This is the equivalent of being awakened by a phone call from your college freshman son, who then leads with "the important thing is that I'm totally fine and everything is totally fine" https://t.co/r2miHDobc9
— Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) December 24, 2018
You knew Trump was a serial bankrupt when you threw your panties the keys to the economy at him, bankers!
If everything is fine you don't go around saying everything is fine when nobody asked. Unless things aren't fine—or unless you're an idiot.
— Mig Greengard (@chessninja) December 24, 2018
Bank executives were startled Sunday when Mnuchin, on vacation in Mexico, arranged calls to make sure they had money to lend. Treasury secretary has come under enormous pressure from Trump, who blames him for Jerome Powell as Fed chair & dropping market. https://t.co/TPTyOgQ1xb
— Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) December 24, 2018
I smell a backfire https://t.co/6EuGZdj1EC
— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) December 23, 2018
Alternatively, Mnuchin could just be an idiot 2/ pic.twitter.com/5nvS5yQzhD
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) December 23, 2018
We should take seriously the possibility that we're looking at an economic team as clueless as their boss — and that they'll respond to real problems by firing off off-point tweets from various golf courses 5/
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) December 23, 2018
Let’s face the music and dance! pic.twitter.com/gXSXHHY1aN
— Schooley (@Rschooley) December 24, 2018
Our governent is shut down & federal workers are going WITHOUT PAY, meanwhile Treasury Secretary @stevenmnuchin1 is playing golf on the beach on Cabo San Lucas with full SECRET SERVICE DETAIL.
HOW DOES THAT WORK?
(I’m pretty sure he is not there to collect payment for the wall)— Stephanie Ruhle (@SRuhle) December 23, 2018
The Mnuchins' Christmas card pic.twitter.com/hy2FeNLt7C
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) December 24, 2018
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
I have to work in the morning (local government employee). I have a feeling my colleagues and I aren’t going to get much done, between checking the headlines and checking our 401(k) balances.
(I don’t actually do the latter, but I can’t talk some people out of it. I think they enjoy panicking.)
oatler.
In the 2001 crash I remember a Charles Schwab commercial that portrayed a calm, confident broker assuring investors that there was nothing to worry about. Then the news came back on to report that Charles Schwab would be laying off 2 craptillion employees.
Ruckus
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice:
I won’t say I’m at the panicking level but I work in the aerospace industry for the most part, a good amount of my income is SS and my healthcare is from the VA. So pretty much all my shoes are in the fire. With my feet in them. Oh well, I’ve been here before, in the last ten yrs actually. Who’d of thought that a moron who can turn billions into bankruptcy would be this bad at, well every fucking thing.
Schlemazel
I know of a leveraged fund that moves in the inverse of the DJIA at 3x. If the market goes down 10% the fund goes up 30% (the risk is if the market goes up 10% the fund loses 30%!)
But if I were 20 years way instead of 2 my 401k would have been in that fund about 2 weeks ago.
rikyrah
All of them are crooks ???
Brachiator
Apart from the Fed, the economy is running on autopilot, with practically no competent oversight by the government.
Meanwhile, here is a great article about all the ways the wealthy can take best advantage of the new tax laws, which appears to have been crafted specifically with their interest in mind.
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-tax-bill-20181223-story.html
The Pale Scot
Frankie Boyle’s review of 2018:
‘Let’s forget Brexit and enjoy our last Christmas with running water’
A delicious read.
Chetan Murthy
@The Pale Scot: Thank you! Was well worth reading the whole thing!
poleaxedbyboatwork
@Brachiator:
This observation, it seems to me, while true, is not so much an observation ex parte, but more a summation in toto.
moops
I’v been wondering what it would take to push the country into full-on recession. A tanking stock market doesn’t do it. It sets the conditions though. The impact of the trade wars takes time to come home to roost. but this. A fed shutdown and the cast of characters looking obviously incompetent and unprepared. That might just do it. I think shutdown, market fluctuation, and the grinding price we will pay for the tariffs. All coming at the same time.
If the sales figures for xmas are not strong…..
NotMax
Invest in curtain rod futures.
Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Cermet
The economy is still too strong for any recession to say the least. But certainly the seeds are planted (thanks to his insane trade war) and this orange fart cloud is now adding water to the soil with his stupidity as well (this letter.) The market will take a hit just because of these actions. But the people with the low IQ voted this moron into power and we are all in the same boat starting to take water as this ass wipe continues to drive us towards a waterfalls as he fucks up the engine. So, looks like 2020, at least, might also get us the senate besides the presidency we’d have gotten anyway. The bad part, this won’t be due to a second blue wave so much as economic conditions – ugh.
NobodySpecial
When I was a child, I was told the idea of stocks was to loan a company money, and the note would have quarterly dividends as something resembling interest. Then you could sell it, and maybe see a nice profit. It wasn’t until later that I realized that all financial stuff is rent seeking or gambling, usually with your money on bets you wouldn’t make.
It’s too bad everyone has to suffer while they trip away unscathed.
OzarkHillbilly
Mulvaney: Trump ‘now’ realizes he cannot fire Fed chair Powell
Well now then, I feel better already.
poleaxedbyboatwork
@Cermet:
Oh? Is it?
It will surprise no one to hear I ain’t much of an economist, but then, I take both cold comfort in knowing that most economists ain’t real good on the economy either. (Don’t call it the dismal science for nothing.)
Sure, Krugman seems to know what he’s all about. But you could fill a stadium with agitprop nitwits who are more akin to Randian ideologues than fair-minded surveyors of the scene.
What rings my bell is the indices that are used to judge the “health” of the economy are, virtually w/o fail, actually indices that judge how well-off to obscenely wealthy folks are doing.
The canary is not only unconsulted but dismissed from the coal mine. This, to me, seems like something of a structural flaw.
Plato
@The Pale Scot:
Ouch.
OzarkHillbilly
@The Pale Scot: Nobody does deadpan like a Brit. I loved this:
eta: then I look again at his name, what can be more Irish than “Boyle”? Obviously, he’s spent more than a little time in the UK, and it’s rubbed off on him.
JPL
@NobodySpecial: lol I often tell my sons, in the olden days the republicans were fiscally conservative. They laugh at me.
ascap_scab
I wonder how much of this sudden warning has to do with the 1MDB – Goldman Sachs scandal and GS stock plunging in the afterhours?
Geoboy
PSQ folks – this is just the beginning.
Cermet
@poleaxedbyboatwork: With such high employment and money flowing through the economy thanks to this, the backbone of our economy is still strong. The stock market isn’t the economy nor is trade a major part, either (compared to our domestic economy.) Certainly you are correct about economist and as we all know – that every single expansion has to end. So, at some point, a crash has to happen and how bad it becomes depends on how well it was prepared for by people who know a good bit about those issues. I just don’t see the obvious signs of a bubble currently here ready to go nor for next year.
I agree the start of one is likely what we are seeing done by these fools but still, compared to all the rescission’s I’ve gone through, I don’t see any signs of the economy deteriorating to the same extent; hence, my optimism for the coming year. But if you can point to a major bubble or economic wave starting to get serious, do post it. I am far from knowledgeable on this topic nor following details.
Of course, the orange fart cloud is damaging this economy and the next year we will certainly see the result of these and the latest clown car actions to build steam. Then I will really start to worry about 2020. At least the Fed is adding some powder to its reserves for what will be coming sooner now thanks to the orange fart cloud.
Van Buren
@JPL: We had a friend over on Saturday. She’s 56, has an MBA, and demonstrated that she cannot unlearn what she was taught 30 some years ago: R’s cut government spending, D’s waste precious tax dollars. No amount of intervention by reality can dislodge these “facts”
OzarkHillbilly
@Cermet: The thing I worry about is the knock on effects of the tax cut. I have not seen enough to say what kind of bubble producing effects it may have, but it’s timing is certainly comparable to unilateral disarmament (Beware the return of the Fiscal Conservative Unicorn and their war cry, “Deficits must end!”) while our enemies (otherwise known as Reality) eye our expanding economy and say, “This travesty can not continue!” (because all good economies turn bad eventually).
OzarkHillbilly
@Van Buren: I have an old friend just like that. Can’t get thru the MBA re-education camp indoctrination.
geg6
@OzarkHillbilly:
Nobody does deadpan like an Irishman. Not to mention the Irish way with words. And they don’t need to travel to Britain to get that way and never did.
