Caligula or Pee-Wee Herman?

Trump isn’t a jobs creator—the jobs reports are down. So what does Trump do? He fires the Commissioner of Labor Statistics. How many jobs will shooting the messenger create?

Meanwhile, his threatened tariffs have stocks headed down. Will he fire Wall Street?

A fed governor steps down, making room for a Trump appointment and setting the stage for a Trump takeover of the Fed. When inflation spirals out of control because of Trump rate cuts, who will he fire?

Meanwhile, Trump is being played by his counterparties in tariff negotiations:

““They’re playing Trump,” said C. Fred Bergsten, a renowned economist who served on the Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and negotiations under both presidents Barack Obama and Trump. “They’re giving him a talking point that he can use to characterize his agreements as big deals with big pay offs, but there’s no ‘there’ there.”

 

“Contrary to accounts of Trump’s “triumphant” performance in trade negotiations, “America is a loser from all of Trump’s trade deals,” said Bergsten, who also served as the founding director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. 

 

“In recent days, Trump has trumpeted multibillion-dollar investments that foreign governments have pledged to put into the U.S. economy, including two separate $750 billion and $600 billion pledges from the EU, a $550 executive account funded by Japan, $350 billion from South Korea. These flashy numbers don’t tell the whole story.

 

“It’s ludicrous to think that these market economies would be able to fulfill such commitments,” said Bergsten.

 

“In a late July release, the White House claimed the 27 member states that make up the EU “will purchase $750 billion in U.S. energy” over the next three years, along with $600 billion in additional investments. Almost immediately, the European Commission contradicted that alleged commitment. Euronews itemized a list of conflicting accounts, ranging from the tariff rate on pharmaceuticals to the pledges to purchase U.S. military equipment, a pledge Euronews reported the EU “resolutely denied.” 

It’s our economy. It’s our dollar. It’s our cost of living. It’s our national stature. It’s our future. He’s burning it all to the ground. We’re in the burning house, peeps.

 

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/experts-say-foreign-governments-are-playing-trump-on-tariffs

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