OP, can you flesh out what this “yielding” will consist of?
Donald Trump cannot do that, and the loyalty of his GOP minions stops at the loss of their portfolios.
I know it seems like the guy is invincible, but his ability to get actual legislation and policy enacted has been pretty chancy. You’ll note the lack of a wall.
When his broadsides is limited to tweets and rants at rallies, it is equivalent to yielding. Like with his wall and the federal budgets. Once upon a time the wall was going up on day one, paid by Mexico, and he’d never sign a budget he didn’t like again. Now it’s all “We’ll see. I don’t want to rock the boat for these guys before the midterms. We’ll see.”
I’m assuming it means that within the next year, the Fed will cut rates in the absence of an economic downturn. (Because if growth takes a bad turn, they would be expected to drop rates anyway.)
Is this a fair summary? And, would you like to place a wager on this? Maybe $500?
I’m not saying he’s invincible, but he’s a populist at a time of great political uncertainty, and what has for long been unthinkable can no longer be considered so. For the record, I don’t think abolishing the fed would be considered as a serious move, but political manipulation of the fed is easier than people think.
He doesn’t actually need to get a lot in the way of legislation; the presidency has been delegated extraordinary powers over the years. He’s using them much more deftly than people give him credit for. Again, how did he get a party that has been consistently pro international trade since the end of WWII to do an about face on global trade? Sure, there are many republicans privately grumbling about it, but that’s all they’re doing: grumbling. They’re not challenging him.
Trump’s only intelligence is manipulating the American id. He has no vision whatsoever. This is a man who literally believes (and this is when I realized he really was not intelligent) that greenhouse gases from aerosols couldn’t possibly get to the atmosphere if you kept the door to the room closed while you were spraying. He would have no vision to see the implications of a non-independent fed. He would only react if he thought his base would blame him for the economic implications rather than the fed.
I don’t think he is. He’s a monkey pressing all the buttons, flicking all the switches, and pulling all the levers. He occasionally makes something happen, but he doesn’t understand cause and effect.
The Republicans haven’t really been asked to do a lot in this regard, though. Everything that has actually happened amounts to executive orders. Congress will pass NAFTA2 because it’s pretty much NAFTA.
Getting rid of the Fed would be the biggest legislative alteration to the United States since basically ever. It’s literally a bigger deal than the Civil Rights Act.
I agree that Trump is, in a limited way, dangerously cunning, but I think you’re misattributing the direction of his cunning. Big important things like getting rid of the Fed, a thing he honestly does not fully comprehend, aren’t his thing. He’ll happily rail against it to score points with Trumpists the same way he rails against Barack Obama but does not actually plan to have his arrested, or blather about countries he really doesn’t want to go to war with. Trump is, for all his power, remarkably petty; he is in fact so petty that it costs him money. He hads put a lot of effort into scamming the taxpayer by forcing government employees to stay at his properties, for instance, though that’s probably not in the top ten profitable ways he could scam the taxpayer. Where Trump is truly dangerous is in subverting democratic norms. In this regard, though, he’s just another Republican; they’re all like that. Far more damage is being done at the state level by Republicans who are now pretty much openly taking the vote away from racialized Americans. Trump contributes to that, but in a sort of stochastic, general way.
Actually getting large, specific things done** is something he usually fails at. ** He has failed to get the wall built despite the fact that would probably be the most influential win he could possibly get. He failed to get the Norks to denuke. He failed to get Congress to kill ACA in a big sweep. He and his Trumpists have had success largely where they can peck away at things by driving the bar down to the ground, but that’s not really an option with the Fed, certainly not in the timeframe in which he’ll be President.
Most of the Fed staff are academic economists I believe. They are not political figures or business leaders. They build economic models.
Perhaps Krugman would be among the 38%. Oh never mind Trump is doing it.
They will slow down rate increases in the face of a stock market downturn.
They will delay rate increases in the face of a stock market downturn. Of course this could be the Greenspan Put at work, so maybe Trump’s effect will be hard to gauge.
I disagree with this part.
However, I agree with this part.
