Trump claims credit he is not due on the economy
Growth has exceeded expectations outside the US rather than within it
Lawrence Summers
Approval for President Donald Trump is boosted by the strong economy, yet the choices his administration makes invite foreign retaliation © AFP
President Donald Trump regularly and proudly takes credit for the US economy’s strong performance.
With rapid growth in the second quarter, the stock market strong, the unemployment rate back below 4 per cent and the midterm elections looming, his rhetoric and that of his supporters will probably escalate in the coming months.
In fact the approval the US president enjoys is boosted more by the strong economy, than the other way around. This conclusion will only be reinforced if Mr Trump’s current steps towards a trade war retard US economic performance, as is increasingly feared. A variety of observations are pertinent.
First, history suggests that presidential popularity rises with declining unemployment. It is reasonable to suppose that, if unemployment were at its long-term level of 5.5 per cent, instead of its current 3.9 per cent, Mr Trump’s approval rate would fall lower than its already anaemic level. As it is, his approval ratings are worse than those of any first-term president with an unemployment rate under 5 per cent.
Second, such acceleration of growth as we have observed is well within the normal range of growth forecast errors. Before the 2016 election, when the Trump presidency was not anticipated, consensus forecasts for the US economy were 2.2 per cent for 2017, and 2.1 per cent for 2018. The actual outcome in 2017 of 2.2 per cent and the consensus forecast of 2.8 per cent for 2018 do not represent a statistically significant fluctuation from the mean.
Third, it appears that growth has accelerated and exceeded expectations more outside the US than within the country, suggesting that whatever is driving America’s growth is a global factor, rather than something for which US policy can take credit. For 2017, the country’s growth exceeded expectations by less than for the world as a whole, or for China, Europe or Japan. For 2017 and 2018 taken together, US growth looks likely to exceed expectations by less than world growth.
Fourth, market evidence calls into question the idea that the US has become a highly attractive place to invest because of Mr Trump’s policies. Net foreign direct investment in the US in the first quarter of 2018 was down nearly two-thirds against the first quarter of 2016.
Goldman Sachs analysts have demonstrated that US companies which do more business abroad have outperformed those that are more domestically focused. And there is the basic observation that before trade war fears took hold, the dollar had declined during the Trump presidency.
Fifth, the underlying reason why the US economy is strong right now is that it has been possible to run a very taut economy with unemployment below 4 per cent and not face significant inflationary pressures. No one is quite sure why this should be. It is probable that some combination of globalisation, technology, and the reduction of employee power as unions have weakened have changed the inflation process. It is hard to see why Mr Trump deserves credit for these structural changes, which have been happening for a long time.
Sixth, there is what Ben Bernanke, the former Federal Reserve chairman, has labelled the “Wile E Coyote” issue, after the accident-prone cartoon character. It may well be that an element of current success that can be attributed to Trump administration policy is borrowing prosperity from the future. This is most obvious in the case of the soyabean exports that were accelerated to avoid tariffs, but it is fairly ubiquitous.
Increasing fiscal stimulus is like a drug with tolerance effects — to keep growth constant, deficits have to keep getting larger. Some combination of gathering foreign storm clouds, the end of growing fiscal stimulus and the delayed effect of tightening monetary policies may converge to slow or end the expansion.
The choices this administration are making invite foreign retaliation against US exporters and use up fiscal capacity even as the economy is growing rapidly. Because of this, and because there is limited room for monetary policy, the country will not be in a position to respond strongly if a downturn comes. All the more reason, therefore, why we should avoid pulling demand forward.
This is all quite dangerous. The president has taken credit for far more economic success than he deserves. He will disproportionately be blamed when the downturn comes. What follows will be a test of our democracy.
The writer is Charles W Eliot university professor at Harvard and a former US Treasury secretary
TRUMP CLAIMS CREDIT HE IS NOT DUE ON THE ECONOMY / THE FINANCIAL TIMES OP EDITORIAL
The Other Russian Meddling
Democrats howl about Putin’s offenses, but not in Latin America.