JPL
@OzarkHillbilly: Tax cuts pay for themselves also.
poleaxedbyboatwork
@Cermet: Tx. for repy, Cermet. For my part, I confess I know somewhere betwixt jack and shit on the subject, but I do have a few troubling impressions.
One is employment. This, to me, seems a highly illusory measure gleaned by whistling past the economic graveyard. One, in my understanding (subject to correx), it discounts the long-term unemployed (who are both legion *and* uncounted, convenient that), and two, it is an aggregate figure that is more a measure of untold desperation than of shiny happy contentment. Lotta peeps work one or more shit jobs, trappt, just to keep their heads above penury w/little or no safety net. That don’t seem like a byproduct of a healthy economy. In the formulation of Charlie Pierce: Peoples got no fuckin’ jobs, Peoples got no fuckin’ money.
And more importantly, “the economy” (or as so many likes to phrase it “this economy”) serves the rentier class. Period. Full stop. imo, ymmv
E.g. The financial services “industry” adds what value, exactly, to the economy? And yet, it, and a few other behemoths, direct what is and, more importantly, what is not possible in “this economy”. Which is virtually nothing that don’t serve their interests.
Ain’t trying to pick a fight, Cermet, so hope you don’t take offense, but will only say that smaller straws than Trump’s unconquerable imbecility have toppled “the economy” before, mostly due to vapid, venal unchecked self-interest (“the invisible hand and the free market fairy always arrive at the best of all possible worlds!”).
I see no check on this. Anywhere. And if history has proven anything, it is that what seemed manageable-to-OK-to-encouraging economic conditions is gotta funny way of spiraling outta control really fucking fast. Seemingly w/o warning.
(Who, e.g., apart from the folks who shorted housing/CDOs/BigShitpile — a minutely small buncha folks — saw the aught-seven meltdown coming? “I’ll take (virtually) nobody for $2,000, Alex!”
I take your provisos about Trump’s malign wrecking-ball influence to heart, but it ain’t the whole story. The rot runs deep, and no, I cannot substantiate anything, but our political climate and “this economy”, to me, feels a lot like a powder keg.
fwiw
poleaxedbyboatwork
Hmph. Did I just break the internet with my own stupidity?
Amir Khalid
@ascap_scab:
Goldman Sachs and two of its executives are facing some serious 1MDB-related charges here, but the allegations have been known about for many months, the downside was factored into its stock price already, and there haven’t been any big new revelations.
tokyokie
@geg6:
You should try hanging around some Native Americans.
Procopius
@Ruckus: About a third of my income is my Social Security pension. It, and the payment system, are supposed to be safe, because it’s a separate tax and administrative system. The other two thirds are an Army length of service pension. It’s supposed to be safe, too. I’m not very worried.
Studly Pantload, the emotionally unavailable unicorn
@The Pale Scot: HO-lee-sh£t. That man is a veritable Bruce Lee with power saws for hands and feet, and can make the reader laugh and recoil in horror simultaneously (such is the fun of our times). Now that I know GB has the brutal likes of him, I no longer feel bad for us stealing John Oliver.
HalfAssedHomesteader
Expect news that the 7th largest bank is folding.
Procopius
@Cermet: You’re right there are no clear signs of a crash in the near future, but Lambert Strether over at Naked Capitalism publishes lots of statistice in his 2:00 PM Water Cooler Mondays thru Fridays. There are lots of little niggles, lots of things that aren’t as strong as they should be, and then they’ll perk up. This weak-ass “recovery” has lasted a very long time, so just based on that we’re due for a recession. It doesn’t look like it’s going to come next year. I really hope it comes at least three months before the election in 2020. Otherwise, people are going to blame the Democrats, and along with their real faults that’s going to hurt them for a long time.
debbie
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice:
With a normal government, panicking might be pointless. But we are being led by a lunatic who wouldn’t think twice about fucking this country over if it would save him. Panicking is practically required.
debbie
@Schlemazel:
Ha! My money was in Magellan back in the 1980s. It was fun while it lasted, alas.
Cathie from Canada
This. If there’s anything that will panic Wall Street AND Main Street, it is this.
VOR
I’m reading the Woodward book and have to take it in small doses because it is so much worse than I thought, and I thought it was bad. Trump was bellowing for tariffs the second he took office. He wanted to withdraw from pretty much all trade agreements, including the WTO, right on Day One. He said we lost every case in the WTO and refused to believe Gary Cohn when he was told we won something like 86% of the time. He really does think the economy consists only of big factories and steel plants. Trump believes he knows better than any of his advisors, on any subject, and simply refuses to listen. I guess I knew all the stuff but it is really something to read example after example in the book.
