Which way for Trump's America?
Key Markets report for Thursday, July 17, 2025
The Jeffrey Epstein controversy isn’t dying down and many observers think it could turn out to be Trump’s political suicide. Trump’s support for Israel, bombing of Yemen and Iran and the seeming pivot in Ukraine have all gradually cooled his MAGA base, causing many of them to wonder if they’d been swindled: “this is not what I voted for,” is the frequent refrain. Trump’s decision not to release the Epstein files to the public could be the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back.
However, not everyone is convinced and not everyone feels equally betrayed. There is a vague sense that the Epstein saga is a much bigger story than just human trafficking, sexual exploitation of minors and entrapment of powerful business, political and media actors. As Promethean Action’s Susan Kokinda pointed out in yesterday’s report titled, “Mandelson’s Revenge…”
Strangely, Epstein went from being a high-school math teacher without even a college degree to one of the major players in the financial industry. For years, the media presented him as a “financier.” That happened just in the run-up to the GFC (Global Financial Crisis) of 2008.
BFFs: Jeffrey Epstein and Lord Peter Mandelson
Somehow the world’s most successful high-school math teacher became closely associated with British banking circles as they maneuvered to tighten control of the American financial system. This process began with the unravelling of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, marked by successive waves of bank deregulation that opened the door to speculative booms and busts in the 1980s, 1990s and ultimately the 2008 GFC.
Over that time, the traditional American banking system has been gradually ploughed under and replaced by the current, parasitic system imposed by the City of London and Wall Street. Mysteriously, the math teacher was involved in all that. From 2000 to 2007, Epstein was the President of Liquid Funding Ltd. - an early innovator in the field of mortgage-backed securities and other financial derivatives. His company was partly owned by Bear Stearns. Between them, they helped ignite the 2008 financial crisis. The overall objective was articulated by Lord Jacob Rothschild already in 1983:
“Two broad types of giant institutions, the worldwide financial service company and the international commercial bank with a global trading competence, may converge to form the ultimate, all-powerful, many-headed financial conglomerate.”
What Lord Rothschild stated wasn’t all that different from what Professor Carroll Quigley wrote in his book, “Tragedy and Hope:”
“The powers of financial capitalism had [a] far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. … The growth of financial capitalism made possible a centralization of world economic control and use of this power for the direct benefit of financiers and direct injury of all other economic groups.”
As it turned out, Epstein worked closely with Lord Peter Mandelson and there are records of their coordination on matters relating to the Federal Reserve actions in 2008 and on subsequent Congressional debates about the Dodd-Frank bill and the Volcker rule, both of which changed the character of the US banking industry. Peter Mandelson has been a part of the Tony Blair political machine for decades and happens to be a closely associated with Lord Jacob Rothschild and with his son Nathaniel.
Epstein was Mandelson’s liaison in communications with JP Morgan’s Jes Staley in 2010. But they also indulged in leisure activities together including visits to Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean. Being such a close associate of Lord Peter Mandelson put Jeffrey Epstein at only one degree of separation from the above-mentioned Lord Jacob Rothschild.
Clearly, Lord Mandelson wasn’t put off by Jeffrey Epstein’s illegal activities related to trafficking and sexual abuse of children because he stayed at his house in New York when Epstein was already serving time for his first conviction in 2009. Today this same Lord Mandelson is serving as the British ambassador in Washington. None of this is a problem for the coincidence theorists out there, but there may be a larger conspiracy at work here and the stakes might far eclipse the justice for Jeffrey Epstein’s victims.
Again, the conflict could be about the United States making the “wrong” choice between the two systems: the British system of free trade vs. the American system of political economy. I summarized the issue in an article titled, “Is Trump actually taking on the bankers?”
The idea that there’s much more at stake and that it is related to American banking and the future of its economic development was underscored by Trump’s Senior Counselor for Trade and Manufacturing Peter Navarro who, on the 4th of July posted an extraordinary X-thread which included the suggestive statements:
Alexander Hamilton was the original architect of American economic nationalism. In his "Report on Manufactures", he argued that tariffs were essential to defend U.S. industry and secure independence from Britain.
…
The America First agenda isn’t new. Hamilton. Clay. Lincoln. McKinley. Trump. Five leaders. One philosophy: Americans First -- ALWAYS.
In another tweet, Navarro suggested that the US needs a national development bank to achieve these objectives. If that’s the thinking, it indicates that there will be a fight against the ruling banking establishment on Wall Street, which has become little more than a satellite of the City of London. Of course, we should not expect that someone will come out and announce it for us and the coincidence theorists will miss the war if it comes to pass.
Pentagon quits the Aspen Security Forum
In an unrelated but interesting twist of events, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth cancelled all Pentagon participation at the Aspen Security Forum this year, explicitly citing concerns about "Globalist Influence." Aspen Security Forum is very much a British-dominated event where London’s Financial TImes moderates five discussion panels and the Economist moderates four.
Correction
Finally, in yesterday’s report I produced a chart with a warped time-scale which, after 2015 went back to 2010 again… That was my manual input error. I find charts generated in excel generally unappealing and clutter-y so I prefer to reformat them in a different software application that allows me to unpack the chart and manually clean them up. clean it up a bit. It also allows me to manually introduce errors, which also happens. For the sake of good order, the corrected version of the chart is below:
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Today’s trading signals
With yesterday’s closing prices we have the following changes for the Key Markets portfolio:
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