President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

People will still be jerking off, even if the report is released.

For some, this is just an exercise to get Trump out. For others, it is an exercise to try to give his presidency legitimacy. Those people are all hyenas.

At the end of the day, there is an objective truth about whether Trump was in cahoots with Russia on the crap they pulled. He probably wasn't. Common sense should have told most people that is likely. Trump, and the clowns he was surrounded with, aren't that smart. And Putin isn't that stupid to leave his fingerprints on it with an assclown who screws up everything.

Put all of that aside, though, and Robert Mueller was never the arbiter of what Donald Trump is. ... a bullshit artist and a grifter and a morally bankrupt person, who has turned the presidency into a joke.

It's up to Americans to see that for themselves, if they are willing, and try to undo the damage we've done to ourselves. If people don't want to do that, though, America will continue to get what it deserves. No one should have expected Robert Mueller (who as a person, appears to be the anti-Trump; not infallible, but an honest man) to be the instrument to do what America won't do for itself. People shouldn't have ever wanted one man to play a role people won't play for themselves.

 

No one on here gives a shit. I didn't post about Jay Powell doing more of a pirouette than a Russian ballerina on steroids, either. Even though the mess the monetary mandarins around the world created, has had way more longer-lasting impact on people's lives than anything Donald Trump could do (short of starting a nuclear war). They are the source of populism and discontent in the world. Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren don't exist without them, even though most people struggling along don't understand the actual cause of their problems.

Whether we are in a recession is beside the point. Nobody outlawed the business cycle. And honestly, it's hard to know precisely what an inversion between the 3 mo/10 year means in such a ridiculously manipulated environment. We have never seen anything as upside down as what they have given us.

But aside from recession talk, what actually matters is how bad things are going to get when everyone does drown in the immense amount of credit they created worldwide (which was ridiculously, poorly allocated because all of the price signals that have been destroyed) this time around. The business cycle they have created is a world of massive risk asset bubbles on the boom side, which they have now overtly admitted they exist to keep propped up (their true mandate), with Powell taking just 3, 4 months to completely flip flop. None of the artificiality of the last decade has reached the real economy. It created some wealth disparity, that's mostly it. What comes next is all of the margin / leverage behind that artificiality imploding and the bubbles deflating (and some of that fake wealth drifting away like a fart in the wind). Unfortunately, just like in 2008, the real economy is going to have to pay the price without ever having gotten a benefit from their lunacy.

I will (not go out on a much of a limb and) guess they try more asset buying before too long to artificially prop up the phony asset prices that they care about, also cut the overnight lending rate of course, maybe do the batshit thing and punish saving to the point where you not only don't get a return for lending money, you get charged (negative rates). But that can't work at a certain point when the amount of debt you have already created has passed a threshold, and there is too much distress. It should have never gotten to that, but just like with Donald Trump, America (and the rest of the world) has gotten what it deserves.

As for the inversion. ... I won't say too much because nobody gives a shit, and I will come off in a way I don't intend to. But I have been positioned for it for a year +, and I didn't have to try to divine how long Powell would be able to get into rate hikes / quantitative tightening before he panicked and had to reverse course to go all in. They boxed themselves in a long time ago.

I'll just say that I wouldn't want to be running a regional bank right now. You are getting absolutely plowed by those idiots on your net interest margins. Regardless of what you think about how much they have fucked up our capital markets (or how someone could profit from their stupidity), that kind of environment is just miserably bad for the long-term health of the global economy. People may be waking up to that right now. Or maybe not. At this point, given the extent they have destroyed price discovery in the debt markets, it may take a mushroom cloud before the "a ha" moment shifts the greed / fear equation.