President Trump

Why Donald Trump Needs The Next Recession To Start As Quickly As Possible

February 12, 2017February 12, 2017 by Michael

A new recession is coming, and Donald Trump needs it to begin sooner rather than later. As I explained last week, most American voters tend to care about their pocketbooks more than anything else. If the next recession were to officially start during the first quarter of 2017, it would be very easy for Trump to blame it on Obama, and then he could portray himself as the one that pulled the U.S. economy out of recession in time for the 2020 election. But if the next recession does not begin until 2018 or 2019, everybody is going to blame it on Trump even if it is not his fault. In politics, who gets the blame for whatever goes wrong is often the most important thing, and if Trump wants to avoid blame for the next recession he needs for it to start as quickly as possible.

For most of 2016, the mainstream media was warning that a new recession was probably coming no matter who won the election. For one example, just check out this Bloomberg article.

And for once, the mainstream media was precisely correct. Barack Obama left us with an enormous economic mess, and it would take an economic miracle of unprecedented proportions to keep the U.S. economy from going into a recession at this point.

During the Obama years, the U.S. went on a debt binge unlike anything we have ever seen before.

The U.S. national debt almost doubled. During Obama’s time in the White House, it increased from 10.6 trillion dollars to nearly 20 trillion dollars, and that means that over 9 trillion dollars of future consumption was brought into the present. That incredible boost to spending would have shot U.S. economic growth into the stratosphere during normal times, but because we were struggling so much all we got out of it was eight years of economic stagnation.

In fact, Barack Obama was the only president in modern American history never to have a single year when the U.S. economy grew by at least 3 percent, and he had two terms to try to accomplish that goal.

And remember, Obama also had the benefit of doctored economic numbers. John Williams of shadowstats.com tracks what the figures would look like if honest numbers were being used, and according to his calculations the U.S. economy has actually continually been in a recession since 2005.

In addition to government debt, other forms of debt are way out of control as well. The total amount of consumer debt in the United States has now hit 12 trillion dollars, and corporate debt has approximately doubled since the last recession.

When levels of debt grow much, much faster than the overall economy, it is inevitable that a crash will come.

If you look back throughout history, I don’t know if you can find a single example where debt has grown this quickly and a crash has not happened afterwards.

By some miracle if we are able to avoid a major economic downturn this time, we will literally be defying the laws of economics.

The employment crisis also threatens to get a lot worse in the months ahead. The mainstream media keeps trying to tell us that we are almost at “full employment”, but the truth is that more than 100 million Americans do not have a job right now.

Yes, there are a few areas of the country where jobs appear to be plentiful, but there are many more areas where they are not.

For example, you will never, ever be able to convince 23-year-old Tyler Moore that the job market is good…

Tyler Moore’s late-December drive to Louisville, Ky., was one of desperation. He was headed four hours west on Interstate 64 to interview for a job. Even if he landed the position, filling his gas tank had left him with $8 to his name. He would have to sleep at a friend’s place until he could earn enough to pay rent.

The 23-year-old had run out of options. He’d applied for dozens of jobs within an hour and a half of his hometown of Lovely, once a coal-mining stronghold. Instead of opportunities, he had found waiting lists.

“Minimum-wage jobs, fast-food restaurants, Wal-Mart, anything like that, a lot of them has already been took,” he says in an Appalachian drawl, explaining that the backlog just to interview was as long as a year. “There are no jobs.”

If the U.S. economy is in “good shape”, then why can’t people like Moore find a job?

Yes, there is a tremendous amount of optimism in the financial markets right now and the stock market has been soaring.

But the exact same things were true in 2007, and we remember how that turned out.

There is no possible way that the S&P 500 can continue to generate an 18% annual return without corresponding economic growth. The following comes from David Stockman…

Altogether the S&P 500 now stands at 3.4X its post-crisis low, having generated an 18% annual return (including dividends) for nearly eight years running.

