President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Iron_chet · Sep 19, 2019

CD Boogie said: ↑

It was an Arabian Nights party...how ya can look like Aladdin or Jafar without...well

Stupid theme for a party. Bad judgment on his part? I guess. But this wasn't last week. This was years ago. Different climate and all that.

Him saying he was mad at himself? That is so freaking lame. That'd be like me saying I'm mad at myself for drinking too much grain alcohol that one time in college and blacking out to the point where I had to be carried home.
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Doing blackface in 2001 was pretty unacceptable. The other thing getting missed in this is how Mr “she experienced it differently” has his hand on the women’s chest in the pic.

Don’t see that type of hand placement in pics with men.

Neutral Corner · Sep 19, 2019

Trump has proved that a politician can lie in the face of photos, sound recordings, or video and get away with it - but I still think that Canadians would have taken one look at that picture and refused to buy it.

TigerVols · Sep 19, 2019

Iron_chet said: ↑

Doing blackface in 2001 was pretty unacceptable. The other thing getting missed in this is how Mr “she experienced it differently” has his hand on the women’s chest in the pic.

Don’t see that type of hand placement in pics with men.
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That's what caught my attention as well. I presume all of the people in the pic are faculty members at that school? Seems like a #MeToo moment to me.

Neutral Corner · Sep 19, 2019

Gotta love the Bill Barr cover up dress.

The Big Ragu · Sep 19, 2019

Neutral Corner said: ↑

Trump has proved that a politician can lie in the face of photos, sound recordings, or video and get away with it - but I still think that Canadians would have taken one look at that picture and refused to buy it.
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I think the reason for this is that people expect Trump to be a jerk and a charlatan and a liar. So we have allowed him to inure us to endless shitty, and even illegal, behavior.

Trudeau couldn't get away with lying in the face of evidence (like a Roy Moore kind of thing, or even a Brett Cavanaugh kind of level of evidence, where Cavanaugh might be able to create enough reasonable doubt if we were in a court of law, but to any reasonable person with working bullshit detectors, they kind of know there is probably at least some truth to the various allegations), because Trudeau's public image isn't of a dishonest jerk. The image he has cultivated is of an honest, caring, sensitive man, who is more moral than Donald Trump, for example.

If he lied, in a perverse way, I think it would hurt him even worse, because he can then be painted as a hypocrite and a phony. Donald Trump, I suspect, actually benefits at this point, because people don't expect anything better from him, so they move on quickly.

It's f'ed up, but I think that is true.

DanOregon · Sep 19, 2019

Trump's sleaze was baked in for 40 plus years before he ran for President. It is his brand. The average pol? A scandal like this is the first time people pay attention - it tends to taint the image.

CD Boogie · Sep 19, 2019

TigerVols said: ↑

That's what caught my attention as well. I presume all of the people in the pic are faculty members at that school? Seems like a #MeToo moment to me.
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Are you referring to this picture?

That is not inappropriate. Notice his left hand is intertwined with her hand. I'm guessing it's his date. And his hand is on her neck, not her breast. She doesn't look uncomfortable to me.

JC · Sep 19, 2019

CD Boogie said: ↑

Drunk much, lynch boy?
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I imagine he’s a proud boy. They are usually a bunch of pussies like he is.

garrow · Sep 19, 2019

The Big Ragu said: ↑

I think the reason for this is that people expect Trump to be a jerk and a charlatan and a liar. So we have allowed him to inure us to endless shitty, and even illegal, behavior.

Trudeau couldn't get away with lying in the face of evidence (like a Roy Moore kind of thing, or even a Brett Cavanaugh kind of level of evidence, where Cavanaugh might be able to create enough reasonable doubt if we were in a court of law, but to any reasonable person with working bullshit detectors, they kind of know there is probably at least some truth to the various allegations), because Trudeau's public image isn't of a dishonest jerk. The image he has cultivated is of an honest, caring, sensitive man, who is more moral than Donald Trump, for example.

If he lied, in a perverse way, I think it would hurt him even worse, because he can then be painted as a hypocrite and a phony. Donald Trump, I suspect, actually benefits at this point, because people don't expect anything better from him, so they move on quickly.

