(Elite E Services) 10/17/2017 — Dover, DE — It’s no secret that the US economy has diverged into a massive 2 world system where there is also a massive gap in between; the employed and the wealthy have increasingly good lives while the poor and unemployed have a deteriorating quality of life. As we have explained in Splitting Pennies, it is monetary policy that ‘Trumps’ all else. Using The Gini Coefficient we can visualize what this means:
In economics, the Gini coefficient (sometimes expressed as a Gini ratio or a normalized Gini index) (/d?ini/ jee-nee) is a measure of statistical dispersion intended to represent the income or wealth distribution of a nation’s residents, and is the most commonly used measure of inequality. It was developed by the Italian statistician and sociologist Corrado Gini and published in his 1912 paper Variability and Mutability (Italian: Variabilità e mutabilità).
Taking a look at basic 2013 data (it’s worse since then) we get a picture of reality vs. what is said in the media. Using Russia as a good example to stay with the Trump theme, USA (41) has roughly the same Gini as Russia (40.9):
Remember that Russia is the unfair system that is a top-down Byzantine oligarchy, right? Then why Russia and USA share almost identical Gini, being surpassed only by the Banana Republics in South America?
Everyone in finance knows there are several things that Trump can do to fix the economic problems of USA in about 5 minutes:
- Surprise increase interest rates to 5% or 10%
- Import tariffs on Chinese crap
- Unwind USA’s Petro Dollar system (drink it!)
- Repeal the Dodd-Frank Consumer Rip-Off Fraud Act that has caused billions to flow out of USA. Make America the world’s banker once again. (This is our industry – FX – we know that this alone would create thousands and thousands of jobs and be a huge boost for the economy – billions would flow into USA and we’d again be the world’s banker. But this same approach likely applies to many industries. Dodd-Frank regulations killed FX and have cost millions of jobs.) We’ve outlined this in previous articles.
It’s not really practical to bring factories back to USA, however we have robot technology and the financial sector is a great example of how we can create high skilled high paid white collar jobs. But Trump seems to be more obsessed with form not essence (and his form is not good).
Oh – you’re thinking that a President can’t do that, right? President is a figurehead, only Congress can pass laws. That’s true. But Nixon did it. Somehow, Nixon was able to accomplish all these things in 1 day and created the floating FX market as it exists today. It was not Nixon’s only genius move, there were many. Was Nixon’s real genius just listening to his advisors like Henry? Either way, in practice, it fixed the problem – only to be unwound by future administrations. Was it a temporary fix? Of course – but that’s what we need. We need to unwind QE which is practically impossible, so jacking up rates is a first good start. Wall St. and the stock market will suffer. But they’ve had a long bull run.
Winter is coming – it’s bear time.
