CONTEXT for Los Angeles Riots:  Approximately 12.3 million Mexicans live abroad, both legally and illegally, with 97% of them living and working in the United States, according to BBVA Research.  Last year Mexicans living abroad sent $64.75 billion back home in remittances, largely from Texas and California to states in central and western Mexico.

According to data recently released, in April of this year remittances back to Mexico dropped 12.1%.  The Mexico central bank said April saw 8.1% fewer transactions than a year earlier, that’s down to 12.4 million transactions. For Mexico this is a devastating outcome.

How dependent is the Mexican Govt on these remittances?  Remittances sent home by Mexicans working outside the country surpassed petroleum revenues in 2015. {link} Oil Revenue in 2015 was 23.4 billion; remittances were $24.8 billion.  Last year in 2024 remittances were $64.75 billion…. and in April of this year the remittances dropped by 12.1%.

If you don’t think there is a critical financial motive in this, think again.

CALIFORNIA – About 700 U.S. Marines were mobilized Monday to support the California National Guard to protect federal personnel and property in Los Angeles during protests there, officials said.

The mobilization of the Marines from their base in Twentynine Palms, California, is temporary, to give time for additional National Guard troops to arrive.

Earlier Monday, President Donald Trump said he would support arresting California Gov. Gavin Newsom for purportedly obstructing federal immigration enforcement actions in Los Angeles.

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President Trump returns to the White House from a brief and undocumented trip to Camp David.  After pausing to talk to the construction teams assembling the massive new flagpole on the White House grounds, President Trump briefly spoke to reporters who asked questions about the Los Angeles riots.

During the Chopper Presser, President Trump noted the people behind the violence and mayhem in LA are “paid agitators, insurrectionists and bad people.” WATCH:

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According to most media estimates, there are over a million illegal aliens in the greater Los Angeles area with many of them currently in a state of uprising against the United States government.  President Trump has authorized the Defense Department and Dept of Homeland Security to take any and all measures to protect the life and property of American citizens now held hostage within the conflict zone.

[Source]

The U.S Northern Command is prepared to deploy additional troops and approximately 500 active-duty marines if needed.

PETERSON SPACE FORCE BASE, Colo. – By direction of Secretary of Defense and in coordination with U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), approximately 2,000 California Army National Guard soldiers have been placed under federal command and control in a Title 10 status to support the protection of federal personnel and federal property in the greater Los Angeles area.

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A few datapoints to keep on a post-it note as things progress; starting with a rather significant new release that I think you will find interesting.

Approximately 12.3 million Mexicans live abroad, both legally and illegally, with 97% of them living and working in the United States, according to BBVA Research.  Last year Mexicans living abroad sent $64.75 billion back home in remittances, largely from Texas and California to states in central and western Mexico.

According to data just released, in April of this year remittances back to Mexico dropped 12.1%.  The Mexico central bank said April saw 8.1% fewer transactions than a year earlier, that’s down to 12.4 million transactions. For Mexico this could be a devastating trend.  [Sidenote: Remember, Trump is likely planning a complete overhaul of the USMCA later this year.]

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -Remittances sent to Mexico slumped 12.1% in April compared to a year earlier, according to central bank data published on Monday, marking the steepest drop in over a decade as U.S. lawmakers mull a tax on such payments sent abroad.

The world’s second-largest recipient of remittances, Mexico receives these payments chiefly from migrants working in the neighboring United States. In April, Mexicans abroad sent fewer transactions and smaller payments, totaling $4.76 billion.

Analysts said the slump likely resulted from a broad crackdown on migration in the U.S. since President Donald Trump came to power in January, as authorities revoke some Biden-era protections and increase raids across the country.

The latest data marks the steepest year-on-year drop since September 2012, according to central bank data.

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King Charles is arriving in Canada today in advance of an opening speech he will deliver to the Canadian Parliament.   Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney invited King Charles to attend, and while the media portray the visit as mostly symbolic there is no doubt the substantive issue for Canada is the economic dependency on the USA and how the U.K can bolster the position of Canada against that threat.

