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Trump Tells Bessent To Halt US Trade With Spain, Calls Madrid A "Wasted Cause"

During a NATO summit in Ankara, President Trump instructed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to cut off trade with Spain over defense spending.

"I didn't speak to Spain. Spain is a wasted cause. We don't want to do any trade business with Spain anymore," Trump told reporters.

"By the way, I'd like you to cut it off," the president said, turning to Bessent, who replied: "Yes, sir."

Trump then added, "Take it immediately. Don't even talk to them. They're hopeless. They're bad people ... They make so much money with us, and we're going to make sure they make a lot less."

Trump told NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte that Spain "doesn't agree to anything, and you shouldn't carry them."

Rutte later tried to ease tensions by saying that Madrid "made a huge step last year" by raising its spending to 2%, although he added that "there are still issues we have to solve".

.@POTUS: "Spain is a wasted cause. We don't want to do any trade business with Spain anymore by the way... Spain is a terrible partner in NATO. They don't participate, they don't pay. I don't want anything to do with Spain." pic.twitter.com/3prqux6p54

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) July 8, 2026

Important to note: Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is a socialist and has been sharply critical of Trump's foreign policy, including denying US military access to Spanish bases during the US-Iran campaign.

Spain is also the world's largest olive oil exporter.

How Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will follow through on Trump's order to halt trade with Spain remains unclear.

However, if trade restrictions materialize, US olive oil importers may have to rethink their supply chains and look more aggressively to Italy, Tunisia, Portugal, and Greece as alternatives to Spanish suppliers.

Tyler Durden Wed, 07/08/2026 - 07:45

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Most Americans Don't Believe NATO Would Assist If The Country Were Attacked

Via The Libertarian Institute

Most Americans do not believe that European members of the North Atlantic Alliance would come to the United States' aid if attacked. 

Politico reported that a NATO poll found that just 43% of Americans believe the bloc would assist the US if needed. While Politico was unable to view survey results from previous years, a NATO official said that American confidence in the bloc was down about eight percent. 

via Associated Press

The foundation of NATO is Article 5 of the bloc’s charter. Article 5 is viewed as a mutual defense pact that calls on each member to come to the aid of any state that is attacked. 

In recent years, Americans have begun to question the United States' membership in the bloc. Americans have long pointed to the US footing the majority of the alliance's military spending. 

The drift away from supporting NATO intensified when the bloc backed Ukraine in the war against Russia. Many Americans argued that NATO providing billions of dollars of assistance to non-member Ukraine unnecessarily created tensions with Russia. 

President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently criticized the alliance over Europe's lack of assistance in the war against Iran:

President Donald Trump declined Tuesday to say whether he plans to announce additional US troop reductions in Europe, telling reporters, "we’re going to see," during a bilateral meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan ahead of the NATO summit in Ankara.

“Well, we’re going to see,” Trump said when asked whether he is likely to announce further drawdowns of US forces in Europe.

The US president also renewed his criticism of NATO, suggesting he had considered skipping the summit altogether.

Trump is meeting other NATO leaders in Turkey this week, where he is expected to push member states to increase military spending. 

PRESIDENT TRUMP: "We’ve invested trillions of dollars in NATO. Why? To protect European countries and others... You would think that they'd be very willing to do something to help us, and they really weren't... I've long said that we help them, but I'm not sure that they'd be… pic.twitter.com/YF7UCfIpo2

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) July 7, 2026

Ahead of the summit, NATO Ambassador Matthew Whitaker downplayed the tensions between Washington and the bloc as growing pains. "The target is that Europe takes over the conventional defense of the European continent. We’re not going away, we’re just doing less." He added, "I see these as just the challenges that we’ve worked through before."

Tyler Durden Wed, 07/08/2026 - 07:20

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Prospective Homebuyers Face Another Year Without Affordability Relief

Goldman economist Ronnie Walker has some bad news for prospective homebuyers: while the housing market appears soft but broadly stabilizing, affordability pressures are unlikely to abate anytime soon.

Walker expects mortgage rates to remain elevated through next year, while national home prices are still forecasted to rise modestly. That means buyers waiting for a price correction or lower rates may be disappointed, as the market remains locked in an ultra-low-turnover environment where high borrowing costs, limited affordability, and sticky prices keep many folks on the sidelines. 

"We expect housing demand to remain tepid," Walker wrote in the note. He pointed out that the 30-year fixed mortgage rate is likely to fall marginally to 6.43% by year's end and hover around 6.3% for 2027.

