About 30 days into Obama’s first term I predicted that, “Obama will eventually go down as a worse President than W, which is hard to do because W might be one of the worst Presidents in U.S. history.” I am making the same prediction of Trump: he’ll go down as a worse President than Obama.
I would surmise that a majority of Trump’s voters voted for Trump as a vote against Hillary. Many of them have expressed relief that “Trump is not as bad a Hillary.” But, au contraire. The decision faced by voters was no different than choosing between liver cancer and pancreas cancer.
Trump promised to “drain the swamp.” That was nothing more than a clever marketing slogan adopted by Trump’s team to galvanize the majority of Americans who felt betrayed by the Democrats, led by Obama, who beginning on day one back-pedaled and repudiated the policy platform on which he campaigned (anyone besides me recall these promises: “I’ll close Guantanomo in the first 90 days” and “I’ll eliminate the use of Executive Orders” and “I’ll repeal all of Bush’s surveillance Executive Orders”).
The Democrats I know have the memory of fruit fly because every one of them seems to have a case of selective memory. Perhaps Obama’s most memorable promise, aside from universal healthcare (Obama’s version of which is collapsing before he leaves office), was his vow to clean up the corruption on Wall Street. Of course, his Attorney General appointment for most of his Presidency was Eric Holder, a career Democratic operative who worked at the Covington Burling law firm. Covington Burling is Wall Street’s “body guard” in Washington, DC. Most people have never heard of Covington Burling, which is how it is intended to be. CB is the real life version of Bendini, Lambert and Locke, the infamous mob law firm in John Grisham’s, “The Firm.”
A little trivia: Holder, as AG for the District of Columbia in the late 1990’s, drafted the pardon letter for Marc Rich, the infamous tax-evader who fled to Switzerland, signed by Bill Clinton as he walked out of the Oval Office for the last time (Clinton’s reward was carnal knowledge of Rich’s wife, Denise).
While the politicians promised that Dodd Frank and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and other legislative reforms had made America safe from Wall Street, in fact the opposite is true. The subprime mortgage bubble has been replaced by a nearly equally as large, if not more insidious, subprime auto debt bubble. With the help of Obama’s Government-backed mortgage “reforms,” Wall Street banks have spawned another subprime mortgage and housing bubble. Derivatives “reforms” did nothing other than enable banks to hide their criminal use of these highly profitable weapons of mass financial destruction.
In other words, the only “cleaning” up that was accomplished over the last eight years by Obama was removing the last remnants of transparency from Wall Street’s operations, as all of these so-called “reforms” have enabled the Too Big To Fail Banks to conduct their fraudulent activities further “off balance sheet.”
So Obama has left his successor with 100% more Government debt, a collapsing healthcare system that is unaffordable for most other than corporate fat-cats and the recipients of free medicaid (and of course for the Congressmen who are exempt from Obamacare and have their healthcare paid for by the public anyway) and a financial bubble that dwarfs the bubble that was popping when Obama took office.
The Wall Street problem for this country is going to get worse under Trump. In some ways it makes sense. Trump’s casino business was a product of Drexel Burnham Lambert’s junk bond juggernaut. I know this because I traded all of the old Trump junk bonds which, by the early 1990’s, were trading at distressed levels. Trump is a real estate guy and real estate guys love debt more than they love their mothers. And Wall Street loves nothing more than to underwrite that debt loved by guys like Trump. In other words, in some ways Trump is a slave to Wall Street as much as, if not more than, his predecessor. Note that among the first words out of Trumps mouth when he claimed victory was a promise to take deficit spending to new levels in order to build out the infrastructure. There’s only way to finance deficit spending…
Circling back to Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp,” I think most of us assumed it not only meant getting rid of the career politicians like Hillary Clinton who had become completely controlled by corporate/Wall Street interests but also getting rid of the elements that controlled them. Most notably the Wall Street bankers ensconced throughout all levels of the Obama Government.
