President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

In North Carolina, party always finds you!

 

That thing doesn't even tell the main reason the repatriate-America-t0-prosperity thing was ridiculous. Yes, less money has come back in than they promised. It doesn't make sense to repatriate cash or assets, even with the amnesty, if you are being punished on the front end by the foreign location you are repatriating from. And that is the case for a lot of companies, which have a responsibility to maximize shareholder value, not to wave an American flag.

Worse, though, with the economy muddled in a decade-long depression since the financial crisis that has only produced the little bits of growth it has during the "recovery" (in quotes for a reason) because of trillions of dollars of monetary-induced debt creation worldwide, why would anyone have thought that any money that does come back would go into capital investment? You don't build factories and invest in equipment and worker training and stuff like that, unless there is a robust economy to try to grow your business into. And that isn't the reality most companies are seeing.

In fact, the thing that has juiced most companies' earnings per share over the last several years has been buying back their own shares -- again due to monetary-induced debt creation. When your earnings are growing anemically, the way to jack your EPS is by decreasing your number of shares outstanding. Since earnings aren't doing it. And when you can borrow at artificially low interest rates over a period of years, because of central bank manipulation, it makes it easy to run up debt and use the borrowed money to do just that. It's policy that ends with. ... well, a lot of debt and the money having been used nonproductively (by overpaying for your own stock).

All the tax benefits did was more of the same. Companies took the one-time windfalls they saw, and by and large didn't invest in their businesses with the money -- because the incentive isn't there for most businesses when the economy (and the markets they sell into ) has gone almost nowhere over a decade in real terms. Instead, the money that was repatriated, for example, was by and large used for yet more stock buybacks.

But it's been perfect. The Federal Reserve's bubble blowing machine made the stock market the replacement for the economic growth that main street hasn't seen during that period. We blew up asset prices and they pretended that the economy was doing great. Then we elected an absolute moron (I believe elected because of the reality I an describing -- populism works when people are disaffected) who not only didn't understand that the bubble was likely to deflate while he was president, he tied himself to it by boasting about how HE was the reason the bubble went from bubblicious to parabolic bubblicious (in part, because the tax bill was a bit more helium / excuse to get another 8-ball of cocaine and try to keep the party going a bit longer). Trump says a lot of dumb things that come back to bite him. Making the stock market the barometer of his performance after 8 years of margin blowing valuations to crazy places was perfect. A politician with a brain would have been distancing themselves from it, just on the probability that a reversion to the mean was going to happen. But not our clown in chief. So he owns it now.