Kooky Macro Tourist has his promoters

Kooky "Macro Tourist" tells us to put aside our political views, uses crabbed Talking Points Memo graph to warn us about Republican federal spending increases

THINGS HAVE CHANGED...:

Although the Republicans are supposedly the party of fiscal conservatism, we all know that sort of talk is only for when they are not in power. ... There should be little surprise that under Republican stewardship, the greatest fiscal stimulus in the past decade has been instituted. Not saying if it is good or bad because my opinion is completely irrelevant. ... You would be foolish to ignore the dramatic change in the world’s attitude towards economic policy. “Tight fiscal and easy monetary policy” is being replaced with “easy fiscal and (somewhat) tighter monetary policy”. And ironically enough, the Republican Party under Trump’s “leadership” is at the forefront of this change.

Apparently the guy can't figure out the facts for himself, which show that Trump is projected by the center left Tax Policy Center to be in the same league as Obama through fiscal 2020, not in the Reagan league, not in the Nixon league, not in the Bush 41 league, either. Hell, he's not even projected to make the Bush 43 league, which was bad enough. Spending is going up under Trump, too be sure, but it's a world away from previous Republican administrations.

What really matters for spending is who controls the purse strings, which is Congress. Until Clinton, Republican presidents had to bargain with Democrat Congresses to get what they wanted. That often meant agreeing to big spending bills. The Republican resurgence in Congress under Clinton marked a new era in spending, which comparatively speaking is way down on a compound annual growth rate basis, even under spendthrift Bush 43.

Personally I'm less fearful than I had been of a new spending spree under Trump with Republicans in control of Congress. Trump is adversarial with the Republican Establishment in a way that no Republican president of the past has been. Getting what he wants hasn't been at all easy for this very reason. Republicans are obstructing him no less than Democrats are even as Trump folds like a house of cards on taxes and regulation without getting anything in return, like a wall. At some point he's going to veto something, or go down to electoral defeat.

At any rate, talk of a new dramatic change is simply kooky.

Global stock insanity, Swiss edition: Swiss National Bank balance sheet shows almost $100 billion in US stocks

From the story here:

It’s all fun and good to speculate on the SNB equity price, but I am more interested in what the SNB’s behaviour means for the global markets going forward.

The real problem is that a Central Bank just monetized their balance sheet against another country’s equity market, and instead of getting punished for this reckless behaviour, the markets are celebrating the Swiss good fortune. And I ask you - have you ever seen Central Bankers not behave like a bunch of antelopes on the Serengeti? It is an amazingly disturbing precedent.