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    Trump’s TACO Today Designed to Manipulate Markets

    Al Punto Hoy from ANASTACIO ALEGRIABy No hay comentarios7 Views
    Trump’s TACO Today Designed to Manipulate Markets
    Trump’s TACO Today Designed to Manipulate Markets

    Trump’s TACO today employed one of the key elements of U.S. strategy in the Ramadan War on Iran: using deception to influence financial markets.

    Trump Says Jump, Markets Say ‘How High?’

    Trump’s TACO today postponed his threat of Saturday, March 31 to “hit and obliterate (Iran’s) various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST” early this morning. just in time to reassure the markets, but after Yves’ daily Iran War update.

    Here’s what Trump posted on Truth Social:

    I AM PLEASED TO REPORT THAT THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND THE COUNTRY OF IRAN, HAVE HAD, OVER THE LAST TWO DAYS, VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS REGARDING A COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION OF OUR HOSTILITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST. BASED ON THE TENOR AND TONE OF THESE IN DEPTH, DETAILED, AND CONSTRUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS, WHICH WILL CONTINUE THROUGHOUT THE WEEK, I HAVE INSTRUCTED THE DEPARTMENT OF WAR TO POSTPONE ANY AND ALL MILITARY STRIKES AGAINST IRANIAN POWER PLANTS AND ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE FOR A FIVE DAY PERIOD, SUBJECT TO THE SUCCESS OF THE ONGOING MEETINGS AND DISCUSSIONS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP

    The markets responded as expected:

    The Kobeissi letter detailed Trump’s TACO and the market’s response:

    And the by now inevitable accusations of Trump insiders manipulating prediction markets for personal profit are already flying:

    The Age of Lies Can’t Last Forever

    I wrote last year about what I’ve called The Interregnum of Unreality which depends on a shared pretense that the western financial markets are robust and the American military is undefeatable.

    I’ve also posted about what Hakan Illatikdi calls “The Spodocene.”

    As a refresher, let me quote Illatikdi again:

    Nothing seems to have changed, and yet everything is about to change.

    Our era is exactly there.

    The Spodocene is not yet the next state. It is the antechamber. The system continues to function, but it does so erratically, inefficiently and increasingly violently against itself. The energy that circulates no longer produces order, but friction. The mechanisms that once guaranteed stability — markets, institutions, narratives of progress — continue to operate, but have lost their ability to structure the whole. The result is not immediate collapse, but prolonged instability: a social, political and subjective warming that heralds an inevitable transition.

    Others are noticing something is off here as well.

    Market Manipulation as Military Strategy

    Matt Stoller’s Big Newsletter yesterday focused on what he called “a weird part of Trump’s Iran war strategy.”

    Here’s how Matt breaks it down:

    …the Trump administration has focused on manipulating markets as part of their war strategy. The most important scorecard for the White House is the value of stocks, so they cannot let them fall. That’s true for a number of reasons. The administration is composed of rich men, and they do not want to lose money. Also, the GOP establishment is run by Wall Street, so Trump’s hold on the Republicans falls apart if equities truly fall. We’ll see how loyal his MAGA base is with the Dow in a 1970s style downdraft; already there are signs they are getting frustrated, with his approval on gas prices at just 27%, vs 66% disapprove. That’s eating into his core.

    More importantly, the American-led hegemonic order really is centered on the U.S. stock market and dollar denominated assets. 18% of our equities are owned by foreigners, and Trump’s domestic economic framework is organized around pulling foreign investment into America to build data centers. So if the market craters, that agenda falls apart, Arab allies lose their financial stake in the system, and Iran will sense weakness. But of course, manipulation can’t be the endgame. In the short-term, you can spin, but to actually persuade the markets you are winning in the long run you have to actually win on the ground.

    Stoller then proceeds to document how the Trump regime has manipulated markets during each of the first four weeks of the war.

    First by timing the attacks for early on a Saturday morning to avoid shocking the markets. In the second and third weeks Trump issued statements to calm and then lift the markets. In week four, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant claimed that the Strait of Hormuz was increasingly open to oil flows.

    Stoller’s piece dropped yesterday, after Trump’s Saturday threats but before Trump’s TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) this morning, but he did note one important thing:

    It’s a very odd situation, to have military threats and timing dictated in part by what will worry speculators. But the half-life of these kinds of comments is shortening; I suspect the market will continue its slow slide. Market participants, and political opponents, are giving less credence to Bessent and Trump, because it’s clear they aren’t in control of the situation.
    …
    It surprised me that it’s taken this long for investors to catch on to the market manipulation. For the most part, Wall Street has gone along with the Trump administration’s spin. I don’t generally think speculators are gullible. But in this case, they have been. Iran, to them, has no credibility in the markets. On CNBC, Jim Cramer veers between confidence the war is over, and disbelief that this war is not under Trump’s control. Unlike his usual schtick of calling CEOs or billionaires and asking them what big money is going to do, he has no sources in Iran he can call.

