Author: admin

Trump’s decision not to appoint a special prosecutor to pursue a criminal probe into Hillary Clinton’s email server or the Clinton Foundation, confirmed by top advisor Kellyanne Conway on Tuesday morning, appears to be is the first major break the president-elect has had with his diehard fans. In what The Hill believe was the first indication of “strains in the relationship” conservatives expressed “feelings of betrayal” on Tuesday after Conway said – and Trump subsequently confirmed during his meeting with the NYT – that the incoming administration would decline to pursue a criminal case against former rival Hillary Clinton.

And indeed, some prominent conservative critics were livid.

Breitbart News, whose former executive chairman, Steve Bannon was recently named as a senior advisor in his White House, slammed Trump’s decision as a “broken promise.”

Wow, Breitbart is unhappy with Donald Trump: http://pic.twitter.com/YOolCTsDC9

— Eliot Nelson (@eliotnelson) November 22, 2016

Conservative pundit Ann Coulter accused Trump of “blocking investigators from doing their job.

As happy as I am that our long national nightmare’s over, NO president shld be blocking investigators from doing their jobs. #EqualUnderLaw https://t.co/8JCQOO0dSF

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) November 22, 2016

Even Judicial Watch, the conservative watchdog organization that has pursued Clinton’s emails for more than a year and whose relentless FOIAs into the Clinton inner sanctum – alongside with the Wikileaks revelations – played a critical part in Hillary Clinton’s loss, called on Trump to reverse his stance.

“Donald Trump must commit his administration to a serious, independent investigation of the very serious Clinton national security, email, and pay-to-play scandals,” organization president Tom Fitton said in a statement. “If Mr. Trump’s appointees continue the Obama administration’s politicized spiking of a criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton, it would be a betrayal of his promise to the American people to ‘drain the swamp’ of out-of-control corruption in Washington, DC.”

“President-elect Trump should focus on healing the broken justice system, affirm the rule of law and appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Clinton scandals.”

To be sure, Trump’s rather abrupt announcement he was willing to mend his pained relationship with Clinton flew in the face of over a year of Congressional hearings and probes, and prompted many to speculate if there was some behind the scenes arrangement between Hillary and Trump.

Congressional Republicans dragged FBI Director James Comey and Attorney General Loretta Lynch to the Capitol on multiple occasions to explain their decision. Lawmakers claimed that the Justice Department officials had created a “double standard” in declining to press charges.

On the other hand, the possibility of a politically motivated probe ordered by Trump had riled legal experts, who called it a potential gross breach of the sanctity of the rule of law.

But Trump’s base in the Republican Party had cheered his promise with repeated chants of “lock her up” and signs reading “Hillary for prison.”

And then, on Tuesday morning, Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway suggested on MSNBC that Trump is backing away from the earlier pledge, in part to “help [Clinton] heal.”

“I think when the president-elect, who’s also the head of your party, tells you before he’s even inaugurated that he doesn’t wish to pursue these charges, it sends a very strong message, tone and content,” she said.

Later in the day, in an interview with the New York Times, Trump denied that his apparent change of heart would deeply disturb his supporters. “I think I will explain it that we in many ways will save our country,” he told reporters and editors from the newspaper.

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who is in the running for the position of Secretary of State although appears to be losing to Mitt Romney as of this afternoon, appeared supportive of the decision. 

“Look, there’s a tradition in American politics that after you win an election, you sort of put things behind you,” Giuliani told reporters at Trump Tower in New York. “And if that’s the decision he reached, that’s perfectly consistent with sort of a historical pattern of things come up, you say a lot of things, even some bad things might happen, and then you can sort of put it behind you in order to unite the nation.

“If he made that decision, I would be supportive of it,” he added. “I’d also be supportive of continuing the investigation.”

As The Hill adds, Trump has yet to make a decision on the future of FBI Director James Comey, whose job might be in jeopardy, the president-elect has suggested, for failing to recommend charges against Clinton. Comey, a Republican, is scheduled to continue his term until 2023, though Trump has suggested he may ask him to leave office sooner.

“I think that I would rather not comment on that yet,” Trump said on CBS’s “60 Minutes” earlier this month.  “I haven’t made up my mind” although like with the case of Clinton, the most likely explanation is that Trump was a lot of bark, and very little bite, and Comey will remain in his post.