But Trump’s appointments, for the most part, suggest that Trump is merely “draining” the swamp of the Blue swamp monsters and is replacing them with Red swamp monsters. And in reality, Wall Street monsters do not distinguish between Red and Blue. That’s because the god they worship is GREEN. The latest proposed appointment is a Sullivan & Cromwell lawyer to head the SEC. Sullivan & Cromwell is Wall Street’s most highly regarded legal operative in NYC. Need anymore be said?
Soon Amerika will be like Russia. You want health card you pay
bribe to local politician. You want good apartment you pay bribe
to local politician. Peoples in Amerika have no ideas how bad it can
get. I hope Amerika never experience these corruptions like we do
in Russia.
Well Nizhniy we have our own politicos who do a very a very
good job of grabbing the populace by the ankles and turning
them upside down and shaking every last nickel out of them.
I don’t think America is that far behind what you have described.
It was said of FDR that he was “a traitor to his class”. FWIW.
But at least the prospect of mushroom clouds, with the election of Trump, have been stayed for a while, yes?
Anxiously awaiting Stewart Dougherty’s Part-Two. He had hoped to have it ready to go on Jan. 2nd. Any update?
About 17/18 months ago, I discovered your website, along with other links, via Mike Maloney’s GoldSilver.com.
These days, you’re the only guy I really take notice of, because all the other commentators that would be loosely described as “Austrian school,” are too enamoured of Donald Trump.
Needless to say, Zerohedge almost have a messianic view of the Donald.
And Greg Hunter, believes that the Donald is the result of divine intervention.
You’re the only one who is willing to articulate an alternative view about Trump, within your peers, that Trump will be just as bad for the financial system, but as you point out, for reasons your fellow Austrians, are not willing to acknowledge just yet.
As for who the worst US Pres in my lifetime is, i would have to be George W. Bush.
I know, everybody has their own subjective view, but as an Australian, I was disgusted and appalled about a whole fiasco around the false WMD narrative, and how that became a pretext, in what was probably America’s worst foreign policy blunder, that being the Iraq war.
And needless to say, my country, Australia, like they have done in the past, behaved like an obsequious poodle, and just blindly followed the USA, into the Iraqi mess.
I don’t think Trump has got any choice , they will buy or kill him , what would you chose ?
If you want the job to be done , do it yourself. We can’t rely on them , people will have to change system .It’s going to be bloody nothing else, otherwise we are losers 100%. , there are no easy option anymore.
I’m curious as to your view on Trump’s bankruptcies.
Were these to the benefit of the banksters?
Sure, cheap debt is a boon to the real estate developer, but it is far from clear to me how Trump will reduce rates to the ZIRP he inherited from Obama.
The way I see it, Trump can do little to improve the economy. And with no improvement to a decent economic growth rate, the debt cannot be paid and will instead continue to grow. With Trump’s plans, it will continue on the hokey stick path to debt oblivion. My feeling is we are at peak debt now, not only here in the US, but globally. The fact that it now takes more units of debt per unit of GDP should tell you something. No thinking person can believe this is sustainable. Most are unaware…
I think we are in a debt trap with no way out. Either we inflate the debt away, or default on our creditors and wipe the debt clean. Either way the public will experience severe pain. And a debt default may even lead to war. A war we are in no position to finance and are unlikely to win. (When have we won any of the wars we have started since WWII?).
I’m told by my friends that I have a negative outlook. But all I do is look at the situation and relate the evidence that I see. I’m a realist, and truth itself is neither positive nor negative. It is how we respond to it that determines our view. I don’t believe we should ignore truth because we feel it is negative. If we are ignorant of reality, how can we know what’s required to make a change?
Willful ignorance is not a game plan. But this seems to be the approach so many are taking so they don’t have to face reality. Take pension funds. They are failing left and right, and we can expect many more failures to come. Social Security is running out of funding. If the generations following the baby boomers can’t find jobs, who will pay the FICA tax? The willfully ignorant (or just plain blind) don’t concern themselves with such things. Saving more and acquiring precious metals or some other wealth protection means would never occur to them.
No, Americans will not change their behavior unless they get hit hard in the pocketbook. Then they will look around for someone to blame. The time will have passed for them to have done something for themselves, as their ignorance will not have prepared them for the future. A future that is not hard to predict if you bother to pay attention.