Pages

Tuesday, September 24, 2019

News Note: What is the Impact of All the Current Political Uproar in Washington DC?

By now the American public is no longer surprised when they wake to up supposedly earth shaking "breaking political news" out of Washington. At some point endless "major political news" that leads to nothing actually happening other than political operatives spouting off their sides political talking points for the day just falls flat for most people. They simply ignore it and go on with their daily routine. Get back to me when something actually happens seems to be the mood.



Our advice here is to ignore all the meaningless noise and just watch the markets. They will tell you if anything truly serious is happening. If you see stock markets nose diving into severe decline that does not bounce back, you have a legitimate indicator something might be up. If you see perceived "safe haven" investments (US Treasuries, gold, silver, etc) suddenly going into a sustained sharp rally beyond normal market behavior, you have a legitimate indicator something significant may be happening. 


Otherwise, you just have a lot meaningless noise that markets are completely ignoring and so should we. So far, based on the reactions of the markets above, there is nothing meaningful to report in terms of all the current "breaking news" coming from Washington D.C. The ongoing unusual activity by the Fed in the repo market had much more potential to rattle markets and even that has had very little impact so far (still bears monitoring). At this point, we certainly see nothing to indicate the stability of the system is at risk which is what we try to monitor here.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Added note: Upcoming on the blog will be a three part series of articles that will examine an innovative new proposal for monetary system reform. First an article that explains the basic idea of the proposal and then a two part interview with the author of the proposal. This proposal is one we will add to our marketplace of ideas for monetary system reform.

Update to news note (9-30-2019): Still nothing to really report for now as we appear to just have an intense political dogfight that has just ramped up to a higher level of intensity. This is something we did predict here was likely to happen although it obviously does not take a rocket scientist to make such a prediction. Just continue to watch the markets (which are still ignoring it all so far) to see if there are signs something significant might be happening.

If you are a glutton for punishment and like to follow all the politics of things like this, at the end of the day the only things that will matter in regards to impeachment are:

1- Does the House vote to impeach? Until that happens, all this really is a complete waste of your time to get worked up about. The Democrats have the majority in the House to get that vote, but there are 25-30 in tight districts who risk losing in 2020 on a vote like this, so just watch to see what that group decides to do.

2- If the House votes to impeach, are there 38 Senators who will vote to acquit the President? If there are, the whole exercise will be a colossal waste of time and energy. If two thirds of the Senators are willing to convict and remove the President, VP Pence would become President. While that could shake up markets to some extent, even that might not rattle them too much. No major policy changes would result from that change and then the 2020 elections would still determine if there will be a major shift in direction or not. Those are still over a year away.

So, if all that is interesting to you, then those two things are the bottom line. All the rest is political noise by political partisans on both sides leading to nothing that will directly impact our daily lives as far as I can determine. Personally, I find the whole process a waste of time and have no interest in following it at all unless something that matters actually happens that impacts people's daily lives. No further updates here on this topic until there is at least some indication that might happen.

No comments:

Post a Comment