President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

1) We are not cutting our military budget to zero. As ridiculously wasteful and a product of cronyism as I think our DoD is, it would also be stupid, because if we are going to leave ourselves vulnerable to others that way, we might as well just leave ourselves vulnerable to a virus that is going to damage our economy.

2) Even if you get rid of our entire military budget last year, and keep the rest of our spending intact, we would still have been running a deficit of somewhere around $300 or $400 billion. The same old game of picking line items out of what we spend (and I realize our military spending is unreal and massive and not just a single line item) and saying, "If we got rid of this, we could have all these other things" is people doing the same thing.

We can't just shift deck chairs around much longer. We need to stop living a fantasy. We are much closer right now to it being a FORCED choice than I think people realize. If, really when, our ability to monetize escalating levels of debt ends, we can't continue with business as usual.

 

He happened to tweet this as we were having this discussion.

 

I don't think I posted it on here, but I was betting with near certainty last week that the first thing we were going to get from our monetary mandarins was a 100 basis point cut to zero on the overnight rate and more QE. You didn't have to be that clairvoyant to guess that they'd be that predictable. They are in a panic that the bubble world they created is going to collapse all at once. I also expected that it was going to surprise them when the equity market they were frantically trying to prop up didn't respond the way it has for the last 10 years, and they were going to find that the short-term funding markets were seized up and this was a deep financial problem that they had no control over.

What I posted and just quoted was that what they did to "shock and awe" markets, showed that they had no clue what the actual illness was or if they did, (more likely), they thought they could project confidence (and pray that it created magical confidence) by not going back to crisis measures.

Since then, short-term lending markets have completely shut off. There is a dollar funding problem. And just now. ...

Fed to reinstate commercial paper funding facility -sources

Mind you, the Fed shouldn't be in this business either. ... But what is really telling is the fact that it took the commercial paper market freaking out for them to get there instead of what their first instinct was, which was to frantically try to prop up their bubble world.

We pay for it all.

 

Oh, and more Repo this afternoon. ... Another $500 billion.

Anyone who keeps their savings in dollars is getting robbed blind right now by these shitheads. ... They may as well be lighting the dollars in your wallet on fire. Most people don't have a clue.

 

For anyone who cares (I realize I am going on and on, but this stuff flies under people's radar and it is at all of our expense), this is a Zero Hedge take on what I just posted.

Moral Hazard Is Back: Fed To Bail Out Commercial Paper Market

They are correct. This is moral hazard in a nutshell. We are socializing failure.

It also might not work; they are not as all-powerful as they have gotten treated for the last 30 years.

"And now we wait for the Fed to make the official announcement as it continues blindly throwing gobs of liquidity at a problem it ultimately is powerless to fix as the collapse of funding chains (which are simply supply chains in reverse) amid a crisis in confidence can not be resolved with even an unlimited amount of Fed bailout/backstop/rescue facilities."