A few days before I write this, King Charles and Queen Camilla made the first Royal state visit to the US since 2007.
Shortly before they arrived, Trump had just cancelled any attempt to revive ceasefire negotiations between the US and Iran. The person that was meant to go to Pakistan and fix this mess was his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who owns a private-equity firm that has taken billions of dollars from the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Kushner is also good friends with Benjamin Netanyahu, so it’s a shame he didn’t go to Pakistan because he sounds like a completely impartial guy.
Susannah Streeter, chief investment strategist at Wealth Club, said of the cancelled peace talks: “The rug has been pulled by the Trump administration, sending plans for talks over Iran skidding once again. The President said negotiators would be wasting their time heading to Pakistan and the lack of progress has hit sentiment. Oil prices have cruised higher again.”
Cruised higher was an understatement. At the time of writing Brent Crude was trading at just under $110 per barrel (editor’s note: $102.49 as we go to press on 7 May), up around 80% compared to the start of the year.
Surprisingly, the Royal visit was deemed a success, with Charles cracking a few good jokes and Donald managing to bite his tongue enough to stop complaining about Starmer, the Mayor of London, and NATO, for a whole 48 hours (he reverted to type shortly after the visit, however).
If you enter ‘Trump’ into Google and select ‘News’, it will give you the 10 most recent news stories for POTUS and it is truly mind-boggling how he manages to upset, annoy and threaten so many countries on a daily basis.
At the time of writing (2 May), Google tells you what Trump did the day before (Friday 1 May). In one day, he managed to continue his feud with NATO and ordered 5,000 troops be withdrawn from Germany, with more troop withdrawals promised from Italy and Spain. Trump also said he is going to hike tariffs on EU cars to 25%. He also told European countries that they will have to wait for their arms shipments because the Iran war is draining US stocks, while at the same time clearing more than $8.6bn in military sales to Israel, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.