To be sure, in an honest free market that very fact would be a flashing red light, warning that exceptionally high gains over an extended period necessitate a regression to the mean in the period ahead.

A lot of people get caught up in trying to predict exactly when the stock market will crash, but what everybody should be able to agree on is that it will crash.

There is no possible way that stocks can stay at such ridiculously overpriced levels indefinitely.

Throughout history, stocks have always moved back in the direction of the long-term averages, and this time will be no exception.

And just like last time, the beginning of a new recession will likely be accompanied by a major financial correction.

In recent articles, I have been highlighting some of the reasons why it appears that a new recession is imminent…

-Federal tax receipts have gone negative for the first time since the last recession.

-Job growth at S&P 500 companies has gone negative for the very first time since the last recession.

-The U.S. trade deficit in 2016 was the largest in four years.

-Lending standards have tightened up for medium and large sized firms for six quarters in a row.

-Lending standard are also tightening up for consumers.

-We just saw the largest percentage decline in average weekly hours since the recession of 2008.

-Gross private domestic investment is down.

-Consumer bankruptcies are rising.

-Commercial bankruptcies are rising.

All of this is not necessarily bad news for Trump.

A horrible recession started during the early years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, but the U.S. economy turned around later in his first term and that momentum helped propel him to an easy victory in 1984.

Similarly, Trump could actually take advantage of the coming economic downturn as long as he is able to pin all of the blame for it on the previous administration.

If there is one thing that is true about U.S. voters, it is the fact that they tend to care about their own economic well-being more than anything else.

If you doubt this, just check out the results of a recent Fox News poll…

The latest Fox News Poll also asks, what defines the American Dream today? At the top, according to the national survey released Wednesday, is “retiring comfortably.” Some 88 percent feel that is extremely or very important to realizing the dream.

Next, 76 percent say “having a successful career” is important. That’s followed by “raising a family” (74 percent) and “making a valuable contribution” to their community (74 percent).

“Owning a home” is seen as a big part of achieving the dream for nearly 7 in 10 (69 percent). About 6 in 10 say “graduating college” (61 percent) and “being better off” than their parents (57 percent).

To most Americans, being “successful in life” comes down to how much money they have.

That should not be true, but it is.

And this is ultimately what Trump will be judged on.

If the economy is improving by 2020, voters will tend to evaluate him favorably. But if the economy is faltering during the next election season, it will be more difficult for him to get a second term.

So what Trump and all those that support Trump should want is for the coming recession to begin and end as quickly as possible.

However, there is also the possibility that the next recession may be a particularly bad one. Because we are in the midst of the biggest debt bubble in human history, any major downturn could ultimately spiral completely out of control. In other words, we may be facing the kind of crisis from which we never quite recover.

One expert that is warning about such a scenario is legendary investor Jim Rogers…

…get prepared because 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.

In 2008 Bear Stearns disappeared, Bear Stearns had been around over 90 years. Lehman Brothers disappeared. Lehman Brothers had been around over 150 years. A long, long time, a long glorious history they’ve been through wars, depression, civil war they’ve been through everything and yet they disappear.

So the next time around 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.

when you start having bear markets as you I’m sure well know one bad thing happens and another bad thing happens and these things snowball just like in bull markets good news comes out then more good news comes out the next thing you know you’re five or six or seven years into a bull market.

Well bear markets do the same thing and so we have a lot of bad news on the horizon. I haven’t even gotten to war. I haven’t even gotten to trade war or anything like that but you know things do go wrong.

If it is as bad as Rogers is suggesting, it wouldn’t be too long before conditions in America would begin to resemble those portrayed in my novel.

Let’s hope that does not turn out to be the case.

Let’s hope that the next recession begins and ends as quickly as possible and that the U.S. economy is on a solid upswing by 2020.

And if you are a Trump supporter, don’t be too dismayed if the U.S. economy takes a major downturn in 2017. As I discussed above, it could actually be just the thing that Trump needs to set the stage for another election victory in 2020.