Yep, see T-Rump’s ineffectual wailing and tweeting about the unbuilt wall, the still-ongoing “witch hunt” by Mueller, and his lack of confidence in still-Att’y-Gen’l Sessions. :dubious: As you say, pure virtue signaling to his base.
For those of you who think Trump is dumb, if you were a narcissist who only craves the spotlight and power, what exactly would you do differently than he has done? You can say, “Well, he didn’t get the wall built.” But I’m not so sure he wants one. It’s a rhetorical device that fires up his base. Witness the fact that he said Spain should build a wall across the Sahara. Obviously Trump knows such a thing is impossible for about a million reasons, but it plays well with his base. His ideology is simply the veneration of himself and he’s really, really good at it. Again, I was doing the same thing with him. I was saying “He’s an idiot plundering through the China shop.” but I was judging his motivations as I would judge a typical politicians motivations, i.e. he has some ideological agenda he wishes implemented and wants to achieve that. That’s like judging the intelligence of a dolphin by how well it climbs trees. He has no ideology. He simply wants to be applauded and in the center of everyone’s mind. When you watch some sort of thing in the world steal attention from him, you’ll immediately see him escalate with another ‘stupid’ thing. We look at him like we would any other politician and ask why he would take focus away from some sort of pending legislation, but that’s assuming he cares about it at all. He doesn’t care about repealing Obamacare. Why would he? He’s rich and insulated from it and you’re not telling me that he cares about its impact on his constituents. He opposes it because it’s the biggest thing to oppose at the moment and opposing it puts eyes on him. When it’s not the biggest thing, he switches to whatever is the biggest thing, that’s why he has wasted so much time and energy on freaking kneeling in the NFL. There’s no ideological reason for it, but it does mean that he’s in the center of every spotlight. He’s very smart and very good at what getting what he wants. He just doesn’t want what the rest of us do.
I would say that prediction isn’t all that falsifiable, because it is to vague.
I wouldn’t have tried to end a popular health care program for some vague but terrible plan. I wouldn’t have cut taxes on millionaires. I wouldn’t have said things to split our NATO alliance. I wouldn’t have said Kim Jong Un is a good guy. I wouldn’t have invited Kanye to the Oval Office. Is that enough for you?
It is not obvious that he knows that is impossible. It is not obvious if he knows where the Sahara is.
This is true.
He isn’t smart, he just has one skill: to rile people up and divide them. Just because someone has a skill does not mean they are smart. Clearly, he isn’t very good as business, and he is worse at governing, as evidenced by the fact that he’s managed to make himself a consistently unpopular president. He isn’t even very good at getting what he wants, either.
So, keeping in mind that your goal is to be the center of attention. Your goal is for the ‘ratings’ to be high and everyone to be paying attention to you, exactly what would you have done differently?
How many rate increases would you expect if they weren’t yielding to Trump? From what I’ve read:
So what exactly is going to happen instead of that?
That is not my goal. That is probably Trump’s goal, but that doesn’t mean I have to accept it as a valid one. But even if you take that as a starting point, Michael Avenotti probably also wants to be the center of attention, and if he were President, he wouldn’t be best buds with Kim Jong Un and putting 2 year olds in cages.
I disagree. Hasn’t the Fed basically announced rate increases through 2019? If they don’t follow through, well there ya go.
I would have stuck with the outrageous and avoided the stupid. The two are not synonymous and Trump isn’t mixing them because he thinks it works better than sticking to just outrageous, he’s mixing them because he’s a one trick pony and can’t tell them apart.
You don’t think Trump would have gotten even better poll numbers and support from establishment republicans if there wasn’t so much evidence of him being plain old dumb?
Because we can say with a pretty high degree of confidence that the Fed would freeze or cut rates if the economy turns south, as that’s what everyone expects them to do. I suppose there’s a scenario in which the economy continues to grow, but the stock market goes soft, and the Fed cuts rates… but that’s a pretty poor basis for a bet.
I’m still open to any suggestions on how this prediction of Trump managing to strong-arm the Fed into cutting rates could be turned into a fair bet.