Trump is not good for the U.S. economy.

And don't you worry your pretty little head with all those charts and numbers: just look at the Dow on election night and now. Unless you foolishly got out of the markets (which I dearly hope is not the case), the Trump presidency should have been very, very good to you.
And best of all we're not getting guilt tripped all the time like we were under Obama and Holder.

Democratic socialism & being taxed at 90% is not good for the U.S. economy, you'll see it when it happens, but then it will be too late!

tariffs figure to tack $5,700 onto an F-150. that alone will secure the orphanator's place in history

How the Trump Tax Cut Is Helping to Push the Federal Deficit to $1 Trillion

The amount of corporate taxes collected by the federal government has plunged to historically low levels in the first six months of the year, pushing up the federal budget deficit much faster than economists had predicted.

The reason is President Trump’s tax cuts. The law introduced a standard corporate rate of 21 percent, down from a high of 35 percent, and allowed companies to immediately deduct many new investments. As companies operate with lower taxes and a greater ability to reduce what they owe, the federal government is receiving far less than it would have before the overhaul.

SAD!

Trump and his minions don’t fear the consequences of truth, because they don’t believe those consequences really apply to them. The president doesn’t habitually lie — about Russian election meddling, or about his paying off a concubine, or about what he said on camera or into a tape recorder just yesterday or the day before that — because he thinks the truth will be politically calamitous.

No, he lies because he’s pretty sure he can make you believe whatever he wants you to believe (it worked for a self-promoting developer in the New York tabloid world), and there doesn’t seem to be a penalty for trying.
Now, as I’ve written before, my industry bears a lot of the blame for making this possible. My colleagues in the media often seem to blame Trump for creating and stoking the public’s abject distrust, when in fact it was our own vanity and triviality — the glib cable punditry, the obsession with rumors and ratings — that created him.

But if there’s a burden on journalists to rebuild that trust (and there is), then there’s a burden on you, too, to be a shrewder consumer. Because make no mistake: Trump and his acolytes disdain you, in a way Nixon on his worst day did not.

They don’t think you’re smart enough to recognize truth or care about it. They don’t fear your judgment, because they don’t think you have any.

So by all means, be skeptical of the media — we’ve earned it. But don’t be blind. Don’t be taken in by a demagogue, or the sycophants around him, who would have you believe that everything you read that doesn’t conform to your worldview must be nothing but garbage, because he says it is.

But the economy is cranking.

This site resides somewhere between a Prius bumper sticker (Fritz)and an ANTIFA riot (xCon).

We probably don't reflect enough on the benevolence of modern corporations--

"Donald Trump lifted the Dow Jones industrial average in his first year in office more than any other president since Franklin Roosevelt.

The Dow has surged more than 31 percent since Trump's inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017. That marks the index's best performance during a president's first year since Roosevelt."

FRITZY;
Name one major city governed by Democrats that is not if fiscal crisis over public pensions.

I double dog dare you.

ATG! Per your post:
FRITZY;
Name one major city governed by Democrats that is not if fiscal crisis over public pensions.
I double dog dare you.

Not a subject I'm knowledgeable about, & I'm not your dog.

^ proof Fritzy, that general ignorance is a requirement to be a liberal.

You guys can't run on what you will do when elected.

You can't name one city ran by liberals that is not in fiscal crisis.

You have a smug superiority complex at the same time admitting you don't know.


That ladies, is a perfect democrat.

The junk debt that tanked the economy? It's back in a big way.

Like most people, you probably assume that the level of lending done by banks at any moment is largely driven by how much demand there is from borrowers. But in the world of modern finance, that’s only part of the story. For just as important is the level of demand from investors — pension funds, hedge funds, mutual funds, sovereign wealth funds and insurance companies — to buy the loans that banks make. Indeed, there are times when there’s so much demand for loans from investors and the profit from selling them is so lucrative that bankers are only too happy to go out and make bigger and riskier loans than they would if they were keeping them on their own books.

Now it is happening again, as investors and money managers scramble to buy floating-rate debt — debt offering interest payments that will increase as global interest rates rise, as they are expected to over the next few years. A big new source of floating-rate credit is the market for “leveraged loans” — loans to highly indebted businesses — that are packaged into securities known as “collateralized loan obligations,” or CLOs. Because the market seems to have an insatiable appetite for CLOs, leveraged lending and CLO issuance through the first half of the year are already up 38 percent over last year’s near-record levels.

Credit-rating companies such as Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s have recently warned that this surge in corporate borrowing and lending has led to a noticeable decline in the quality of the loans. The borrowers have lower credit ratings. The loans contain fewer of the standard conditions that are meant to protect lenders. And the rating companies calculate that lenders should expect to recover less of their money if the borrowers default or go into bankruptcy.

For the most part, however, these warnings have gone unheeded. Although some sophisticated investors have begun to pull back from the CLO market, they have been replaced by retail investors seeking higher yields who have flocked to mutual funds and exchange-traded funds that specialize in CLO debt.

Earlier this year, after complaints from banks and dealmakers reached sympathetic ears in the Trump administration, the newly installed chairman of the Federal Reserve and the Comptroller of the Currency Office declared that previous “guidance” against lending to companies whose debt exceeded six times their annual cash flow should not be taken as a hard and fast rule.