As for Trump’s loyal, at times rabid, fan base, betrayed or not it will have to decide how to deal with disappointment and flip-flops by the billionaire real estate investor (perhaps with Mitt Romney by his side) because as today’s most glaring yet example demonstrates, disappointments will come and they will come fast and furious over the next two months as Trump finalizes the policies that he will begin to enact after his inauguration in two months’ time.

via http://ift.tt/2gf9gk6 Tyler Durden

Via DaisyLuther.com,

Anyone who has ever had a toddler knows that when your little one falls down, often, they look to you before deciding whether they should cry or not. If you rush over and say, “Oh you poor baby, you’re hurt” then the wailing commences. If you glance over and say, “You’re okay. You’re a tough cookie. Get back up,” then you’re teaching them that the proper response to falling is shaking it off and getting up again. We’re instilling courage and resilience when we do this.

We teach children how to respond to almost everything by modeling a healthy response for them, but our school/indoctrination system seems to have missed this crucial concept of Dealing with Disappointment 101. Their overly nurturing and politically biased response to Trump’s win over Hillary Clinton is making everything worse.

Basic psychology tells us that when we bolster someone’s fear by our response, we’re actually reinforcing that they have grave reason to be fearful.

By babying these kids because their favored candidate lost and constantly discussing the fears, the education/indoctrination system is teaching kids that the proper response to a Trump presidency is abject terror, disappointment, and donning the cloak of victimhood. The meetings for a primal scream, the delaying of midterm exams, the counseling, and the excused absences to protest all say to kids, “Oh my gosh, this is serious. We’re all be spending next Christmas in a Death Camp.”

Here are some ridiculous examples of anti-Trump bias being taught in schools. These tactics aren’t education. They’re indoctrination. 

One school system introduced an anti-Trump curriculum

The San Fransisco Chronicle is reporting that lesson plans in the Bay area include such instructions as:

“Let us please not sidestep the fact that a racist and sexist man has become the president of our country by pandering to a huge racist and sexist base,” wrote Fakrah Shah, a Mission High School teacher, in the introduction to her lesson plan. “DO NOT: Tell (students) that we have LOST and that we have to accept this.”

Let’s look at two things in the introduction to this program.

First, “DO NOT: Tell (students) that we have LOST and that we have to accept this.”

Who are the “we” in that line? It seems to presume that all students were Clinton supporters. Would this have been acceptable if a school was teaching the children that they didn’t have to accept a woman as a president? Or a black man? Or a person of a religion other than Christianity?

Not only that, but the plan demonizes anyone who voted for Trump. The curriculum says that the only way Trump won the office was by “by pandering to a huge racist and sexist base.” That means that anyone who voted for Trump will be, in the eyes of the children being fed this garbage in a tax-payer funded classroom, considered a racist and a sexist.

I took the liberty of downloading the lesson plan from Google Docs. You can read the whole thing here.

An English teacher in North Carolina made her students do an assignment comparing Trump to Hitler

English students at Cedar Ridge High School in North Carolina got an earful from their teacher, Amanda Harder, who used the election and her distaste for Donald Trump as the impetus for classroom assignments. She made the kids watch videos of translated speeches by Adolf Hitler and compare them to speeches by Donald Trump.

A with a cell phone caught the teacher saying,

“Basically, the only people who seem to be safe from this guy are white Christian males. Am I missing anything? Oh, American – white, Christian, male Americans.”

But then the teacher discovered that kids were recording her and took pre-emptive action, according to a report on Fox News.

After the teacher found out she had been recorded, she demanded that students turn over their cell phones, one parent alleged.

 

“She made the kids drop their phones in a basket by the door,” the parent said. “So we just told the kids to either take notes or record her on their laptops.”

Here’s a recording of the “lesson” recorded by a student.

Schools across the country are enhancing the fear.

An essay published (surprisingly) on US News and World Report gave other examples of this fear enhancement:

Of course, it’s important to discuss current events and allay fears, but the sympathy and endless discussions are only making it worse.

Back to raising small children as an example: If you tell your kids that darkness is scary, make sure there’s always a light on in the bathroom, and slink around with a flashlight yourself, then they will become scared of the dark.

