President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Stephen Moore is a lot of bad things. But he's not a stupid man. He's just a political hack. And will take any stance in the moment to justify what he wants to do, which is cut taxes, enable a president he likes to run huge deficits, etc. etc. It's economics by crayon.

As Trump's pick, Moore -- the gold standard guy -- will be the exact opposite of the gold standard guy. The Fed exists to monetize debt for the politicians in power, who run big deficits that would sink the country without a central bank to inflate away our debts. That was what the Fed did for Obama, and that is what the Fed is reduced to doing for Trump. Not so much because they love Trump -- the majority of the governors despise him -- but because they have spent the last decade creating a credit mess through radical monetization of debt unlike anything ever seen, all to prop up the credit mess they had created, which popped in 2008. They can't escape the mess they created, so all that is left now is to keep doing whatever necessary to prop up a way overlevered economy with more and more debt monetization -- essentially creaing more and more credit for as long as they can, while they claim they are managing the economy.

Moore will fit right in, again, not because he is aligned with Loretta Mester, and the rest of them, but because that debt monetization is what he wants -- it enables his guy, Trump, to keep acting recklessly and the country to keep running huge deficits without us drowning in our interest payments -- kicking that can down the road, hopefully for him until Trump is gone. Moore may have said things about a gold standard in the past, but just last month, before he was nominated, he wrote an Op Ed for the WSJ calling on the Fed to not only stop the hiking cycle it had been on (which the Fed predictably did when their stock market bubble started to crash), but to cut rates by 50 basis points immediately. In other words, Stephen Moore, the full-of-shit gold standard guy will be the most dovish guy on the board if he takes a seat today -- the antithesis of someone who cars about sound money. He's only in favor of a gold standard or sound money, when the president is someone running up massive amounts of debt to blow through money in different ways than the ways Stephen Moore's guy does.

That won't create economic uncertainty. Markets will be as euphoric as ever if that is the path we take -- provided the inevitable credit crisis doesn't end the fantasy between now and then -- just as they have loved all of the debt monetization (the suppressed interest rates and asset buying by central banks).