By Mary Anastasia O’Grady
Americans are rightly upset over President Trump’s obsequiousness toward Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. The former KGB agent heads a gangster government, and Mr. Trump should have stood up to him.
On the other hand, Democrats’ moralizing Helsinki hysteria is phony. They’re upset with Mr. Putin’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election because Hillary Clinton lost. When it comes to Russian expansionism in the Western Hemisphere and the Kremlin’s abysmal human-rights record, the American left mostly looks the other way.
Democratic ballyhooing over Mr. Putin’s habit of jailing and sometimes killing his political and media opponents is especially rich. Russia’s longstanding ally Cuba has an even worse civil-liberties record. Yet when President Obama unconditionally reshaped U.S. policy to please Cuban dictator Raúl Castro, his party cheered. Mr. Obama even trotted off to a baseball game in Havana with the Cuban mob boss. Democrats cheered some more.
Advocates of the Obama Cuba policy argue that Havana poses no threat to U.S. interests. But if regional security, stability and economic growth matter, that is demonstrably false. Sixty years after Castro came to power, Cuba, with strong backing from the Kremlin, still underwrites tyranny in Central and South America.
Venezuela is Exhibit A. And now there is blood-soaked Nicaragua, where Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez arrived on Thursday to celebrate the 39th anniversary of the Sandinista rebel victory over dictator Anastasio Somoza.
Daniel Ortega, legendary leader of the Marxist Sandinistas—longtime heroes of Democratic politicians such as former Secretary of State John Kerry, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, to name a few—is at war with his own people. Since April, when university students began peacefully protesting Mr. Ortega’s decade-plus consolidation of power, national police and pro-government militias have cut down some 350 Nicaraguans. Many have been murdered by sniper fire. Others have been shot at close range.
This state terrorism is copied from Venezuela’s military dictatorship, which has flattened its student-led opposition. In both cases a youth movement believed that its commitment to truth and freedom gave it the undisputed moral high ground. In both cases the dictatorship unleashed paramilitary forces to crush them. In both cases students met with jackboots, nighttime raids on their homes, torture and prison.
Both authoritarian regimes are born of the same ideology, and have the same progenitors: Havana and Moscow. Cuba has been instrumental in suffocating dissent in Venezuela by infiltrating the military, academic institutions and media. Now Castro’s regime, together with Caracas, is aiding Mr. Ortega. Students arrested and tortured in Nicaragua have reported hearing Venezuelan and Cuban accents in clandestine jails.
Outside help for intelligence-gathering, paramilitary training and weaponry also comes from beyond Latin America. Clearly, some of it comes directly or indirectly from Moscow. Around 2005, Mr. Putin began rekindling Russia’s warm economic and military relations with Cuba. He also has re-engaged with Nicaragua.
As I noted in a July 8 column, the Interior Ministry of Russia recently completed a multistory “Police Training” center in Managua. Mr. Ortega says it is for counternarcotics work. That’s laughable given Russia’s closeness with narco-states such as Venezuela. A more likely purpose is repressing dissidents so Mr. Ortega can retain power.
In a June 2016 essay for a Central Intelligence Agency peer-reviewed quarterly, Robert Vickers examined Nicaragua’s Cold War history and its current relationship with Russia. Mr. Vickers reminded readers of an airfield 60 kilometers north of Managua called Punta Huete. “It was constructed in the early 1980s—soon after the leftist Sandinista regime took power—with Soviet funds and Cuban technical assistance,” Mr. Vickers wrote. Its exceedingly long runway was designed to accommodate heavy bombers.
The airfield wasn’t finished during the Cold War, and the project sat idle after the Soviet collapse and during the eclipse of Mr. Ortega in the 1990s. But when he returned to power in 2007, the Moscow-Managua axis was restored. Punta Huete was completed in 2010 with, according to Mr. Vickers, “Russian financial assistance.” Russia recently donated two Antonov military transport planes to Nicaragua. It sold Mr. Ortega 50 T-72 tanks in 2016. To what end? One wonders.