Planned Parenthood Workers That Reached Abortion Sales Quota Goals Were Rewarded With Pizza Parties

February 7, 2017February 7, 2017 by Michael

Could you imagine having a job where you had to meet an “abortion sales quota” every month? According to a shocking new investigation, this was actually happening at Planned Parenthood clinics all over the nation, and workers that reached abortion sales quota goals were rewarded with pizza parties and other incentives. Every year, Planned Parenthood murders hundreds of thousands of precious little children, but that isn’t good enough for them, and so they have their workers aggressively push abortions to the vulnerable young women who come into their facilities. It is a national disgrace, and Planned Parenthood should be defunded by Congress immediately. But of course Planned Parenthood was never defunded after it was revealed that they systematically harvest baby parts and sell them off to the highest bidder, and so many observers are pessimistic that they will be defunded now.

In this video, women that used to work for Planned Parenthood explain how the abortion sales quotas worked. This is evil that is on a level that is hard to put into words…

America will never, ever be “great again” as long as this kind of thing is allowed to happen.

As you can see in the video, former Planned Parenthood center manager Sue Thayer says that if the number of abortions got too low pressure was really put on the workers to get the number back up to an acceptable level…

“It was on this big grid, and if we hit our goal, our line was green. If we were 5 percent under it was yellow, if we were 10 percent under it was red. That’s when we needed to have a corrective action plan – why we didn’t hit the goal, what we’re going to do differently next time,” she said.

“So we were really very goal-oriented. I trained my staff the way that I was trained, which was to really encourage women to choose abortion, to have it at Planned Parenthood, because that counts toward our goal.”

Thayer’s testimony was corroborated by former Planned Parenthood nurse Marianne Anderson. According to Anderson, she often felt like “more of a salesman” than a nurse while she was working for the organization…

“I felt like I was more of a salesman sometimes, to sell abortions,” former Planned Parenthood nurse Marianne Anderson says in the video. “And we were told on a regular basis that, ‘You have a quota to meet to keep this clinic open.’”

A very long time ago I worked in a high pressure sales environment, and I was reminded of those days when I watched this video. In fact, some of the techniques that Thayer says Planned Parenthood uses to sell abortions are just like high pressure sales techniques that are commonly used in other industries…

She continued: “We would try to get the appointment scheduled for the abortion before they left our clinic. We would say things like, ‘your pregnancy test, you visit today is X number of dollars. How much are you gonna be able to pay towards that.’ … If they’d say, ‘I’m not able to pay today,’ then we would say something like, ‘Well, if you can’t pay 10 dollars today, how are you gonna take care of a baby?’

“‘Have you priced diapers? Do you know how much it costs to buy a car seat? Where would you go for help? There’s no place in Storm Lake – or whatever town they were in – you know, where you can get help as a pregnant mom.’”

Since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, more than 56 million babies have been slaughtered in abortion mills across the United States.

And your tax dollars are being used to fund Planned Parenthood. In fact, Planned Parenthood gets close to half a billion dollars from the federal government every year.

But now there is an effort to change all that. A new bill has been introduced in Congress that would take that money away from Planned Parenthood and give it to other organizations that provide health care services for women…

Two U.S. Senators have introduced a bill that would redirect more than $500 million in federal funding from the abortion and contraceptive giant Planned Parenthood to women’s health care providers that do not perform abortions.

Sens. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, and James Lankford, R-Okla., recently introduced the “Protect Funding for Women’s Health Care Act” with the support of 127 co-sponsors.

“Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no federal funds may be made available to Planned Parenthood Federation of America, or to any of its affiliates, subsidiaries, successors or clinics,” the bill reads in part. “All funds no longer available to Planned Parenthood will continue to be made available to other eligible entities to provide women’s health care services.”

Thanks to the recent election, the Republicans now control the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives.