Here's more context from Walker about the US housing market and his mid-year outlook into next year:

Residential investment faltered in the first half of the year on the back of particularly poor weather and a sharp rebound in mortgage rates: after declining 8% annualized in Q1, residential fixed investment fell 5% annualized in Q2, we estimate. In this Analyst, we review our key forecasts for the housing market for the rest of the year.

No Keys for Golden Handcuffs

The outlook for the economy's most interest rate sensitive sector is largely a function of the outlook for mortgage rates. Exhibit 2 shows that mortgage rates rebounded in March in response to the Iran War, higher oil prices, and the prospect of Fed hikes. Our strategists expect mortgage rates to remain elevated for the foreseeable future, remaining around current levels (6.43%) through yearend before moderating slightly next year (6.3%), reflecting our dovish forecast for the Fed.

Sustained higher mortgage rates will continue to have their most pronounced impact on housing turnover. The left panel of Exhibit 3 shows that almost 80% of mortgage borrowers have interest rates below current market rates, and almost 60% have rates more than 2pp below market rates. The combination of mortgage borrowers refinancing at low rates en masse in 2020 and 2021 and the high current level of mortgage rates has created a significant financial cost to moving, as buying a new home would require homebuyers to prepay their current mortgage and take out a new mortgage at a significantly higher rate. As a result of this "lock-in" effect, we expect existing home sales to total just 4.2mn in 2026, 22% below 2019 levels but a touch above the pace of the last two years. Next year, we expect existing home sales to edge up to roughly 4.3mn, reflecting both modestly lower mortgage rates and the natural decay of the lock-in effect that comes from, for example, borrowers paying down their mortgage.

While a modest rebound in the pace of existing home sales would boost the gross supply of available homes, it would have limited implications for net housing supply and the longstanding—but moderating, as discussed below—nationwide housing shortage, as households are often simply switching between housing units and no housing units are created or destroyed. Still, turnover has meaningful implications for GDP, as more existing home sales boost residential fixed investment via brokers' commissions (which hold a 15% weight in RFI).

Single-family Homebuilding: Slightly Less Support From the Shortage

The longstanding housing shortage has kept single-family homebuilding extremely resistant to higher interest rates. The elevated pace of homebuilding in recent years has improved supply-demand balances, albeit they remain at levels that are still historically tight (Exhibit 4).

That improvement, along with the corresponding compression of margins for homebuilders back to pre-pandemic levels (Exhibit 5), has contributed to a moderate slowdown in single-family housing starts. Single-family starts have declined by 2% so far this year compared to last year but because of the still-tight housing market have averaged 4% above 2019 levels despite 3pp higher mortgage rates today. Looking ahead, we expect single-family housing starts to total 0.92mn this year (vs. 0.94mn in 2025) and to end the year around a 0.93mn annualized pace. This view is similar to the signal from equity analyst expectations, a proxy for corporate guidance, for units delivered by homebuilders this year.

We expect housing demand to remain tepid. On the positive side, domestic demographic trends remain supportive and survey-based measures of purchase intentions (such as the measure from Conference Board that asks respondents whether they plan on purchasing a home within six months) have improved over the last year.

But on the negative side, income growth is poor and reduced immigration will continue to weigh on household formation. Exhibit 6 shows our model of household formation that combines projections of headship rates (the share of people who are heads of a household) by age group with Census projections of population growth by age group that we have then adjusted for reduced immigration. This approach yields an estimated rate of household formation of about 1.0mn per year for the next few years, below the recent trend.

The combination of still-elevated supply growth and slightly weaker demand should continue to push the homeowner vacancy rate higher, we estimate from 1.1% in 2026Q1 to 1.2% in 2026Q4 and 1.3% in 2027. Against the backdrop of an easing housing market, we expect national home prices to rise just 0.8% December-over-December this year and 2.3% next year.

What impact has the slowdown in immigration since 2025 had on housing supply, housing demand, and their balance

Combining our state-level estimates of unauthorized immigration based on court case data with state-level housing outcomes, we find that the states that experienced greater slowdowns in unauthorized immigration between 2024 and 2025 have had both weaker home sales and homebuilding (Exhibit 7, top panels). We also find that home price growth has been weaker in states with a greater immigration slowdown (bottom panel), suggesting a slightly greater hit to demand than supply. However, the relationship with home prices has only borderline statistical significance, and we did not find a meaningful relationship between slowdowns in immigration and changes in vacancy rates.