If you teach them how to handle darkness, how to let their eyes adjust, how to put your hand against the wall and take small steps, then they’ll learn the coping mechanisms necessary to function and will be less fearful.

If you explain that there really is no monster in the closet and open the door and show them, it will allay their fear. If you say, “Oh my gosh, run to my room! That monster is going to get you!” and teach them that panic is the appropriate response, they’ll also be terrified.

What the school system should be doing is investigating the truth and explaining it to children. No, Muslim kids aren’t going to be rounded up. No, gay marriages aren’t going to be dissolved. No, black families won’t be “sent back to Africa.”

Instead, they’re creating a generation of people who will be even more fearful and easily offended than the current batch of snowflakes. If you aren’t homeschooling or unschooling, now might be the time to consider it.

via http://ift.tt/2gI5Zv2 Tyler Durden

Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid is one of the few strategists on Wall Street to admit he was wrong (although he may still end up being right). Previewing his annual credit outlook titled “Volatility Ahead”, Reid confesses that “we’ve long felt that as we approached 2017 we would likely be at the turning point of the credit cycle. Indeed our forecasts are for wider spreads in our annual outlook for the first time since the Euro Sovereign crisis earlier this decade. However in the course of writing this outlook much has changed.” 

The strategist admits that, alongside virtually everyone else on Wall Street, he became bullish, almost as if overnight on one catalyst: the election of Donald Trump, which universally was panned by most experts (if not here), as a major selloff catalyst. “The forecasts are less bearish than they would have been when we started writing this publication in late October partly because spreads have widened notably since and also the probabilities of a US recession in 2017 have lessened given the possibility of aggressive fiscal spending from the new US administration.”

Naturally, this is the bullish assumption which in the past two weeks has been adopted by all, namely that Trump will unleash a trillion dollar (or more ) debt issuance spree, aka “massive” fiscal stimulus, an assumption which we explained yesterday will soon be challenged by Congressional Republicans. However, more than a simple political hurdle, a greater gating factor is what happens to interest rates, a traditional buffer to risk assets any time the economy is on the verge of overheating: should they rise too high, the entire stock market house of cards falls.

It is here that Reid points out something truly fascinating, namely the interplay between monetary and fiscal policy, however not at the national level, but at the international, where the US is injecting hundreds of billions in debt in the global system, which then is soaked up not by the tightening (for now) Federal Reserve, but courtesy of foreign central banks such as the ECB and BOJ.

This is how the Deutsche Bank strategist explains the “post-Trump” flow of funds:

The main driver of 2017 will again be policy and we’re left with an intriguing combination where the US will likely implement serious fiscal stimulus but without Fed QE supporting it whereas Europe will have no meaningful fiscal stimulus but lots of QE. Japan is a hybrid as it will have monetary policy that easily allows for more expansionary domestic fiscal policy but without clear evidence – at the moment at least – that we’ll deviate too far from the status quo. However there is some evidence to suggest that we’ll effectively have cross border helicopter money.

So there it is: helicopter money is here… and nobody is talking about it because it is not national helicopter money but cross-border, i.e., between central banks, something which makes perfect sense in a globally interconnected world of fungible money, and yet because it does not comply with conventional models, has flown right under the economists’ radar.

So how will the next stage in the global monetary-fiscal experiment look like, one in which cross-border helicopter money has now essentially arrived? Well, the answer will determine if Trump’s attempt to make the American economy great again with trillions in investments (funded by individual investors in Europe and Japan) will succeed or fail.

Assuming the ECB continues sizeable QE all year, and perhaps more importantly if Japan defends the zero 10 year JGB rate, then this could easily help cap UST yields at lower levels than they would naturally be at given President-Elect Trump’s aggressive fiscal plans.

Ultimately, it all goes back to Trump:

Given his protectionist leanings it’s perhaps ironic that the President-Elect’s biggest global allies might end up being the BoJ and the ECB. The biggest risk to his plans and to market stability might be if the BoJ decides to abandon the defense of zero and/or if the ECB signals a taper earlier than expected.

Ironic indeed, that Trump – who hopes to effectively isolated the US from the world – will be the one president more reliant on the rest of the world than any of his predecessors to bring his plan to fruition.

