The notion some folks are telling themselves is that if Bannon is gone, this all magically changes. It does not.
"This guy's going to get us all killed. There's nobody in charge. This man (Trump) has the nuclear codes," Moore, 63, told Reuters Television in an interview on Thursday.
"I'm hoping somebody in the Pentagon is protecting us. Like, whatever's in that nuclear briefcase it's just some girlfriend's phone number or something[...]".
Most Fed officials subscribe to a view of inflation in which prices rise more quickly as unemployment declines. The basic idea is that companies must offer higher and higher wages to keep their workers.
Now, the Fed is confronting “the coexistence of low inflation and low unemployment,” a phenomenon that inverts the “stagflation” experience of the 1970s, when both inflation and unemployment climbed.
The meeting account said most officials continued to regard low unemployment as the most important factor. They said inflation was rising slowly because of temporary factors, like a decline in cellphone service prices. And they remain inclined to raise the Fed’s benchmark rate later this year.
Have a look at the chart below. The total amount of revolving credit outstanding, much of it reflecting credit-card borrowing, peaked in 2008 and then collapsed during the financial crisis. After bottoming in 2011, it slowly began to rise, and almost nine years after the peak has finally reached new highs. There also were new records for the size of the U.S. population, gross domestic product, total household income, net worth and, perhaps most important of all, disposable personal income. This is what tends to happen in an economic expansion.
We at EFF defend the right of anyone to choose what speech they provide online; platforms have a First Amendment right to decide what speech does and does not appear on their platforms. That’s what laws like CDA 230 in the United States enable and protect.
It’s notable that in GoDaddy and Google’s eagerness to swiftly distance themselves from American neo-Nazis, no process was followed; CloudFlare’s Prince also admitted that the decision was “not CloudFlare’s policy.” Policies give guidance as to what we might expect, and an opportunity to see justice is done. We should think carefully before throwing them away.
But if there is a single reason why so many individuals and companies are acting together now to unite against neo-Nazis, it is because a future that seemed unlikely a few years ago—that white nationalists and Nazis now have significant power and influence in our society—now seems possible.
Anyone with eyes — eyes not glued to Fox News, anyway — has long realized that Trump is utterly incapable, morally and intellectually, of filling the office he holds. But in the past few days things seem to have reached a critical mass.
Journalists have stopped seizing on brief moments of not-craziness to declare Trump “presidential”; business leaders have stopped trying to curry favor by lending Trump an air of respectability; even military leaders have gone as far as they can to dissociate themselves from administration pronouncements.
Put it this way: “Not my president” used to sound like an extreme slogan. Now it has more or less become the operating principle for key parts of the U.S. system.
Thor Harris—frontman for Thor & Friends, and former member of Swans and Shearwater—said today that he wants to run for governor of Texas.
Standing in front of a rainbow flag, he explained his reasoning. “Howdy, my name’s Thor Harris, and I’m running for governor of Texas, ’cause fuck this.”
When asked if he’s really planning to run, Harris responded to Pitchfork, “Why the fuck not?
In February, Harris was suspended from Twitter after he posted a joking tutorial about how to punch Nazis. His how-to followed the viral video of alt-right activist Richard Spencer getting punched in the head on Inauguration Day.
"As our members have expressed individually over the past several days, intolerance, racism and violence have absolutely no place in this country and are an affront to core American values...We believe the debate over Forum participation has become a distraction from our well-intentioned and sincere desire to aid vital policy discussions on how to improve the lives of everyday Americans," a statement from members of the Strategic and Policy Forum council read.
"As such, the President and we are disbanding the Forum," it added.
Within minutes, Campbell Soup Co. president and chief executive Denise Morrison issued her own statement, in which she said, "Racism and murder are unequivocally reprehensible and are not morally equivalent to anything else that happened in Charlottesville."
Even now, two generations later, as we have seen that when you take economic equity for granted it goes away, Chuck Schumer in 2016 and Mark Penn this year have continued to laud a strategy grasping for suburban Republicans and eschewing the traditional Democratic urban working class. As it turned out, bill Clinton had the priorities of voters fundamentally wrong: social conservatism was categorically more important to a critical mass of (especially white Southern) voters than economic conservatism.
But the ideology that Bill Black spoke of in June was already flowering 40 years ago -- the turning away from traditional Democratic power centers, and from broad government programs anchored in economic populism, in favor of social issues and a commitment to lower taxation and more efficient fiscal prudence -- espoused by a group that grew up in the post-war middle class suburbs and sought to appeal to those suburbanites first and foremost, taking for granted that the broad prosperity that those programs forstered would continue.
With the term of Janet Yellen as Federal Reserve chair ending next February, the president will have to nominate and the Senate will have to confirm a new head of the central bank in coming months.
If history is any guide, it is more likely than not that the economy will go into recession during the next Fed chair’s four-year term. Recovery is now in its ninth year with relatively slow underlying growth for demographic and technological reasons, very low unemployment and high asset prices. Even without these factors, experience teaches that recessions are almost never forecast or even rapidly recognised by the Fed or the professional consensus forecast, but there is at least a 20 per cent or so chance that if the economy is not in recession, it will be so within a year. So the likelihood that the next Fed chair will have to address a recession is probably about two-thirds.
Historically, the Fed has responded to recession by cutting rates substantially, with the benchmark funds rate falling by 400 basis points or more in the context of downturns over the past two generations. However, it is very unlikely that there will be room for this kind of rate cutting when the next recession comes given market forecasts. So the central bank will have to improvise with a combination of rhetoric and direct market intervention to influence longer-term rates. That will be tricky given that 10-year Treasuries currently yield below 2.20 per cent and this would decline precipitously with a recession and any move to cut Fed funds.
As a result, the economy is probably quite brittle within the current inflation targeting framework. This is under-appreciated. Responsible new leadership at the Fed will have to give serious thought to shifting the monetary policy framework, perhaps by putting more emphasis on nominal gross domestic product growth, focusing on the price level rather than inflation (so periods of low inflation are followed by periods of high inflation) or raising the inflation target. None of these steps would be easy in current circumstances, but once recession has come effectiveness will diminish.
There must be more risk now of presidential interference with the Fed than at any time since Richard Nixon. In dealing with international matters, the Fed is partnered with an understaffed and amateurish Treasury and a president who is dissipating US credibility. Most fundamentally, the temper of the times has turned against technical expertise in favour of populist passion and the Fed is the quintessential enduring apolitical institution.
