Forty-fifth in my series of notable quotes:

The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.

Marcus Aurelius

The indications are that the Chinese, the Europeans and the Japanese - perhaps in a coordinated effort - were dumping US Treasuries and then converting the dollars from those sales into their own respective currencies

youtu.be/H3nRgZGBREs

That is the mechanics of how the rates stayed up

Not this time!

Treasury rates stayed up this time as the markets took a dive.

Not this time.

Because this time there is a bad actor in the house itself, a malevolent presence in the White House, to be precise.

Because this time the call is coming from inside the house.

It's like going back inside your house when there is trouble outside, locking the door and breathing a sigh of relief.

In such times, the treasury rates go down because the US does not need to pay much interest to sell the treasuries as they are in such demand.

Once you accept that he is a Russian asset, everything falls into place: declaring a friggin war against Canada (!) & against other allies, destroying NATO, deliberately tanking the US economy, destroying the status of US Treasuries as safe haven and status of the dollar as world's reserve currency

...

Now contrast this with his visage from any press conference from those days: angry, hostile, defiant, a man surrounded by perceived enemies.

(However, nowadays, in his second term, Trump seems, at least to my eyes, more relaxed, being comfortably surrounded exclusively by sycophants.)

Anyways, now look at the photos from that aforementioned meeting in May 2017. (This was right after he fired Comey as FBI Director) You will see a Trump there you don't get to see anywhere else. He is genuinely happy! He is relaxed, elated with relief. He is among friends for a change.

...

Parenthetically, I should add: Even though they were not publicized, these high-level meetings continued to happen: In the first impeachment proceedings, it was at one point mentioned that White House visitor logs showed that there had been 16 (!) such meetings up to that point.

Early in the first Trump administration, in May 2017, there was a meeting in the White House between Trump and a delegation of high-level Russian officials including Pavlov and Kislyak. We know of this meeting only because TASS, the Russian News Agency, published it - a mistake they never made again

At this point, as an aside, I should note that this KGB psych/bewitchment only worked with our two stupid presidents. We had no such problems with our competent presidents: George H. W. Bush (Bush the Elder), Bill Clinton, Obama ...

George W Bush once said about Putin: "I looked the man in the eye ... I was able to get a sense of his soul ... I found him to be straightforward and trustworthy"

Imagine being bamboozled enough to look into the vacant grey eyes of a life-long KGB operative and see a trustworthy person there!

In the Soviet times, KGB excelled at figuring out what made people tick and turning them. Vladimir Putin comes right from the heart of that tradition.

I don't believe he has been coerced into this role by some kompromat. I think he has psychologically accepted the role; he is happy to play it.

It is not that there is that one single p-tape out there. Hey, there may be a hundred "p-tape equivalents", to borrow James Carville's phrasing. I mean every private conversation with Putin with only Vlad's interpreter present as witness is a p-tape if Putin decided to "leak" it, LOL.

Why the desperation? Putin is facing internal challenges-many of which may not even be visible to us-because of his enormous blunder of starting the Ukraine invasion
For all we know, forces/events may be brewing in Russia so that his dictatorship may be ripe for termination within a matter of weeks!