MSNBC host comments on potential US-Canada conflict

An MSNBC host floated the outlandish possibility that the US could be fighting a military war with Canada in a matter of days. Katy Tur was speaking on Tuesday with Canadian journalist Stephen Marche - whose article in The Atlantic evokes the chance of an armed conflict with the US's neighbor to the North.
'Stephen, let me ask you about the article you wrote for The Atlantic - and I sent this around to my friends,' Tur began. 'Just the very fact that it was published, I think is surprising - that we can have a conversation that is serious about what a war with Canada would look like. Explain why it's no longer unthinkable,' she pressed the journalist on her show, Katy Tur Reports.
Marche (pictured) replied by blaming the rhetoric of President Trump for egging on a potential military battle between the longstanding allies. 'Well, because Donald Trump makes us think it, right?' he said. 'I mean, he talks about annexing us on a regular basis. I mean somewhere around two percent of the American population actually wants to do this, but you know at this point in history, you know, the American people can obviously be convinced of anything right?' he argued. 'And already, you see numbers of Republicans who consider Canada an enemy to be growing... 'And you know, I think when countries are in constitutional crisis and when their legal systems start to fall apart , violence against neighboring countries is a very common - to me, it's very intimately tied with this talk about being a third-term president ,' Marche said.
'That's exactly, that's out of the playbook of authoritarian governments around the world. 'And so Canada really does need to think about protecting ourselves from the United States and making sure that we're not just a snack,' he argued. Marche made similar arguments in his piece for The Atlantic, which was published over the weekend - just ahead of Trump's meeting with the new Canadian Prime Minister.
'Donald Trump's pointless and malicious trade war has been, by his own account, a prelude to softening up Canada economically so that it can be appropriated as the 51st state,' the journalist wrote. 'He has brought up his plans for incorporating Canada into the union with Prime Ministers Justin Trudeau and Mark Carney in private calls. 'Canada could no longer comfortably sit within the American military sphere,' Marche declared. 'In this stark moment, our nation has abruptly become an adversary of the most powerful country in the world.'
He goes on to argue that Canada would not be seized easily, and weighs the possibility of an armed conflict. Ultimately, Marche concludes: 'If Trump decides to run again, a manufactured emergency over Canada would be a convenient excuse for overturning the constitutional barriers. Nobody wants to believe that a continental conflict could happen,' he continues, noting, 'Very few Ukrainians, right up to the point of Russia's 2022 invasion, believed their malignant neighbor would invade. 'Canada cannot afford complacency,' Marche wrote.
The discussion came as Trump met with the new Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, inside the White House on Tuesday. During their conversation, Trump once again brought up his idea to make the northern nation the United States' '51st state.' He claimed that the U.S.-Canada border was an 'artificially drawn line' and if they joined together it would be a 'wonderful marriage.' He added: 'But it takes two to tango, right?' Carney appeared to squirm in his seat and fired back that Canada was 'not for sale.'

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Pakistan to nominate Trump for Nobel Peace Prize

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Two days of terror: How the Minnesota shooter evaded police and got caught

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After that, he wasn't seen by police again until he arrived at the residence of Melissa Hortman, the top Democrat in the state House, in Brooklyn Park. Sensing that Hortman might be a target, Brooklyn Park police officers had decided to check on her. When they arrived at 3:30 a.m. they saw a black Ford Explorer outside her house, its police-style lights flashing. Boelter was near the front door. When Boelter saw the officers exit their squad car, he fired at them. He then ran through the front door on the house, where he killed Melissa and Mark Hortman, her husband. When Boelter left the Hortman's home, he abandoned his fake-police SUV. Inside the car, police found a 9mm handgun, three AK-47 assault rifles, fliers advertising a local anti-Trump "No Kings" rally and a notebook with names of people who appear to have been targets, according to court documents. From that point, Boelter was on the run. 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EU fantasies of toppling the dollar are totally delusional

