President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

If we don't get revisions (which there usually are as they go along), and we get another quarter, he can certainl crow. The problem is that there were huge inventory builds and there were huge shipments of soybeans going to China, essentially because people were trying to beat the tariffs when the crazy talk was going on. That is a phony, one-time thing. Add to it a one-time sugar high from tax cuts, and it's actually right around where it should be. You could argue that if we weren't in a depressed global economy going on a decade, with that kind of phony stimulus, the sugar high quarter should have been higher. But there is so much other stuff weighing down economic growth, and on top of it, most of the tax cut went to financially engineering higher stock prices via buybacks and dividend raises, not to investment in workers, plants, equipment, training, etc. Those kinds of things would have the potential to create more sustainable growth, but nobody is investing into our debt-ridden economy. There is no reason to believe you'll get paid back for that investment.

At the beginning of the year, the story in markets was "globalized synchronized growth." But most of the world is slowing down, and now it is, "Oh, OK. But the U.S. is growing so well!" China, and particularly Europe, where the countries almost everywhere else are seeing declines -- prints like .2 percent in France today. There is no way the U.S. is growing like gangbusters while the rest of the world is slowing down. It just doesn't work that way in a globalized world. And on top of it, we are very close to the longest expansion in modern history. The world has been flooded with leverage and credit for the last 9 years, and while it didn't produce the huge boom $10.5 trillion of free money should have created, it has held off recession -- and given just a depressed 1, 2 percent growth (averaged out), with some spikes like the ones you pointed out based on fiscal factors. It's all noise. We have been in a prolonged depression. And if history is a guide, we are overdue for a recession. You don't get expansions this long in the age of monetary control of everything. When that next recession comes, it will come into ultra cheap monetary conditions that are already there (so they will have a tougher time creating yet more credit, which is their response) and fiscal irresponsibility that has sent global sovereign debt, as well as private debt, to crazy levels. The U.S. is going to run more than a trillion dollars more of deficit next year with what they did with that tax cut and spending binge, so it's not even like any adults have stepped up yet. The payback for even the crappy growth the world has had since the financial crisis is just not going to be pretty.

The U.S. is not growing at 4 percent on a sustained basis, even if I would love to be wrong about that.