I’m closer to the boomer end of GenX, according to a recent article by David Coletto of Abacus Data.
I don’t watch much YouTube, but I also don’t have cable. I read news stories all day long but don’t often watch the news.
I check in with the site formerly known as Twitter once in a while but since Elon Musk trashed the settings, there’s far more fake news than real news in the feeds. I usually stick to notifications from people I was following before the switch but it’s still much quieter than it used to be. BlueSky is coming along, though it leans more U.S. still than Canada.
Coletto says that, depending on how you’re plugged in, you may be seeing a much different election than I.
The data tells him that Donald Trump is mostly a factor for the 65+ age group because they’re still watching cable news. I’m nowhere near that age but I get my news from the same reliable sources; just cherry-picked to weed out murder and mayhem of the brutish sort.
Political mayhem is the only kind of mayhem for me.
For those in my own age group, between 34 and 64, he says the data tells him they’re not nearly as engaged because they’re also picking and choosing what to engage with; they may be aware of tariffs, or the trade war, but not necessarily know how that might affect them personally. After all, it’s a different country, right?
This reminds me of my slightly naive view when I first started writing about politics. Originally, my plan was to focus just on Alberta. Then, in 2017 when the fight between B.C. and Alberta was going on over TMX, I realized I had to branch out a little. As that was going on, I saw that I also needed to keep up with what was going on federally. Next, because I live in a province with a global commodity, I then saw I also needed to keep up with some globally-relevant news as well.
Which also led me to include keeping up with the stock markets once in a while. Or, as it happens, for the past few weeks.
It’s not just because of the tariffs, and the trade war, or that the markets are going down every day — that’s bad enough but it' gets worse.
The stock market is a gamble, and as it turns out, there’s still the gamble on the gamble itself; think 2007 financial crisis.
Hedge funds bet on the differential between the cash market and the bond market. Usually, that’s a safe bet because the Treasury holds the bonds, and the Treasury is seen as “safe”.
When the bond market increased while the cash market decreased, that put a lot of space between the bet.
How big is the basis trade? It is currently around $800 billion and an important part of the $2 trillion outstanding in prime brokerage balances. It will continue to expand as US government debt levels continue to grow, see charts below.
Why is this a problem? Because the cash-futures basis trade is a potential source of instability. In case of an exogenous shock, the highly leveraged long positions in cash Treasury securities by hedge funds are at risk of being rapidly unwound. Such an unwind would have to be absorbed, in the short run, by a broker-dealer that itself is capital-constrained. This could lead to a significant disruption in market functions of broker-dealer firms, such as providing liquidity to the secondary market for Treasuries and intermediating the market for repo borrowing and lending. For example, during Covid, the Fed was at the peak buying $100 billion in Treasuries every day.
In addition, if the supply of Treasuries grows further, for example, because of a growing budget deficit or the Fed doing quantitative tightening, it will potentially depress Treasury prices, hurting the long leg of the trade, and stress repo funding, as dealers have limited balance sheet capacity.
The bottom line is that the large and growing cash-futures basis trade, driven by leveraged hedge fund positions in Treasuries, poses a risk due to potential market disruptions and liquidity issues, especially in the event of an exogenous shock or increasing Treasury supply.
Torsten Slok; Apollo Chief Economist, April 8, 2025
Normally, tariffs would be a decision left to Congress, but Mr. Trump got around them by declaring an National Security Threat over fentanyl and migrants. Remember when that was the issue?
There’s pressure coming from inside the U.S. as businesses are seeing these tariffs applied to their own stock orders (Mr. Trump isn’t the only one who doesn’t seem to know how tariffs work), and people start realizing that there’s almost nowhere in the world they can order from that won’t come with increased costs.
Obviously, they’ve got to put out the fire in their own house before they try to light ours, but the further they dig themselves into this hole, the more desperate Mr. Trump could become.
