2017-02-17

Looming Economic Crisis to be Blamed on Trump, Experts Warn

Feb 15, 2017  by  Alex Newman



An economic crisis of potentially historic proportions appears to be just around the corner, and the establishment may be setting up President Donald Trump and other anti-globalist forces to take the blame for it. So says former congressman and GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul and other economic experts with a proven track record of accuracy who have studied the issue. And at this point, there is probably nothing that can be done to stop it.

While the groundwork for the upcoming financial chaos was actually laid down early in Obama’s term — and even before — by the Federal Reserve System, the figurative chickens will likely be coming home to roost under the new Trump administration. “The Federal Reserve’s policies of printing trillions of dollars back in ’08-09 have locked into place a serious financial crisis at some point in our future,” Paul warned. “It’s unavoidable, and even Donald Trump can’t stop it. Trump will unfairly get the blame though.”

“There are some dire predictions that say in the next year, or 18 months, we have something arriving worse than 2008 and 2009, the downturn is much worse,” Paul said in a recent interview with liberty-minded anti-globalist radio host Alex Jones. “They’ll say, ah, it’s all Trump’s fault. No. It wasn’t. 08 and 09 wasn’t Obama’s fault. It was the fault of the Federal Reserve, it was the fault of the Keynesian economic model, the spending too much, the deficit. So, unfortunately, there’s nothing he can do — Trump can’t do it.”

Paul, a medical doctor who took a keen interest in economics throughout his celebrated career as a constitutionalist in Congress, said Trump could “help” the situation by pursuing good policies. “But you can’t avoid the correction, the correction is locked in place, because the deficits are there, the malinvestment, everybody agrees interest rates have been too low too long,” he said in the late January interview. “The only thing he can do is allow the recession to come, get it over with, liquidate the debt. Politically, nobody wants that, so you’re going to see runaway inflation before you see this country wake up.”

“All empires end and we’re the empire. It’s going to end and it’s going to be for economic reasons,” Paul continued, noting that there would be “horrendous increases” in spending and inflation. “This is a monetary problem. This is a spending problem. This is a foreign policy problem. And that is what is going to bring us down, it’s going to be financial.”

But Paul is hardly the only expert warning of a looming economic crisis. Among other concerns, experts have warned that the over-valued stock market, pumped up by easy Federal Reserve money, could face major declines, with a potential massive sell-off in the months or years ahead. Right now, American stocks are at record highs, and so, the correction could be brutal. Bond markets are also said to be unstable.

Another potential problem cited by more than a few analysts and experts is massive inflation and a potential collapse in the value of the U.S. dollar. Such a scenario, brought about by the Fed’s wild currency printing in combination with a global sell-off as foreign governments reject the unstable American currency, could easily be blamed on Trump’s policies, despite the structural causes having been put in place years, decades, and even generations prior to his presidency.

“Get prepared,” warned legendary billionaire investor Jim Rogers, co-founder with George Soros of the Quantum Fund, in an interview this week with MacroVoices. “We’re going to have the worst economic problems we’ve had in your lifetime or my lifetime and when that happens a lot of people are going to disappear.” He noted that in the 2008-2009 crisis, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers both went under. But the next time, he warned, “it’s going to be worse than anything we’ve seen and a lot of institutions, people, companies even countries, certainly governments and maybe even countries are going to disappear. I hope you get very worried.”

In an interview late last year, author and financial expert James Rickards issued similar warnings and said there was nothing Trump could do. “A financial crisis is certainly coming. What is most important is that the crisis is coming and the time to prepare is now. It could happen in 2018, 2019, or it could happen tomorrow. The conditions for collapse are all in place,” Rickards told MarketWatch, adding that it would be “much worse” than the last crisis because of developments since the 2008 economic meltdown. “The next crisis will be of unprecedented scale and damage.”

Rickards also suggested that, unlike in the last crisis, when the Fed flooded the planet with freshly created fiat dollars, the “elites” would likely freeze the financial plumbing during the next one, meaning banks will close, wealth in digital form will be inaccessible, and chaos will reign. “Likely triggers could include a major bank failure, a failure to deliver physical gold, a war, a natural disaster, a cyber-financial attack and many other events. The trigger does not matter,” he said. “The exact timing does not matter. What matters is that the crisis is inevitable and coming soon. Investors need to prepare.”

Of course, Obama and his bipartisan enablers in Congress certainly did not help matters by doubling the federal government’s already absurdly unsustainable debt load in eight short years. But the biggest problem is, has been, and will continue to be the Fed and the ridiculous debt-based fiat monetary regime that literally depends on perpetual credit expansion to stay afloat. Still, the establishment’s propaganda arm, better known as the “mainstream media,” will work overtime to ensure that Trump and conservatives get the blame rather than the real culprits.

