He's Still Crazy, Though

 

The market performed extremely well after Trump announced by way of social media that things would be somewhat less stupid, but make no mistake, they are still fairly stupid. We still have the potential for a recession. We still have a trade war with China, and 10% reciprocal tariffs, and it's a 90-day pause, not an admission that the whole tariff scheme is stupid, and we might not even be in for 90 days of an actual pause since Trump is, in fact. nuts. 

Basically, Trump reacted to the reaction. He admitted himself that the pause was because people were "yippy." Are we looking at a case of masterful strategery on his part?  Let's just say it caught some advisers by surprise (mid-defense of Trump's policy, no less), but we're pretty sure not everyone.

I'm not sure too many people would be shocked to find there has been gambling in this establishment. 

We're Sticking it to Those Penguins, Though

 

The funny/not funny thing about Trump's "reciprocal tariffs" is the way the White House apparently just willy-nilly came up with a plan to suit the ill-informed whims of a mentally ill man who doesn't know what he's doing.  The places being tariffed are internet domains, the alleged tariffs the location have on us is somewhat fictitious, and the formula for levying a "reciprocal" tariff is a bit of slap-dash treating a trade deficit like a tariff and, hoo boy. 

This is "nuking the hurricane" territory.  His sycophants are arguing, "Well, we have to trust him! He's Mr. Art of the Deal, right?"

(Um. No, he isn't. He's a glorified failure who cheats.)

Anyway, at least we are sticking it to those very duplicitous thieving Heard Island penguins, whose exports include, per their trades minister, Binky: "bit of extra fish", "shiny pebble" and "piles of poo for some reason, you weirdos." 

Isn't that a kind of grim satisfaction in the teeth of losing a healthy economy?

Maybe I Have This Twisted

 

Last night, I had the stupidity to forget how kiss-up, punch-down hierarchies work because I have never actually lived in a fully corrupted banana republic before. My dumb ass posted: 

And DOGE undermining the social safety net and intimating that Medicare and Social Security need big cuts is actually very bad? 

Because of course that is--but his antipathy to democracy at all is also really bad. 

I think it gets worse from here for Musk.. And I think I like it that way. As he starts to sink and stink, Trump will cut ties, because that's how he rolls. 

Except that was dumb, because if Trump truly believes he is post-"elections matter", well, he no longer has to care about whether people hate Elon. He just has to protect the guy who can easily dump $100M into his PAC (slush fund). 

Joe Six-Pack with the retirement fund and a MAGA hat isn't his main concern. Elon SuperPAC donor is.

Ergo, he turned the front of the White House into a sales lot for Tesla and cut a promo. They are cutting the Board of Education, Veteran's medical access, Social Security functionality as a whole thing, IRS (the revenue-finders!) and so on, but the White House had to help rescue one stock today.

The DOW lost many points. Tesla had a little unreality rally. Also, too, Trump declared folks vandalizing Tesla dealerships were "domestic terrorists."  

Let me get this straight. Pardon the idjits who attacked the Capitol with great violence on 1/6/2021 but the people protesting Tesla are the real villains against the US? 

TWGB: The Bedminster Bore

 

Not that long ago, I watched some right-wing commentator on Bill Maher's show try to say that Trump was NOT a "country club Republican", and for some reason, no one told her that Trump owns the fucking country clubs. (Was it Batya Ungar-Sargon? I can't find the clip but it's hardly worth my time to keep looking for it.) He owns the country clubs. He is not a working-class hero. He stiffs working people whenever he can. 

He just sat down with fellow billionaire Elon Musk and talked about how unions were bad because working people would be paid more if they were unionized. And today, he stood in front of his country club in New Jersey with some prop groceries and...um...talked about Hillary Clinton's emails and calling Kamala Harris a communist. Because how long can someone talk about the economy when he's only talking about it to get elected?  He lied, as per usual, because it's what he does. 

It was a dumb snooze version of his stump speech that he fooled certain chosen journalists into turning up for. Low energy. Lower-case "t" Trump. 

Something Inauthentic Here

 

This is wild. Particularly the part where he says "my friends and I coordinated a bank run" followed by "so then I bought shares of the bank thinking I could profit off the run". pic.twitter.com/67iwCrE6yj

— @chimeracoder@mastodon.social🦦 🏳️‍🌈 (@chimeracoder) March 12, 2023

While I appreciate the idea that people with money in SVB aren't necessarily bad actors who deserve to lose their savings (above the insured amount) and that the majority should be "made whole", there is something that feels inauthentic about the collapse of this bank and Signature Bank (which has a lot of crypto money in it).  I don't trust what I'm looking at because of the people I'm looking at. There are people wealthy enough to lose some portion of their vast fortune and still be fine--a bank run is just an investment in fuckery.

