Trump to win?

[lektrode]

Re: Trump to win?

dup deleted.

[lektrode]

Re: Trump to win?

Now the Very Smartest People tell me the unmitigated disasters a Trump presidency will bring. Now the shit is real, they tell us. Now it's time to panic, the smart set say. But to get the future they believe in, the rest of us have to give up our futures and pretend the past never happened. That's the smart and responsible thing to do, they tell me.

Well that's never going to happen. Not ever.

Why? Because the "Bernie Bros" and the Trump rabble just won't get it - there's just too much democracy! And unless we accommodate ourselves quickly to a most undemocratic moment, well the bad man will build a wall, keep Muslims out, and make it much more expensive to hire people to maintain lawns and golf courses. Well, I'm thinking that's too damn bad and also that there's someone else who might deserve credit for the rise of Trump.

So why support Trump if the Democrats nominate Hillary? Screw unto others as they have screwed unto you; this is my first commandment.

I won't listen to it or to another word from the Very Smartest People on why it would be so very dumb to support Sanders or Trump. It's a pleasure to watch them squirm, to see the GOP implode under the weight of its own obstinate hypocrisy, to see the incompetence of the elite media laid bare, and to know the Democratic Party is a walking dead zombie soon to crumble as its remains turn to dust.

HEAR HERE!!!!

+10 to the Nth power
(sorry if thats not logical, i didnt take calculus)

sez the strangest of bedfellows?

and i'll just leave this here:

Submitted by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,

Donald Trump says a lot of whacko things, and his recent wild pitches about defaulting on the national debt and replacing Yellen because she is not a Republican sound as if they were coming right out of his wild man wheelhouse. Certainly these statements have gotten mainstream financial journalists and editorial writers in high dudgeon.

Said the NYT editorial page about Trump’s observation that if things got bad enough he’d seek to negotiate “discounts” on Uncle Sam’s towering debt,

Such remarks by a major presidential candidate have no modern precedent. The United States government is able to borrow money at very low interest rates because Treasury securities are regarded as a safe investment, and any cracks in investor confidence have a long history of costing American taxpayers a lot of money.

Well, now. These “very low rates” could not have anything to do with the fact that the Fed has vacuumed-up $3.5 trillion of Treasury debt and its close substitute in GSE securities since September 2008. Apparently, the law of supply and demand has been suspended until further notice—-except for the fact that when Bernanke even hinted that the Fed might sell-down some of its grossly bloated balance sheet in April 2013 treasury yields erupted higher in the infamous taper tantrum.

The fact is, ultra low rates on Uncle Sam’s mountainous debt have everything to do with central bank manipulation of interest rates; and “confidence” in Washington’s fiscal rectitude is but an empty platitude.

There has been a central bank Big Fat Thumb on the scales for nearly two decades, and it now includes the $1.7 trillion of treasury debt owned by the People’s Bank of China (including its off-shore accounts), the $1.2 trillion owned by the BOJ and the nearly $7 trillion owned by central banks and their affiliates as a whole.

That’s right. The world’s central banks own more than 50% of the publicly traded US debt of $13.5 trillion, and not one single penny of it was purchased with real savings or anything which remotely resembles honest money. It was all scooped-up when central banks hit the “buy” key on their digital printing presses.

In short, the “very low yield” on US Treasury debt is the product of a giant monetary fraud, not a testament to the strength and safety of Washington’s credit. And it most certainly has nothing whatsoever to do with investor “confidence” in Washington’s integrity.

Just the opposite. The Wall Street traders are all-in on the scam. The marginal bond price is “discovered”, in fact, when fast money traders buy the stuff on 95% repo leverage while front-running the central banks.

So Donald Trump’s wild pitch in this instance can’t hold a candle to the truly scandalous arrangement under which Uncle Sam’s debt is actually priced. Even the treasury debt in commercial bank vaults is mainly there because regulatory authorities permit the fiction that it is risk free and therefore require zero capital backing.