Finally, as to what all this means for the year ahead, Jim Reid is cautious. Here is his forecast.

We therefore think it’s a transitional year ahead with many contradictions. Transitional because with debt so high across the globe, expansionary fiscal policy without your own domestic central bank propping up yields is risky and only half way towards what still seems the inevitability of broader helicopter money. Much might depend on the ECB and BoJ continuing current large scale purchases of government bonds. For 2017 we think they will but the debate over the funding of increases in US (and perhaps UK) fiscal spending will increase over the next 12 months and is likely to lead to more volatility as the financial market swings from believing that fiscal spending will lead to higher growth, inflation and higher yields for a period of time to perhaps then believing that global central banks are likely to cap the rise in yields.

To be sure, this is a simplified model: one should also consider the risk of ongoing (and record as we showed) US Treasury liquidation by the likes of China and Saudi Arabia. Should they proceed to sell off US paper more aggressively, all bets are off. Which means that Trump will have to remain friendly with not only Japan and Europe, but also China and Saudi Arabia.

Can he do it? For now the market is happy to answer in the affirmative, although as Jim Reid concludes, “the days of one-way dovish monetary policy, with no fiscal spending and low volatility in asset prices and growth are likely over.”

via http://ift.tt/2ghWhvY Tyler Durden

Submitted by Jeffrey Snider via Alhambra Investment Partners,

It is an apparent contradiction to where we can describe a desperate money supply situation yet stock prices, in particular, are at all-time highs or at least outwardly unconcerned about all of it. This isn’t anything new, however, as noted last week where we may be witnessing the third or fourth iteration of the same repeating cycle. It was, after all, the S&P 500 registering a brand-new high in October 2007 more than two months after liquidity (“dollar”) problems were discovered to be widespread and systemic.

There aren’t any perfect or perhaps even good analogies by which to explain these differences, these periods where, as I described them, risk markets in particular convince themselves that the low rumblings of trouble are exclusively overseas or trivial concerns. That was 2013 and into 2014, a period that on more reflection feels a very apt comparison to what we find now. Stocks absolutely surged throughout 2013 even though the conditions that eventually made the “rising dollar” were obvious and apparent at that time.

One analogy I can make is that of an engine with a single piston that is misfiring, mistimed or maybe not properly seated in its cylinder so that you hear an audible and distinct knocking sound as the engine is running. That problem piston is the localized “dollar” problem that registers a perhaps ambiguous warning, one that can be disregarded since an engine, and thus your car (as the economy), will continue to run even with a misfire – for a time. The longer the piston remains off, the greater the strain it puts on the rest of them in both mechanical and efficiency factors. If it goes on long enough, you will be forced to deal with it and not by choice and not in a favorable outcome.

The way that “inefficiency” propagates throughout the “dollar” system is also complex and takes time to figure. In mid-2013, that “massive dollar warning” as I called it at the time took a full year to become the “rising dollar” even though it had in between crept up and into various market problems including interest rate swaps and especially overseas currencies. CNY, for example, turned lower in January 2014 which was an especially significant development especially as to how far this disruption might have by then progressed. It was just written off as China being China, entirely unrelated to US circumstances. Even the shocking dropoff in growth was totally set aside as something completely related to snow and cold.

But even by July 2014 as these seemingly “overseas” problems started to crop up in domestic issues, they were still largely ignored in places such as stocks. The economic stats were ambiguous (without calibrating for “dollars”), meaning that there wasn’t a clear progression easily established from “dollars” to markets to economy. That wouldn’t happen, of course, until late 2014 and early 2015, and even at this relatively late stage stocks and economists were unimpressed; the S&P 500 hitting and being close to new highs, eerily reminiscent of October 2007, all the way to around late May that year.

Beside the complexities that require time to feed disruptions through to widespread function, stocks have their own distinct sources of liquidity and funding that aren’t always tied to interbank conditions and what we find in global money markets. Not only have the corporations themselves been huge, non-economic buyers, so, too, have global central banks and not just of their own local stocks but also in a great many jurisdictions that have added huge positions in US equities. The same has held for sovereign wealth funds, as well as personal savings distributions here and abroad.