I remember back in December I was snarky about a Russian bank run. These things can be precipitated by rumors. I feel like the bank management and certain investors need to be looked at. This bank run has nothing to do with "wokeness" specifically (how do you even connect the dots on that one? A bank certainly could do woke shit and be responsible enough to have a risk assessment officer--these guys didn't) so much as deregulation and gambling in the old savings establishment again. In the meanwhile, the people who served us junk bonds and the dot com and housing bubbles really don't have anything they need to be telling us about moral hazard right now. 

There is no good reason there should be any "contagion" from this thing. Doom-saying about it...feels inauthentic. 

Trump and the Trade War He Chose

The market futures were down this morning when China announced new tariffs against American goods including automobiles, and the market did start down, but it was going to be okay--because Jerome Powell gave a reassuring speech that he would responsibly keep the economy rolling along even if he didn't give a definite date about a rate cut. Good enough for investors; things were picking up. 

Not good enough for the toddler in the White House, who proceeded to Tweet disparagements at Powell, 

As usual, the Fed did NOTHING! It is incredible that they can “speak” without knowing or asking what I am doing, which will be announced shortly. We have a very strong dollar and a very weak Fed. I will work “brilliantly” with both, and the U.S. will do great...

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2019

and included a useless demand for US businesses to pull out of China and delivery carriers (private companies!) to search for fentanyl in Chinese-based shipments. (This isn't how anything works.)

And swoosh! the markets were off to a downhill slalom. Because nothing gives a sense of economic security like President Queeg blowing up. Of course, because he's not just awful, but nasty, he blamed the slide on an unlikely source:

The Dow is down 573 points perhaps on the news that Representative Seth Moulton, whoever that may be, has dropped out of the 2020 Presidential Race!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2019

which might have been read as an attempt at humor that Moulton did not deserve and that Trump was inappropriate at hell to go for at that time (the market kept falling), and then after the close of bell, he announces his get-back at China:

So much for Christmas! 

None of this seems particularly strategic at all, and it isn't. China announced the tariffs just when Trump would particularly be spooked by them, and he behaved like a spooked individual. His retaliation might show "strength" but the joke that China's tariffs are "(politically motivated)" is just dumb--what is all of his "chosen" talk about, if not politics? He's not delusional (well, he is, but this part is political), he's chalking up potential losses to rounds of a long war in which he wants us to believe we will ultimately prevail if he remains at the helm. But at the same time, his Tweets reveal insecurity and weakness. He is more answerable to public opinion than Xi, and his missteps have already demonstrated that he doesn't understand how any of this works. We may have permanently lost soybean sales in China. The US manufacturing sector has already begun to contract, and this latest round of tariffs aims right at it. This will ultimately effect profits, and jobs (usually a lagging recession indicator anyway). 

Trump was chosen by the electoral college. He chose this trade war, and is doing it badly.

Pining for the Fjords?

Dana asks Larry Kudlow about purchasing Greenland "The President knows a thing or two about buying real estate" #FNS pic.twitter.com/HeaxR49JuU

— FoxNewsSunday (@FoxNewsSunday) August 18, 2019

I know that the thing I should be dinging Larry Kudlow over is his irrational exuberance (he's, um, coming off like he's tripping harder than Santana at Woodstock) regarding the economy on his chat show tour, which is deeply worrisome, because he famously didn't think we were headed for a recession in 2007/8 either, but I think the pretending Trump wanting to buy Greenland isn't totally batshit on Dear Leader's Favorite Channel is just about the damnedest Through-the-Looking-Glass shit I'm arsed to deal with this morning. As with the TV not working when the wind stops blowing and how tariffs work, I feel like people tried to explain the problems with all of this to Trump and he wasn't taking no for an answer, so, welp. Now they're stuck with it.

He's nucking futz, people. But he also seems to be a carrier.

Crazy Inverted Yield Curve!

I am not an economist and I don't try to play one on the blog, but yesterday's stock market results in response to a dip on the bond market are worrisome to me, not because I especially know what that means for the economy (former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen says it might not even mean a recession, and she would know a whole lot more than I do), but because I have a read on how the current president deals with things he doesn't know how to handle, and it's not great:

I don't think this problem is going to be fixed by yelling on Twitter--but the man can't help himself. 