It's f'ed up, but I think that is true.
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And that is exactly why Trump never got heat for how he looked in this photo:

2muchcoffeeman · Sep 19, 2019

The Big Ragu said: ↑

The Fed lowered their overnight rate by another 25 basis points yesterday. Someone posted about it.

So while they spent last year telling everyone that after 10 years since the financial crisis the economy was finally strong enough for them to make very tiny attempts to reduce the amount of manipulation of the rates market that has really only created asset bubbles, leveraged gambling and a lot of debt all around us, that normalization lasted about as long as the stock market sell off in December and January (same as they have reversed course two other times, in 2013 before that when they stopped quantitative easing and the stock market started to crash, so they reversed course) and they have completely reversed course again.

The rest of the world has gone even more radical with their price fixing of the rates markets to desperately try to monetize more and more debt. Last week, the ECB lowered their overnight rate further into negative territory (they have negative rates across Europe), and they announced yet more bond buying, theoretically with no end to it (QE Infinity).

There is now a realization of what I have said for the last 5 or 6 years, that they can never normalize, they can only prop up the mess they created for as long as they can until there is a debt crisis and they have no control. It just takes more and more debt and that requires more and more extreme interventions by them.

In the case of the Fed, they have lost complete control of the mechanisms they supposedly are controlling, and short term repo rates have blown out this week. It's not getting enough attention, because for most people it isn't understandable or it seems like an obscure thing.

The repo market is where very short-term borrowing transactions take place, and it funnels about a trillion dollars every day to big banks, investment firms, and hedge funds, etc. to do their day-to-day transactions. They should be able to borrow right at where the Fed supposedly has set overnight rates.

People believe that the Federal Reserve simply sets interest rates, but they don't. They manipulate what is a market to TRY to set interest rates. And with interest rate policy (as opposed to the quantitative easing they have done where they intervened in our debt markets to actually buy treasuries and mortgage-backed securities with money they created out of thin air), they really only influence the shortest end of the interest rate curve -- overnight borrowing rates.

With their rate cut yesterday, that short-term rate is supposed to sit about between 1.75 percent and 2 percent. Earlier this week before the latest cut, it was set at between 2 percent and 2.25 percent.

But the repo market hasn't been behaving that way, and at times this week, that short-term borrowing rate has jumped to more than 6 percent. It spurred the trading desk at the New York Fed (which is essentially the world's worst hedge fund -- with QE, they overpaid for trillions of dollars of debt) to intervene each morning this week, with freshly printed money (which they do with a flick of a computer key), injecting hundreds of billions of dollars in to try to loosen things.

At the same time, overnight borrowing rates for commercial paper, which are unsecured loans to corporations to fund day to day needs, have also surged.

These are signs of some kind of stress.

What it all means, I can't say, but the distortions those clowns have created over the last 11 years or so with their extreme intervention in our markets have led to a lot of misallocated capital creating insane amounts of debt that couldn't be priced correctly because by making money free, they blind people to the risks they would have had to consider if there was a market-determined risk premium attached to that money. It's precisely what they did to create the financial crisis in 2007 / 08, except on a much grander scale, and the reason is that rather than allowing the deleveraging that was necessary to happen then, they instead tried to solve an overleveraging and debt problem by manipulating markets to pile more debt on top of that debt problem to paper over a mess (and make it worse in the process).

What I can say is that in the past, sudden and weird moves in the repo market have usually meant some kind of trouble ahead. It's often an early warning signal. For example, in the summer of 2007, repo rates suddenly tightened, and it was one of the first signs of the built up problems in the financial system due to misrated mortgage-backed securities.

It's worth keeping an eye on, but most people don't follow these things or want to understand them.
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¿TLDR?

Inky_Wretch · Sep 19, 2019

I'm sure this is totally fine and not a canary in the coal mine situation.

Birds Are Vanishing From North America

Starman · Sep 19, 2019

garrow said: ↑

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Yeah. Their rough tough alpha male mucho macho god emperor is a flouncing foof with a lisping mincing foo foo effeminate speaking voice, who wears lipstick and pancake makeup, and has his hair styled so as to look exactly like his mommy.

And whose mentors and male role models were Roy Cohn and Liberace.

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President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

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President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

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