Juggling Dynamite

Designates who are appointed to represent others in positions of trust must be held to a fiduciary standard.  The courts of equity have long acknowledged that financial conflicts and non-disclosure of personal benefit are anathema to fulfilling fiduciary duty.

Although Donald Trump handed over control of his businesses to his sons, the president still collects on their profits. Here’s how Trump’s White House is a money-making machine. Here is a direct video link.

Trump’s White House has been a money-making machine from CNBC.

When willfully blind, over-confident central bankers run monetary policy to serve their greed-engrossed-bank owners at all costs, prudence is extinguished and madness ensues. We are there and we are all vulnerable in the fallout.

While central banks, like pensions, have historically and wisely focused on capital preservation above all other goals, today both are running a doomed race to overcome capital deficits by ramping up the likelihood of capital loss.  See Central banks are ramping up their risk taking:

Lucid article from Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone yesterday, reminds that bankers are commanding governments of all political stripes.  Meanwhile, we, the people, keep paying the bill.  See Why killing Dodd-Frank could lead to the next crash:

The latest indignity is S.2155, a.k.a. the “Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act.” Supposedly designed to help some banks by reducing capital requirements and ending regular “stress tests,” the act is really more like helping ships steam faster by allowing them to ditch their lifeboats…

Nobody will say so, but everyone on the Hill knows why this bill passed. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, three of the bill’s Democratic co-sponsors, North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp, Indiana’s Joe Donnelly and Montana’s Jon Tester, are three of the Senate’s biggest recipients of financial-services donations. Quelle surprise!

This would be merely politically disgusting, were it not for the consequences in an overheated economy. Remember how tossing the Glass-Steagall Act during the Internet boom worked out? We should be increasing safety standards, not eliminating them. “With debt levels higher than before the last crash, a stock market bubble and wage stagnation,” says Dennis Kelleher, head of the watchdog group Better Markets, “now is the worst time to deregulate the financial industry.”

We’ve been here before – in an economy that feels shakier than suspiciously swollen stock market numbers would indicate. Either Trump is an economic genius, or we’re in for a correction soon. Who feels like taking off the life jacket?