This post “Look Ma, No Hands!” appeared first on Daily Reckoning.
The Deep State is escalating its war on President Trump but the Wall Street partiers apparently couldn’t care less. When the machines tagged 2402 on the S&P 500 yesterday, it was surely a historic case of “look ma, no hands!”
It’s hard to imagine what more will be needed to ignite an eruption of fear and panic in the casino amidst Wall Street’s record and wholly irrational state of somnolence.
After all, the Fed is sidelined and out of dry powder. The Red Ponzi is tottering. The U.S. retail sector is descending into an apocalypse. The giant auto bubble is fracturing. The Trump Stimulus is dead in the water, and Washington is heading for an extended stretch of complete dysfunction and acrimonious combat.
And if that isn’t that enough to upset the applecart — there are a lot more headwinds coming down the pike.
But the point is the insane governance process in Washington, which is completely unhinged, is combined with a level of insane complacency on Wall Street. Which is literally off the charts.
It would be one thing if our current fantastically inflated financial markets were reflective of a gusher of private sector growth, investment and productivity. That is, something like a new gilded age of invention and raw capitalist energy like occurred in the 1880s or 1920s.
The opposite is more likely the case, however. We have a mutant outbreak of financialization, debt, falsified financial prices and biblical levels of speculation and money shuffling — artificial economic conditions which are absolutely dependent upon agencies of the state.
Without treasury bailouts and endless central bank credit infusions, today’s massive financial bubbles would have splattered long ago.
Stated differently, with Washington heading into terminal breakdown, the boys and girls and robo-machines on Wall Street are now home alone. When they discover that there are no more bailouts and stimulus injections coming down the pike, they will panic like it’s October 1987 and then some.
The Fed’s persistent and drastic falsification of interest rates and all other financial asset prices has caused a monumental mis-allocation of capital and other economic resources into unproductive speculation and money shuffling.
That’s the long-run consequence of “pump-priming” with permanent deficit-financed tax cuts under both GOP and Democrat administrations since the 1980s.
Unfortunately, The Donald seems to be falling for the same Keynesian sludge “pump-priming” with deficits.
While cutting taxes is always a good idea in theory — that’s only true in practice if you pay for it (and “earn” it politically) with off-setting spending cuts or a more benign form of taxation. And tax cutting is also likely to be more timely and potent if the tax burden has been steadily creeping higher.
The Federal tax burden today is no higher than it was in 1977 under Jimmy Carter. The Federal tax extraction was 17.5% of GDP in 2016 — the same level as in 1979.
As it happened, real GDP grew by only 1.8% last year compared to 6.0% in 1979. So it …read more
Source:: Daily Reckoning feed
The post “Look Ma, No Hands!” appeared first on Junior Mining Analyst.