By Michael Collins
Washington - Donald Trump promised during his campaign (click here) that if he won the White House, he would wipe out the national debt in just eight years.
But in his first 2½ years in office, he has gone in the opposite direction.
Trump Friday signed into law a budget bill hammered out with leaders of the Democratic-led House and the Republican-controlled Senate. It was a rare bipartisan agreement but some in the GOP were furious over the increase in spending.
The legislation will add an estimated $1.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
That’s not all: When other bills that Trump has signed are factored in, Trump’s total contribution to the national debt is projected to top $4.1 trillion, the budget watchdog group said.
“Our national debt is a self-inflicted wound,” said Maya MacGuineas, the group’s president. “It will take the kind of leadership that currently doesn't exist in Washington to fix.”...
The US economy is in bad shape as I write this, never mind about next year, the financial agencies are buoying this economy in spite of Trump and Secretary Muchkins's mess. The financial markets are getting bailouts even though it is not as evident as the global economic collapse of 2008.
Trump's economy is a very expensive failure. He is waiting for the country to be grateful for an economy that is paid for by the USA Treasury.
By Colin Harper
This week, (click here) the Federal Reserve leveraged one of its tools for tinkering with U.S. financial markets — one that it hasn’t used since the Great Recession.
The New York branch of America’s central bank financed some $278 billion worth of repurchasing agreements (repo) from September 17 to 19, 2019. For some market watchers, the move raised an alarm because, as Nobel laureate Paul Krugman put it, the financial turmoil that necessitated this intervention “was at the heart of the 2008 financial crisis.” Still, other economists have posited that the cash injections came in response to a hiccup and that markets are doing just fine.
That “hiccup” was a spike in the overnight money market interest rate in response to a cash crunch. Typically, this rate stays on track with the Federal Reserve’s fed funds rate — an interest rate set by the Federal Reserve to guide the lending rates for bank-to-bank loans. At the beginning of the week, the money market rate decoupled from the funds rate — surging from the target 1.75 to 2 percent rate to 10 percent. By pumping more dollars into the cash-strapped lending market, the Federal Reserve brought the market money rate back in line with its funds rate.
What started as a single act on September 17, 2019, has now snowballed into four straight days of repo agreements to inject more than a quarter of a trillion dollars’ worth of capital into the system....
