The Run-Up


"Trump Win is a Grand Slam for Banks"
Yahoo Finance
"Trump to Tap Ex-Goldman Sachs Banker Steven Mnuchin as Treasury Secretary"
Market Watch
"Wall Street Wins Again as Trump Chooses Bankers and Billionaires"
Bloomberg
"Trump Treasury Choice Vows to Strip Back Dodd Frank"
Wall Street Journal
"Trump's Wolves of Wall Street"
New Yorker
Mr. Trump's first-round economic appointments of Steven Mnuchin and Wilbur Ross are not the long-awaited people's justice whose specter he used to boil his campaign messaging, nor do they reflect his vision of divorcing the architects of New York finance from the operatives of political sway in Washington. And yet, even in the dissonance, there's a nauseous lack of surprise.
Mr. Trump didn't have to winnow his virtual Rolodex in order to make economic cabinet selections from the platinum stables of Goldman Sachs or the nation's private equity roster.  He just hosted them at our new White House in Manhattan.
The New York Times
 The courtship is nothing new, in kind. Washington's been good to Goldman alums for a long time.  But the House of Wall Street is already immaculately fortified, while the house you'll find on America's average Martin Luther King Drive continues to delapidate and buckle, without a champion of national esteem.  The sub-prime bust showed us that the best in American finance win whichever way the nation goes.  An artful hedge lays opposing bets on long enough timelines that, sure, the win of one can cover the loss of the other but, if things are dialed-in rightly, you'll take gains from the first, in time to reap those of the second too.  Make money on selling the house.  Make money on the foreclosure. In that duplicitous dance, these men are expert.


The improving circumstance of an average American is irrelevant to success in the paradigm of world finance, because the public's coordinate plane of personal liberty, security, and economic prosperity is fashioned in a language altogether alien to the one on which finance plays.  Instead, the game is beating the people around you to seats of advantage when the world becomes volatile.  On the finance plane, one needs the well-being spectrum to stretch fully from suffering to exuberance because the line between the two can be played for profit, both ways and on top of itself. 
That cast is not meant to shape leaders of nations, and that's not who we're getting for the heads of Treasury or Commerce.  Their training is one for opportunists accustomed to knife fights between six of the world's largest banks, whose dedication is not and has never been to the public good, but instead to identifying - or creating anew - footholds for self-enrichment in the rules that govern financial instrumentation.
When they the banks lose big, as they did in 2007, after the system of their devising had written so much un-backable debt that it collapsed on itself, they the people win anyway.  AIG was the big sucker in the room, you remember. After buying so much radioactive debt from Goldman and others who were first to realize the potato was hot, AIG borrowed $182 billion from American taxpayers, and promptly paid themselves $160 million in bonuses - tone deafness of super power proportion.
The Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 volleyed a shot across the speculation bow, to head off future rendez-vous with collateralized debt obligations or security default swaps, but Wall Street authority over American life has mostly concentrated since then.  The nine banks are now six.  The federal government does not allow borrowers to enter bankruptcy for student debt, but insures 80% of the securitized student debt it turns and sells to banks. Institutions that manage retirement funds are not required to act as fiduciaries in the interest of their depositors and the Trump administration has vowed to keep it that way.  Congressional Republicans continue to resist a world in which people making less than $45,000 a year should be paid for their overtime. And through ownership of stock, equity in businesses, and debt holdings, the top 10% of the country owns America, by any meaningful economic metric.  The anger that America has dressed itself in is, so often, based in real hardship, but has found itself a villain dressed in hero slacks.
These things do not happen on accident.  They happen when we elect people who choose to protect the already-anointed, people who sell us a rug and pull it out from under us. Trump's administration will remove what's left of Dodd-Frank, dissolving the Volcker Rule, which attempts to protect the customers of commercial banks (that's you and me) from speculative market play, by those banks.  All it took to trick the American public into thinking the Volcker Rule was a sort of Washington establishment-arian-ism was shouting and pounding on a podium for 18 months.  
So with Dodd-Frank's repeal the old blue collar truism - liberty means banks are free to write derivatives with my savings account - will be well kept.  Wages will rise, so long as the Trump administration's tax cuts are so massive as to leak uncontrolled from the savings accounts of America's wealthiest class (which has never happened) and inflation does not run so rampant as to dilute any change in middle class income.  In the meantime, maddeningly, Trump's tax plan remains as blatantly in-favor of the already exorbitantly rich as it was during his campaign.

As such, the run-up to January 20 is getting underway.




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