Geopolitical and defense analyst W. Alejandro Sánchez discussed the Nicaragua-Russia relationship in the Sept. 25, 2017, issue of National Interest, observing that today “Russia’s most stable and closest friend in the region is arguably Nicaragua.”
Mr. Trump should call Mr. Putin on all this. Meanwhile, if Democrats want their outrage over Russian meddling to be credible, a little concern about the mounting body count in Nicaragua is a good place to start.
DONALD TRUMP AND VLADIMIR PUTIN WANT TO CREATE A NEW WORLD ORDER / THE FINANCIAL TIMES OP EDITORIAL
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin want to create a new world order
We should take their vision of unfettered state sovereignty seriously
Anne-Marie Slaughter
Trump supporters at a MAGA event in Pennsylvania in March, and supporters of Vladimir Putin at a pre-election rally in Moscow earlier this year © FT montage; Getty Images
The US press coverage of the Trump-Putin summit— variously dubbed the “surrender summit” and the “treason summit” — has focused almost entirely on the president selling out his own intelligence institutions and US democracy itself to an adversary.
It is self-evident to all Americans who came of age in the cold war, and to many born since, that Russia is an adversary. But it is time to stretch our imaginations and picture the world — and the world order — that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin would create if they could, and to take that vision seriously.
The Helsinki summit was a meeting between two macho megalomaniacs. Each identifies his country’s interests with his own personal aggrandisement. But both men also tap into a deep current of anger, resentment and nostalgia for an imagined past that was orderly, predictable and patriarchal. In this lost era, men were the heads of households and nations; their masculinity was measured in toughness, swagger and spoils. Women were obedient and decorative. White people were superior to non-whites; children married within the tribe in clearly demarcated cultures.
From this perspective, Putin supporters in Russia and Trump supporters in the US are ideological allies, working together to elect like-minded parties across Europe and to support leaders, from Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel to Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, who embrace the same values and methods. They reject a free press and the rule of law, preferring a tame media and loyal judges. They favour symbolism over substance; and rule in the name of tradition, nationalism and ethnic purity.
This ideology of authoritarian patriarchy rejects any constraint on the ruler at home or the state abroad. Mr Trump and Mr Putin support a return to an era of unfettered state sovereignty. They would dismantle international and supranational organisations of all kinds and return to multipolar “Great Power” politics, in which alliances shift and are transactional. As Mr Trump has said, America’s allies can be “foes” on some issues and “friends” on others, without any overarching loyalties based on niceties like a shared commitment to liberal democracy.
Above all, nations would not be subject to globalist dictates about how they should treat the people within their borders. They would control and protect their definition of national purity.
From this vantage point, Nato and the EU are intolerable exemplars of the “liberal international order” — an order built in support of a set of anti-nationalist values that were encapsulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The preamble to the North Atlantic Treaty reaffirms the parties’ “faith in the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations,” including the universal principles of “democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law”.
Similarly, the EU proclaims as “fundamental values”, and indeed requirements for membership in the union, “respect for human dignity and human rights, freedom, democracy, equality and the rule of law”. Not national dignity and rights, but human.
The Russian president may indeed have some kind of hold over Mr Trump, as former CIA director John Brennan has suggested. But opposition to the current international order does not require a scene out of a spy novel. The extreme right of the Republican party has been exaggerating the danger of the UN for decades. Mr Trump is only taking their views mainstream.
A 2017 poll shows more than half of Republicans say the US and Russia should work more closely together. That is still less than 20 per cent of the population, but they are “America first-ers”, the would-be architects of a new world. And they are reaching out to Britain-firsters, Hungary-firsters, France-firsters, Israel-firsters — wherever nationalists are to be found. They seek a return to the rules of the 19th century.