There’s little space between us and them
As Mr. Trump continues to wall off the U.S. from incoming trade, other countries are putting their own walls up to the U.S.. The one that can most easily come back on Canada is Mr. Trump’s escalation with China.
Our leadership has, in the past, aligned its policies with the U.S. administration, particularly when it comes to China. Former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau authorized holding Huawei’s Meng Wanzhou as we have extradition agreements with the U.S., but also, we don’t want to start a war with China, so we didn’t extradite her but kept her here while the matter moved through the courts. China responded by arresting and holding two Canadians Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig.
When Joe Biden’s administration wanted to keep cheap electric vehicles out of the U.S. market, putting 100 per cent tariffs on them, Canada did so as well.
Now, Mr. Trump and China are in a nasty game of “who can raise tariffs higher?”
Mr. Trump retaliated with 104 per cent tariffs to the retaliation from China, who was retaliating to the April 2 tariffs, which Mr. Trump thinks are “fair” because U.S. businesses buy too much stuff from China and he doesn’t like it.
There is a hypothetical president with a hypothetically similar agenda who could answer these questions. This actual president cannot. He did not reason himself into his preoccupation with tariffs and can neither reason nor speak coherently about them. There is no grand plan or strategic vision, no matter what his advisers claim — only the impulsive actions of a mad king, untethered from any responsibility to the nation or its people. For as much as the president’s apologists would like us to believe otherwise, Trump’s tariffs are not a policy as we traditionally understand it. What they are is an instantiation of his psyche: a concrete expression of his zero-sum worldview.
The fundamental truth of Donald Trump is that he apparently cannot conceive of any relationship between individuals, peoples or states as anything other than a status game, a competition for dominance. His long history of scams, hostile litigation — not to mention his frequent refusal to pay contractors, lawyers, brokers and other people who were working for him — is evidence enough of the reality that a deal with Trump is less an agreement between equals than an opportunity for Trump to abuse and exploit the other party for his own benefit. For Trump, there is no such thing as a mutually beneficial relationship or a positive-sum outcome. In every interaction, no matter how trivial or insignificant, someone has to win and someone has to lose.
Of course it’s about Trump; at least in the real world
I know David Coletto preemptively said I was wrong, because for most Canadians under the age of 65, this election is not about Donald Trump. As I said Monday, everything Mr. Trump is doing is going to have negative impacts on things Canadians do care about; like jobs, housing, and affordability.
It’s not even that it only affects us — it doesn’t — but we are in a much more difficult position in the years ahead than China, or the E.U., or any other country for that matter because we share a border and he’s already got a fantasy in his head about annexation.
At this moment, though, it’s less about who can “stand up to” Donald Trump and more “who can manage the fallout?”
If this election is not about how Donald Trump’s disastrous policies will affect every voter, then that’s a failure of the Liberal campaign.
If this election is not about who has a plan to manage the difficulties Mr. Trump is forcing on the global economy, that’s a failure of the Liberal campaign.
Voters don’t particularly like Pierre Poilievre and they don’t see him as either credible or competent enough to deal with Mr. Trump over the next… however long he manages to retain power.
If voters under 65 aren’t taking the threat that is Donald Trump as seriously as they should, there’s only one party to blame — because the other party refuses to acknowledge the problem at all.
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I think the Liberals Re addressing the Trump problem BUT I also think that the media is playing the usual election game and blowing up Conservative criticisms -- no matter how wrong -- just because they are still locked into an easy anti-Liberal format. Carney is out there WITH journalists yet I turn on the TV and they're showing Poilievre again.
I’m very confused at the suggestion that Carney and the Liberal Party are not focused on Trump.
I think the Liberals Re addressing the Trump problem BUT I also think that the media is playing the usual election game and blowing up Conservative criticisms -- no matter how wrong -- just because they are still locked into an easy anti-Liberal format. Carney is out there WITH journalists yet I turn on the TV and they're showing Poilievre again.