. Americans for Limited Government strongly urges House passage of S.J. Res. 18 to do away with CFPB’s misguided regulation that would only further limit consumer options in financial services.” 

To view online: https://getliberty.org/2025/04/alg-urges-house-to-disapprove-cfpb-overdraft-price-control-midnight-rulemaking/