Saturday wrap-up: Poof!

Some stories I saw today that wrapped up this week:

First, it looks like the trade talks are dead, at least for now, so our Canadian retaliatory tariffs will be a go on Tuesday

Hooray! 

Canada's retaliatory tariffs take effect Sept 8, and the target list runs through Maine, Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan and Indiana. Every one of those states has a race worth watching. Ottawa isn't hiding the logic. #Tariffs #Canada www.disruptionbanking.com/2026/09/03/t...

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— tolkadot.bsky.social (@tolkadot.bsky.social) September 3, 2026 at 10:02 AM

The Globe and Mail reports

Canada and the U.S. have no plans to resume trade talks before Ottawa’s retaliatory tariffs take effect on Tuesday, a move likely to provoke even more tariffs from Washington and deepen U.S. President Donald Trump’s continental trade war. One Canadian government official told The Globe and Mail on Friday that there are no negotiations scheduled for the Labour Day long weekend. Dominic LeBlanc, the minister in charge of the file, delivered a similar message in a briefing to business leaders on Friday afternoon, according to two other people with knowledge of the call.
...If Canada goes ahead with its tariffs next week, the U.S. will retaliate against the retaliation, the Trump administration has warned.
One source with knowledge of White House discussions said officials are hoping to hit back against Canada’s retaliation no later than Wednesday. The Trump administration is considering banning imports of Canadian alcohol, dairy products and possibly steel, the source said.
Some in Mr. Trump’s orbit, however, are pushing for even tougher measures, the source said, though it is unclear what those would be.
...The President on Friday threatened during an Oval Office photo-op to stop all trade with Canada, Mexico, the European Union and Switzerland, claiming such a move would “save” the U.S. money. Stopping roughly US$3.7-trillion worth of annual business with major trading partners, however, would devastate the American economy and drive up inflation...

In the meantime, Trump's behaviour got wilder and wilder as the week progressed. 
Dean Blundell reports

Last Sunday, Donald Trump got on Truth Social and issued an order to an entire country’s private sector.
“Let all Canadian Companies that are doing business with America move to the United States immediately. Many of them are Companies that moved out years ago due to stupid U.S. Leadership. When you move back, there are no TARIFFS!”
That’s the pitch. Come to America, and the beatings stop. And the story he tells his base is that it’s working, that Canadian businesses are packing up by the thousands and heading for Texas and the Carolinas because they finally see the light.
So I went and checked. Not the vibes. The numbers. Statistics Canada, TD Economics, the Bank of Canada, Unifor, Reuters, the automakers’ own earnings. And here’s what the actual data says about who is moving where.
Spoiler: it’s not us.
Foreign direct investment into Canada in 2025, the first full year of Trump’s trade war, hit its highest level since 2007. Not despite the tariffs. During them. TD Economics called it “Buy Canada,” and they weren’t being cute.
And the biggest buyer? The United States.
American companies put roughly $52.5 billion into Canada in 2025, the same as the year before. Then they came back for more. In the first half of 2026, U.S. direct investment into Canada hit $31.4 billion. That’s $4 billion more than the same period a year earlier. TD’s own note, published last week: “The U.S. re-emerged as the leading source of investment in the first half of 2026.” Manufacturing investment picked up in Q2. Energy and mining are running about $6 billion ahead of last year....
...The Bank of Canada’s latest business survey has Canadian firms’ investment intentions at a two-year high and export expectations at their strongest since 2022. There’s more than $1 trillion in announced projects on the table and an investment summit later this month. Kearney’s FDI Confidence Index ranks Canada second in the world for where money wants to go next. Second only to the United States, which is currently doing everything in its power to lose the spot.
America, your president told you Canada was collapsing, and its businesses were crawling to you for mercy. Your own companies are quietly telling you the opposite with their chequebooks. GM, Alphabet, Amazon, the Chicago bottlers, the pension funds buying our bonds.
Nobody is moving to the US. US manufacturing is moving to Canada because we’re stable and Mark Carney isn’t Donald Trump. He made it up. And the people who know he made it up are the ones signing the cheques....