Still, that didn’t stop the Washington Post from harrumphing even more self-righteously than the NYT.

By its lights, Trump’s purported cave man views threated financial civilization itself:

If these phrases mean anything, they contemplate at least partial repudiation of the U.S. government’s obligations, sacrosanct since the time of the founding. The “full faith and credit” of the United States, established over centuries and embodied in its debt, is the glue that holds global finances together. The minute the United States tried to reduce its debt load by offering creditors less than 100 percent of principal and interest — i.e., by “discount,” or “making a deal,” like Argentina or Greece — every institution that had taken this country at its word would be instantly destabilized.

What the Post was all lathered up about is the official policy

Here’s the thing. What the Post was all lathered up about is the official policy of the United States—–and one that is actually pursued with a punctilious vengeance. According to Janet Yellen and her entire posse of camp followers in the Eccles Building and on Wall Street, the Fed must move heaven and earth to boost the inflation rate to 2% annually.

Not only that, it must use the shortest measuring stick possible (the PCE deflator less food and energy) to track its progress and keep the printing presses running white hot to insure it stays there. That is, it must deliver 2% inflation at all hazards, world without end.

Then again, isn’t that the very skunk in the woodpile? After all, under a scenario of 2% inflation year-in-and-year-out, a 30-year US treasury bond will be worth exactly 54.5 cents on the dollar at maturity. The Donald could only imagine a discount of that depth.

Yes, the savvy insiders argue its 2% uber alles. That is, everything goes along for the inflationary ride—–prices, wages, profits, rents, indexed social benefits and the works. Except it doesn’t work that way in the slightest. Just like the Donald says, debtors get relieved and savers get creamed.

The deliberate national policy of 2% inflation is the most capricious form of economic injustice imaginable. Not even its perpetrators have a clue as to the utterly random incidence by which it impacts economic agents over time and the resulting windfall gains and losses in wealth which flow therefrom.

And that’s not the half of it. The Fed’s deliberate 2% inflation policy not only results in the arbitrary seizure of deep discounts on the public debt by the government, but also an immense dissipation of economic resources by the private sector. That is, all kinds of racketeers are enabled to make a handsome living peddling information and services which would never be needed under a regime of sound money.

Economists who work the “fed watch” beat are a prime example. If the Fed had stuck to the original passive rediscounting mission conferred on it by Carter Glass in 1913, there would be no open market operations and the Fed would not be stuffing its balance sheet with trillions of public debt, thereby drastically falsifying its price.

And that means that racketeers like the so-called economist quoted below would be as rare as white buffaloes. Lou Crandall thus declaimed in tones of righteous disdain:

“No one on the other side would pick up the phone if the secretary of the U.S. Treasury tried to make that call,” said Lou Crandall, chief economist at Wrightson ICAP. “Why should they? They have a contract” requiring payment in full.

Right!

The do have a contract—-and it’s to have 45% of their investment seized every 30 years by the central bank. And they even get to pay court jesters like Crandall to watch the central bank’s machinations as their wealth steadily erodes.

This is why Trump’s politically incorrect bluster is such a refreshing tonic. It exposes the entire tissue of fraud, corruption and willful deceit that underlies the Washington/Wall Street status quo.

None of his loudly remonstrating bettors, for example, even bothered to mention the context in which he mentioned the possibility of default in the form of negotiated discounts on the public debt. Namely, what happens, the GOP nominee inquired, if interest rates rise by “2, 3 or 4%”?

That is a perfectly valid question and one that is studiously avoided by the Keynesian Cool-Aid drinkers who pass for economists and fiscal experts. The truth is, interest rates must return to something like our current 2.3% core CPI inflation plus a 2% margin for risk, return and taxes or the entire monetary system will someday blow sky high.

Yet ten years from now the public debt will be $33 trillion at minimum—-unless you really believe that the central banks have abolished the business cycle and that the word “recession” will disappear from the face of the earth.

