Two black hats at the OK Corral
The corporate media has just amped up its ten year disinformation campaign against Donald Trump. Seems the Justice Department has launched a criminal probe into the renovations at Federal Reserve headquarters at the Eccles building. One Jerome Powell, chairman of the Fed, is under investigation.
No one disputes this. So why do I use the pejorative “disinformation”?
The forked-tongue establishment alleges it to be a pretext for strong-arming the Fed into cutting interest rates, threatening the Fed’s independence.
What independence? This is where the media are just making things up. In order to lose its independence, the Fed must have been independent in the first place, no? Where is the media’s investigation into that question? Nowhere to be found. It has presented no evidence whatsoever that the Fed is or was independent. Media reporting on its potential loss is therefore pure confabulation.
What if the Fed has been dancing to the tune of Wall Street? Then this would start to make sense. Wall Street might see its control of the Fed under challenge from the White House.
Powell protests Trump’s intrusion as an attempt to interfere with its business of working for the American people. More forked tongue. Which American people benefited from its years of inflationary malfeasance, its printing of trillions of dollars and slashing rates to zero five years ago? Those the most conspicuously benefited were the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and other tech oligarchs. Their fortunes multiplied while small business were closed down. Wall Street and the Hamptons were also on the receiving end of this heist. Ever since, the average “American people” has been suffering the ravages of inflation, while the not-so-average have benefitted at their expense. The K-shaped economy was shaped that way by Powell Inc. There is also a certain element of poetic justice in finding itself politicized after having eased monetary policy into the last election with utterly no justification except possibly … politics.
So no white hat for Mr Powell.
But if it looked like this was going to be a defense of Mr Trump, well … it’s not. A Trump monetary policy would be even worse. Trump wants to inflate like the dickens and try to paper over the injuries with gimmicks. For example $200B of federal mortgage buying. The best that can be said about this is at least it wouldn’t be being done by the Fed, which has no business encroaching into fiscal policy.
That’s just one of many gimmicks. A 10% cap on credit card rates. New tax loopholes for senior, tip and overtime income. Tariff “dividend” giveaways. Seizing other nations’ oil. This is no better than his predecessor treating the nation’s treasury and oil reserves as his own party’s campaign funds for student loans giveaways and lower gasoline prices to buy votes.
Apparently anything … anything … but get to the root causes of economic illness and address them. Government beats the economy into distress then offers up whiskey and bandaids to make it feel better.
Now we don’t really know if there was criminal misconduct at the Fed. That’s what investigations are for. But it sure looks bad. I mean for Trump … it looks like this is weaponizing the justice system to get even with or to pressure the Fed. That would be taking a page right out of the dirty playbook that was used against him. In so doing, he would lower himself to his opposition’s level. It sure as hell doesn’t elevate him.
So no white hat for Mr Trump either.
Trump apparently realizes he’s in deep doo-doo. He’s courting a major shellacking (to borrow Obama’s word) in the upcoming mid-terms. Not only would that kneecap his agenda, but he would find himself again under intense, constant investigation, possibly multiple new impeachment proceedings. Unfortunately, not only for him but for the American public, he has no clue how to respond. His instinct is to fight, but what he really needs are good economic policies. Alas, despite his business acumen, he apparently knows nothing about economics.
Outside of illegal immigration, Trump’s policy achievements are few. His answer to debt pain is more debt. His answer to inflation pain is more inflation. His answer to a ridiculously complex tax code is more complexity. His answer to the ills of years of easy money is yet easier money. He’s done nothing to simplify the stultifying maze of health care finance (Obamacare, Medicare, Medicaid) or Social Security, with their networks of rules and gotchas so byzantine entire industries have sprung up to help people manage them, and yet they regularly make mistakes anyway. He micromanages private business, already suffering from too much federal involvement, even using government funds to take equity stakes in private corporations. When I was growing up, we called state ownership of the means of production communism.
Trump entered his second term with the potential for Kennedy or Reagan caliber greatness. He still has time to grab the brass ring, but it’s looking increasingly unlikely he will. He may turn out to be the most consequential president in modern memory, but not necessarily in a good way.