In fact, the laying of the groundwork for blaming Trump began long before he was even elected, with the IMF and other globalist institutions warning that opposition to their globalist system would lead to economic problems. After the election, the propaganda continued. The U.K. Independent newspaper, for example, ran an article shortly after Trump’s election headlined “How President Donald Trump will wreck the world economy.” The sub-header provided a perfect description of what is likely to become the establishment media’s narrative once the crisis begins. “The great dollar crisis of 2017 will follow the banking crisis and the great Recession — and it will all be sparked by The Donald,” claimed Independent reporter Sean O’Grady.

The report does acknowledge that much of the problem — the absurd debts and deficits run up by the U.S. government, for instance — were not in fact Trump’s doing. But it still suggests that Trump’s presidency may be the instigator of the coming collapse. “Following his win, it is likely that the dollar will drop like a stone, and everyone will be poorer,” O’Grady argued. “Yes, Donald Trump could prove the catalyst for a world economic cataclysm, one that would make the financial crisis feel like an aperitif for the main event. From what we know about the signs are not promising.”

More recently, the same newspaper pushed the same narrative even more explicitly. “Donald Trump’s first gift to the world will be another financial crisis,” reads a January headline in the Independent. Trump, writer Ben Chu claimed, “gives every impression that he will soon be hustling America — and possibly the entire world — in the direction of another catastrophic financial crisis.”

The piece also quotes alleged “experts” laying out the same case. “If the Trump administration does just half of what it says it’s going to do in economic policy and financial regulation, another financial crash is almost certain and sooner rather than later,” Dennis Kelleher, chief of the “Better Markets” think tank, is quoted as saying.

More than a few establishment insiders are pushing a similar narrative, arguing that Trump’s proposed policies — not a banking-cartel scam disguised as a “monetary system” — will be the cause of the coming crisis. “The deregulation in some areas like finance is hugely dangerous,” claimed former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, a Big Government monger and a member of the establishment globalist Council on Foreign Relations, in an interview last month on Fox. Summers also claimed reducing government regulation was “setting the stage for the next financial crisis.”

Even before Trump’s election, though, astute analysts were warning that the establishment was plotting to blame conservatives and anti-globalists for the coming economic chaos. “The vast majority of analysts in the mainstream and in the alternative media refused to acknowledge the possibility that a successful Brexit actually works in FAVOR of the globalists, because it provides them a perfect scapegoat for a financial crisis that has been broiling for years and is now ready to burst into flames,” wrote Brandon Smith at Alt-Market.com after Brexit but before Trump. “I find still that many people will not dare to consider the idea that a successful conservative resurgence is actually part of the plan for globalist institutions.”

And after the successful Brexit vote, establishment voices were out promoting the narrative. Last summer, responding to Brexit, former Fed boss Alan Greenspan warned that serious economic pain was on the way. “We are in very early days of a crisis which has got a way to go,” he told Bloomberg. “This is the worst period, I recall since I’ve been in public service. There’s nothing like it, including the crisis — remember October 19th, 1987, when the Dow went down by a record amount 23 percent? That I thought was the bottom of all potential problems. This has a corrosive effect that will not go away. I’d love to find something positive to say…. I don’t know how it’s going to resolve, but there’s going to be a crisis.”

A similar situation appears to be developing with Trump in the United States. And, in the months before the election, Alt-Market’s Smith was predicting a Trump presidency, followed by an economic collapse blamed on Trump, Brexit, and others opposed to globalism. “I continue to hold to the position I always have — that Donald Trump is going to be ALLOWED into the White House, and that this will be a prelude to economic crisis,” Smith argued in October. “The stage is being set for a grand finale to our ongoing financial collapse. The great villain behind the whole disaster will be revealed, and we will be told that the villain is us.”

After decades of criminal looting and abuse masquerading as fiscal and monetary “policy” by Western governments and central banks, another economic crisis of massive proportions does appear almost certain at this point. And with conservatives, anti-globalists, and anti-establishment forces surging into power across the West, it is hardly difficult to imagine the looming collapse being blamed on those who opposed the establishment and its rigged system. At that point, the establishment’s pre-packaged “solutions” — a global currency run by the IMF, a re-invigorated and more totalitarian system of “global governance,” and other evils already waiting in the wings — will be much easier to sell to a desperate public.

Billionaires and members of the elite are already preparing for collapse, buying up bunkers and huge tracts of land from Idaho to New Zealand. Some states are considering it, too. The task for liberty-minded citizens everywhere, though, must be to educate the American people on the true sources of the looming problems — and real solutions, such as a return to an honest monetary system and constitutionally limited government. It will be an enormous task, but a crucial one, if liberty and prosperity are to thrive over the long term.