Everything is always about the money of the thing, this dynamic between the U.K and Canada is no different.  What we would call the ‘western’ global financial system is contingent upon all U.S. allies retaining the United States as their consumer base and stable currency center.  President Trump has exposed the vulnerability of Canada as he confronts the parasitic relationship {GO DEEP}.

In advance of the U.K positioning itself as the skirt behind which Canada can hide from the horrible Trump, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer extended an invitation for President Trump to attend a state visit in his honor later this year.  The effusive praise from Starmer during the White House meeting was keenly strategic, so too was their urgency in creating the first new-era free trade agreement with the USA.

Perhaps President Trump’s embrace of Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia should be viewed through this financial prism where the EU, U.K and Canada will ultimately go to war (together) against the efforts of President Trump.  Within the partnership of the UK, EU and Canada, the Snow Mexicans are the weakest link, the most vulnerable to collapse from Trump’s economic policy.

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According to the people present, when former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau traveled to Mar-a-Lago to meet with President-elect Donald Trump, his primary objective was to inform President Trump his public demands for U.S. trade reciprocity with Canada were unachievable.

Trudeau was not lying.  In this outline we will explain a dynamic that is certain to surface this summer.

President Trump has deferred all North American trade negotiations with Canada and Mexico until later in the year, after the priority trade deals with other large trade partners are completed.  The USMCA trade pact is due for review and renegotiation this year [BACK STORY]. We should expect an entirely different trade pact as an outcome, quite possibly the ending of the trilateral nature of the current agreement.

A few days ago, Politico noted that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney had a reprieve from his prior campaign points about confronting President Trump on tariffs immediately.  PM Carney is currently trying to align allies for what will likely be a major confrontation that he cannot win.

♦ BACKGROUND – Following the 2024 presidential election, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau traveled to Mar-a-Lago and said if President Trump was to make the Canadian government face reciprocal tariffs, open the USMCA trade agreements to force reciprocity, and/or balance economic relations on non-tariff issues, then Canada would collapse upon itself economically and cease to exist.  In essence, in addition to the NATO defense shortfall, Canada cannot survive as a free and independent north American nation, without receiving all the one-way benefits from the U.S. economy.

To wit, President Trump then said, if Canada cannot survive in a balanced rules environment, including putting together their own military and defenses and meeting their NATO obligations, then Canada should become the 51st U.S state.  It was following this meeting that President Trump started emphasizing this point and shocking everyone in the process.  However, in the emotional reaction to Trump’s statements, no-one looked at the core issues outlined by Trudeau that framed President Trump’s opinion.

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Only President Trump could get the Canadians to vote for an exit to the USMCA, and he did it brilliantly.

To understand President Trump’s position on Canada, you have to go back to the 2016 election and President Trump’s position on the NAFTA renegotiation.  If you did not follow the subsequent USMCA process, this might be the ah-ha moment you need to understand Trump’s strategy.

During the 2016 election President Trump repeatedly said he wanted to renegotiate NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement.  Both Canada and Mexico were reluctant to open the trade agreement to revision, but ultimately President Trump had the authority and support from an election victory to do exactly that.

In order to understand the issue, you must remember President Trump, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer each agreed the NAFTA agreement was fraught with problems and was best addressed by scrapping it and creating two seperate bilateral trade agreements. One between the USA and Mexico, and one between the USA and Canada.

In the decades that preceded the 2017 push to redo the trade pact, Canada had restructured their economy to: (1) align with progressive climate change; and (2) take advantage of the NAFTA loophole.  The Canadian government did not want to reengage in a new trade agreement.

Canada has deindustrialized much of their manufacturing base to support the ‘environmental’ aspirations of their progressive politicians.  Instead, Canada became an importer of component goods where companies then assembled those imports into finished products to enter the U.S. market without tariffs.  Working with Chinese manufacturing companies, Canada exploited the NAFTA loophole.

Justin Trudeau was strongly against renegotiating NAFTA, and stated he and Chrystia Freeland would not support reopening the trade agreement.  President Trump didn’t care about the position of Canada and was going forward.  Trudeau said he would not support it.  Trump focused on the first bilateral trade agreement with Mexico.

