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I'm disappointed in the way we're winning

Grabs Turds Bare

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I realize that every thread on this board is a Trump hate circle jerk. That's fine.

Are there people like me who were/are purple voters who are happy with the economy and progress on the fiscal front, but have started to doubt whether the reputational harm and impact on level of discourse is worth it?

I know some of the true blues on this board can't be reached, and likewise for the deep crimsons. I'm mainly interested in hearing from the less rich colors. I'm still pro-president, but I wish some of the rhetoric was softer.
 
Yeah. Were you happy with the economic progress under Obama?
 
I realize that every thread on this board is a Trump hate circle jerk. That's fine.

Are there people like me who were/are purple voters who are happy with the economy and progress on the fiscal front, but have started to doubt whether the reputational harm and impact on level of discourse is worth it?

I know some of the true blues on this board can't be reached, and likewise for the deep crimsons. I'm mainly interested in hearing from the less rich colors. I'm still pro-president, but I wish some of the rhetoric was softer.

From early on I indicated that I believed Trump's role in the decline of public discourse was a serious long-term problem for the US, and that therefore - along with his basic unpredictability - I would not/could not vote for him. And I didn't.

His unpredictability remains a problem but can perhaps at times be an advantage.

The economic expansion is in the category of so far so good. Let's enjoy it while it lasts. The growth of the debt is not so good. The failure to deal effectively with the illegal migrant problem remains a blight for the Trump administration and a serious long term problem for the country. Not really a fan of expanding military spending in the post-Cold War period. Little has been done with the proposed investment in infrastructure that is no doubt needed. Some of that military money could have been better spent on infrastructure, or maybe the wall. Good Supreme Court appointments. After the disaterous Obama foreign policy, which was truly jv, Trump has been much better at trying to defend America's interests abroad. The trade imbalances and unfair play by many of our trading partners needed to be confronted eventually. The road to reciprocity will be long and difficult but it had to start somewhere, and not a moment too soon. NATO needs to start paying their fair share. The alliance is too important for it to be sacrificed on the altar of petty chisling. Trudeau is a fashionable leftist horse's ass among the lefty chatteraty but our relationship with Canada is more important than making fun of Trudeau. Replacing the corrupt and incompetent leadership of the FBI, our intelligence agencies, the Department of Justice, and the Department of State, which was left over from the Obama administration, has been essential but has not gone far enough. The Mueller probe has become the most cynical exercise in a town filled with cynical exercises. We need fewer but more incisive presidential tweets. Quality Donald, not quantity. Stay tuned.

The response of the lefties on this board, as well as the media, is well beyond all reason. It is basically a hysterical fit without end, which they always ultimately try to justify with, well ... Trump. Some may never recover. What foolishness!
 
We’re winning?






It seems to me we are squandering the opportunity we have to put our financial and economic houses in better order. To prepare for the next serious downturn.

I’m afraid there’s a lot of economic pain coming.


The accelerating rise of leading by lying, incompetence and corruption worry me.



I don’t care about coarsening of discourse. If it’s honest.
 
We’re winning?






It seems to me we are squandering the opportunity we have to put our financial and economic houses in better order. To prepare for the next serious downturn.

I’m afraid there’s a lot of economic pain coming.


The accelerating rise of leading by lying, incompetence and corruption worry me.



I don’t care about coarsening of discourse. If it’s honest.

nothing particularly honest about today's public discourse in Washington, but of course it is getting more and more coarse
 
nothing particularly honest about today's public discourse in Washington, but of course it is getting more and more coarse

This.

At first, I understood Trump's methodology as being, "give them something to talk about." He has been a master at using the media as a tool, and the media has really lapped it up.

I don't like the space it creates for the red scare crap, and I hate how hard he has to fight to drain the swamp. But I credit Trump with exposing how deep the swamp really is. I though rhinos still had a fiscal conservative viewpoint, but Trump has shown Paul Ryan and his ilk to just be Democrats that don't believe in abortion.
 
trump is the swamp. and any conclusion that Paul ryan is a pocket dem is just breathtaking.
 
This.

At first, I understood Trump's methodology as being, "give them something to talk about." He has been a master at using the media as a tool, and the media has really lapped it up.

I don't like the space it creates for the red scare crap, and I hate how hard he has to fight to drain the swamp. But I credit Trump with exposing how deep the swamp really is. I though rhinos still had a fiscal conservative viewpoint, but Trump has shown Paul Ryan and his ilk to just be Democrats that don't believe in abortion.

absolutely, no thinking or decent person can have any doubts anymore about the magnitude of the swamp
 
absolutely, no thinking or decent person can have any doubts anymore about the magnitude of the swamp

Why do I have the feeling that you and Tweedle Dumber aren’t talking about the numerous Trump Cabinet members, staff and supporters that are under investigation?
 