    But not everyone is as easily fooled by Trump’s TACO as Jim Cramer.

    What If I Told You No Talks Are Happening?

    Sky News by contrast has sources to call in Israel, and even they are doubting Trump:

    Even administration mouthpiece Axios had to report Iran’s denial that any such negotiations are being held with the Trump administration, despite Trump’s TACO and their own (seemingly false) report of the 16th:

    Iran denied any such talks had taken place and claimed Trump was just trying to calm the energy markets.

    An Israeli official told Axios that U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner had been in touch with the speaker of the Iranian parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.

    Trump did not name the Iranian interlocutor, saying he did not want to get him killed, but claimed the U.S. and Iran were aligned on many of the key issues. “We are dealing with a man that I believe is the most respected, not the supreme leader, we have not heard from him,” Trump said.

    Despite Trump’s claims of growing consensus, a source with knowledge of the discussions said there did not appear to have been any direct talks yet between Ghalibaf and Trump’s team,

    Ghalibaf himself denied that any “negotiations” had taken place and called the U.S. claims an effort to manipulate markets and “escape the quagmire in which the U.S. and Israel are trapped.”

    The source said Egypt, Pakistan and Turkey passed messages between the U.S. and Iran on Sunday and were attempting to set up a call on Monday between Ghalibaf and Trump’s team.

    Drop Site News has more on the Iranian denials (via AliceX):

    Iran immediately dismissed his claims. “Fake news is intended to manipulate financial and oil markets and to escape the quagmire in which America and Israel are trapped,” wrote Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the Speaker of Iran’s parliament, in a post on X.

    A senior Iranian official confirmed to Drop Site that “no new developments have occurred” between Washington and Tehran. The official was not authorized to make public statements and spoke on condition of anonymity. The U.S. has continued to send messages through third countries, he said, but Iran has only reiterated its position and has not engaged in any back and forth.

    “There aren’t any negotiations taking place. The Iranian side has simply communicated its conditions to them and even that has been done indirectly,” the official said. He added that Iranian officials had previously expressed their position on ending the war in general terms to regional countries acting as intermediaries, but that they “firmly deny” claims that any talks had taken place between Iranian and American officials.

    According to the official, Iran’s conditions for an end to the war include a simultaneous ceasefire in Iran, Lebanon, and Iraq. Iran has consistently said that it will not accept a ceasefire similar to the one requested by Israel and the U.S. that ended the “12-Day War” in June 2025.

    Deception is the Trump regime’s go-to tactic, but it is also a deeply rooted Western strategy.

    The West’s Most Dangerous Weapon and Iran’s Counter

    Anti-Zionist Israeli Alon Mizrahi addressed the deep strategies at play with Trump’s TACO and Iran’s response:

    What is the West’s most lethal most dangerous weapon?

    It is not even something we think about as a weapon. It is not a missile. It is not a ship. It is not an airplane.

    The West’s strategic and most danger dangerous weapon is the lie.
    …
    This is the centerpiece of western identity. The lie, the lie of freedom, the lie of democracy, the lie of prosperity, the lie of equality, the lie of seeking peace, the lie of diplomacy, the lie of feminism, the lie of green energy and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on. It is endless.

    We live in a world made completely of lies. No part of the world that we see in the west and anywhere that’s influenced by the west is true. No part

    As observers of the Ukraine War and the Iran-Israel missile exchanges have long suspected, tactical lying is a known part of U.S. military doctrine:

    But let’s go back to Mizrahi for his explanation of Iran’s fiendish counter-strategy:

    Iran’s weapon in this war is the truth.

    And what Iran has been doing is cutting through the fake fabricated engineered existence that the west and westerns powers have assumed is going to go on forever unchallenged, unbroken and I’m going to give you some examples.

    The idea that Iran’s Arab neighbors, the western puppets, can create this fake reality, this American made, …fake bubble, this fake world where money from oil flows endlessly and they can buy the whole world and every sports team and media outlet and skyscraper and piece of infrastructure that they want anywhere in the world while oppressing their people and being really slave regimes, slave systems while relying on the US to sustain this fake false structure is now collapsing.

    Iran has made this lie null and void. It’s gone. It’s dead. Iran introduced truth to the Persian Gulf. Now, all the illusions and the lies and the stories that the West tried to tell about the Persian Gulf, about Dubai, they are gone. They are gone.

    And Iran managed to do this by using its power strategically, thoughtfully, not in a wild and savage way, in a very strategic manner.