One interesting point was that Admiral Ronny Jackson, the former Presidential physician, apparently checked on Trump every day. Hmmm.
Plato
@Procopius:
If people are that stupid (and that racist), they deserve that hurt.
different-church-lady
Suspiciously Specific Denial.
H.E.Wolf
@geg6:
Re: Frankie Boyle:
Google reports that Frankie Boyle was born and raised in Glasgow in Scotland, and earned his BA in English Literature from the University of Sussex in England. His Irish parents had relocated to the British mainland before his birth.
As the offspring of an immigrant parent, I’ve always been interested in how that parent did (or did not) match the stereotypical characteristics attributed to their country of origin.
My other parent is the descendant of immigrants several generations further back… some of whom were Irish. I hope that makes me distantly related to President Obama! :)
chopper
mnuchin’s statement reminds me of the monty python bit
Brachiator
@Procopius:
I don’t think that a recession is coming, and certainly not one which will scare people into voting against Trump.
The economy may continue to sputter along as it has for a while now, with “strong” GDP growth, low unemployment, and stagnant wages.
The economy will continue to be hobbled by Trump’s pointless strategy of tariffs and trade wars.
The new tax laws will ensure that the wealthiest Americans will engorge themselves on even more of the country’s wealth.
And even though stories about the fate of the rest of us have been bopping around for some time, in April Newsweek pointed out once again that Dollar Stores are predicting a permanent underclass in this country.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is matching some conservative states in advocating tougher requirements to qualify for food stamps, and inevitably the GOP will push to cut Social Security and Medicare to “fix” the deficits that they created with tax cuts for the wealthy.
chopper
hard to say re: recession. this is an economy run a great deal by consumerism, and the current mood is that a recession is coming, which can slow things down. likewise, overseas economies are either shrinking or punching themselves in the dick (brexit) and they have an effect on ours.
what i do know is that if we have even a mild slowdown it’s likely to make itself worse than it would need to be given that low-ass rates will hobble the fed’s response.
what we don’t have are any inklings of a financial crisis, so why the fuck the administration decided to do this is beyond me. unless there’s something wall street isn’t telling us.
J R in WV
@Cermet: \
\
\
\
Dude, you can’t even spell recession, and we’re supposed to care about your opinions of the probability of a rescission…? Do not think so! Plus plural of recission is not recission’s.
Geeze, did you learn English at a Polish school, or German, or Russian?
Luthe
As a Millennial, my entire economic philosophy is: “Recession is coming.” What goes up must eventually splatter like a carton of eggs dropped from 40,000 ft.
Ruckus
@Van Buren:
You said the magic word.
She has an MBA.
She’s been taught American Business by Conservatives which is that all monies need to flow to the owners, any monies not going to them are not profits and are bad. Of course she’s not going to believe anything else.
Ruckus
@Procopius:
It’s that supposed to be safe that gets me. This crowd hates, with the heat of a thousand suns, SS and with the heat of a half a thousand suns, government pensions.
I still work so I’m still putting money into SS and every year so far that has resulted in an uptick in my payment besides CoL, because my piece of the fund of course has continued to rise. Not this year, I got my notice of CoL and nothing else. Because of work I haven’t been able yet to go to SS and find out what’s what. Is it a normal snafu or is it an individual 1 fuck up? I’m going with the most likely.
Ruckus
@H.E.Wolf:
Go back farther.
According to the bible if you go back far enough we are all related to the same two people. Other books vary.
Of course if you study biology it goes far deeper as to our relatives.
Ruckus
@Luthe:
Recessions are always coming. An economy is run by people and their actions, some will help an economy and some will destroy it. The goal is to keep the swings from going too far in either direction. And as is obvious in the last ten years, that doesn’t always happen. I like that in the last 100 yrs the largest recession and the depression were both caused by “smart” people ignoring all sense and running head first with their clothes on fire with exactly the wrong responses into the deep end of a drained pool.
Yes we will always have recessions and overpowered economies if we continue to look a the wrong data and use the wrong responses. Of course if we don’t do that the rich won’t get as rich, so we can’t have that.