Aussie dollar dumps as America First goes feral

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He’s going off. Via the FT:

Donald Trump will threaten to limit intelligence sharing with Britain if the UK government allows Huawei to build part of the country’s 5G mobile network, a message he plans to deliver in person during his visit to London next week.

…One White House official said Huawei would “obviously be on the agenda”. Another person involved in trip planning said Mr Trump was ready to make his objections known both in public and in private. “The president is preparing to repeat the message that Chinese involvement in 5G could pose significant challenges for US-UK intelligence co-operation. He is prepared to go hard on this issue,” the person said.

Serious shit. The UK can now pull a second Singapore on Australia here. Recall that Australia was behind the Huawei push, via Reuters:

In early 2018, in a complex of low-rise buildings in the Australian capital, a team of government hackers was engaging in a destructive digital war game.

The operatives – agents of the Australian Signals Directorate, the nation’s top-secret eavesdropping agency – had been given a challenge. With all the offensive cyber tools at their disposal, what harm could they inflict if they had access to equipment installed in the 5G network, the next-generation mobile communications technology, of a target nation?

What the team found, say current and former government officials, was sobering for Australian security and political leaders: The offensive potential of 5G was so great that if Australia were on the receiving end of such attacks, the country could be seriously exposed. The understanding of how 5G could be exploited for spying and to sabotage critical infrastructure changed everything for the Australians, according to people familiar with the deliberations.

Mike Burgess, the head of the signals directorate, recently explained why the security of fifth generation, or 5G, technology was so important: It will be integral to the communications at the heart of a country’s critical infrastructure – everything from electric power to water supplies to sewage, he said in a March speech at a Sydney research institute.

Washington is widely seen as having taken the initiative in the global campaign against Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, a tech juggernaut that in the three decades since its founding has become a pillar of Beijing’s bid to expand its global influence. Yet Reuters interviews with more than two dozen current and former Western officials show it was the Australians who led the way in pressing for action on 5G; that the United States was initially slow to act; and that Britain and other European countries are caught between security concerns and the competitive prices offered by Huawei.

The Australians had long harbored misgivings about Huawei in existing networks, but the 5G war game was a turning point. About six months after the simulation began, the Australian government effectively banned Huawei, the world’s largest maker of telecom networking gear, from any involvement in its 5G plans. An Australian government spokeswoman declined to comment on the war game.

After the Australians shared their findings with U.S. leaders, other countries, including the United States, moved to restrict Huawei.

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The last thing Western nations need to fracture the Five Eyes network, most of all Australia.

Then there’s Mexico, via CNBC:

The U.S. will impose a 5% tariff on all Mexican imports from June 10, President Donald Trump said in a tweet on Thursday night.

“The Tariff will gradually increase until the Illegal Immigration problem is remedied,” Trump said in his tweet, adding that ”….at which time the Tariffs will be removed.”

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You’re with us or against us, it seems. Let’s hope both US allies buckle quickly.

Aussie dollar pushing back to the 0.68s.

About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.