As yet another day of Trumpian madness unfolds, we are not sure who wins the Doofus of the Day award – the Donald, again, or his unhinged Secy of the Treasury. As it happens, the latter was apparently making a run for the money earlier this morning with this doozy:

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated at a press conference today: “We will impose100% tariffson Chinese goods if they continue to buy Iranian energy products.” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi stated: “We will continue to buy from Iran, whether you impose100%or even 200% tariffs – I don’t care.”

Here’s the thing, Scottie. For the reasons we laid out in Part 1 and amplify below, your blockade ploy is already coming a cropper. Even the speculators in the oil pits have figured out that Iran ismonths–notdays–from capitulation owing to your imaginary imminent shortages of cash, oil storage space or both. In turn, energy markets also realize this means the growing global bow wave of un-shipped oil will hit gargantuan proportions long before the mullahs cry Uncle.

Perhaps that’s why in the wee hours this AM the Brent futures price tagged exactly2Xthe level it stood at when Bibi Netanyahu found his long sought “mark” in the Oval Office on February 28th.

For want of doubt, it’s also well to recall that last time Brent hit this level at the onset of the Russia/Ukraine disruption in the Black Sea region, the correlate of $120 + global crude oil was $5 gasoline at the pump in Flyover America.

But as we will show below, the Black Sea energy and commodity outages of February 2022 were just a warm-up. What will occur if the much more expansive Persian Gulf basin remains closed down much longer–as both the Donald and his loony tunes Secy of Treasury are now promising–will truly amount to the Mother of all Supply Shocks–and not just with regards to petroleum, either.

But as of 4AM Monday morning, anyway, the Donald was self-evidently still under the illusion that his purported no cash/no room in the tanks double-tap on Iran’s petroleum life line has already won the day. Hence came braggadocio that befits a 13-year old getting his first chest hairs.

Of course, you can say this is merely the Donald being the Donald, and that he’s just punking us, anyway. Then again, we do recall from personal experience how an earlier POTUS sent a message to a far more fearsome foe than today’s benighted Iranian theocracy with a GDP equal to, well, barely1.3%of America’s.

To wit, Ronald Reagan sent Gorbachev a succinct but polite message that literally brought down the Iron Curtain, ended the truly evil Soviet Empire and thereby changed the course of history. And in a good way, too.

Moreover, upon the delivery of this historically pivotal message, President Reagan did not proceed to belittle Gorbachev–to say nothing of attempting to assassinate him. Instead, he met with him for honest negotiations four times–at the Reykjavik Summit (1986), the Washington Summit (1987), the Moscow Summit (1988) and a UN meeting in New York (1988) .

Source: Antiwar.com