If they do not defund Planned Parenthood now, there is no excuse.

So I and millions of other deeply concerned Americans will be watching. During the campaign, Donald Trump promised that he would defund Planned Parenthood. If it doesn’t happen, it will be a horrible stain on the Trump presidency.

People are so fired up about Trump’s executive orders on immigration and other issues, but what he does about Planned Parenthood is far, far more important than any of that.

We simply cannot continue to murder millions of our own children and expect to have any sort of a future for our nation. In my latest book I talk about the judgments that are coming to America, but if we were to turn from our wicked ways perhaps those judgments could be delayed.

Any society that kills millions of kids deserves to be destroyed. So please do not buy into the deception that America can be “great again” without addressing this great evil.

This revelation about Planned Parenthood comes at a critical time. If the federal government is going to defund Planned Parenthood, it is probably going to happen fairly quickly.

But if it doesn’t happen, the blood of countless numbers of precious children will be on the hands of Donald Trump and the Republicans in Congress, and they will have absolutely no excuse.

Gorsuch Will Not Shift The Balance Of Power On The Supreme Court As Much As You May Think

February 1, 2017February 1, 2017 by Michael

On Tuesday, President Trump announced that he would nominate Neil Gorsuch to fill the open seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. Gorsuch currently serves on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, and he was confirmed unanimously by the Senate when he was appointed to that position by President George W. Bush in 2006. Gorsuch appears to have some strong similarities to Antonin Scalia, and many conservatives are hoping that when Gorsuch fills Scalia’s seat that it will represent a shift in the balance of power on the Supreme Court. Because for almost a year, the court has been operating with only eight justices. Four of them were nominated by Republican presidents and four of them were nominated by Democrats, and so many Republicans are anticipating that there will now be a Supreme Court majority for conservatives.

Unfortunately, things are not that simple, because a couple of the “conservative” justices are not actually very conservative at all.

For example, it is important to remember that Scalia was still on the court when the Supreme Court decision that forced all 50 states to legalize gay marriage was decided. Justice Anthony Kennedy joined the four liberal justices in a majority opinion that Scalia harshly criticized. So with Gorsuch on the court, that case would still have been decided the exact same way.

Sadly, even though Kennedy was nominated by Ronald Reagan, he has turned out to be quite liberal. In the past, not nearly enough scrutiny was given to justices that were nominated by Republican presidents, and a few of them have turned out to be total disasters.

And let us also remember that Scalia was still on the court when the big Obamacare case was decided. Chief Justice John Roberts joined the four liberal justices in a decision that was perhaps one of the most bizarre in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court.

For some reason, Justice Roberts was determined to preserve Obamacare, and if you read what he wrote it is some of the most twisted legal reasoning that I have ever come across.

As someone that was once part of the legal world, let me let you in on a little secret. Most judges simply do whatever they feel like doing, and then they will try to find a way to justify their decisions. So if you ever find yourself in court, you should pray that you will get a judge that is sympathetic to your cause.

Fortunately, Gorsuch appears to be one of the rare breed of judges that actually cares what the U.S. Constitution and our laws have to say. In that respect, he is very much like Scalia…

Gorsuch is seen by analysts as a jurist similar to Scalia, who died on Feb. 13, 2016. Scalia, praised by Gorsuch as “a lion of the law,” was known not only for his hard-line conservatism but for interpreting the U.S. Constitution based on what he considered its original meaning, and laws as written by legislators. Like Scalia, Gorsuch is known for sharp writing skills.

“It is the role of judges to apply, not alter, the work of the people’s representatives,” Gorsuch said on Tuesday at the White House event announcing the nomination in remarks that echoed Scalia’s views.

One of the most high profile cases that Gorsuch was involved with came in 2013. That was the famous “Hobby Lobby case”, and it represented a key turning point in the fight for religious freedom. The following comes from CNN…

In 2013, he joined in an opinion by the full Court of Appeals holding that federal law prohibited the Department of Health and Human Services from requiring closely-held, for-profit secular corporations to provide contraceptive coverage as part of their employer-sponsored health insurance plans.