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When President Trump announced the 90-day pause in combination with the increase in tariffs against China, there was a background element missed by many.

At the moment President Trump triggered the public announcement, U.S. Trade Representative Jamison Greer was testifying to congress.

President Trump is not a jerk.  Donald Trump would not put a top executive Greer in that optically vulnerable position if USTR Greer was the tip of the spear, it’s just bad business form.

The timing and background indicate something more substantial.  For what we are calling ‘the BIG UGLY’ Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is the point, Greer is a functionary.  It’s a shift from the Term-1 approach, because the global trade reset is magnitudes bigger and more substantive.

This approach would also explain why Robert Lighthizer was not reenlisted in Term-2.  If Lighthizer was in Greer’s chair in front of congress at the moment of the public announcement, he would have been furious and rightly so.  Lighthizer and Wilbur Ross were the tip of the spear in term-1, Lighthizer facing the region of Asia and Ross facing Europe; but the same strategy is not present in term-2.

In the Term-2 trade reset, the entire globe is being targeted simultaneously.  Enter, the U.S. Treasury Secretary in a bigger, more substantive, and much more prominent role due to the scale of the trade reset.

This trade approach is much bigger, obviously. As the nuclear-level trade detonation takes place, Secretary Bessent is in control of both the financial market response and the core finances of the USA as it relates to the reverberations.

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The atomic sledgehammer that President Trump just delivered to the German auto industry simply cannot be overemphasized.  A 25% tariff on imported cars and car parts completely negates hundreds of billions in pre-positioned investment dollars by German auto companies in Mexico.  [Executive Order Here]

[Cliff Notes Here]

To give scale to the impact on Germany, consider that German automakers currently have 330 automotive suppliers in Mexico according to information from VDA.  Audi (a subsidiary of Volkswagen) has no U.S. production sites; every Audi sold in America will be subject to a 25% tariff. The Audi brand access to the U.S. market was/is 100% dependent on Mexico, including for manufacturing the Q5 SUV, its top-selling U.S. model.

According to prior reporting from Politico, “Volkswagen’s most popular model for American consumers is the Tiguan, an SUV that is entirely manufactured in Mexico. The German automaker sold over 30,000 of the vehicles in the final quarter of last year, a nearly 50 percent year-over-year increase.”  But wait, it gets worse….

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Canadian leftists have selected Mark Carney as their replacement for Justin Trudeau, Carney will be sworn in as Prime Minister shortly and complete the remaining segment of Trudeau’s term before new Canadian elections.

The only issue on the mind of voters in Canada is which candidate will fight U.S. President Donald Trump the hardest.  Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has vowed to fight Trump harder than Mark Carney, but the leftists in Canada are now back on the ascendency and will dispatch the pontificating Poilievere shortly.

During his acceptance speech at the Liberal Party convention, a beaming Mark Carney promised to defeat President Trump and the Americans in the upcoming trade war.  Carney noted, a sense of national pride has swept across Canada as the people unite in their hatred for everything Trump and everything American associated with him.  WATCH: 

In addition to tariffs against Canadian goods and services, U.S. President Trump has massive economic arrows in his quiver that can be deployed against the Canadian economy.  Measures including larger tariffs (tariff reciprocity), financial sanctions, restrictions on Canadian investment in the USA, revocation of visa-free border crossing, forced divestiture of American asset holdings for the Canadian people (banking reciprocity), all the way to a full-throated embargo of all goods and travel from Canada are potential.

If that sequence of events ever happened, the Canadian government led by Prime Minister Mark Carney has vowed to respond in kind to Trump with identical action blocking any/all USA products, services and American citizens from entry into Canada.  This approach would enable us to finally determine which nationalistic outlook will survive, Canada or the USA.

(Via Politico) – […] One of Carney’s first decisions will be whether or not to call a snap election in the middle of a trade war. He has identified Trump’s rolling tariff threats as an “economic and sovereign crisis.”

“The Americans want our resources, our water, our land, our country,” Carney said. “Think about it. If they succeed, they will destroy our way of life.”

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