But then again, an average 4.5% carry cost on the prospective Federal debt would amount to $1.5 trillion of interest charges annually or 6X the $253 billion the CBO currently projects for net interest in 2016.

Can you say with the Donald, “debt discount”?

In fact, let us point out that the scam built into the phony $253 billion net interest figure for this year leaves Trump’s alleged voodoo economics far behind. To wit, in the most recent year, the Fed earned upwards of $120 billion from its $4.5 trillion trove of Treasury and GSE debt, but paid virtually nothing for its $4.5 trillion of liabilities because, alas, they were conjured from thin air.

So after paying the banks their IOER (interest on excess reserves) bribe of about $12 billion and the salaries of several thousand economists and other apparatchiks of dubious value, it remitted its “profit” of more than $100 billion to the US Treasury as an off-set to its interest expense.

Now, that’s voodoo economics, if there ever was such a thing. The Treasury might as well have issued non-interest bearing “greenbacks” in the first place and have been done with it. Today’s circular arrangement is just crank economics by another route.

Indeed, the Capitol Hill guardians of fiscal virtue being implicitly heralded by the Trump bashers have discovered that the Fed’s phony baloney profits are the gift that never stops giving.

After a two-year stalemate on the matter of the bankrupt highway trust fund, for example, these practitioners of “fiscal responsibility” dipped into allegedly excess system “profits” at the Fed to cover the gap.That is, between $25 billion and $70 billion of phantom profits from the Fed’s balance sheet, depending upon how you do the phony accounting, were pumped into the highway trust fund because these incompetent cowards could not see fit to cut out the massive waste which goes into mass transit, bicycle paths and the repaving of little used state roads, on the one hand, or raise the gasoline tax, which hasn’t been adjusted for inflation since 1993, on the other.

So “confidence” is being threatened because Donald Trump has told the truth that the Federal debt is on a track toward unmanageability and default while Washington plays games like this?

Moreover, the highway trust fund caper was only small beans. During the last several years, the reported Federal deficit has been reduced by upwards of $250 billion owing to another scheme of phony “profits” repatriation. Namely, Fanne Mae and Freddie Mac have generated giant profits under an accounting scheme that is a complete circular fraud, and then sent them back to the US Treasury.

These GSEs are effectively “renting” Uncle Sam’s credit rating in order to be in the multi-trillion mortgage guarantee and warehousing business without paying any meaningful rent for the long-term risks they are incurring. Stated differently, Washington is parking the risks off budget and booking the profits in its current accounts.

And that gets us to the loud screeching about the sacred independence of the Fed elicited by Trump’s welcome statement that he wouldn’t reappoint Yellen. Whether that is because she is not a Republican or because she is utterly incompetent as an economist doesn’t matter. The Fed is part and parcel of the state and its massive intrusion in private capitalism; the notion that it is “independent” is a just plain bad joke.

Yes, Uncle Sam’s credit standing is in deep trouble and the Fed is heading for a monetary calamity.

But these untoward prospects have nothing to do with a couple of alleged wild pitches from Donald Trump. Upon closer examination, it is evident that the Donald was actually right on the money.

and i'll bet the crow being served for lunch - at dave's antagonists fave neo-lib academic cafe - like where paul slugman eats his - is oh-so tasty today, eh woody?

[vt]

Re: Trump to win?

The most awkward handshake ever:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iis...ature=youtu.be

[jk]

Re: Trump to win?

samantha bee says farewell to ted cruz and explains the whole primary process as a replay of back to the future ii
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFYCQGvW-cg

[Woodsman]

Re: Trump to win?

AMEN to all of that. Only caveat to the above is that it isn't the elites by themselves that's nominating Billary for their third term at the House. Why are so many states still coming out in favor of this eternal BS propaganda churning machine? I get it that they fixed the elections in NY probably other places too, but what has kept the democrats in the south from waking up and smelling the coffee (or in this case, the pile of hot smoking turd) they've been served by the establishment on both sides for the last 30 years?

