President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

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.

 

Have I missed it somewhere else on here, or has there not been any discussion about Justin Trudeau's penchant for dressing up in blackface and doing minstrel shows when he was younger?

The first one, where it was a photo of him from some "Arabian Nights" thing at a school he taught at in 2001 seemed to me like it could be explained away somehow.

This one, nuh uh.

I am not piling on just for the sake of piling on. Honest. Even with the idiot governor in Virginia, who probably really is a racist. ... when that broke, I tended to give a personal amount of leeway for the fact that attitudes have changed a lot, even over just the last 15 to 20 years. And while that stuff may have been insensitive at best, outright racist at worst 20 or 30 years ago, in today's climate it gets met with a lot more outrage than it did in the past.

One reason why I think Trudeau should be skewered and not be let off easy, though, is that with the way he has managed his public image, if anyone else had made news this way in Canada, we all know he would have been in tears apologizing to the world about all of the racism and injustice in Canada and making mealy proclamations about what "we as a country can do," to make sure nobody is ever hurt by such insensitivity again.

 

Just realized I had missed a post on Trudeau earlier!

One small mitigating thing for me. At least he didn't deny it! I don't think he realistically could have, given that it would have then been proven that it was him in the photos and video by others present and where they were taken, etc. But we have gotten so used to politicians lying, deceiving, denying, etc. when something negative comes public. I have always believed the true test of character is what you do when it's most difficult to do the honest thing. I don't want to pat Trudeau too much on the back, because like I said, I think he has to know that lying would have potentially come back to bite him even worse. But I am happy he is being honest.