Alex Newman is a correspondent for The New American, covering economics, education, politics, and more. He can be reached at anewman@thenewamerican.com. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU.

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https://www.thenewamerican.com/economy/economics/item/25385-looming-economic-crisis-to-be-blamed-on-trump-experts-warn

Heritage Foundation Blames Obama Admin. for America’s Economic Decline

Feb 13, 2017 by  Bob Adelmann



The Heritage Foundation minced no words in commenting on its latest Index of Economic Freedom: America’s continuing decline is all Obama’s fault:

America’s standing in the index [now in 17th place, the lowest in history] has dwindled steadily during the Obama years. This is largely owed to increased government spending, [increased] regulations, and a failed stimulus program that enriched the well-connected while leaving average Americans behind.

For the ninth time in 10 years, America’s index has lost ground. Coming in above 80 in 2008, the United States’ current index is barely above 75, tying it with Denmark, and just above Sweden and Latvia. But the latest rating places it way behind the United Kingdom (76.4), Canada (78.5), Australia (81), Switzerland (81.5), New Zealand (82.7), Singapore (88.6), and Hong Kong (89.8).

Heritage names “large budget deficits and a high level of public debt” as contributing to the continuing decline in America’s economic freedom, keeping it in the middle category of “mostly free” into which it first fell in 2010. Added Heritage:

Registering its lowest economic freedom score ever, America continued its string of discouraging trends in the 2017 index. Obama’s Washington-first, government-centric approach to policymaking has inflicted long-term damage to U.S. economic growth.

About the only bright spot that Heritage could find was that America’s manufacturing sector measured both by output and productivity is “at historic highs.”

Under “Rule of Law,” Heritage notes that “rising civil asset forfeitures by law enforcement agencies … have directly encroached on U.S. citizens’ property rights. Steve Byas, writing in The New American, made the same point:

It is not a small problem. In 2014, federal law-enforcement officers seized over $5 billion in assets [compared to] burglary losses [which] were less than $4 billion.  This does not include private property seized by local law-enforcement agencies.

This disregard for the law has, according to the Pew Research Center, reduced Americans’ trust in government significantly, with just 19 percent trusting the government “always or most of the time.”

The size of government has grown enormously under the Obama administration along with the attendant tax burden. Taxes take 26 percent of the country’s economic output while government spending at all levels (federal, state, and local) approaches 40 percent.

Regulations have grown to the point where annual compliance costs now exceed $100 billion. And government welfare programs “combined with federal subsidies for agriculture, health care, green energy projects, corporate welfare and other special interests” have all contributed to the increase in deficits and the national debt.

Also to blame, according to Heritage, are the enormous costs of administering ObamaCare and the negative impact on Wall Street of the 2,100-page Dodd-Frank legislation imposed following the Great Recession.

These problems can be solved, says Heritage in a separate study it just released: “A Mandate for Leadership in 2017.” It states that tax reform resulting in “the lowest level possible for constitutionally appropriate activities … should apply the least economically destructive forms of taxation … and minimize the cost of compliance for taxpayers.”

The budget should be balanced “by driving down federal spending, including through entitlement reforms, while maintaining a strong national defense, and not raising taxes.”

The regulatory burden should be greatly reduced, states Heritage, by forcing proposed legislation to “undergo an impact analysis before a floor vote by Congress.” In addition, every major piece of proposed legislation by federal agencies must obtain congressional approval before taking effect, and have a “sunset” date included.

Heritage called for the death of both ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank, stating,

Congress should repeal ObamaCare in its entirety and replace it with patient-centered, market-based reforms. Dodd-Frank should also be repealed.

Additional reforms should include removing the federal government from housing finance, ending the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending power, and ending federal loan and security guarantees.

The entire federal welfare system is unsustainable, said Heritage, and fails to meet its objectives: encouraging people to get off welfare and go back to work. And most of those federal programs that survive the cuts should be put back onto the states where the incentives to operate them more efficiently are greater.

Heritage retains its optimism that these changes and reductions are possible:

The 2016 election was a game-changer. America has been given an incredible and unique opportunity to move away from Obama’s failed liberal policy agenda and toward an agenda that strives to restore America’s economic freedom and spur dynamic growth.

Heritage has once again performed a vital service, following the First Law of Holes: If you are in one, stop digging.

An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at badelmann@thenewamerican.com.

Related article:

Trump Supports Civil Asset Forfeiture Even Without Conviction

https://www.thenewamerican.com/economy/commentary/item/25390-heritage-foundation-blames-obama-admin-for-america-s-economic-decline

Trump Is Fighting With Everything He’s Got To Save The U.S. Economy: 2/12/17 Full Show

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