And although a narrowly divided 5-4 Supreme Court would endorse that view (and affirm the 10th Circuit) the following year, Gorsuch wrote that he would have gone even further, and allowed not just the corporations, but the individual owners, to challenge the mandate.

Donald Trump said that he wanted a conservative judge in the mold of Scalia, but I think that he was also looking for someone that he could get through the Senate.

And considering the fact that Gorsuch was confirmed unanimously by the Senate in 2006 will make it quite difficult for Democrats to block him now. Gorsuch has tremendous academic and professional credentials, and he will probably have a smoother road to confirmation than someone like appeals court judge William Pryor would…

Trump may have favored Gorsuch for the job in hopes of a smoother confirmation process than for other potential candidates such as appeals court judge William Pryor, who has called the 1973 Supreme Court ruling legalizing abortion “the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history.”

But Pryor is still reportedly on the short list for the next spot on the Supreme Court that opens up, and by then the rancor in the Senate may have died down.

If Gorsuch is confirmed, what will this mean for some of the most important moral issues of our time?

As for abortion, even if Gorsuch is confirmed I do not believe that the votes are there to overturn Roe v. Wade. But if Trump is able to nominate a couple more Supreme Court justices that could change.

But even if Roe v. Wade is overturned, it would not suddenly make abortion illegal. Instead, all 50 states would then be free to make their own laws regarding abortion, and a solid majority of the states would continue to keep it legal.

The analysis is similar when we look at gay marriage. If the Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage in all 50 states was overturned, each state would get to decide whether gay marriage should be legal or not for their own citizens. And just like with abortion, it is likely that only a limited number of states would end up banning gay marriage.

So the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court appears to be a positive step, but it does not mean that we are going to see dramatic change when it comes to issues such as abortion or gay marriage any time soon.

But at least Gorsuch can help stop the relentless march of the progressive agenda through our court system. So in the end we may not make that much progress for right now, but at least the liberals won’t either.

The United States Is On The Precipice Of Widespread Civil Unrest

January 29, 2017January 29, 2017 by Michael

It doesn’t take much of a trigger to push extremely large crowds of very angry protesters into committing acts of rioting and violence. And rioting and violence can ultimately lead to widespread civil unrest and calls for “revolution”. The election of Donald Trump was perhaps the single most galvanizing moment for the radical left in modern American history, and we have already seen that a single move by Trump can literally cause protests to erupt from coast to coast within 48 hours. On Friday, Trump signed an executive order that banned refugees from Syria indefinitely and that placed a 90 day ban on travel to the United States for citizens of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. Within hours, protesters began to storm major airports, and by Sunday very large crowds were taking to the streets all over the country…

From Seattle to Newark, Houston to Boston, hundreds jammed airport terminals — lawyers, immigration advocates, ordinary citizens compelled to the front lines, many refusing to leave until those who had been detained by U.S. Customs had been freed or had obtained legal counsel.

On Sunday, the movement caught fire and demonstrations and rallies erupted in communities across the U.S. from city halls to airports to parks. In the nation’s capital, the site of the march that drew a crushing 500,000 people Jan. 21, Pennsylvania Avenue was shut down Sunday as thousands trekked from the White House to the U.S. Capitol. An energized crowd stopped outside Trump’s showcase hotel along the avenue to shake fists and chant “shame.”

You can see some really good pictures of the protests going on around the nation right here.

As I was going through articles about these protests today, I remember one woman holding up a sign that said “Remove Trump By Any Means Necessary”.

It doesn’t take much imagination to figure out what she was suggesting.