And why not? The post-second-world-war order is just 70 years old — a blip in the history of multi-polar diplomacy. The Soviet Union lasted 70 years. It collapsed but Russia endures. The EU could collapse and European countries would endure. Nato could collapse and transatlantic relations would endure, on a bilateral and plurilateral basis.
It is incumbent upon those of us who see an arc of progress bending towards peace and universal human rights to appreciate the full scope of the threat posed to our 20th-century global architecture. Our response has to be more than defending the status quo. We must begin sketching an affirmative counter-vision of state and non-state institutions that empower their members more than they constrain them and solve problems effectively together.
The writer is president of New America and an FT contributing editor
GEORGE SOROS BIG BET ON LIBERAL DEMOCRACY. NOW HE FEARS HE IS LOSING. / THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
By Michael Steinberger
George Soros.Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times
He barely acknowledged the audience, which included the president of Serbia and the prime minister of Albania, except to say, “I think this is the right place to discuss how to save Europe.” But apart from urging the European Union to direct more aid to Africa, which he said would ameliorate the refugee crisis that has led to so much of the recent political upheaval in Europe, his remarks were more descriptive than prescriptive. The European Union, he said, faced an “existential crisis.”

Paris was the first stop for Soros on a monthlong spring trip to Europe. He normally would have visited Budapest, but not this time. Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, a former Soros protégé, was re-elected in April after running a campaign in which he effectively made Soros his opponent. Orban accused Soros, who is an American citizen, of plotting to overwhelm Hungary with Muslim immigrants in order to undermine its Christian heritage. He attacked Soros during campaign rallies, and his government plastered the country with anti-Soros billboards. In the aftermath of the election, the O.S.F. announced that it was closing its Budapest office because of concerns for the safety of its employees. The fate of the Soros-founded Central European University, based in Budapest, was also in doubt.
When he moved to New York in 1956 to take a job on Wall Street, his goal, he told me, was to sock away $100,000 in five years, which would allow him to quit finance and turn to scholarly pursuits. But instead, he quipped during our dinner, “I overperformed.”
While the era was one of Western triumphalism, when it was widely assumed that Russia and other newly freed countries would inevitably embrace liberal democracy — a view most famously expressed in Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay, “The End of History” — Soros did not share that certitude. This part of the world had little tradition of civil society and liberal democracy, and in his view these needed to be nurtured if the region was to avoid backsliding into autocracy. “I generally have a bias to see the darkest potential,” he told me. “It is something that I have practiced in the financial markets to very good effect, and I have transferred it to politics.”
Malaysia’s prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, called Soros and other speculators “unscrupulous profiteers” whose immoral work served no social value. Soros publicly rejected the criticism, but when investors took aim at the Indonesian rupiah in the fall of 1997, Quantum was not among them. Nor did it join other hedge funds when they targeted the Russian ruble the following year. Having already invested hundreds of millions of dollars trying to stabilize Russia, Soros would have been undercutting his own work by betting against the Russian currency. He ended up taking a $400 million loss.

Along with the fiery speeches, there were the billboards, which featured a picture of a smiling Soros and the message, “Let’s not let George Soros have the last laugh.” The laughing Jew had been a trope of Nazi propaganda, but Orban denied that the billboards were anti-Semitic.
He accused the Bush administration of employing Nazi propaganda techniques, and later said that the United States would need to undergo “a certain de-Nazification process” after Bush left office.

After Obama was elected, “he closed the door on me,” Soros said. “He made one phone call thanking me for my support, which was meant to last for five minutes, and I engaged him, and he had to spend another three minutes with me, so I dragged it out to eight minutes.” He suggested that he had fallen victim to an Obama personality trait. “He was someone who was known from the time when he was competing for the editorship of The Harvard Law Review to take his supporters for granted and to woo his opponents,” Soros said.
