Trump, likely: "Who cares? It'll go back, just like the climate."The budget deficit rose by a third in the October to August period from $674 billion in the same timeframe a year earlier, the Treasury Department said in a statement on Thursday. Spending rose by 7 percent to $3.88 trillion, outpacing revenue gains of 1 percent to $2.99 trillion. Revenue from corporations fell to $163 billion, down by $71 billion from a year ago.
The U.S. fiscal gap has continued to balloon under President Donald Trump, raising concerns the country’s debt load, now at $21.5 trillion, is growing out of control. A combination of Republican tax cuts enacted this year -- that will add up to about $1.5 trillion over a decade -- and increased government spending are adding to budget strains.
The White House says the tax cuts will pay for themselves by creating more revenue through faster economic growth. The International Monetary Fund has warned the tax reductions risk putting the nation’s debt on an unsustainable path and could cause the economy to overheat.
Bloomberg
Also, he's pissed at the Fed.
Also, see Is the Economy Going to Collapse Under Trump? by Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone.
An ominous week on Wall Street has President Trump blaming the Federal Reserve for raising interest rates, which the President claims has caused stock indices to fall for six consecutive days – for example, the Dow Jones average fell by over five percent in two days. Presidents second guess the Fed when rates increase, but Trump went beyond second-guessing when he described the Fed’s policies as “loco”, and said yesterday it “has gone crazy.”
The attacks on the Fed are curious because Trump himself chose Wall Street insider Jerome Powell as Fed chair, refusing to reappoint Janet Yellen (the first woman to chair the Fed, and the only Fed Chair not to be reappointed in the past 39 years).
[...]
As Forbes contributor Frances Coppola pointed out, the Fed has been predicting rising inflation for almost a decade, but we still don’t see significant price or wage pressures. Although the unemployment rate has reached record lows, many workers are not getting raises. My recent analysis shows that more than half of older workers are being pushed out of their jobs, hardly a sign of a booming labor market.
Some market analysts believe the Fed is correcting a worrisome convergence between short and long-term interest rates—the “flattening yield curve,” which often signals an impending recession. Others justify the rate increases as offsetting the economic stimulus provided by Trump’s tax cuts, which come at a time of steady economic growth but will balloon the federal debt and deficit in the future.
And many analysts (including me) believe the stock market is highly overvalued, pumped up by the tax cuts which went mostly to the wealthy, and are fueling unsustainable price/earnings ratios. Corporations are generally not using their new found net-of-tax revenue to make productive investments, but instead are buying back their own stock and making aggressive mergers and acquisitions, further driving up the market.
[...]
The Fed is also aiming to slow rising home prices.
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The market’s increasingly dangerous separation from the economic fundamentals would be better served by limiting stock buybacks, imposing a stock transactions tax, and rolling back the tax cuts that are feeding the market and creating a risky long-term deficit and debt increase.
The Fed’s movements aren’t crazy--they are steady, dull, and very predictable. These are characteristics that many people wish there were more of in Washington
Forbes
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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