By Denny Gulino
THE WHITE HOUSE (MaceNews) – The Washington Nationals soundly repudiated the business model of the Houston Astros and the result is going to be a rethinking of conventional player-investment wisdom in those fancy offices of the owners in both leagues.
A bold statement, perhaps, but well grounded. And so much more enlightening than President Trump’s weak echo of his earlier criticism of the central bank.
During a quiet day in which he had no scheduled public appearances, Trump interspersed his tweets about the “Greatest Witch Hunt in American History” with a sad lament in the wake of the FOMC’s latest rate cut and Chairman Jerome Powell’s debut of “material reassessment,” the hurdle in front of a December follow on cut.
Leading up to his midday tweet, “The Impeachment Hoax is Hurting our Stock Market,” as the S&P 500 was clocking in at around a six-tenths deficit, the president looked back at the Federal Open Market Committee meeting with a heavy heart.
“People are VERY disappointed in Jay Powell and the Federal Reserve,” he wrote. “The Fed has called it wrong from the beginning, too fast, too slow. They even tightened in the beginning.”
Others, he said, “ are running circles around them and laughing all the way to the bank. Dollar & Rates are hurting … our manufacturers. We should have lower interest rates than Germany, Japan and all others.”
Alone among the leaders of advanced industrialized economies, the current U.S president has never hesitated to repeatedly thumb his nose at the niceties of economic discourse, paying no heed to even the lip service the rest give to not using short-cuts to rig the trade game.
The IMF communique, for instance, earlier this month expressed the sentiments of countries big and small, as the top 20 have done for years in the G-20 communiques, to “refrain from competitive devaluations and (we) will not target our exchange rates for competitive purposes.”
Yet time and again, the president urges the Fed to cut rates, not because of some misalignment with current economic conditions, but to weaken the dollar so to make American manufacturing exports cheaper.
So he wrote Thursday, “We are now, by far, the biggest and strongest Country, but the Fed puts us at a competitive disadvantage. China is not our problem, the Federal Reserve is! We will win anyway.”
Yet ever since he did that interview on the Fox Business network and answered a question about Powell’s future in the affirmative, that he would not try to remove or demote Powell, the tweets on that subject have lost their teeth. Powell could repeat Wednesday, after still another question about his reaction to the tweet assaults, that he is never going to comment on the remarks of elected officials.
So Trump has blinked on the Fed, and in his kind reference to China being less of a problem than the Federal Reserve, he reminded what has been observed here already, he has blinked on China.
The “Phase 1” deal may be signed soon, if a venue can be found to replace the cancelled APEC meeting and if China leadership, in the “Plenum” policy meeting just concluded, did not chart a different negotiating path.
At the same time there is little to no evidence that China is phasing in the probability of any more phases, at least unless Trump backtracks on existing tariffs as well as on the scheduled Dec. 15 intensification.
Democrats, working on their attack lines, are testing the one that says Phase 1, if signed, does little more than return to a status quo ante, the conditions that prevailed before the trade dispute nearly two years ago.
Meanwhile, trade tensions have slowed economies worldwide, not just that of the United States, some supply lines have been altered perhaps forever, and China has been thoroughly demonized as a trade predator, anything but a bargain-priced supplier of goods American’s freely purchased.
What about the Nationals? Take Howie Kendrick, whose latest two-run homer helped so much. At his age, he would surely have been retired had he not had a two-year contract, allowing him to recover from being sidelined for a year with a ruptured Achille’s tendon.
Take Ryan Zimmerman. How many veterans his age are in the leagues any more? Teams don’t tend to make big deals for over-30 players these days. Like the Astros, the teams concentrate on young talent, saving money in the early years while harvesting top-level performace.
Except the Nationals didn’’t. And won it all. Veterans edged out too soon can only benefit.
On Capitol Hill, a change in the seasons, at least as far as the impeachment inquiry is concerned. The vote of the full House Thursday set a path that will mean public hearings starting as soon as in about two weeks.
A lot of House members left for home after the vote, for what are called “district work days,” and they’ll be gone until Nov. 12. Except for the committees tasked with grinding out more days of closed-door hearings, in which Republicans are present, by the way, just sworn to secrecy.
Once the public hearings begin, it will be a day-to-day battle on television of adversaries, two branches of government, as temperatures drop outside and winter kills all the flowers in the White House and Capitol Hill carefully manicured gardens.
Daily twitter “Witch Hunt” assaults may then matter less than countering testimony, which takes planning and organization and coordination, attributes not easily associated with this White House.