Jamie Dimon's Casino
Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2017 7:21 pm
David Stockman posted....
The Donald is winging it...His economic team isn’t even in place yet
— but he'll still have a "phenomenal" tax plan in a couple of weeks.
His own Department of Homeland Security did a first crunch of the
Mexican Wall costs at $21.6 billion, but he waved off the number,
insisting it will "come way down." He's also got a giant fiscal freight
train coming at him in the form of a $20 trillion debt ceiling that
freezes into place on March 15, but apparently no one has informed him
he will run out of cash a few months thereafter. And he's picking fights
with everybody — Sen. McCain, who deserves it, and Nordstrom, whose only
offense, apparently, was that it dumped Ivanka's fashion line owing to
punk sales. I haven’t even mentioned, of course, the demolition derby
that is arising from his travel ban fiasco and last week's sudden eruption
of mass deportations of illegal aliens. In both cases, there are plausible
reasons for carefully prepared action.
But the crisis-mentality embodied in the White House's haphazard forays
on border controls are warranted less by facts than the various alternate
realities lodged under The Donald's combover. Still, this emerging White
House train wreck is entirely welcome. As I have said all along, Trump's
job is not to enact phony cures. We've had those for decades. He has been
chosen by the fates to be the Great Disrupter and to bring the system to
a crashing halt and America's fantasy-land dwellers to a rude awakening.
To be sure, a large faction of the establishment remains clueless about
Trump's true mission. Even as the political left is on the verge of
mobilizing Vietnam-era scale protests against his new presidency, much
of Wall Street is still stuck on the infantile delusion that Trump is
an economic magician. No, he is an incendiary bubble-buster, and I am not
referring merely to the 8% stock market gain since Nov. 8. What's actually
in the cross hairs of the whirling dervish in the Oval Office is the entire
Bubble Finance regime of the last 30 years. Trump will bring on the mother
of all fiscal crises within a few months, not some Trump Reflation.
When that causes a heart-stopping plunge in the casino, the C-suites of
Corporate America will panic like never before as their stock prices and
option packages evaporate. This will trigger, in turn, another violent
liquidation of the inventories that have been built up during the last years
of this illusory "recovery." Then the rubber will meet the road. If you
haven’t gotten out of the casino yet, now’s the time.
The Donald is winging it...His economic team isn’t even in place yet
— but he'll still have a "phenomenal" tax plan in a couple of weeks.
His own Department of Homeland Security did a first crunch of the
Mexican Wall costs at $21.6 billion, but he waved off the number,
insisting it will "come way down." He's also got a giant fiscal freight
train coming at him in the form of a $20 trillion debt ceiling that
freezes into place on March 15, but apparently no one has informed him
he will run out of cash a few months thereafter. And he's picking fights
with everybody — Sen. McCain, who deserves it, and Nordstrom, whose only
offense, apparently, was that it dumped Ivanka's fashion line owing to
punk sales. I haven’t even mentioned, of course, the demolition derby
that is arising from his travel ban fiasco and last week's sudden eruption
of mass deportations of illegal aliens. In both cases, there are plausible
reasons for carefully prepared action.
But the crisis-mentality embodied in the White House's haphazard forays
on border controls are warranted less by facts than the various alternate
realities lodged under The Donald's combover. Still, this emerging White
House train wreck is entirely welcome. As I have said all along, Trump's
job is not to enact phony cures. We've had those for decades. He has been
chosen by the fates to be the Great Disrupter and to bring the system to
a crashing halt and America's fantasy-land dwellers to a rude awakening.
To be sure, a large faction of the establishment remains clueless about
Trump's true mission. Even as the political left is on the verge of
mobilizing Vietnam-era scale protests against his new presidency, much
of Wall Street is still stuck on the infantile delusion that Trump is
an economic magician. No, he is an incendiary bubble-buster, and I am not
referring merely to the 8% stock market gain since Nov. 8. What's actually
in the cross hairs of the whirling dervish in the Oval Office is the entire
Bubble Finance regime of the last 30 years. Trump will bring on the mother
of all fiscal crises within a few months, not some Trump Reflation.
When that causes a heart-stopping plunge in the casino, the C-suites of
Corporate America will panic like never before as their stock prices and
option packages evaporate. This will trigger, in turn, another violent
liquidation of the inventories that have been built up during the last years
of this illusory "recovery." Then the rubber will meet the road. If you
haven’t gotten out of the casino yet, now’s the time.