In other words, it isn’t until these separate sources are directly forced to confront these contradictions that new highs turn into waves of selling and liquidations. Liquidations are, after all, the combination of illiquidity plus selling; without the latter there isn’t much that will occur of any interest. It was that way in October 2007 as well as throughout 2013 and then again in the first half of 2015.

It is this repetition that gets overlooked because each time people want to believe that “it” cannot possibly continue any longer. People believe that either central banks will finally guess correctly given enough chances, or things will just improve because depressions have been banished by credentialed economists from the mainstream vernacular. And still the process repeats: overseas problems that are ignored in the almost-euphoria of central banks doing something “different” at least partly in response; the first triggers of doubt that those “overseas” problems might not be strictly overseas; more obvious data and prices that show festering problems becoming more widespread; further confirmation that economy as well as money and markets are being significantly affected; and finally more easily observed statistics or indications that leave no doubt. It is only close to the end of that evolution where the mainstream, including stocks, is finally confronted with its obliviousness.

In 2007, the process was greatly condensed by the speed at which “dollar” problems themselves progressed, as a matter of quick revulsion and then panic. In the “rising dollar”, it was spread out over a large period of time because the “dollar” itself was a function of banks slowly withdrawing resources not in a panic but in a series of calculated responses to the reverberations throughout “overseas” and back again. It wasn’t until early 2015 that it finally started to resemble a landslide.

The ability at which the “market”, largely stocks, as well as economists can rationalize these developments cannot be overstated. I had produced throughout 2015 an enlarging list of those excuses which proved to be a very good indication itself for this process going from strictly overseas “dollar” to blatant, global economic disruption:

1. Dollar doesn’t matter, indicates strong economy relative to the world
2. Dollar matters for oil, but lower oil prices mean stronger consumer
3. Manufacturing slump doesn’t matter, only temporary
4. Manufacturing declines are consumer spending, but only a small part
5. Manufacturing declines are becoming serious, but only from overseas
6. Maybe domestic manufacturing recession too, but the rest of the economy is strong
7. Rest of the economy might not be as strong as thought, but only an “earnings recession.”

By the time #8 appeared, which was growing acceptance that full-blown recession might be a very good possibility, it had been two years since the “dollar” first warned about the next global leg down. That difference, however, is important to keep in mind; 2014 was supposed to be the year that the global recovery was initiated, the long-awaited liftoff, but was instead beset by seemingly minor disturbances supposedly unrelated to the US as at least the “cleanest dirty shirt.” In truth, the US was just as dirty a piece of clothing as all others; the only actual difference was that by overlooking the grime the mainstream was able to wallow once more all over again in confirmation bias.

The fact that stocks are at record highs as the “dollar” disrupts still another time is as regular as the seasons. Stocks are fueled by hope which takes time for the “dollar” to disprove through first its own systems and then full economy; as it has time and again.

via http://ift.tt/2geSPUQ Tyler Durden

India’s decision to ban Rupee notes above 500 has become the financial media’s topic du jour.

However, India is in fact just the latest in a series of countries to ban physical cash in higher denominations.

The war on cash has been going on since at least 2014 if not earlier.

To that end, France has banned any transaction over €1,000 Euros from using physical cash. Spain has banned transactions over €2,500. Uruguay has banned transactions over $5,000.

Outside of these countries Canada, Norway, Denmark, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Mexico and other nations are currently either proposing or rolling out programs that will ban cash from certain transactions if not completely.

And if you think this is impossible in the US, think again. A campaign is already underway to do precisely this.

Indeed, the number of high profile financial “experts” who have called to ban higher bill denominations if not banning cash altogether grows almost weekly.

As former Chief Economist for the IMF, Harvard’s Ken Rogoff is one of the most listened to economists in the US.

Rogoff’s current book is literally titled The Curse of Cash.

Then there’s former Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers. Summers has called repeatedly to stop producing large denominations of cash in the US. Indeed, despite the chaos this policy has caused in India he coauthored a piece stating:

”…nothing in the Indian experience gives us pause in

 recommending that no more large notes be created

 in the United States, Europe, and around the world.”

Even current Fed Chair Janet Yellen, arguably the single most powerful financial insider in the world, stated during a Q & A session “cash is not a convenient store of value.”

Regardless of your personal views on Rogoff, Summers and Yellen, they are some of the most powerful and connected financial insiders in the world.

