...and in other news
Over the last week when everyone - including me - has been fretting about Iran, the world kept spinning, as it will. You know, deadline lines loom, people start eyeballing Switzerland, and writers getting ripped off. And yet Iran has managed to piss in the whisky… they’ve been trying hard enough.
Let the fun continue
That famously indecisive 90-day Tariff pause expires on 8 July, and is just 89 trade deals short of it's 90 deals in 90 days. Last week Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said it was "highly likely" that the deadline would slide for those countries negotiating in good faith. After announcing that unilateral "take-it-or-leave-it deals would be going out, President Trump reiterated that there was really no need for the deadlines to slip.
The financial markets don't seem to be too worried about it - but they rarely are until the panic takes hold. The hope is for another TACO trade - where the erratic, white-knuckle volatility is short lived for those with right kind of stamina. One economist we spoke with hoped that if the president would focus on his golf game, or get himself into some legal hot water, leaving Bessent to sort it out on his own.
The Price of Money
Both the Swiss and the Norwegian central banks have cuts rates, while Brazil has hiked their central rate (the 7th consecutive) to 15% to combat wild inflation. While the UK and US has remained steady with a wait and see attitude.
Norway is, essentially, tacking into a preemptive impact of the trade war. What is more interesting is Switzerland. It’s not a part of the EuroZone, and since all the late debate on the dollar’s reserve status the Swiss franc has become something of a mini-haven in these zany times. Although the greenback’s reserve status is still pretty solid owing to no plausible alternative.
AI v. Booklearning
According to federal judge, AI firm Anthropic training its chatbots on books without the author’s consent is “fair use”, while storage of the 7mm pirated the firm books pirated is not.
The ruling makes a lot to sense: in that an author can’t own the conclusions or influence drawn from a copyrighted work, but is entitled to distribution and reproduction.
Radioactive Iran
The 4717 was always a little dubious about the claim that Iran's nuclear program was "obliterated" largely because the idea was idiotic. The real best-case scenario is that we'd managed to kick the nuclear can further done the road than the threat. The jury is still out on that, and we won't know that until we get there. Iran's current problem isn't its nuclear program, but that it is politically radioactive.
The 90% of the Muslim world that isn't Shi'a already hates the Islamic Republic. As for the Axis of Chaos: Moscow is terrified that the US will get off the sidelines in Ukraine if they openly support a country in a shooting fight with America. North Korea is funny, but pointless unless you're trying to hack a bank. And then there is China, which has somehow found itself throwing a line of credit to a gang of rouge nations that needs it a lot more than they China needs them. Maintaining an entourage of bastards gets expensive, and if Big Panda is going to keep its export-led economy chugging along, they need American markets.
Richard Murff is the founder of 4717 Insights. For more insight to tear things up, head to the 4717. Murff is the author of Haint Punch, Drunk as Lords, and the revised and updated Pothole of the Gods: Holy Wars, Proxy Wars & Fake News - coming soon.