Major new economic strategy outlined, while Left smears Trump’s chief strategist as racist, by RT.
Stephen Bannon, President-elect Donald Trump’s top strategist pick, … has faced fierce criticism from Democrats and civil rights groups for alleged racism and anti-Semitism.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has called Bannon a “racist individual,” urging Trump to rescind his appointment. More than 150 members of Congress have echoed the same message.
“I’m not a white nationalist, I’m a nationalist. I’m an economic nationalist,” Bannon “mockingly” told Wolff. “The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get f***ed over.”
He has criticized Democrats, saying they have “lost sight of what the world is about,” which cost Hillary Clinton’s team the victory. Another misstep of Clinton’s campaign, which helped Trump win, was what he called “the media bubble.”
“It’s just a circle of people talking to themselves who have no f***ing idea what’s going on,” he said. “It’s a closed circle of information from which Hillary Clinton got all her information — and her confidence. That was our opening.”
Bannon shared he has a plan to “build an entirely new political movement. It’s everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy. I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan,” he said.
He also advocates for “negative interest rates throughout the world” as the “greatest opportunity to rebuild everything.” “Shipyards, ironworks, get them all jacked up. We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution — conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement,” he said.
You can get a lot done it your money is free — if you can borrow as much as you want at zero or even negative interest rates. The sky’s the limit for capital expenditure. (Btw, that’s essentially what China did. Presumably Trump figured out how they got all that new stuff, and is going to do it too.)
It sounds like the US is going to ramp up economic stimulus greatly. This will require newly manufactured money, which implicitly lowers the value of all existing money because the new money does not create new goods and services of as much value as the new money (or else the market would already have already done it, by and large). There have been large amounts of financial stimulus since the GFC in 2008 — enough to stop a slide into depression, but not enough to solve the debt problem. But one can always do more stimulus, with a modern virtual printing press.
Bottom line: Short term benefit of more jobs and economic activity, long term damage as money gets squandered on tasks that are not worth doing (“malinvestments”), and a great deal of eventual inflation which will ease the world’s crippling debt problem at the expense of a huge transfer of real wealth from savers to borrowers and printers (the last being government and big banks).
That bubble is also debt, because modern money is created as debt. Whilst that debt is so far above the normal range, the world has a debt problem. Inflating it away is the only politically acceptable solution (if only because the damage is disguised from the losers for a while), and it sounds like Bannon and Trump are going to give it a red hot go. There will be winners and losers, but staying forever with that debt burden is a long term losing strategy for almost everyone.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