I voted for Sanders and would give anything to see him pull this one out, but I can't deny the reality of the math. Only a Billary indictment by the FBI may save us now. If that doesn't happen, I may have to convince myself to vote for this racist, misogynist, facist douchebag because I too want to see Napolean and Snowball go screw themselves.

Lot's of folks are looking at this the same way. If the Democratic Party elites are intent on tripping up Bernie, the Democratic rank and file and independents will trip Hillary and toss it to Trump.

Exit polls: Nearly half of W.Va. Sanders backers would vote Trump

Nearly half of the voters in the West Virginia Democratic primary who backed Bernie Sanders say they would vote for Republican Donald Trump in the fall presidential election, according to exit polls reported by CBS News.

Forty-four percent of Sanders supporters surveyed said they would rather back the presumptive GOP nominee in November, with only 23 percent saying they'd support Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton. And 31 percent said would support neither candidate in the likely general election match-up.

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/...nia-would-vote

[ProdigyofZen]

Re: Trump to win?

Lot's of folks are looking at this the same way. If the Democratic Party elites are intent on tripping up Bernie, the Democratic rank and file and independents will trip Hillary and toss it to Trump.

Thus the reason why a Trump/Sanders ticket would crush any opposition and shock the world.

I would love to see that.....

[Prazak]

Re: Trump to win?

Hey Woody,

Always good to read your posts.

I don't doubt that Democratic elites prefer Hillary over Bernie. But given that Hillary has received some 12.5m votes to Sanders' 9.4m, is it not also possible that the Democratic "rank and file" prefer Hillary over Bernie?

The truly sad statistic in all this is just how few of the eligible voters have actually cast votes for any of these . . . distinguished public servants. Is it not harder to bemoan that the game is rigged when so few people bother showing up to play? Not a whole lotta Bern (I feel a Led Zeppelin re-write coming on . . .)

[Woodsman]

Re: Trump to win?

Hey Woody,

Always good to read your posts.

I don't doubt that Democratic elites prefer Hillary over Bernie. But given that Hillary has received some 12.5m votes to Sanders' 9.4m, is it not also possible that the Democratic "rank and file" prefer Hillary over Bernie?

The truly sad statistic in all this is just how few of the eligible voters have actually cast votes for any of these . . . distinguished public servants. Is it not harder to bemoan that the game is rigged when so few people bother showing up to play? Not a whole lotta Bern (I feel a Led Zeppelin re-write coming on . . .)

That's generous of you. I have zero confidence in the accuracy or fairness of the reporting coming out of the NY-DC axis regarding the Democratic contest. I can't fathom how any sensible person could. And that's not even mentioning the foul-play committed by Gauleiter Wasserman-Schultz.

If the numbers turn out to have any semblance to reality, what's to say after Mencken?

“No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

Every day Democratic primary voters learn more about Hillary's embrace of the right. First we have a wave of right-wing neocon fanatics giving their support to Hillary after two decades calling her a cauldron stirring witch. Now we learn the Democratic Convention is being hosted (paid) by Republican donors and anti-Obamacare lobbyists.

If that's not enough to convince primary voters to support Sanders, well then it's like the sign says:

"Thank you Lord Jesus for President Trump."

[rjwjr]

Re: Trump to win?

Bye bye democrats.

Democrats? Bye, bye the GOP establishment and good riddance.

Hopefully this current one-party system, loosely disguised as as a two-party system, will finally meet it's demise. A new multi-party system and honest debate of ideas may just make America great again (to plagiarize a slogan I heard somewhere).

[vt]

Re: Trump to win?

No it's bye bye Democrats and Republicans.

The left has lost:

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-br...-idUSKCN0Y206H

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl...hits-a-new-low

The right has lost too.

We have two warring camps with Trump and Sanders leading the insurrection from different directions.

Hopefully out of this chaos a new majority party on independents will rise to get rid of the insanity of the left and right.

[Woodsman]

Re: Trump to win?

No it's bye bye Democrats and Republicans.