Separately, a Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas report adds another pressure point for many Americans already priced out of the housing market. The report suggests that the Biden-Harris regime's open-border policies helped fuel a surge in illegal aliens, creating a housing-demand shock that contributed to faster home-price and rent growth nationwide.

Taken together, the message for prospective homebuyers is not encouraging. Goldman sees the housing market as soft but broadly stabilizing, yet mortgage rates and home prices are expected to remain elevated into next year. Meanwhile, the Dallas Fed's findings suggest immigration-driven demand may have worsened affordability pressures.

All in, 2027 is shaping up to be another year in which affordability concerns keep millions of would-be buyers on the sidelines, delaying or denying participation in the American dream of homeownership.

Tyler Durden Wed, 07/08/2026 - 06:55

It’s difficult to remember a year with as much change.

These pampered pups get fancy supplements, curated diets and high-tech devices. After all, one owner said, "Anything we can do to extend valuable time with them, even if we don't know if it actually works, is worth it."

US Bitcoin Reserve Stalls As Treasury And Commerce Vie For Control: Report

Authored by Micah Zimmerman via BitcoinMagazine.com,

Sixteen months after President Donald Trump ordered his administration to build a federal bitcoin reserve, the White House says it is still working out how the fund should be structured, and a dispute between two departments has slowed the effort, according to recent reporting from Bloomberg.

Trump signed an executive order in March 2025 to create what he called a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, along with a separate U.S. Digital Asset Stockpile for other cryptocurrencies. 

The order directed the Treasury and Commerce departments to develop budget-neutral methods for acquiring bitcoin, ones that would not draw on taxpayer money. 

The reserve was to be funded in large part with bitcoin the government already holds through criminal and civil forfeitures.

Strategic Bitcoin Reserve obstacles

According to Bloomberg, the plan has run into two obstacles. Treasury and Commerce are each making a case to run the reserve, and questions have arisen over whether Treasury has the legal authority to manage the holdings. 

People familiar with the matter, who were not authorized to speak in public, said housing the reserve inside the Commerce Department is one option under review.

The Justice Department said its Office of Legal Counsel “is working closely with both the Treasury and Commerce departments to determine legally available options to accomplish the president’s policy.” 

A further concern is whether the government can hold bitcoin for an indefinite period, as the order intended, given the currency’s price swings.

“President Trump campaigned on a vision of cementing America as the global capital of cryptocurrency and other cutting-edge technologies,” White House spokesperson Liz Huston said in a statement. “To deliver on the president’s vision, the Trump administration continues to evaluate the best structure for a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and U.S. Digital Asset Stockpile.”

The administration’s chief crypto adviser, Patrick Witt, said in April that he expected a major announcement within weeks. That announcement has not come.

Officials have said a presidential order alone cannot complete the project. The order does not carry the force of law, and Congress has not passed legislation to authorize the reserve. 

Yesterday, while speaking on the newly introduced Trump Accounts, President Trump said bitcoin could eventually be added to the accounts, saying “something could happen” when asked about the asset. Trump also said he’s “a big fan of crypto.” 

BREAKING: 🇺🇸 President Trump says "a lot of people" are using Bitcoin 👀

"I don't think anybody realizes how powerful (it is)" 💥 pic.twitter.com/CkVrvHUE3q

— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) July 6, 2026 New Bitcoin legislation introduced

A bill from Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., and Rep. Nick Begich, R-Alaska, would codify the order and set a target of acquiring 1 million bitcoin over five years through budget-neutral strategies. No such measure has advanced. If Republicans lose their House majority in this year’s midterm elections, the prospect of passage could dim.

The government’s bitcoin position ranks among the largest in the world. Estimates put it above 300,000 coins, worth more than $20 billion at current prices, according to Arkham Intelligence. The White House has said premature sales of seized bitcoin cost taxpayers about $17 billion over the years, and that a single reserve holding the asset for the long term would give the country a strategic advantage.

Timing has also worked against the plan as an investment. Bitcoin reached a record in October, a rally the administration tied in part to enthusiasm about Trump, then fell close to 50% from that peak. When Trump first called for the reserve, bitcoin traded near $93,000; it now sits above $64,000, a drop of about a third.

While the structure remains unresolved, Trump has built a personal bitcoin position of more than $50 million, according to his recent financial disclosure. 

The reserve, described by the administration as strategic, differs from a conventional strategic reserve because it is meant to be held for the long term rather than tapped during market emergencies.

Tyler Durden Wed, 07/08/2026 - 06:30

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