A bigger issue is that the Democratic Party remains committed to campaign-finance reform and abhors the effect that the Citizens United decision has had on American politics. That 2010 Supreme Court ruling gave billionaires like Soros the right to spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns. Kamarck says that in the post-Citizens United world, Democrats “can’t unilaterally disarm” and spurn donations from plutocrats like Soros, but they are conflicted about billionaire donors in a way that the Republicans are not.

One morning in Paris, I had coffee with Alex Soros, who is 32 and the second-youngest of George’s five children. Bespectacled, wiry and careful with his words, he had recently earned a doctorate in history from the University of California, Berkeley, and was now running his own philanthropy while also working with the O.S.F. He was a little groggy, having been up late the night before writing an op-ed for The Daily News rebutting Roseanne Barr’s Nazi tweet. (His father’s lawyers also filed a cease-and-desist order against Barr; she issued an apology two weeks later.) When the caffeine finally kicked in, Alex told me that for many years, his father had not been eager to advertise his Judaism because “this was something he was almost killed for.” But he had always “identified firstly as a Jew,” and his philanthropy was ultimately an expression of his Jewish identity, in that he felt a solidarity with other minority groups and also because he recognized that a Jew could only truly be safe in a world in which all minorities were protected. Explaining his father’s motives, he said, “The reason you fight for an open society is because that’s the only society that you can live in, as a Jew — unless you become a nationalist and only fight for your own rights in your own state.”
On Twitter, Soros haters trace virtually every national trauma, as well as every setback for conservatives, to him, or anything with the flimsiest connection to him. This stuff isn’t confined to the digital fringes either. The claim about Charlottesville, for instance, was leveled by Paul Gosar, a Republican member of Congress. After news broke of a sex scandal involving the former governor of Missouri, Eric Greitens, that state’s Republican Party issued a statement claiming that he had fallen victim to a “political hit job” orchestrated by Soros.
Soros was one of the prominent Jews featured in the last ad of Trump’s 2016 campaign, which many regarded as anti-Semitic. Steve Bannon, formerly the head of Breitbart, led Trump’s campaign at the time. On a trip to Europe in March, Bannon lauded Viktor Orban as a “hero” and “the most significant guy on the scene today.”
That Soros had a home and office in London was irrelevant. “He can’t vote here,” Lamont said. In his view, Soros’s effort to get a do-over vote was undermining British democracy. “I think there would be incredible disillusionment with the political process if this vote was annulled,” he said.
It is a comment that gets to the heart of the Soros conundrum. Even if you concede that policymakers are ultimately to blame for the income inequality that has fueled so much of the current backlash against globalization, the financial sector has had a major role in worsening it, and hedge-fund titans like Soros are powerful symbols of that inequality. And while Soros has written very candidly and persuasively about the pitfalls of casino capitalism — most notably in a 1997 Atlantic essay, subsequently expanded into a book called “The Crisis of Global Capitalism,” in which he acknowledged the destabilizing effect of financial markets — that doesn’t make him any less of a symbol. When pressed, Soros has said that if he hadn’t gone after the British pound or the Thai baht, someone else would have. That is unquestionably true (and in fact, Quantum was not the only hedge fund targeting those currencies). But that is not a particularly satisfying answer, and certainly not after the Great Recession, in which investment banks and hedge funds played such a destructive role. The industry that made him a billionaire contributed significantly to the circumstances that now imperil what Soros the philanthropist has tried to achieve.

There have been mistakes; by his own admission, Soros erred in championing Mikheil Saakashvili, the mercurial former president of Georgia, and also became too directly involved in the country’s politics in the early 2000s. He clearly misjudged Orban. But as Victoria Nuland, a former American diplomat who worked for both Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton, put it when I spoke to her recently, “George is a freedom fighter.”
Illiberal democracy, of the sort that Orban had fashioned in Hungary, was proving to be “more effective,” for the time being at least. The new-age autocrats had shown themselves to be particularly cunning in going after civil society as a means of consolidating their power. “It’s a less abrasive way of exercising control than actually killing people who disagree with you,” he said.