Visions of violence are dancing in the heads of these very frustrated people, and they are being egged on by top members of Congress such as Chuck Schumer…

‘These orders go against what America has always been about,’ Schumer told the crowd in Battery Park according to the New York Daily News. ‘The orders make us less humanitarian, less safe, less American and when it comes to making us less safe people forget this, that’s why so many of our military, intelligence, security, and law enforcement leaders are opposed to this order and all those like it.’

Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of Trump’s presidential rival, Hillary, tweeted a picture from the rally. It was captioned: ‘Yes. We will keep standing up for a country that matches our values and ideals for all. #NewYork #NoBanNoWall.’

On Sunday, President Trump attempted to clarify what his executive order was really about and make it clear that it was not a ban on all Muslims. The following comes from CNN…

President Donald Trump insisted Sunday his travel ban on certain Muslim-majority nations would protect the United States from terrorists, after a weekend of outrage and confusion over the move.

In an afternoon statement, Trump wrote the country would continue showing “compassion to those fleeing oppression.”

Unfortunately, polls show that somewhere around a third of the country greatly dislikes Trump, and those people are more than ready to believe that Trump is a racist bigot that hates all Muslims.

But the truth is that Trump does not hate any group of people. His target is simply Islamic terror, and he is actually pro-immigration as long as it is legal immigration.

Let us not forget that his wife is a legal immigrant.

I know that Trump is quite eager to get things done, but putting out this executive order at this particular moment was definitely a case of poor timing.

We are a nation that is deeply, deeply divided, and now this latest controversy threatens to divide us even further.

When I was out earlier today, I saw a pro-Trump billboard that some business owner had put up that was urging liberals to quit their whining.

On the surface that may sound funny, but it definitely doesn’t do anything to bring us together.

If you give anger enough fuel, eventually it leads to violence. I am certainly not suggesting that we should ever compromise on what we believe, but what I am suggesting is that there is a wise way to handle things and an unwise way to handle things.

Someday, widespread civil unrest is going to sweep across the United States and major American cities will burn.

My hope is that we can put this off for as long as possible.

In fact, I sincerely hope that this will not happen at all during the Trump/Pence era.

But you would have to be blind not to see the hate, anger and frustration that are all growing like cancer in the hearts of our young people.

This is a time for the peacemakers. If there are any left in Washington, we need them to rise up now and try to bring healing before it is too late.

Is It Just A Coincidence That The Dow Has Hit 20,000 At The Same Time The National Debt Is Reaching $20 Trillion?

January 25, 2017January 25, 2017 by Michael

The Dow Jones Industrial Average provides us with some pretty strong evidence that our “stock market boom” has been fueled by debt. On Wednesday, the Dow crossed the 20,000 mark for the first time ever, and this comes at a time when the U.S. national debt is right on the verge of hitting 20 trillion dollars. Is this just a coincidence? As you will see, there has been a very close correlation between the national debt and the Dow Jones Industrial Average for a very long time.

For example, when Ronald Reagan took office in 1991, the U.S. national debt had just hit 994 billion dollars and the Dow was sitting at 951. And as you can see from this chart by Matterhorn.gold via David Stockman, roughly that same ratio has held true throughout subsequent presidential administrations…

During the Clinton years the Dow raced out ahead of the national debt, but an “adjustment” during the Bush years brought things back into line.

The cold hard truth is that we have been living way above our means for decades. Our “prosperity” has been fueled by the greatest debt binge in the history of the world, and we are greatly fooling ourselves if we think otherwise.

We would never have gotten to 20,000 on the Dow if Barack Obama and Congress had not gotten us into an extra 9.3 trillion dollars of debt over the past eight years.

Unfortunately, most people do not understand this, and the mainstream media is treating “Dow 20,000” as if it is some sort of great historical achievement…

The average began tracking the most powerful corporate stocks in 1896, and has served as a broad measure of the market’s health through 22 presidents, 22 recessions, a Great Depression, at least two crashes and innumerable rallies, corrections, bull and bear markets. The blue chip reading finally cracked the 20,000 benchmark for the first time early Wednesday.

