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Old 10-10-2018, 03:55 PM
Chicks Chicks is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2017
Posts: 13,284
What if Donny had been in charge as Lehman collapsed 10 years ago?

Today’s meltdown brings that nightmare sharply into focus. This clown administration will have absolutely no idea what to do if things really go south.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/wh...ago-2018-09-14

Quote:
In this environment, imagine we have a president who:

• Always thinks about his self-interest first, like the guy who spent time Thursday tweeting about a year-old hurricane as a new one approached.

• Has hired a terrible team, with a cable-news commentator running the National Economic Council and a Treasury secretary in Steve Mnuchin who lies almost as often as Trump does.

• Reads basically nothing, and who, according to Woodward’s book, absorbs information slowly and can’t be moved off of believing in old wives’ tales about economics, as when he told former NEC chief Gary Cohn that he couldn’t say why international trade is bad but he had known it for years.

• Caters every move to his “base” of voters who, simplifying slightly, wanted to let them all rot. And which, years later, often argues banks and General Motors GM, -0.15% should have been allowed to fail.

Some modest suggestions of what might happen include:

• Trump would still tweet about Puerto Rico, and Paul Manafort, and suggest the crisis was Fake News.

• He would get news about the financial collapse from “Fox & Friends.”

• He would move slowly, if at all, and more banks would fail as Trump failed to attract bipartisan support for a bailout package. General Motors would collapse as Trump declined to lend it money, not comprehending that credit markets were locked up, making a private-sector rescue impossible. Chrysler would follow.

• Merrill Lynch might collapse, as Mnuchin lacked the respect from bankers like Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase JPM, -0.23% (whom Trump also tangled with on Twitter this week) to get Bank of America BAC, +0.03% to merge with Merrill, as Paulson and Bernanke did.

• And he’d likely spend time on his own portfolio, since he never put his assets in a blind trust.

From there? Who knows? Contagion would be loose, and Trump’s main goal would be to shift the blame before November’s election.

And to tweet about Mueller, fiddling while markets and jobs burned.
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