Friday, March 23, 2018

Trump holds a gun to the economy's head

The market intensely dislikes two things - bad economics and unproductive war. 

Bad economics disrupts productivity - if there is an established flow of resources to production centers to points of sale - bad economics spoils that flow. There are all kinds of resources (physical/financial/information) and there are all kind of production centers. Most of these are linked in ways no one can predict or claim to know. Disrupting productivity in one stream produces non-trivial effects in other teams. 

Unproductive war (like the shooting wars of old or the civil wars of today) destroy production centers and consume manpower. This ends productivity in a very fundamental way as capital resources decline precipitously and control over those resources becomes contested at a very high level. 

By opening the door to a trade war with so many US international trade partners (China, Canada, Mexico, etc...) and simultaneously appointing John Bolton as the NSA - Trump has created both problems at once.

Everyone - even the smallest businessman - knows you can't overload the system like this. It falls apart completely and that outcome favors no one. 

I am guessing that Trump (and his patron Putin) know this all too well but with Mueller so much closer to putting them behind bars for the rest of their lives, Trump has decided to put a gun to the economy's head as a whole. 

I see the worried faces in the NatSec community - people know how bad this is and that millions will die from this deadly combination of events. 

It is easy at this point for people to say - "Well then have Mueller back off - that will calm Trump down and we don't have to do this" but that doesn't work either. As I had discussed in my earlier post,  ending the Mueller investigation will make Trump think he is emperor. When he thinks like that he will move aggressively to eliminate his liabilities (Nazis, 2A guys - this means you) at that point these "liabilities" will launch a civil war. So that outcome will be even more damaging to the economy than whatever trade wars Trump attempts to ignite and whatever real wars Bolton tries to set up.

A flip side to Trump putting a gun to the economy like this is that those rich Midwestern farmers who voted Trump in, will feel the pain that their Great Generation ancestors felt when the elected Hoover and he put Smoot Hawley into effect. The situation with Ag debt/asset ratios is already pretty bad, Trump's attempt at a trade war with China will backfire on his supporters. There is little one can do about that - one only gets what one puts in. 

The same is true for Bolton, he is in public service today because he skated responsibility for his role in triggering the Iraq war. A lot of people got away with that, but if he triggers another war, he may find himself being handed over an international criminal court as a war criminal. Again - the man loves war so much - he might actually enjoy the prospect of being the target of a Nuremberg style proceeding (yeah he is like that). One cannot protect people from the consequences of their own actions. 

By appointing Bolton (the poster child for Bush era Warmongering Elitist) as NSA and with the exposure of the "electronic brain washing" by Cambridge Analytica of old white men in the US, I feel a subtle fissure has opened up inside Trump's vaunted "base". We are not at the point where his base is openly questioning him, but even one question asked openly by those in the base - will cause his fragile ego to shatter. 

Trump really expects his base to follow him like sheep being to the slaughter. He no more expects questions from them - than a farmer expects questions from the pigs he is about to kill.  


6 Comments:

At 4:11 PM, Blogger Ralphy said...

did you see how quickly the chinese came back with a targeted tariff retaliation especially against trump supporters?

the cheen have studied us thoroughly. they know their opposition like the back of their hands.

they know where our heart lays and our motivations. back when bill clinton was touting the wto agreement with the chinese they had every intention of finding ways around the wto negating it....like requiring tech transfer, restricting us businesses, reserving markets for chinese companies only, stealing patents, the list goes on........like stealing candy from a baby.

and they paid off the clinton foundations and campaign funds that the msm does not like to talk about.......in short we were sold down the river by liberal elitists and rino conservatives BECAUSE THERE WAS MONEY TO BE PUT INTO THEIR POCKETS. they didn't give a damn about any Americans job

may they rot in hell......

 
At 4:14 PM, Blogger Ralphy said...

don't believe it? try this for starters......

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_United_States_campaign_finance_controversy

 
At 9:51 PM, Blogger Ralphy said...

Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071DSP4RT/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

 
At 4:58 AM, Blogger maverick said...

Firstly Schweitzer is Bannon's guy, part of the Breitbart CA RIS slander machine. Buyer beware.

Secondly HRC nor BC are not President so even if this is true it is currently irrelevant.

Thirdly China will eventually pay off Trump via brand royalties and Kushner via Anbang. At which point Trump will forget about tariffs. China will however make back the money by shafting US states that voted for Trump. They already made the bank with TPP. Trump will use the money from China to pay lawyers to wage a psy war on Mueller and appoint himself Prez for life.

Look I get it, Trump & GOP convinced you that Clintons were corrupt. What I can't get my head around is why you think the GOP or Trump are any less corrupt? Especially when all the data points at them being even more corrupt.

 
At 9:07 AM, Blogger Ralphy said...

why is trump the only one to do something about it? everyone else rides the chinese government gravy train.......

 
At 6:01 AM, Blogger maverick said...

Because he is the President or so every Trumper tells me.

He made a promise to his "base" that he would fix all this stuff - drain the swamp, destroy the deep state etc... but I never believed him - so I can't really hold him to his promise.

Trumpers should be holding him to his promises, because that is how I think democracy works but I hear that his "base" keeps handing out mulligans even though they are getting screwed by his behavior.

I really don't know what these folks really wanted out of electing Trump but it seems like ending Chinese influence operations was not one of them.

The "base" seems real okay with Trump's crimes but displace all their angst and anger at having been duped by Trump into slandering Clinton and Obama.

They tell me that it was all about MAGA and feeling good about being an American etc.. etc... and that Trump was their last hope. But when I point out their last hope was stillborn, lets just say denial is not a river in Egypt anymore. The invest more energy into denying the truth than into fixing what is wrong with their chosen setup. This intrinsic failure in every Trumper filters upwards to the GOP leadership who live in fear of offending Trump.

I never thought I would live to see a day when this great nation was duped in so comprehensive a fashion by a reality TV star. Guess I put too much faith in people.

 

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