Regulators later explained that the announcement was not meant to lower lending standards but rather to emphasize that multiple factors would be used by bank examiners in assessing loans. More broadly, their view is that because banks are now so much better capitalized, with less leveraged and less reliance on short-term funding, they will be able to survive a serious market correction, as demonstrated by recent “stress tests” in which their exposure to leveraged loans was factored in.

Whether intended or not, however, the market read the regulators’ announcement not only as a green light to the banks to step up their leveraged lending but also as an indication that regulators would be more responsive to industry pressure than during the Obama years.

The CLO market got an even bigger boost this year when an appeals court in Washington struck down a regulation issued under the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law that required all securitizers — the firms that bundle loans of any kind and sell pieces of the packages to investors — to retain 5 percent of a deal. The regulation’s rationale was that if the securitizers had “skin in the game,” they wouldn’t have an incentive to make or buy questionable loans and peddle them to unsuspecting investors. For Dodd-Frank’s authors, this was a central feature of the architecture of financial reform.

When the risk retention rules were finally announced, however, the association representing independent CLO managers — those not associated with big banks — sued to block it, arguing the law did not apply to them because they never take ownership of the loans, so there is nothing for them to “retain.” Instead, these managers raise money from investors through an independent, legal entity known as a special purpose vehicle and then direct the SPV to use that money to buy the loans on the open market. A district judge saw through the ruse and dismissed the suit, but in February, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit bought the industry argument hook, line and sinker.

The appeals court opinion is a model of legal and etymological hairsplitting by activist, conservative judges who were clearly looking for a way to ignore the explicit intent of Congress, which was to make risk retention a feature of all loan-backed securities, no matter who made the original loan.

In fact, the CLO managers had asked the House Financial Services Committee to include a specific exemption for them in the law, citing the financial burden it would place on smaller securitizers. They also argued that the standard CLO fee structure, which provided bonus payments if investors were paid in full, was the equivalent of their having “skin in the game.”

The legislators, however, were not receptive to those arguments.
“The basic idea was to cover all securitizations, so we used very broad language,” Lawranne Stewart, then assistant chief counsel to the committee, recalled. “In fact, the language in the bill generally was so broad that we were criticized for overreaching. . . . We told [the CLO managers] that we would leave it to the regulators to deal with the question of who did and did not deserve an exception.”

Regulators, however, were also reluctant to create an exception. As they warned the appeals court in their briefs, if independent CLO managers were exempted from risk retention, it would create a giant loophole for any managers using the same method and structure to securitize any type of loans. Those who didn’t would be at a serious competitive disadvantage.
Although none of the three judges had spent a day working on Wall Street, they nonetheless dismissed the warnings of agency experts and in their opinion “provided a road map for securitizers of all sorts to avoid risk retention,” according to Michael Barr, a professor of law and public policy at the University of Michigan who served as point man on the financial reform effort for the Treasury in the Obama administration. As a result, Barr said, we “have now re-created the condition that led to the last crisis by making it easier to aggregate loans that are not good for investors.”

The three judges who signed on to that opinion were all appointed by Republican presidents, all have a long track record of skepticism toward regulation and regulators, and all have a long association with the conservative Federalist Society. Only one of them, however — Brett M. Kavanaugh — was just nominated by President Trump to be a Supreme Court justice.

Fritz, rather an alarmist article and somewhat typical for msn. CLO’s aren’t anywhere close to being the danger that article would have us believe.

U.S. Businesses Are Beginning To Pay The Price For Trump's Trade War

Plenty of experts agree that trade warfare is a bad idea. And still, from a supply chain management perspective, President Trump’s flailing maneuvers on global trade are probably causing more trouble than even most detractors realize. Initial moves to put tariffs on aluminum and steel are beginning to bite with negative earnings impacts for General Motors, Whirlpool and Ford. At the same time fears of Chinese retaliation have hurt prices for soybeans and pork with farmers already suffering.
So far these are the obvious problems. Unfortunately, it could get much worse.


Trump likes to tout the healthy stock market as evidence that he’s doing the right things. The Dow Jones Industrial Index is up 26.5% since his inauguration, which is great. Over the exact same period after Obama’s inauguration however, it was up by 30.8%. It went on to record a 181% gain during Obama’s free-trade presidency.
Investors saw money in the Trump tax cut, but have been much less enthusiastic since talk shifted to trade. Most are betting that it’s all bluster and won’t matter in the end. What they may be missing is how far even that bluster ripples back into the global supply chain. The trouble has just begun.

"The tariffs on vehicle imports alone would increase the average price of cars generally, while diminishing consumer choice," JAMA (Japanese Auto Manufacturers Association) said. "This represents harm to all U.S. consumers, including families and companies that use automobiles in or for their business operations.

A study by the National Taxpayers Union Foundation estimates that prices for cars built in the United States could increase by an average of at least $1,262 per vehicle and the average price of imported cars would increase by $4,205 per vehicle. Yet another study estimates that the price of an imported $30,000 car would increase by about $6,400."

I think most folks are reconciled to voting trump out

It would be nice if he could still be prosecuted thereafter