WASHINGTON – Politics continues to dominate the financial news cycle as a new trading week begins. Tops on today’s Irony Alert List is Nancy Pelosi’s cynical Covid bill ultimatum to both the GOP-led Senate and to President Trump. Namely, “compromise with my overstuffed, fiscally irresponsible Covid bill in 48 hours, or your election chances are toast.”
More on Pelosi’s cynical Covid bill ultimatum
CNBC offers the particulars.
“House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office said over the weekend that she is giving the Trump administration 48 hours to reach an aid deal before the Nov. 3 election. Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin continued their discussions on Saturday. They agreed to speak again on Monday.
“‘The 48 only relates to if we want to get it done before the election, which we do,’ Pelosi told ABC’s ‘This Week’ on Sunday. ‘We’re saying to them, we have to freeze the design on some of these things — are we going with it or not and what is the language? I’m optimistic, because again we’ve been back and forth on all this.’”
What a lie! Pelosi never wanted any “compromise.” She just wants another fake issue to scare the voters away from Trump and the GOP, both of whom she’ll totally blame for the failure to make a deal.
Also Read: Whipsaw Thursday on Wall Street as investors worry about stimulus impasse
Compromise with Democrats = Cave or die!
Compromise with a Democrats always means only one thing: Cave in or die. That’s natural for a party that’s thrived on political and fiscal extortion for nearly 90 years and running.
The actual big issue here is bailing out historically impecunious blue states with a massive infusion of taxpayer subsidies, enabling them to skate into 2020 without going bankrupt for their idiotic, ruinous lockdown and pro-Antifa / BLM policies.
Pelosi’s ultimate aim is to pave the way for the rollback of the GOP tax bill’s sensible cap on mortgage interest deductions which, until the 2017 tax bill was passed, provided massive taxpayer subsidies to the wealthiest of blue state residents.
If Trump and / or the Senate cave to this extortion, it won’t help their re-election chances one whit, but it will bail out Pelosi’s rich pals for another year, for sure. So, as bad as the optics of flipping Pelosi the bird might seem – as reflected in the left-wing media propaganda machine – it’s probably the most honest way to go.
Cocaine Mitch and President Trump may be at odds on this one
Cocaine Mitch seems ready to go with this nuclear option. But our President, for all his marvelous qualities, may still find it irresistible to “deliver” a compromise for his badly hurting constituency. We’ll see how this works out.
Meanwhile, the prospect of this failure to “compromise” to address Pelosi’s cynical Covid bill ultimatum has got Wall Street in a snit Monday morning. The market briefly pivoted into the green after the opening bell this morning. But it’s been tanking ever since.
The biggest tonic for the market would be for all the dictator-led blue states to lift their idiotic lockdowns and permit the economy to get back to where it was prior to the Covid catastrophe that hit in early spring. The lockdowns have gone on way too long, and it’s time to get back to business and to life. Most Americans would agree. Except that the media has got a great many otherwise reasonable Americans scared too ess-less to see how they’re being gamed by always “increasing” reported “cases” over actual Covid deaths, which continue to sink.
Covid is here to say, for G_d’s sake. So let’s stop with the useless lockdowns already
If this Pelosi-led nonsense doesn’t end soon, more Americans will die from needless Covid “side-effects” like permanent unemployment, evictions, lost savings, physical and mental despair, resulting suicides, and, of course, unrelated deaths caused by delays in critical heart and cancer surgeries which lead to untold and unreported deaths.
As I’ve stated many times here, the coronavirus, like our various strains of influenza, is here to stay. It will constantly return, just like the flu does, in slightly different forms, which will require different annual vaccines, just like the flu. So remaining in lockdown mode is getting beyond asinine. This disease is never going away. So let’s stop acting like we can hide from it. The best we can do is develop a series of vaccines while protecting the elderly and infirm against a disease that’s generally an insubstantial event for 98-99% of the under-70 population.
Ask President Trump, who’s back out on the campaign trail with a vengeance after the shortest of dalliances with Covid-19. And he’s 74, BTW, and – no offense, Mr President – a bit on the portly side as well. Meanwhile, Ukraine Joe hides in his basement this week, keeping a “lid” on news from his campaign thru Thursday we are now told. That’s must certainly encourage the ten or so reporters who’ll show up for his next highly scripted, “no questions” rally.
Pelosi’s Covid bill charade is keeping Wall Street in a neverending bipolar funk
Frankly, this reality-warp also has Wall Street, along with most investors, in a funk as well. Polls currently show Biden with a 98% chance of a landslide win – just like the Hildebeest in 2016. That’s clearly wrong. Which means investors no longer have any confidence whatsoever in where they’ll place their final pre-election bets. We’re in a seriously bi-polar market environment.
Stocks are arguably overpriced for a best-case scenario. Which is interesting, since absolutely no one can agree on what a “best case” scenario actually is. Is it a big victory by Slow Joe? That could mean we’ll return to the Obama days. You know, when rich Democrats will get richer. And during which, Marx-Lenin-like, the middle class will “wither away?” Or will all the Trump-haters who got rich under the past 3.5 years of Trump-o-nomics hold their collective noses and vote not for the man but for his policies?
Logic is out the window here. And without an objective correlative, Mr Market has been getting schizzier by the day.
Recipe for disaster: Politics and Mr Market are once again one and the same
Once again, politics has become indistinguishable from this year’s election carnival of chaos. Even worse, the carnival very likely won’t end on the evening of November 3.
Things can and will get ugly. Our best strategy – today at least – might be to start paring back misbehaving positions right now. If Mr Market doesn’t like the November 4 news, we may be in for the Mother of All Market Swan Dives. So unless investors are short, they could suffer a serious portfolio wipe out. This is something to consider seriously as we move into the campaigns final two weeks.
*– Headline image: Wile E. Coyote takes another dive, just like stocks are diving due to the COVID-19 panic. Wile E. Coyote character and image copyright Warner Bros. Fair use: slightly altered for satirical purposes.*
