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Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Election Impact on Monetary System Change?

This is just a brief news note to say that it does not appear that anything related to the US mid term elections is likely to impact major monetary system change. Below I have listed the potential outcomes and how they might impact things.
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- Democrats take over both the US House and US Senate

This has been touted as a strong possiblity for some time, but more recent polling suggests this is now unlikely. However, this is the scenario that could have the most potential impact. We can assume that if the Democrats take control of the House, they will at a minimum prevent any further major legislation from being passed. At maximum, they will launch an effort to impeach President Trump. All that could certainly create a lot of market volatility and disruption. It is extremely unlikely that this would lead to President Trump being removed from office because that takes a 2/3 vote of the US Senate. The Democrats will not have anything close to that in the Senate regardless of how this election turns out. Also, removing President Trump simply puts in Vice President Pence and likely little to no change in policy from the Executive branch of the government.

- Democrats take over the House, but not the Senate

This is the more likely scenario as of this writing although more recent polling shows that control of the House is probably very tight and could go either way. For our purposes, nothing changes from the above analysis other than it becomes even less likely that President Trump would be removed from office and the Democrats might not even attempt impeachment since they would not have control of the Senate.

- Republicans hold the House and Senate

This scenario leaves things pretty much unchanged from the current situation. It is very unlikely anything major would change policy wise in this scenario. Also, there would be no effort towards impeachment in the House. Markets would probably not be impacted in any way in this scenario. 

Summary: I do not see anything related to the election that is likely to impact major monetary system change. 

I do see a lot articles in both mainstream and alternative media suggesting that markets may be about to roll over into a major correction and there are always lots of people predicting another major crisis at any given point in time. So nothing new there. The continued strength of the US dollar could create some problems and is probably the result of interest rates going higher along with the QT policy of the Fed.

The conditions for this are always present, but so far have not led to any kind of new major crisis. Should a new crisis emerge, President Trump has already made it clear he will blame the Federal Reserve for it and that would probably create some market disruption. An already badly divided nation would probably become even more intensely divided. Trump allies/supporters will go along with blaming the Fed. Trump opponents will blame it on Trump. That much is pretty predictable.

Added note: Here is Jim Rickards take on the upcoming election (and the potential for market impact) for anyone interested.

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