By Denny Gulino
THE WHITE HOUSE (MaceNews) – Here at the center of the action Tuesday, about 150 feet from the Oval Office , there is …. no action.
When you watch the evening news, it will seem that a lot is going on. But take it from one of the “pool” reporters who rotated into the job of keeping track of what President Trump is doing during the day.
“Other than tweets, your pooler has seen no sign of presidential activity today,” he wrote to all the other reporters who depend on him.
OK, one thing did happen. If you follow one of the on-line news aggregators, you might have seen the top headline above everything else. “RAT FALLS FROM WHITE HOUSE CEILING.”
Actually it was a mouse. The Drudge Report was exaggerating. It made its surprise appearance in the press room, a space that now only very seldom is used for news briefings and now is packed with camera gear as well as reporters. Not only was the headline exaggerating, it included a picture which it can now be revealed, was not the actual mouse.
It was not like next door at the usually serene Treasury Department press room a few years ago where there were actual rats, plural. The department said they had been chased indoors by construction nearby. For a while there was even a “Treasury Rat” twitter account.
The White House mouse got away. It had fallen into the lap of NBC News correspondent Peter Alexander then ran into the main room before it disappeared.
The mouse appearance did not seem to affect stock prices but something did, and the blame was placed on the Institute for Supply Management purchasing managers’ report.
For some asset management firms like Ameritrade, Vanguard, E-Trade and Interactive Brokers there was a bombshell that cratered their shares, a development even more unwelcome than a mouse landing in your lap. Schwab announced an aggressive competitive move, the full elimination of commissions on stock trades. Its own shares plummeted as well, more than 10%, as its investors saw that trading revenue go out the window.
What about real news, you might ask, like the story about President Trump’s private lawyer Rudy Giuliani never having actually talked to Ukrainian Prime Minister Zelensky? If you insist, let’s add Zelensky’sing locations.
And what about the story of the Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, and Florida Ukrainians who have been the apparent source of some of Giuliani’s conspiracy theories and who now have the honor of being summoned by congressional committees. They subpoenaed Giuliani Monday and Tuesday he reportedly retained his own lawyer.
And there was Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, also subpoenaed, who wrote to those committees and told them to stop picking on department staff who were, again, subpoenaed.
How about Sen. Chuck Grassley, a seven-term Republican, and someone who contradicted almost everything the president has said about this particular whistleblower?. That anonymity is guaranteed and should not be challenged, he said.
And you couldn’t have missed the story about how Attorney General William Barr and Giuliani don’t get along and never have, complicating the impeachment defense. All those stories and more are just a few key clicks away.
Here it may be more interesting to focus on the ISM report. It disappointed and so many descriptions of it also disappointed. The ISM, a collection of opinions of those who manage the inventories in factory warehouses, is a measure of momentum in the space. Yet it is constantly identified as measuring something different, the level of factory activity.
For instance here’s a well known cable news channel during the day: “In the surest sign yet that the trade war is hurting the American economy, manufacturing activity contracted for the second month in a row in September, falling to a LEVEL not seen in 10 years.”
The report went on, “The Institute of Supply Management’s closely-watched manufacturing index dropped to 47.8 in September, its lowest LEVEL since June 2009 and worse than what economists had expected.”
For anyone familiar with the ISM report and its panel of purchasing managers that drive it, they would be the last to claim they are quantifying the LEVEL of factory activity. They will also remind you they are definitely not economists.
For levels you have to turn to the government’s survey of 3,100 manufacturing firms, representing two-thirds of the largest manufacturers in the country.
The monthly survey will be updated for September on Thursday morning. For August, by the way, orders were up 1.4%, the second month of gains. How about over the entire past year? Weak growth, but growth, not a minus sign. Even sectoral recessions are built of minus signs.
What about President Donald Trump? What was he doing during the day? All that is known for sure, other than routine items like his intelligence briefing, is he was tweeting, staying aimed at the impeachment inquiry and its leading inquisitor, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff.
“Why isn’t Congressman Adam Schiff being brought up on charges … etc,” he wrote, rephrasing a tweet from Monday and others from previous days.
There was one tweet aimed at another familiar target, the Federal Reserve, which for some reason had dropped out of tweet range for the past couple of days.
Once again Trump ignored the G-20 consensus not to use currency as a trade weapon. “As I predicted,” he wrote, “Jay Powell and the Federal Reserve have allowed the Dollar to get so strong, especially relative to ALL other currencies, that our manufacturers are being negatively affected. Fed Rate too high. They are their own worst enemies, they don’t have a clue. Pathetic!”
There were unconfirmed suspicions that, as a great fan of military parades, Trump was watching footage of what may have been the largest military parade ever, the 70th birthday extravaganza in Beijing.
There were all sorts of weaponry unveiled there for the first time, accompanied by the coordinated marching of tens of thousands of soldiers and sailors. The Daily Mail website offered a slideshow of 88 still pictures and videos. The military show was only half of the pageantry. The other half was devoted to extravagant floats and thousands of dancers and other performers depicting the country’s commercial achievements.
There was the Dongfeng 41, a new intercontinental missile that can supposedly drop nearly a dozen nuclear warheads on the United States within 30 minutes.
There was the new Dongfeng hypersonic missile that launches a warhead that is maneuverable and so unstoppable. For trivia buffs, “Dongfeng” counterintuitively means something akin to “spring breeze.”
There could be seen the new JL-2 submarine launched intercontinental missiles, the GJ-11 long-range stealth attack drone, the HQ-98 defensive missile system, the H6N bomber, an old standby modified to be refueled in flight to extend its reach.
There were a lot of China’s new air superiority fighter planes intended to rival the U.S. F-35. Helicopters flew in a formation in the shape of the number “70” commemorating the survival of Communist rule and more recently state controlled capitalism since 1949.
And there was a strange squadron of gyrocopters, vulnerable to BB guns but nevertheless part of the gargantuan display.
In Hong Kong, meanwhile, Tuesday saw the first demonstrator to be shot and critically wounded by police.
Nothing can stop the progress of China, President Xi declared.
The trade talks with the U.S. resume next Wednesday in Washington.
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Contact this reporter at denny@macenews.com