What I see is that Trump didn't learn from the last crash and deregulated the financial industry, taking off brakes that were put in place to prevent Bad Things from happening again, and his "trade war" scheme hasn't really been an all-around success for the economy. (He has, between the lines, almost admitted that the US consumer actually pays the tariffs on imported goods with his recent delay of the next round as a "Christmas present.") His goal to shrink the trade deficit has not worked. 

And as for ways we chip our way out of a recession, he's already got us in massive deficit spending. Also, he has deepened the polarization in Congress with antogonism. If things go bad, I simply don't see him as the guy to help make anything better.

Panic and Pettiness

My opinion of the people currently in charge of the US is not actually very good. I think I've made my estimation of Donald Trump pretty clear, and am heartened to know that many people have made the Donald J. Coyote/Wile E. Trump connection that I did the other day. On one hand, it's nice that I am not alone in thinking that the POTUS resembles a cartoon of a perennially ineffectual schemer who doesn't ever achieve his goals. On the other hand, we appear to have a president who is a cartoon of a perennially ineffectual schemer who doesn't ever achieve his goals. 

Retired General Jim "Mad Dog" (although he doesn't actually even like that nickname?) Mattis served his country for a good long while and sort of had a bug about Iran that made Obama accelerate his departure at Centcom. But he was actually sort of good for a Trump Administration pick. He even resigned with a kind of decency and generosity--although his resignation didn't offer any compliment for the CINC he served, he nonetheless offered to retain continuity by working in his office through to February 28, to give the President reasonable time to find a replacement. 

Alas, Trump watched enough tv this week to figure out the hidden disses of his foreign policy that were lodged deep within the hidden recesses of the Mattis resignation letter, that might have been unlocked by anyone with a fifth grade reading level. Incensed, he directed his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to do the actual dirty business of telling Mattis to box up his shit and git. That is apparently the way he rolls.

In other news, the US envoy who was overseeing the diplomatic efforts regarding the war against Daesh, Brett McGurk, accelerated his own departure in response to Trump's precipitous decision to withdraw from Syria, and to mark this occasion, Trump saw fit to "neg" him. 

When, really, Trump should have known who this was and probably consulted with this guy before deciding on a withdrawal during a phone call with Turkish president Recip Erdogan, because even Erdogan was kind of freaked out about how quickly Trump wanted to let him go and most likely attack Kurds, or whatever. (See BBBB for his thoughts on how we are screwing over what should be our great allies once again.)

It's stupid that Trump said that he did not know his top guy doing State shit in a key area of the Middle East, but it's also stupid that his Acting Chief of Staff has to try and explain why Trump doesn't know him:

And it's because Trump doesn't "follow this topic". Which is actually seriously infuriating, because Daesh is a kind of big deal, and one Trump promised he had a very special secret plan for. Of course that was obviously a lie, but it's disgusting he doesn't cover up his failure to perform even the minimum of following through on his lie even the least bit.

In the meanwhile, everyone might have noticed that the DOW and Nasdaq and all that have not been doing the greatest, and probably chalked that up to the economic uncertainty caused by the trade war and the shutdown and so on. But in an alarming aside, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has been phoning the heads of different banks to just check in and make sure they are liquid, NOT THAT THIS IS A CRISIS OR ANYTHING, and saw fit to broadcast those conversations over social media which is very normal and not at all likely to cause anything like AN ENTIRE FUCKING PANIC. Not that we would know if there was any reason at all he should FEEL THIS WAY given that the Trump Administration has no grown ups.

The Trump agenda is motivated by pettiness, and now, panic. He blames the people around him, like his aides, or like Fed chairman Jerome Powell, for things he should look in the mirror about.

He was unqualified to begin with, and is proving to be an unqualified disaster. My disdain for those who can still support or even stomach his reign of error only grows.

President Obama Has An Economic Legacy

One of the things that bothers me about Obama criticism is that the dismissal of what Barack Obama has done as president seems to rest on an idea that one president, in one or two terms, can unfuxxor a Great Recession, while trying to win assorted foreign conflicts aginst terrorism, and get nothing but good press and approbation along the way. Despite opposition to things he might have been able to do to help more. Although the success of the recovery isn't an absolute success--many good things have happened. The rebound of full-time employment, while part-time jobs stayed stable--is part of the picture.  Full-time jobs are awesomesauce, they have bennies and security--and that they are the jobs gained in the economy as opposed to a boost in part-time employment is significant--but again--that's just part of the picture--I want to tell a whole story in numbers.

So, the thing I want to specifically address in this post is whether the Obama economy is a problem for Hillary Clinton as a kind of beneficiary of some sort of economic mojo--or whether she has a lot of positive opinion for Democratic economic performance to work with.