If they are calling to ban cash you better believe that discussions on how to do it are taking place behind closed doors at the highest levels. The fact that insiders at this level are openly stating this tells us that a campaign to ban cash in the US is already underway.

Indeed, we've uncovered a secret document outlining how the Fed plans to incinerate savings in the coming months.

We detail this paper and outline three investment strategies you can implement

right now to protect your capital from the Fed's sinister plan in our Special Report

Survive the Fed's War on Cash.

We are making 1,000 copies available for FREE the general public.

To pick up yours, swing by….

http://ift.tt/1eaWvC8

Best Regards

Graham Summers

Chief Market Strategist

Phoenix Capital Research

 

 

 

via http://ift.tt/2geQJV7 Phoenix Capital Research

After a day of frenetic OPEC headlines being all that matters, oil traders may briefly focus on fundamentals as API reports an unexpectedly large build in gasoline inventories ( +2.68mm vs 900k exp). Overall crude, cushing, and distillates saw inventory draws which left wti slightly lower post-data.

 

API

• Crude -1.28mm (+1mm exp)
• Cushing -140k (-100k exp)
• Gasoline +2.68mm (+900k exp)
• Distillates -350k

After last week's across the complex builds, it was ony gasoline that saw a build this week (which fits seasonally)

 

A rollercoaster day in WTI thanks to OPEC headlines

 

Rather notably, as Bloomberg points out, the prompt WTI M1-M2 spread widened to -90c today, the biggest discount since April. "There’s plenty of supply around,” Zahir say, adding that a deepening contango encouraging more oil to go into storage.

via http://ift.tt/2gHRXtb Tyler Durden

We're hearing lots of after-the-fact explanations for why Trump won the election. The most common interpretation of events is that many citizens had a view of the country that pundits, pollsters, and the Clinton campaign missed. But somehow Trump accurately identified the mood of the people – especially in the Great Lakes region – and crafted a message to fit their emotions.

That explanation of events fits the observed data. Trump’s priorities do seem to match what polls tell us people are thinking and feeling. Or at least enough people feel that way to give Trump the Electoral College win. In this view of the world, Trump is a populist who has good instincts about what people want to hear.

But as Dilbert Creator Scott Adams has been detailing for the past year, people can be living in different movies while physically inhabiting the same spacetime…

Trump’s priorities do seem to match what polls tell us people are thinking and feeling. Or at least enough people feel that way to give Trump the Electoral College win. In this view of the world, Trump is a populist who has good instincts about what people want to hear.

 

But as I have been teaching you for the past year, people can be living in different movies while physically inhabiting the same spacetime. In your movie, Trump might be a populist as the experts are saying. But in my movie, Trump is a Master Persuader. And the script for my movie fits the observed facts just as well as yours. Maybe better.

 

The Master Persuader filter says Trump didn’t identify and match the preferences of the people so much as cause them to think the way they are thinking. My filter on the election says that Trump’s skill for persuasion could have given him the victory with DIFFERENT policies than the ones he championed – such as Bernie Sanders policies. And Trump would look like a populist in that case too.

 

Keep in mind that most voters are handcuffed to their party’s candidate. That guarantees that most elections will be close, no matter who runs. The winner is the candidate who can move perhaps 5% of voters from column A to B. And the Master Persuader had a year-long election cycle and total media exposure to get that minor task accomplished. This is why I predicted Trump’s win a year before it happened.

 

I don’t believe reality is something the human brain can understand. We didn’t evolve with the ability to see reality for what it is. Evolution only cares if we survive and procreate. In this case, people who think Trump is a populist can have babies, and so can the people who think we elected Hitler, and so can the people who think Trump is a well-meaning Master Persuader. That’s three different movies. Evolution doesn’t care which worldview is right, if any. It only cares that we can make more babies. And we can.

 

Still, it might matter who has the most “useful” movie among us. The Master Persuader movie did a good job in predicting Trump’s success. It also predicts Trump moving to the middle, persuading Pence to be more LGBTQ-friendly, and good relations with other countries. That’s the movie plot I see coming.

 

But some of you are in a movie that is dark and dangerous.