The left has lost:

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-br...-idUSKCN0Y206H

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl...hits-a-new-low

The right has lost too.

We have two warring camps with Trump and Sanders leading the insurrection from different directions.

Hopefully out of this chaos a new majority party on independents will rise to get rid of the insanity of the left and right.

I guess you have't noticed but a class-based left politics in America died about the time you quit VISTA. From there, the left traded class-struggle for ass-struggle.

Apologies to all my gay friends on the left (and thanks for nothing to those on the right). I'm glad you all are finally free to be you, but after reading this I'm reminded what a terrible trade-off that turned out to be for the rest of us.

https://morecrows.wordpress.com/2016...unnecessariat/

From where I'm standing, the right looks utterly victorious and that in my opinion accounts for just about everything that's been made to turn to shit in the last 50 years.

[lektrode]

Re: Trump to win?

I guess you have't noticed but a class-based left politics in America died about the time you quit VISTA. From there, the left traded class-struggle for ass-struggle.....

best one-liner of the year!

or, read another way - its what happens when 'identity politix' and the 'cause du jour' overlap to screw the 99% - aka:
The Rest of US - which we can 'thank' Team D for - since THEY have become The Party of the 1% - or whatevah the lamerstream media-led kneejerk reactionary activist PC-gestapo groupthink mob decides to protest this week - in the 'name of equality' ??

= We, The Rest of The People - LOSE

all so Team D can peel-off another 1% 'margin of victory' (as in 2008 + 12)

Team D = THE party of corruption, since wildbill&co 'took over'

(and NO that doesnt mean i'm pluggin fer team R, altho i AM a 'small-r' type who thinks that the .gov aristocracy is THE problem)

[jk]

Re: Trump to win?

I guess you have't noticed but a class-based left politics in America died about the time you quit VISTA. From there, the left traded class-struggle for ass-struggle.

Apologies to all my gay friends on the left (and thanks for nothing to those on the right). I'm glad you all are finally free to be you, but after reading this I'm reminded what a terrible trade-off that turned out to be for the rest of us.

https://morecrows.wordpress.com/2016...unnecessariat/

From where I'm standing, the right looks utterly victorious and that in my opinion accounts for just about everything that's been made to turn to shit in the last 50 years.

what do you think happened? was it paul volcker's recession followed by reagan firing all the air traffic controllers? that was kind of a 1-2 punch for organized labor, the first to the gut, the second to the head. in the 70's part of the wage price spiral was the fact that many big unions had negotiated cola's which helped their members keep up with rising prices. and those were industrial unions, which were a big deal back then. it seems like the biggest surviving unions are gov't employees. just add on some teachers -oops gov't employees. no, some service workers, hotel cleaning staff, but the steel workers and auto workers are gone as political/industrial actors. teamsters and cargo handlers, i guess, still have significant unions. sorry for the detour, but my point is that the 70's were the peak of union power as far as i recall, and it's been downhill for both unions in particular, and blue collar workers in general since that time.

i'm not sure that the left gave up when reagan ascended to the oval office. more like they were neutered. so gay rights became a civil rights struggle, and so much nicer than worrying about the fact that minorities were still getting screwed always and everywhere.

it seems like the turning point was after carter was elected, and lewis powell wrote his famous memo.

[vt]

Re: Trump to win?

Woody,

Of course I wasn't speaking about America. The examples of Brazil and Venezuela show the bankruptcy of the left, and of course you have the failure of the oligarchy of the right. The people want neither.

What is of concern is the romance of Bernie and the pied piper of socialism. This won't work either as it has failed everywhere.

Obama is as close to the left as we've had and he failed to jail the bankers and let them make billions. We need to throw all the bums out.

[ProdigyofZen]

Re: Trump to win?

Obama is as close to the left as we've had and he failed to jail the bankers and let them make billions

Obama the closest to the left? You mean he was the closest to corporatism and the rentier economy we have ever had?

He surely was no where near the left IMO.