"Buffoonery"

 

     This morning, MSNBC pundit Stephanie Ruhle was on The 11th Hour with Ali Velshi. As everyone knows, Ruhle used to be a money person on Wall Street and successfully ran a hedge fund before getting her own show on MSNBC. So, if you care at all about these things, when Ruhle starts talking about high finance and the economy, one would do well to listen to her.

     Velshi broke the news this morning that Trump had once again caved and announced some major exemptions on the ridiculous 145% tariffs that he'd imposed on them days ago. The exemptions consist of electronic devices and components such as microchips, cell phones, computers, etc. In other words, as Ruhle swiftly pointed out, the things that we actually buy from China in bulk.

      I think it would be a little short-sighted to crow over this as another example of how senile Donald Trump is and how easily he caves. Before pronouncing Trump as incipiently demented, one first must ask, "Who benefits from this whipsaw style of economics and tariffs? And what value do these people have to the White House and vice versa?"

      Well, to comprehensively answer that, we have to look far beyond just the Chinese tariffs and look at what's been happening on Wall Street over the last week. Trump and his senseless tariff wars have been the single biggest driver behind the Dow Jones losing well over 10 trillion dollars of its value. In fact, if you look at the 10 biggest Dow Jones losses in history, nine of them belong to Trump and some of those losses happened in the past week, such as when the Dow lost a catastrophic 2231 points in a single day.

     So, who benefits from this yo-yo-ing of the stock market? In a word, short sellers.

     If you're the president, as Trump is successfully pretending to be, in order to make the always jumpy Wall Street panic, all you have to do is to announce steep tariffs on every nation on earth (except if you're Russia, Saudi Arabia or Israel). This will result in panic selling on the part of investors. Panic selling in sufficient numbers makes the share price of the affected stocks dive-bomb.

     But if you have an in with the global criminal enterprise posing as a presidential administration and you know exactly when there will be a sudden moratorium on those steep tariffs, then all you have to do is to buy up those stocks while they're still artificially cheap then sell them off when the stock market goes from bear to bull again, such as when Trump abruptly announced the 90 day moratorium on tariffs.

     The problem with that scenario is that would involve a crime called "insider trading", which is still, technically, a felony on the law books. The problem with that is that whatever enforcement mechanisms we have in place to prevent that sort of thing, like the SEC and DOJ, are stuffed with some of the worst psychopaths and fellow crooks that Trump could get his short fingers on.

     It's fallacious to assume that these so-called regulatory and enforcement bodies will do anything about this obvious stock market manipulation and set up for insider trading. And, with a criminal organization like Trump's, insider trading in the face of massive stock manipulation isn't a potentiality as much as it's an inevitability.

     But if you look at just the effect these games are having on Wall Street and Main Street, you're still not looking at the big picture. One of my Facebook friends, Renee S. DeCamillis, put up a video by a woman who follows Russian state TV. And this woman translated and gave us the abstracts of a Russian news show that featured six officials from the Russian government. And these six Russian officials were quite frank about what Trump was doing to the US economy and they were laughing themselves sick.

      The damnable thing was virtually everything they were saying was true. These Russian douchebags were essentially giving everyone who could follow them a roadmap of how Trump is wrecking the US economy. And they could afford to laugh because, once again, the "Independence Day" tariffs that Trump had imposed on virtually country on earth exempted Russia. They wouldn't affect their economy or their stock market.

     Another thing to keep in mind is that, far from affecting just stocks and futures, Trump's reckless drunk driving of the economy is affecting the bond markets. Now, in case you don't know anything about the bond market, here's a quick breakdown:

     Treasury bonds are essentially the backbone of the US economy. That's the long and the short of it. People have been buying Treasury bonds for decades as a way of showing their confidence in the dollar, which, at least until recently, was the world's default currency. It used to be much more common to see people buying safe, secure Treasury bonds than selling them.

     Yet, that's precisely what we're seeing these days. Longtime bond holders are now selling off enormous numbers of their government bonds, meaning that if this frightening trend continues, it'll cripple the US economy, perhaps permanently. And why are people selling off their Treasury bonds like crazy?

     Because when Trump began these needless trade wars, the new Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney, quietly held meetings with other nations and unions such as Japan, the EU and others. They didn't beat their chests and bellow and bluster and deliberately tank markets to enrich a handful of short sellers. No, instead, they held meetings and calmly discussed how they were going to prepare to lead a new world order without the United States at its head. Don't forget, Prime Minister Carney, while no blushing liberal, nonetheless used to be the governor of the Bank of Canada and, before that, the Governor of the Bank of England. In other words, a money guy who knows what he's taking about regarding high finance. 

     In other words, they're leaving us in the dust and their initiatives are simply devaluing the dollar. When the dollar gets devalued, American confidence in that currency will drop and people will begin dropping their bonds like so many hot potatoes. And that makes Russians gleeful.

     And, putting aside the very strong likelihood that Trump and his family are benefiting from short selling by using insider trading tactics,  just the way that Trump is tanking a strong economy that he inherited from Biden is grounds right there for a third impeachment or, better yet, invoking the 25th amendment and getting him out of office permanently.