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Paul Krugman writes

...A large fraction of the world’s gold reserves actually sits in a vault underneath the Federal Reserve Bank of New York,...And why not? The sanctity of nations’ ownership of gold stored in New York is guaranteed by the word of the U.S. government — a government that is utterly reliable, because it honors the role of law.
Or anyway, that’s the country we used to be.
“Rule of law” is not a phrase often applied to the Trump administration. And the administration has special contempt for international law. Many of Trump’s tariffs have been ruled illegal under U.S. law, but more or less all of those tariffs were and are in clear violation of past agreements solemnly signed by previous U.S. presidents, including Trump himself.
So the idea that the U.S. government might devise some excuse to seize gold held in the Fed’s vault is no longer far-fetched. And nations are taking precautions. Earlier this week the Dutch central bank announced that it was shifting about $12 billion in gold from the vault in New York to the Bank of England’s vault in London. This follows a move by the French central bank to shift an even larger sum from New York to Paris. Other countries are considering similar moves.
The direct economic or financial impact of these actions will be minimal. There won’t even be large trans-Atlantic gold shipments: foreign central banks will sell their New York gold to private buyers in America and replenish it with purchases from private sellers in Europe.
But the symbolism is chilling. America is no longer trusted. Foreign governments can no longer count on us to obey the most basic rules, like the commandment that thou shalt not steal other people’s gold.
And even when Trump is gone, it will take many years of honest, responsible U.S. government to restore that lost trust.

The US is losing all over while the world is winning Kevin Boucher begins All Sizzle, No Steak with an analysis of  Trump's Venezuelan oil deal. He continues

...After Canada walked away from a deal that, in Carney’s words, “asked too much and offered too little,” Washington turned to Brazil. The US demanded exclusive tariff concessions that Brazil legally cannot grant under its Mercosur trade obligations — the same sovereignty play Carney said the US tried to insert into the Canada deal at the last hour. Canada walked. Brazil said no.
Then Washington went to Chile. The US deputy trade representative arrived and left without an agreement. The US ambassador then warned Chile there would be no deal if government ministers kept publicly criticizing the negotiations. What Chile was being asked to do wasn’t just about trade. Washington wanted Chile to join the Shield of the Americas — a Trump-designed regional security alliance where, as one international law attorney put it, participating “implies that you give up control of your armed forces.” Chile’s defense minister responded that his country was “no one’s backyard.”
Canada. Brazil. Chile. Same demand each time. You get a deal when you give up the right to decide who else you deal with. Every country so far has said no.... This week the show expanded considerably.
Norway — home to the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, $2.3 trillion — proposed cutting nearly $80 billion from its holdings of US Treasury bonds. Not for political reasons. For commercial ones. American government debt is soaring. Long-term borrowing costs are rising. Bond markets are under pressure. Norway looked at the numbers and decided it was time to reduce exposure.
Trump’s response: “The ultimate intervention is our military, and if we have to use that we will.”
He threatened to bomb the bond market.
Then this morning the US Labor Department released its August jobs report. American employers added 162,000 jobs — more than double what economists expected. Strong number. The kind of number a president should be able to celebrate.
Instead Trump went on Truth Social and threatened to stop trading with every country in the world that runs a trade surplus with the United States unless his own hand-picked Federal Reserve chair cuts interest rates. His exact words: “LOWER THE RATE OR I’LL STOP TRADING WITH COUNTRIES WITH WHICH WE HAVE A DEFICIT. IT’S BETTER THAN TARIFFS!”
From the Oval Office he named Canada specifically. Said he was under “no obligation” to allow trade. Said he could implement a full embargo with “one swipe of the pen.”
Here’s the part that needs to be said plainly. A strong jobs number makes it less likely the Fed will cut rates, not more. A hot labour market is inflationary. Controlling inflation is the Fed’s job. Trump’s own Fed chair signalled at Jackson Hole that the Fed has “work to do on inflation.” After this morning’s report, the probability of a rate hike at the September meeting jumped to over 60%. The probability of a rate cut: exactly zero percent.
The stock market fell. As it does when rate hike odds rise. Trump posted: “With a great Jobs Report, like just announced, stocks should go up, not down. That’s the way it was for 200 years. Growth does not mean inflation!”
Two hundred years of market history says otherwise. But sure...

And actually, I don't believe that jobs number either. 

Finally, this happened:

They really messed me up as a kid with that Mercator map. I was fascinated by Greenland, this vast unexplored continent the size of Africa, I wrote grade school adventure stories about underground ice dinosaurs. 100% Trump got hooked on the Greenland thing bc he still thinks it’s that huge.

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— Rob Sheridan (@rob-sheridan.com) September 4, 2026 at 4:58 PM

The Equal Earth projection map actually shows the United States as bigger than the old Mercator did -- I would have thought Trump would like that.