Even if you love everything else he has done and the way he has done it, Trump’s treatment of the environment and environmental policy is atrocious and is worth fighting at every level in every way possible.
 
Did someone say “debt”?


Apparently it’s not just government debt that’s (predictably) spiraling out of control.


The Big, Dangerous Bubble in Corporate Debt


The $30 trillion domestic stock market seems to get all the attention. When the stock market sets new highs, we instinctively feel things are good and getting better. When it tanks, as happened in the initial months of the 2008 financial crisis, we think things are going to hell.

But the larger domestic debt market — at around $41 trillion for the bond market alone — reveals more about our nation’s financial health. And right now, the debt market is broadcasting a dangerous message: Investors, desperate for debt instruments that pay high interest, have been overpaying for riskier and riskier obligations. University endowments, pension funds, mutual funds and hedge funds have been pouring money into the bond market with little concern that bonds can be every bit as dangerous to own as stocks.

Unlike buying a stock, which is a calculated gamble, buying a bond or a loan is a contractual obligation: A borrower must repay a lender the borrowed amount, plus interest as compensation. The upside in a bond is limited to the contractual interest payments, but the downside is theoretically protected. Bondholders expect to get their money back, as long as the borrower doesn’t default or go bankrupt.

But for much of the last decade, risk has been mispriced to a staggering degree. In other words, the prices of bonds (and corporate loans) have not accurately reflected the riskiness of the underlying borrower’s credit. A company that is a poor credit risk, because it has too much debt or is struggling, should have to pay higher rates of interest. And investors would expect a higher yield — roughly the interest rate divided by the price paid for the bond or loan — for taking on that risk. Since the financial crisis, that simple calculus has been upended. Until recently, investors have been paying higher prices for the debt of riskier companies and not getting properly compensated for that risk.

The International Monetary Fund has noticed. In a recent blog post, an I.M.F. economist wrote that the current debt craze was “fueled by excessive optimism among investors,” and he added: “When the economy is doing well and everybody seems to be making money, some investors assume that the good times will never end. They take on more risk than they can reasonably expect to handle.”

For now, the bond market, like the stock market, looks robust. It has been a long bull run for both stocks and bonds, and borrower defaults have been at historically low levels for years. As has the “spread”— the difference between the yields — of Treasury-backed securities and riskier bonds. But as interest rates continue to rise, and some companies and other borrowers fail to meet their debt obligations, defaults will inevitably increase along with the spreads.

When they do, trillions of dollars in invested capital could be lost. If that happens, as it did after September 2008, access to credit for most borrowers could dry up, setting off yet another potentially devastating economic crisis. To be sure, the growing concern about the mispricing of risk doesn’t mean we’re on the verge of a recession. But the corporate debt bubble inevitably will play a role in causing it.

Here’s the crux of the problem: After the financial crisis, the Federal Reserve Board under Ben Bernanke decided to lower short-term and long-term interest rates. Fed officials hoped that by flooding the zone with inexpensive credit, borrowers would have access to money to build new factories, buy new equipment, hire more employees and pay them higher wages. Mr. Bernanke’s idea was that the Fed could engineer an economic recovery by making sure that most businesses that wanted capital could get it at an attractive price. It largely worked. His strategy was so successful that it was envied and then copied by central banks around the world.

To lower interest rates, the Fed employed two tactics. One was to cut the so-called Fed Funds rate — what the Fed charges the nation’s biggest banks to borrow money on a short-term basis — to nearly zero, and keep it there for seven years. Lowering long-term rates required more creativity. Mr. Bernanke had a clever plan, what he called “quantitative easing”: The Fed would buy trillions of dollars of toxic securities that had marred the balance sheets of the Wall Street banks.

By creating artificial demand for these securities, where there had been virtually none, the Fed helped big banks cleanse their balance sheets, reassuring investors and creditors. But like anything else, bond prices are subject to the vagaries of supply and demand; the Fed’s gorging drove up not only the price of these particular bonds but also bond prices generally, lowering their yields. (When bond prices increase, yields decrease.)

The plan worked, perhaps too well. Both short- and long-term interest rates were reduced to levels rarely seen in our lifetimes. The Fed’s balance sheet expanded to about $4.5 trillion, from less than $900 billion before the crisis, thanks to the purchase of squirrelly assets from Wall Street. The world was awash with cheap capital. (Of course, that didn’t mean it was any easier for home buyers to get a mortgage or for small businesses to get loans.)

In the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, a sustained period of low interest rates led to a widespread deterioration of credit standards for mortgages, among other securities. The same thing is happening now for other kinds of loans and debt instruments. Only this time, the Fed has kept interest rates lower for longer.

