Tepid Tuesday – Waiting on the Fed

Waiting.

Another day until the Fed’s pronouncement but already we seem to be drifting aimlessly along with all of our indexes flatlining since yesterday’s pumped-up close.  Bloomberg had a nice run-down of the status of the major Central Banks – unfortunately in the context of how totally screwed we all are after 8 years of ZIRP financing where all roads lead to inversion and, most likely, Recession.  

At the same time equities are boiling over at record highs, Team Trump is doing its best to take the shakles off the Banksters by rolling back Dodd-Frank which, as noted by Business Insider’s Pedro da Costa, risks “another Lehman Brothers but on a larger scale.”  That’s right, the banks are even bigger now than they were then.  Simon Johnson, who was Chief Economist for the IMF agrees with what I said on Friday, stating that the latest proposal is “a dangerous plan for financial deregulation [where] the primary beneficiaries would be the big banks.”

The current Vice-Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Stanlely Fischer warned the President that rolling back reforms poses a serious risk to the entire Financial System:

“We seem to have forgotten that we had a financial crisis which was caused by behavior in the banking and other parts of the financial system and it did enormous damage to this economy.  Millions of people lost their jobs, millions of people lost their houses.”

“The strength of the financial system is absolutely essential to the ability of the economy to continue to grow at a reasonable rate, and taking actions which remove the changes that were made to strengthen the structure of the financial system is very dangerous.”

When did this country decide to enter into a suicide pact?  We’re tearing down the regulations that protect us from harm and destroying the environment while breaking off long-standing relations with our allies – and it’s only Day 144 – not even a baseball season!  I’ll be George Steinbrenner would have fired Trump by now.  As noted by Seth Meyers, Trump has yet to score a significant win, he is mainly focused on tearing down the accomplishments of others.  What baseball team would keep a guy like that?  

IN PROGRESS

Provided courtesy of Phil’s Stock World.