I agree.
I think this administration has a lot of potential, but execution has been sledgehammer blunt.
The U.S. has been “dating” Greenland for 80+ years, and with upgrades to treaties the US is effectively “engaged” to Greenland. But instead of asking for Greenland’s hand in marriage it’s more akin to John Belushi in The Blues Brothers saying “How much for your women. How much for the little girl.”
It’s hamfisted excessively blunt negotiation. Countries don’t have friends, they have interests. But citizens conceptualize in human friendships and relationships. This doesn’t help. It hurts.
He has started to walk it back(hard power invasion) as expected.
But the “every country for themselves” vibe is growing,
In a world where trust has been on a long-term declining trajectory, this and things like it, accelerate it.
Maybe this period right now is the part on the Titanic where men went from Edwardian chivalry and morality to chaotic every man for himself?
I tell my wife that for us this period feels very much like that scene in The Big Short where Brad Pitt’s character chastises the young investors he helps to short CDOs and tells them not to gloat.
I see Gold’s rise as inversely related to the fall in trust.
The world we actually want is one of high trust and low gold prices.
Gold is just the life boat to float around in until we can trade it for a berth on the USS High Trust before the gold lifeboat sinks.
I can’t recall ever having such mixed feelings of gratitude(at the personal level) and sadness(at the societal level).
The world feels like 1989-1991(Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fall of the Warsaw Pact, Fall of the Soviet Union, Tiananmen Square, and multiple wars) again.
But this time it would appear that rather than just some, far more nations are trying to mask critical vulnerabilities, everything from serious to existential.
Haha the Blues Bros cite is so fitting. It’s hard to argue with the methods of one of the most successful men in modern times, but I do it anyway;-).
Looking back over the past 25+ years, every president has been good to gold. To the extent one office bears responsibility, anyway. The bull market started under Bush II. Greenspan has to share the credit/blame; he inflated a stock market bubble in the nineties and then a mortgage bubble to paper over its implosion. We all know how that worked out … the Fed then spent years pounding rates down to zero and printing by the trillion. This helped entice already-fiscally-irresponsible politicians to borrow as if money were free. Because it almost was.
The US entered the millennium with a nearly balanced budget. Looking back on it now, it seems almost surreal that there were serious ruminations about how the financial markets would function without a government debt market. Gold prices bottomed in the $200s around then; which now seems almost equally surreal. Their rise since then reflects the deterioration since in the fiscal condition of the US and its joined-at-the-hip monetary policy. What was effect becomes cause becomes effect …
Reminds me of LBJ & Burns…………..
The Europeans just sussed they not at the table….. they on the menu!
I think you are both wrong……Trump about to present a major success.
He used Greenland as a bat to beat the Europeans…….”Give me peace with Russia or i break NATO!”
“They” folded…
Trumps crew on the way to Moscow……the Green goblin has been summoned to DAVOS.
I haven’t said anything here about Greenland or NATO; the discussion was about Trump’s confrontation with the Fed and the rise of gold.
But Trump really wanted Greenland. He’s a real estate guy. It would have been his biggest deal ever. He may be clever, but lacks discipline. No filter between mind and mouth. He craves being the center of attention and achieved it at great cost to his credibility and American global standing, alienating our friends to the north and around the world. At that price, only actually winning Greenland would have been worth it. The visible payoff pales in comparison. Unless they happen to own a lotta gold, the people that employ the America First president are not a bit better off.
You’re in some distinguished company:
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/niall-ferguson-how-trump-won-davos
Just got an email from a contact in Home office
Mike the man walked into that gilded snake pit at Davos and eviscerated the entire globalist cabal with the cold, unflinching precision of a predator who’s done toying with prey. On their stage. Under their lights. Broadcast on their networks. Forced every last one of them…those smug, self-appointed overlords…to sit in silence while he carved their rotten empire to the bone.
He didn’t scream. He didn’t need to. His voice was low, steady, absolute. Every sentence a kill shot.
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