President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

She got trounced in the election. Who is to say that photo wasn't part of the reason?

 

S&P futures had a muted reaction when this hit this morning, but that is because this stuff isn't really what everyone is focusing on right now. There is a central banker circle jerk in Jackson Hole, WY over the next few days. It's an annual event. Janet Yellen speaks at 10, Mario Draghi later in the day. Ostensibly, it's all academic, but the tea leave readers, algorithms and robotraders will be sitting with their fingers on their buttons. Draghi, in particular, has a penchant for fucking with them with cryptic and confusing language (which inevitably gets walked back a day or two later).

As much as most people are focused on the politics and the potential fiscal ramifications, it's the monetary manipulation that is running the show. They have sucked all liquidity out of various currency, fixed income and equity markets by putting their thumbs permanently on the scales of finance. This was in the Financial Times a week and a half ago: Subscribe to read Debt levels have exploded, and central banks own a fifth of all public debt now -- and they have only increased the buying (they print money out of thin air and then buy up debt -- which is increasing. It's positively Bernie Madoff like, except they are sanctioned). And that doesn't include the corporate bonds that the ECB has loaded up on or the outright equity purchases that the Japanese and Swiss banks have loaded up on.

But fiscally, just in the U.S., we are running big deficits and social security and medicare / medicaid are albatrosses. There is no "infrastructure" spending without blowing an even bigger hole in the budget, and on top of it, tax cuts of any sort that aren't accompanied by massive spending cuts -- which aren't on the table -- does the same thing. The whole conversation is a giant fantasy, but that is what we do now. If we get what people started talking about when the orange idiot was elected, we will blow up our debt even further, and we are closer than most people realize to being out of room in that game. Without monetary mandarins expanding the major currency monetary supplies at a crazy rate to try to inflate away as much of the debt we are racking up as possible, that game would already be over. And the longer it goes on, the bigger price there will be to pay, so anything dumb fiscally we do is just additive to some major pain down the line.

 

She got to the second round because Francios Fillon, who probably would have won the election, got tangled up in an criminal / ethics investigation that killed his chances, and the only other competition with serious name recognition was an outright communist (who came fairly close to advancing, and I mean communist, not typical European socialist).

You can't compare poll results from when there were something like 15 candidates in the race to when they had narrowed it down to 2 candidates and say there was hardly a blip in movement. Yeah, she beat the communist, which effectively was what she had to do to get to the final round. But was that despite the Putin stuff .... as in, if she was a serious candidate a communist never would have fared that well? Then she got trounced by Macron.