It's a nice problem to have amid the Trump-inspired madness that grips today's foreign exchange markets. But it's a problem none the less. The Swiss franc keeps on appreciating, and there seems to be almost nothing the authorities can do to stop it. Increasingly alarmed by its trajectory, the Swiss National Bank last week cut its official policy rate back down to zero, and there is now talk of rates going negative again by summer's end. But to little effect. Switzerland's safe haven attributes have rarely been in such high demand. Rising geopolitical tensions have combined with growing loss of trust in the dollar as the bedrock of the global economy to send the franc soaring, almost regardless of whatever rate of interest it carries. Lest it be gold, there are few repositories of wealth thought more secure than Switzerland. Contrast that with the UK, where Bank Rate is still firmly stuck at 4.25pc with stubbornly persistent inflation to match. Thanks substantially to the lower import prices that the surging franc brings about, prices as a whole are going down not up; there is little or no cost of living crisis. This is great for consumers, not so much for Swiss industry, which has to match these deflating prices at home and abroad. But thus far at least, it's coped remarkably well. I've never bought the idea that a competitive economy needs a weak currency. Persistent devaluation has been the British way for decades now, and little good has it done either. At best, it's only smoothed the decline – a tranquiliser to avoid having to face up to the hard yards of painful structural adjustment. While the UK has grown poorer, the Swiss grow ever richer – living proof that a strong currency goes hand in hand with a competitive economy. The one is a reflection of the other. Bad, uncompetitive companies are quickly weeded out and dispensed with, while the disciplines of having to compete with cheaper foreign goods and services forces the survivors into imaginative innovation and productivity gain. You can, however, have too much of a good thing, and this is the unfortunate position that Switzerland now finds itself in. Broadly speaking, Switzerland produces in appreciating francs, but sells in equally fast depreciating dollars. There is only so far countervailing productivity improvement can take you. Theoretically, Donald Trump's tariff policies should make the dollar stronger, in that all other things being equal, they ought to reduce the size of the deficit. But it hasn't worked out that way. In practice, they've only further undermined international confidence in US economic management more widely. To most observers, it looks as if the White House is deliberately trying to tank the dollar. And on one level, it is; a depreciating dollar temporarily helps domestic producers by making imports more expensive. When combined with tariffs – effectively a sales tax on foreign producers – US industry gets a double boost. Trump wants the best of both worlds; he wants a weak dollar, but he also very much likes the dollar's commanding position in the global economy for the geopolitical power it bestows. Sadly for him, it's not clear he can have both. To support a weak dollar, he needs to make dollar assets less attractive to foreign investors. As Stephen Miran, the head of Trump's council of economic advisers, has suggested, this might be achieved by imposing a withholding tax on income generated by US assets, or by converting foreign holdings of US Treasuries into 100-year bonds. Trump's problem is that the less attractive the US makes itself to foreign investors, the less likely it is that the dollar can sustain its dominant reserve currency position. Use of the dollar for sanctions against countries the US has got a problem with has further undermined trust in the currency as both a store of value and reliable means of exchange. International trust relies crucially on the idea of a global order based on agreed rules, the very thing Trump wants to dispense with. So the dollar turns weaker, and together with the Trump tariff shock, it drives up domestic US inflation. Despite almost daily berating from Trump, Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, is sitting on his hands and refusing to reduce interest rates in the precipitous way the president demands. The more Trump complains, the more Powell digs in. Determination not to give way has become a matter of principle, almost regardless of its economic merits. Powell's stance is totemic in the wider struggle to protect institutional integrity from presidential diktat. Once Federal Reserve independence goes, the whole fragile structure of dollar hegemony begins to crumble. Even Trump must know that. Meanwhile, Europe is cutting fast – with the notable exception of the UK, where inflation remains a problem. Normally, America's higher interest rates relative to Europe would cause the dollar to strengthen, but the trust issue has provoked a very different response – a weaker dollar despite a widening interest rate gap. Christine Lagarde, the president of the European Central Bank, sees Trump's antics as an opportunity for a 'global euro moment'. It has long been the ambition of European policymakers to look the mighty dollar in the face, and eventually usurp its position in the international monetary system. This has always seemed fanciful. For all its grandstanding, the EU remains a disjointed confederation of fiscally sovereign and often deeply divided nations, with no centralised Treasury function to speak of, no banking union and no unified sovereign debt market. This makes its monetary union acutely vulnerable to existential crisis. Lagarde might think of herself as queen bee, but her powers and reach are remarkably limited. As long as this remains the case – and there is little sign of it changing – Lagarde's musings are just delusional nonsense. Where reserve managers have been diversifying away from the dollar, it has, moreover, tended to be into gold, not the euro. Indeed, gold recently overtook the euro as the biggest central bank reserve asset after the dollar. A rather more potent long term threat comes from China, whose central bank digital currency and the infrastructure being built around it are deliberately designed to provide an alternative to the dollar for trade and investment. Those who take umbrage at Trump's America can try China instead. Who's to say it's less reliable than a country that slaps record tariffs on some of its closest allies? Regrettably, Switzerland is just too small to act as a global reserve currency. As it is, it struggles to manage the inflows of international capital looking for safety amid the bedlam of today's world. Already, the Swiss National Bank balance sheet is swollen by its various currency interventions to a size considerably bigger than that of Switzerland's entire economy. It can surely go no further in printing Swiss francs to buy foreign assets. But as I say, it's a nice problem to have.