THE DEEP STATE, TRUMP & THE WORLD.../
THE DEEP STATE, TRUMP & THE WORLD...
Cliff Maud
I watched Trump’s press conference in full following his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. To me, Trump sounded positive and perfectly reasonable, and his behavior at this time was actually Statesmanlike. Here is a link to the full press briefing including an English translation of what Mr Putin said. It is worth watching this in full if you haven’t already, as shortened versions are likely to be selectively edited. Of course it was to be expected that the gangsters who now run the United States but don’t entirely control Trump would react in a hostile manner to Trump’s remarks, but even I was a little taken aback by their rabid apoplexy. The mainstream media, which they totally control, went into full attack mode on Trump. Whilst the majority of normal and balanced people would doubtless like to see a state of peace and concord between Russia and the United States, that is not what the Military Industrial complex and the Neocons want – they want Russia as an adversary, because they need a bogeyman, an enemy, so that they can continue to drain the blood and treasure of the American people into their coffers. It has been estimated that a Military budget of $200 billion per year would be more than adequate to defend the Homeland of the United States against any and all who might try to threaten or overrun it militarily. However the Military and the Pentagon bleeds the American taxpayer to the tune of $800 billion per year - $600 billion in excess of what is required to get the job done – so it’s no wonder that the American middle class is feeling drained and exhausted, and the infrastructure of the country crumbles as defense contractors live “high on the hog”. Furthermore, much of this budget is wasted on inefficient projects like the vastly expensive F-35 fighter, whose real purpose is to funnel money into the pockets of all involved in it. That’s just the military we are talking about here and doesn’t take account of the other arms of the bloated parasitic government machine.
John Brennan had the effrontery to call Trump’s Helsinki press conference “nothing short of Treasonous”. Stop and think about that for a minute – Trump makes the effort to defuse a dangerous escalation of tensions with Russia, which is in no-one’s interest except the Neocons and the Military, and he gets called treasonous for his pains, which is a gross disrespect to the democratically elected President of the United States and therefore to his supporters – in other words the greatest percentage of voters at the election. In the writer’s view this kind of disrespect to the democratically elected President of the United States by someone holding public office is not only disgraceful but itself treasonous, and if the United States judicial system functioned properly, which it does not as it has been totally corrupted by the gangsters who now control the country, Brennan would be fired and incarcerated. In the old days, when real traitors were recognized as such and given short shrift, he would probably have been put up against a wall and shot – if he was lucky.
As we know, the Deep State exercise total control over the mainstream media, which attacked Trump like a pack of rabid dogs right after the Helsinki conference. They clearly hold the view that the majority of the population are absolute morons who will believe anything, and sadly, they are probably right, which is what makes the outlook so bleak. You may be amused to read some of their attack articles of the past few days, such as You’ll never make America great again by chucking Americans under a Russian bus in such a grotesquely disloyal manner, Mr President and Trump’s darkest day and Putin’s Puppet! Clearly, you have to be retarded to believe this Deep State propaganda, but it seems like a lot of people are. Even Arnie chimed in, saying that Trump had sold out America to Russia. Now, Arnold Schwarzenegger was a great and unique “tough guy” actor, and his loyalty to his adopted country is certainly to be commended, but my pet dog knows more about geopolitics than him, and for that matter a lot of the Left-wing liberal acting class that flocculate around Los Angeles, who are high on ideals and low on acumen and analysis – he is simply clueless about how the country has been taken over by a coterie of gangsters who are bleeding it white. This became obvious when the crooked, shifty semi-articulate George W Bush became President in 2000 and things quickly went downhill thereafter. Bush junior made Al Capone look like a member of the aristocracy.
