Steve Wynn: Trump Vs Hillary Is A Distraction From The Real Problem, Which Ends With "Wheelbarrows Full Of Money"

Sooner or later, our political establishment is going to be forced, regardless of party affiliation, to deal with $19 trillion in debt that’s climbing by around $1.6 billion a day. That means that in the Treasury auction each month in Downtown Washington, we’re printing money at the rate of $40 billion or $50 billion a month which is of course increasing the money supply and directly impacting the living standard or the buying power of the U.S. dollar for people who are being paid like everybody on this call today.

Now, part of the frustration in America is the fact that the deficit is having an enormous impact on the living style and the living standard of Americans, but not all of this is well understood by the folks, to use Bill O’Reilly’s term. The folks are being – their living standard being clipped by the deficit and by the printing of money and the increase in the money supply.

How long can this go on? In the history of the Western world, inflating your way out of this kind of a problem taken to its extreme, to use the Weimar Republic as an example, people went grocery shopping with wheelbarrows full of currency. Now, before the recession, the euro was $0.85 on a dollar. During quantitative easing one, two and three, it went up to $1.48. That was a devaluation of American currency by 20%. Now, it’s $1.10, and to use that as a benchmark for a moment, it isn’t that the dollar got stronger. It’s that the euro got weaker because they started quantitative easing and printing money in the euro community.

So this deficit issue impacts the mental health, the frustration, the positive sense of tomorrow that working people feel in America. It doesn’t have anything to do with rich folks. It’s got to do with government, fiscal and monetary policy. We have $14 trillion in public debt and $5 trillion in intergovernmental debt. The coupon on that $19 trillion and climbing is around 2.3%, and that’s with short-term interest rates at zero, virtually. Now the Fed, the current Fed, the lady is going to keep interest rates where they are. That of course protects all of the credit card debt of $1 trillion that’s out there, and so we don’t have mass panic on the credit card interest. But I know that the government is in a quandary as to what to do about this.

Now, the issue about what’s going to happen with the election isn’t so much an issue of Trump versus Clinton at the moment. It’s a question of whether the House and the Senate and the executive branch can get together and make Americans feel safer and have a fiscal and monetary policy that isn’t self-destructive, which currently it is.

I know that in this time of year, everybody is making all kinds of promises and declarations that they can do things, or they will do things, but of course they cannot without exacerbating the problems that are currently plaguing the country. What is lamentable is that the public discourse today on both sides misses the point entirely. We’re in the chicken-for-every-pot season where everybody’s promising the moon.