During the current bull market, the second longest in history, the Dow has more than tripled since March 2009.

Since Donald Trump’s surprise election victory, the Dow has now climbed by approximately 2150 points.

And it took just 64 calendar days for the Dow to go from 19,000 to 20,000. That is an astounding pace, and financial markets around the rest of the planet are doing very well right now too. In fact, global stocks rose to a 19 month high on Wednesday.

So where do we go from here?

Well, if Donald Trump wants to see Dow 30,000 during his presidency, then history tells us that he needs to take us to 30 trillion dollars in debt.

Of course that would be absolute insanity even if it was somehow possible. Each additional dollar of debt destroys the future of our country just a little bit more, and at some point this colossal bubble is going to burst.

But you can’t tell most of the “financial experts” these things. Most of them simply believe that the “market always goes higher over time”…

The “market always goes higher over time,” Todd Morgan, chairman of Bel Air Investment Advisors. “The lesson here is that through wars, recessions, elections, impeachments, financial crises, and on and on, investing for the long term in high-quality stocks is the key to building wealth. … We are telling our clients that you can’t time the market. Think long term. Stay the course. We expect the market to see Dow 30,000 in my lifetime, and for my grandchildren to see Dow 50,000 in their lifetime.”

My hope is that the market will continue to go up. But nobody can deny that valuations are already at absurdly high levels, and the only way that this party can keep going is to continue to fuel it with more and more debt.

But for the moment, there is a tremendous amount of optimism out there, and most experts expect the Dow to continue to set new highs. In fact, CNBC says that whenever the Dow crosses a new threshold like this it usually means good things for investors…

CNBC looked at market data from the past 30 years and zeroed in on the times when the Dow has crossed levels like 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 … all the way up to the 19,000 level it hit in November. At those times, investors can typically expect traders to push it up even higher, according to data from Kensho. Not only does the Dow go up, but it outperforms the S&P 500 index along the way.

But as USA Today has explained, not all Americans are benefiting from this stock market rally…

The breakthrough came just four trading days into Trump’s presidency, a whirlwind in which the billionaire has reaffirmed his commitment to strengthen the U.S. economy and create more jobs and higher wages for workers. Still, nearly half of Americans have not benefited from the so-called “Trump Rally,” which has generated more than $2.2 trillion in paper gains for the Wilshire 5000 Total Stock Index since Election Day. The reason: only 52% of Americans polled by Gallup last April said they “have money invested in stocks” — the lowest stock ownership rate in the 19 years Gallup has tracked the data and down sharply from 65% in 2007 before the financial crisis.

Hopefully the good times will continue to roll for as long as possible.

But there is no possible way that they can keep going indefinitely.

For decades, our debt has been growing much faster than our GDP has. By definition, this is an unsustainable situation. At some point we will have accumulated so much debt that our financial system will no longer be able to hold up under the strain.

Many were convinced that we would reach that point before the U.S. national debt hit 20 trillion dollars, and yet here we are.

So how much higher can we go before the bubble bursts?

That is a very good question, and I don’t know if anyone has the right answer.

But for President Trump, this is going to present him with quite a dilemma.

Either he can keep the debt party going for as long as possible, or he can try to get us to take some tough financial medicine right now.

If an attempt is made to deal with our debt problems now, we will experience severe economic pain almost immediately.

But if the can keeps being kicked down the road, our long-term prognosis is just going to keep getting worse and worse.

And if we try to delay the inevitable indefinitely, at some point the laws of economics are going to make our hard choices for us.

So let us celebrate “Dow 20,000”, but let us also understand that it is far more likely that we will see “Dow 10,000” again before we ever see “Dow 30,000”.

Do You Believe In Miracles?