An unintended consequence of keeping interest rates artificially low for so long is the mispricing of risk. The Fed’s artificial demand has kept bond prices higher than they otherwise would have been, and their yields lower. But investors have an insatiable demand for higher yields, a collective hunger that Wall Street has been only too happy to feed.

Examples of mispriced risk are strewn across the financial landscape. In June, Asurion, an insurer of cellphones, closed on a $3.75 billion loan package from Wall Street’s biggest banks, with minimal covenants — agreements to protect creditors by notifying them when certain red flags, like a higher than agreed-upon debt-to-cash flow ratio, are waving.

The proceeds of Asurion’s “covenant-lite” or “cov-lite” loan were used to pay dividends to the three private-equity firms that own the company. Its debt load has increased to $11.3 billion, seven times its cash flow. For additional irresistible fees, Wall Street then repackaged the Asurion loans into securities and sold them to investors, who now own the debt of a highly leveraged company with far fewer protections.

According to LeveragedLoan.com, which monitors the corporate loan market, the issuance of cov-lite corporate loans has exploded in the past few years and reached a record in May. Cov-lite loans now account for nearly 77 percent of the estimated $1 trillion corporate loan market. And some of these loans are packaged and resold as bonds or as other complicated investments.

To help pay for its recently completed $8 billion buyout of the margarine and spreads business of Unilever — since renamed Flora Food Group — KKR, the private equity firm, offered investors 1.1 billion euros (about $1.3 billion) of senior notes with a minimal covenant package. Moody’s rated it 4.99 on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the weakest. Nevertheless, investors gobbled them up.

Or consider the mighty AT&T — now stuffed to the gills with an estimated $180 billion in debt following its $85 billion acquisition of TimeWarner. It is, according to Moody’s, the “most indebted, nongovernment controlled, nonfinancial rated corporate issuer” and one now “beholden to the health of the capital markets.” In other words, the company is so indebted that chances are high it will need continuing access to the credit markets to refinance and pay back its mountain of debt as it becomes due.

So-called junk bonds — issued by companies with poor credit ratings — historically have yielded around 10 percent or more, to compensate investors for taking the risk of buying the debt of such companies. These days, junk bonds yield around 6.25 percent, meaning that investors — still desperate for yield — have overpaid for these bonds sufficiently to drive down their effective yields to levels that fail to compensate them for the risks they are taking.

When junk bond yields return to more normal levels, as interest rates rise and investors’ yield-fever breaks, the price of the bonds bought during the feeding frenzy will fall and billions of dollars stand to be lost — by endowments, pension funds and high-yield funds, among others — as bonds across the board are repriced by the market.

When that happens, the entire credit market could start to contract, as it did after the 2008 crisis. When the pendulum swings away from fast-and-loose credit standards for corporations, lenders become more cautious. That means ordinary people will pay much higher rates for mortgages, car loans and small-business loans — if they can get them at all.

This is not a minor concern. In a July 30 interview on CNBC, Jamie Dimon, the chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, America’s largest bank, said the biggest risks to the economy were the consequences of tariffs on China and the unwinding of the Fed’s quantitative easing policies and its implications for bond prices and credit markets generally. “I don’t want to scare the public,” he said, “but we’ve never had QE [before]. We’ve never had the reversal.”

It may not be too late for a course correction. Banks could tighten their underwriting standards — ratchet down the leverage, demand more covenants, nix loans that are used to pay big dividends — and investors could be more discerning about the prices they are willing to pay for high-yielding bonds. Regulators could be more vigilant about allowing such loans and bonds to be issued in the first place. Wall Street could also redesign its compensation system to reward bankers to be more cautious with their underwriting and to take fewer risks with other people’s money.

In the meantime, we must inure ourselves to the inevitable. It may take yet another major financial crisis for things to change, or maybe things will never change. Either way, it’s a lesson we never seem to learn until it’s too late.
 
Assume this thread is a troll attempt.

But in case it’s not, it reeks of the bully who picks a fight and then proceeds to call timeout in the middle of getting his ass beat.
 
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Which was happening under Obama. Trump has simply yet to fuck it up.

LOL... the economic gurus from the Tunnels Left are always entertaining.

How do the unemployment rates today for women and minorities compare to the unemployment rates under Obama?

Obama was the only president in history to never reach 3% GDP growth in any year. His average growth over his 8 years in office was a pathetic 2% which puts him in the same category as Herbert Hoover.

Can someone remind me what the economy growth rate was for Q2 2018? 4.1% for those scoring at home. I'm shocked this news was never posted on the Tunnels...
 
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