    This is one lie that Iran killed and the West is now weakened for it. Because every time you remove a a layer of lies, the west shrinks and is revealed in its true monstrous identity or character.

    The other lie that Iran exposed and is now gone out the window is the idea that the US is this unstoppable military that no one can contend with, no one can withstand, no one. They just crush. They just crush.

    Exposed as a lie. The US can do nothing to open the Strait of Hormuz. They can do nothing. They can do nothing. That the two aircraft carriers that the US sent to destroy Iran now ran away.

    Israeli dissidents are not the only ones noticing.

    The New York Times Calls Out Trump’s TACO & Lies

    The editorial board of the U.S. paper of record called out Trump’s lies this weekend:

    From his first announcement of the attack on Iran on Feb. 28, President Trump has issued a stream of falsehoods about the war. He has said Iran wants to engage in negotiations, though its government shows no sign of it. He has claimed that the United States “destroyed 100% of Iran’s Military capability” when Tehran continues to inflict damage throughout the region. He has said the war is almost complete even as he calls in reinforcements from around the globe.

    …

    Yet lying about war is uniquely corrosive. When a president signals that the truth does not matter in wartime, he encourages his cabinet and his generals to mislead the country and one another about how the war is going. He creates a culture in which deadly mistakes and even war crimes can become more common. He makes it harder to win by hiding the realities of conflict and by making allies wary of joining the fight. Ultimately, he undermines American values and interests.

    Of course the NYT would love to support Trump’s war on Iran, they just don’t like how he’s selling it:

    There is a reasonable debate to have about the wisdom of this war. Iran’s murderous government does indeed present a threat — to its own people, to its region and to global stability. Mr. Trump could make a fact-based argument for confronting the regime now, especially to prevent it from menacing its neighbors and, above all, from developing a nuclear weapon. We are skeptical, but we acknowledge that there is a case to be made.

    Mark Ames calls out the NYT for their family blogging:

    In a separate tweet, Ames also points out that while Judith Miller has been cancelled for her 2003-era pro-war lies published by the NYT, her male co-writer Max “Aluminum Tubes” Gordon is still at it, now for the WSJ.

    Max still has his screwball:

    While power plants are generally considered to be civilian infrastructure, current and former U.S. military officials say that an adversary’s electrical infrastructure can sometimes qualify as a legitimate military target.

    Under the Law of Armed Conflict, if striking power infrastructure makes a concrete contribution to a military operation and the potential harm to civilians is minimized, it can be permissible, they say.

    “Expected civilian harm–including second order effects from loss of electricity–cannot be excessive relative to the anticipated military advantage,” said David Deptula, a retired Air Force Lieutenant General who helped direct attacks during the 1991 Desert Storm campaign to evict Iraqi forces from Kuwait. “The choice between temporary disruption and permanent destruction can influence this analysis.”

    Wait, What About the GCC and More Importantly, Their Investment Funds?

    It’s too easy to point out the lies of the MSM, so let’s end with a look at how The Financial Times is gingerly beginning to grapple with one of the lies that Alon Mizrahi says the Ramadan War has exposed, namely the supposed endless wealth of the Gulf monarchies. The column is by Mohamed El-Erian, the Rene M Kern professor of practice at Wharton School, chief economic adviser at Allianz and chair of Gramercy Funds Management:

    …among the many other questions investors and policymakers should consider is a financial one: how will the relationship of the Gulf countries with international capital markets change in the short term?

    The six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council — Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — have collectively grown over decades into one of the most consequential forces in global finance, investing across the world.

    But there is a risk that increased domestic need for funds in the wake of the war may have a temporary impact on those flows even if the long-term position of the countries is not in question. This would have implications for global interest rates and the distribution of funding, as the world has come to rely on GCC capital more deeply than many realise.
    …
    The GCC countries have generated a current account surplus of more than $800bn in the past four years. They have deployed their ample resources with sophistication, managing their wealth for current and future generations.
    …
    Any change in global capital flows would come at an already challenging time for markets. Large budget deficits in advanced economies and the need to refinance maturing debt are driving up global bond issuance. At the same time, the AI revolution has huge financing needs and a wall of corporate refinancing looms elsewhere.

    The net result? “Higher-for-longer” borrowing costs that have a disruptive impact on virtually every country, corporation and household, which compounds the longer the war lasts. It’s an environment that also risks aggravating existing financial fragilities — such as those associated with the AI bubble, certain segments of private credit and some sovereign debt concerns — while potentially exposing new ones.

    The GCC nations will restore their oil exports and the region will retain its status as a transport and tourist hub. I have no doubt about that.

    Somehow Professor El-Erian’s lack of doubt doesn’t convince me of much, how about you, dear readers?

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