November 9, 2016November 9, 2016 by Michael

We have never seen anything like this in the history of American politics. Donald Trump’s shocking victory on election night is nothing short of a modern day miracle. Several weeks ago I told my readers that it would take the biggest political miracle ever in order for Trump to win, and I had been strongly urging them to vote, but even early on election night I was skeptical that Trump could actually pull it off. Initially the results coming out of Florida, North Carolina and Ohio looked rather ominous, and a lot of Trump supporters were freaking out. But those initial numbers strongly reflected early voting results, and those results typically favor Democrats. Once the Election Day numbers started rolling in, it was clear that there was a massive unanticipated wave of momentum for Trump.

Once I saw that Virginia was going to be much more tightly contested than anticipated and that Trump had jumped out to a lead in Michigan, I realized that Trump had a really good shot at winning the whole thing. Over Skype I told a stunned audience that the numbers were looking really good for Trump, but it was still so early in the evening that I don’t know if a lot of people believed me. And I certainly didn’t blame them, because I could hardly believe it myself.

Once Trump took the lead for good in Pennsylvania, I knew that it was all over. My wife and I looked at each other in disbelief, and we are still trying to come to grips with a future that we didn’t think was possible.

Watching Donald Trump speak to the American people after he had been declared the winner was a surreal experience. At this moment, it still doesn’t seem real to me that he could become the next president of the United States a little more than two months from now. But at this point it looks like that is precisely what is going to happen.

After it was all over, I kind of stumbled around my home lost in my thoughts. I was happy, confused, hopeful, stunned and pensive all at the same time. Like so many others, what I thought I knew about politics turned out to be wrong. But in other ways, the election of Donald Trump has confirmed so much of what I know to be right about America.

Ultimately, it was the American people that decided this election, because the elite were doing their best to absolutely bury him.

Never before has the mainstream media been so openly biased against a major party presidential candidate. For months on end they dumped sewage on Trump, but it didn’t work.

Never before has a major party presidential candidate faced a civil war in his own party on the eve of the election. A whole host of big names in the Republican Party publicly announced that they would not vote for Trump, but it didn’t work.

Never before have we seen a bigger October surprise than the lewd tape from 11 year ago that came out and shocked the world. That would have instantly killed the campaign of any normal politician, but it didn’t kill Trump’s campaign.

From the very beginning it seemed like Trump was at war with almost everyone, and somehow he came out on top in the end.

He beat the Bushes and the Clintons.

He beat the Republicans and the Democrats.

He beat Hollywood and the mainstream media.

He beat the pollsters and the pundits.

He beat the never-Trumpers and the billionaire donors.

He beat Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Jay Z, Beyonce, George Clooney, Matt Damon and Lebron James.

He beat the forces of globalism, elitism and political correctness.

He beat CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and Barack Obama.

He beat them all.

Of course Donald Trump is not perfect and he is not going to be a perfect president.

But this is about as perfect a moment as you are going to get in American politics.

Donald Trump took on the entire American political universe and he won.

We have never seen anything like it before, and I doubt we will ever see anything like it again.

And I want to apologize for being so skeptical to those that kept trying to tell me that Trump was going to win. As a former attorney, I was trained to be skeptical and to look at the cold, hard numbers. And the cold, hard numbers kept telling me that a Trump victory was nearly impossible.

I kept strongly urging people to vote, particularly because the prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency was absolutely horrifying for me personally, but I was not optimistic.

In hindsight, perhaps we all should have recognized that the signs were there. For example, it seems a very strange “coincidence” that Donald Trump will be 70 years, 7 months and 7 days old on his first full day as president of the United States. This is a man that appears to have had a date with destiny, and we shall see what happens in the months to come.

Yes, there will be great challenges ahead, but those discussions are for another day.

Today I am just happy.

I am happy that the American people have elected a man that I will be proud to call president.

And I am happy that we are not going to have to endure four years under the most wicked, vile and corrupt politician that the United States has ever seen.

Against all odds, Donald Trump won.

At this point I am not exactly sure what comes next for America, but things are definitely looking a lot brighter today than they did yesterday.

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