 

Perhaps you see a world in which the next Hitler just came to power. Some of you see a clown with no skill coming to power because his populist message was effective. Those are scary movies compared to my feel-good film. If you could switch to my movie, and lose nothing but your anxiety for the future, wouldn’t you want to do it? In my movie, we have lots of Trump success ahead and none of the dark possibilities will come to pass.

So, Adams asks rhetorically, how can you tell whether or not you are in the wrong movie?

I’ll give you a few clues. Consider…

If Trump didn’t win because of his persuasion skills, which other Republican candidate can you imagine beating Clinton?

 

You might be thinking that Clinton’s email problems and the Comey announcements made her an unusually weak candidate, and that means any sane Republican could have beaten her. But you’d be wrong. The reason that the emails, the Comey decisions, and Wikileaks were so effective is that Trump had been labelling Clinton “Crooked Hillary” for months. That created the confirmation bias trap that made everything Clinton ever did sound suspicious. None of the other candidates would have crafted such a perfect persuasion trap.

 

I also have a hard time imagining any other candidate going after Bill Clinton so hard that it took him out of the game. Was Jeb going to do that?

 

If you believe Trump’s skill for persuasion wasn’t the key variable in his win, you have to imagine some other candidate beating Clinton with the same set of policies as Trump. Personally, I can’t imagine it.

 

If you think Trump is the next Hitler, or a clown who got lucky with his populist message, you have to ask yourself why the stock market and the dollar are both up following the election. The smartest money-managers in the world have already abandoned their old movies and jumped over to movies they see as more useful for making money, apparently.

 

If you think Trump is the next Hitler, you have to ask yourself why every major world power has already said they think they can work with him, no problem.

 

If you think Trump is a lucky incompetent who inherited money from his father, you have to explain why he has succeeded in real estate, reality TV, and now politics. Can incompetent people win that bigly in three different arenas while everyone is watching?

 

If you think Trump has anti-semite advisors, you have to wonder why his son-in-law Jared Kushner hasn’t noticed any of that and is working hard for Trump.

 

If you think Trump is a racist, you have to wonder how he learned to act so well that he could be in this picture looking as non-racist as a person can look.

 

 

And if you think Trump is any or all of the things you heard from the mainstream media, you have to wonder why they were so thoroughly wrong about the one thing that can be measured objectively – the election results.

 

 

You might also wonder why the anti-Trump protests are petering out. If a real Hitler came to power, would people get tired of walking around outside to protest?

 

The biggest demographic group opposing Trump – including the ones on the street – are young people. Objectively speaking, young people are the dumbest people within every demographic group. I was dumber when I was younger. So were you. So is everyone else. Ask yourself if it is a coincidence that the dumbest people within every demographic group lean in the same direction.

 

The Master Persuader filter says that young people have not yet experienced multiple situations in which the media scares the public over nothing. To them, the fear of Trump is real because the Internet and the media says it is real. To people my age, we have seen one fake media scare after another. We don’t believe in fake scares the same way that that young people do because we’ve been through it so many times.

As the election season fog begins to clear, most people will start to see Trump as an unconventional president whose policies conform to the preferences of the governed. But that simple movie is boring. I invite you to join my movie, in which each of us has a small role in making America Great Again. You just have to find your part.

It’s a good movie. I think you’ll like it.

Read more here…

*  *  *

You might like reading Adams' book because evolution.

via http://ift.tt/2ghGqxg Tyler Durden

 

"Most Shorted" stocks have now risen for 12 of the last 13 days – the biggest short squeeze since the March 2009 lows…

 

While The Dow is doing great post-election, we note that Goldman Sachs alone accounts for 27% of all the gains…

 

Small Caps don't seem to care that their cost of funding has surged…

 

HYG (HY Bond ETF) rallied to a crucial intersection of 50- and 100-DMA…

 

The long-end continues to outperform…

 

The Treasury Curve steepened modestly today after plunging for 10 days…

 

Not flashing the same bullish signal that bank stocks believe in…

 

US Financials credit risk pushed on to one-month highs… desite the exuberance of shareholders…

 

The Dollar Index declined for the 2nd day in a row…

 

Gold, Silver, Copper, and Crude are all higher on the week…

 

The crude complex was complete chaos today as OPEC headlines were all that mattered ahead of tonight's API data…

 

 

 

via http://ift.tt/2fosjY2 Tyler Durden