Soon after, the gangsters pulled off their spectacular stunt on September 11th 2001, which enabled them to “stitch up” the American people with their Patriot Acts, and then attack Afghanistan and Iraq. Their total unaccountability and impunity is amply illustrated by the way they have repeatedly plundered the assets of the American people in recent years. They netted hundreds of billions from the sub-prime scam of the 2000’s, and when that came off the rails they simply claimed “too big to fail” status for their big criminal corporations which were bailed out at public expense by such measures as the euphemistically named TARP (Troubled Assets Relief Program), which in reality stands for “We screwed up and you, the people, are going to pick up the tab”. After that they concocted their QE and super low interest rate scam, which enabled them to borrow money at almost no cost to speculate in Real Estate and stocks etc. on a gargantuan scale and drive prices into the stratosphere, while the ordinary Joe who expected to be able to live off interest on his savings going into retirement was left with nothing and no choice but to live off his savings, either that or join in the speculative fray by buying stocks or go back into work, or both. Those who have left it too late to do the former will be ruined as the stockmarket crashes.
As mentioned above these gangsters now control the judiciary and the media and the two political parties of course, are above the law, which is why Hillary escaped a jail term (although an interesting twist here is that it has been learned that the Chinese succeeded in hacking all of the missing 30,000 Clinton Emails – spare a thought for those delegated to read through them), and are so deeply entrenched that there is no hope at all of removing them, short of an all-out revolution, which most American people simply don’t have the stomach for, which is understandable given the militarization of the police force – but they might discover their courage one day if they lose their comfy sofa, giant TV and car, and have to fight for food in the streets. Until that happens though, things only look set to get worse, especially when the dollar loses its Reserve Currency status, which is only a matter of time, and the elites can divert public fury from themselves by carefully orchestrating the polarization of society, pitting the Left against the Right – they couldn’t care less if they cannibalize each other and burn the areas where they live to the ground. You may have noticed that this process has already started – and that’s even before the stockmarket crashes and it really hits the fan – better study up on Venezuela if you want to be truly prepared. In a nutshell the right investment strategies for US citizens who are able to is to buy gold in a safe jurisdiction outside of the country, get some capital out of the country and get a 2nd passport without delay.
Far from being his “darkest day”, I consider that Trump’s press conference in Helsinki was his “brightest day”, which if he stuck to his guns (no pun intended) would save millions of lives in the future and potentially billions or more like trillions of US taxpayer’s money. However, soon after the conference the Deep State and their controlled media unleashed a “blitzkrieg” upon him, and he rapidly backpedalled on some of the things he said. It is not known whether this was due to weakness on his part, or a tactical move to avoid the full wrath of the Deep State. In any event the stance he took in Helsinki was a bold and courageous one for the common good, especially as if he persists in this manner he could end up like John F Kennedy, as he probably knows only too well.
The writer lives “outside the matrix looking in”, and understands only too well that many of you who read this are “inside the matrix looking out” and simply cannot comprehend what is written here, and are programed to reject it, and perhaps become hostile. This is normal, but the longer it takes you to wake up, the worse it will be for you.
Bienvenida
Les doy cordialmente la bienvenida a este Blog informativo con artículos, análisis y comentarios de publicaciones especializadas y especialmente seleccionadas, principalmente sobre temas económicos, financieros y políticos de actualidad, que esperamos y deseamos, sean de su máximo interés, utilidad y conveniencia.
Pensamos que solo comprendiendo cabalmente el presente, es que podemos proyectarnos acertadamente hacia el futuro.
Gonzalo Raffo de Lavalle
Friedrich Nietzsche
Quien conoce su ignorancia revela la mas profunda sabiduría. Quien ignora su ignorancia vive en la mas profunda ilusión.
Lao Tse
“There are decades when nothing happens and there are weeks when decades happen.”
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.
Warren Buffett
No soy alguien que sabe, sino alguien que busca.
FOZ
Only Gold is money. Everything else is debt.
J.P. Morgan
Las grandes almas tienen voluntades; las débiles tan solo deseos.
Proverbio Chino
Quien no lo ha dado todo no ha dado nada.
Helenio Herrera
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
Karl Marx
If you know the other and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.
Sun Tzu
Paulo Coelho

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