The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) released its latest policy statement to finish out 2024.  The Fed reduced its target federal funds rate by 25 basis points.  It now sits between 4.25 and 4.50 percent.  This move was widely expected.

What wasn’t expected was Jerome Powell saying that inflation is still a challenge and the Fed’s so-called “dot plot” indicating that we should expect fewer rate cuts next year than what was previously anticipated.

This sent markets in a tumble, with the Dow losing over 1,100 points and the Nasdaq down over 700 points on the day.  Gold was also down considerably, as the U.S. dollar rose.  The euro is getting quite close to being on par with the U.S. dollar.

So, even though the Fed cut rates like stock investors wanted, we should now expect two more rate cuts next year instead of four.  What’s to say it can’t go back to four at the next Fed meeting?

A Contradictory Policy

While the Fed continues to cut its target rate, and nearly everyone commenting on it assumes a looser monetary policy, the Fed actually has a tight monetary policy right now.

In the FOMC’s Implementation Note, it clearly states that the Fed will continue to reduce its holdings of Treasury securities by $25 billion per month and mortgage-backed securities by $35 billion per month.  If you look at the Fed’s balance sheet, this is indeed what is happening.  Approximately $60 billion is coming off the balance sheet each month.  This is monetary deflation.

This is the whacky world we have been living in since 2008, where the Fed controls the short-term interest rates by paying banks interest on their reserves.  The interest rate function has become somewhat independent, at least for now, of the money supply.

As the Fed’s right hand is lowering interest rates, the left hand is doing something else.  The left hand is sending us into a recession.

Of course, the recession is baked into the cake because of prior monetary inflation, but the push for deflation now will make a recession more inevitable in the near future.

The Yield Curve

After about two years of inversion, the yield curve is finally returning to “normal”.  It is still very flat, but the long-term rates are now slightly higher than the short-term rates.  The yield on a 30-year bond is about 30 basis points higher than the yield on a 3-month Treasury bill.

The inverted yield curve has been an accurate predictor of recessions.  Yet, every time it happens, we hear that this time is somehow different.

Before you think we have escaped recession, it is important to know that the recession comes after the yield curve has been inverted and then returns to normal.  In other words, the recession should be coming very soon if we aren’t already in it now.

Meanwhile, the Fed is deflating the money supply in the face of this.

The Fed could reverse course quickly, but it would be too late at this point, unless they plan to go wild like 2020.  Even then, it might not be enough to stop the oncoming recession.

Once the recession comes, Jerome Powell’s words from today will be meaningless.  The dot plot will be meaningless.  We could see the equivalent of four rate cuts in one meeting if things get bad enough.

If you think the plunge in stocks was bad on Wednesday, wait until a recession becomes evident.  There are going to be staggering losses.  Depending on how aggressive the Fed’s initial response is, we could see a stock market plunge of 75% in the next few years.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is a cute name.  But let’s hope that the name does not actually reflect the goals of the organization.

DOGE is being set up as part of the new Trump administration.  It will be headed up by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.

I believe Musk and Ramaswamy are both sincere in wanting to make America a better place, or I at least have little reason to doubt their sincerity.  They are both rich and don’t need the grief or the hate that is flung at them.

It is music to my ears when Musk suggests that federal spending should be cut by $2 trillion annually.  We don’t need the federal government to help with this or that.  We need less government in every facet of our lives.

Musk and Work at Home

Elon Musk, as a successful businessman, is somewhat old school when it comes to certain things.  He has made it clear that he believes workers should be in the office.  In other words, they should physically be at a workplace and not working remote.

This may be the case for his companies.  It probably is important in a lot of areas that people be together to collaborate.  You can really see where this is probably true when it comes to designing a Tesla or sending a rocket ship to Mars.

Musk has been pointing out that a large portion of federal employees work at home.  He insinuates that they should be reporting to an office.

I strongly disagree with Musk on this.  Working remotely often exposes the good workers and the bad workers.  It is much easier for a micromanager to look over people’s shoulders and make himself look busy while in an office setting.

The more productive people will tend to get even more done at home or in some kind of a remote setting if their job doesn’t involve a lot of collaboration.  They can work more with fewer interruptions.

There is another problem.  Having office space for everyone is more expensive.  If Elon Musk wants to convince Trump that all federal employees need to report to an office, then the government (i.e., the taxpayers) will have to pay for the additional office space.  Many employees will also seek higher compensation because of the time and expense of commuting.

Now, if Musk’s plan is to make life more miserable for federal employees, then maybe there is something to that.  But is that really the way to go about it?  If anything, you will drive away the more productive employees who will seek other work.

And if you are trying to reduce the number of federal employees, it shouldn’t be done on the basis of driving people away who don’t want to work in an office setting.  It should be done on the basis of whether the job should be a function of government.

Government Efficiency vs. Productivity

We shouldn’t confuse efficiency with productivity, especially when it comes to the government.  We also shouldn’t confuse these with competence.  There are probably areas where we really do want competence in government.  We want the person handling the nuclear missiles to be competent, as long as he isn’t evil.  Most people want the government to be competent in issuing passports and sending out Social Security checks.

In many areas, we really don’t want the government to be efficient.  We probably want efficiency in areas where it may actually be a legitimate function of the government, such as defending the nation and the court system.  Even here, we only want efficiency if these functions are there to serve us.

We really don’t want efficiency in most areas of government.  I don’t want a more efficient IRS.  I don’t want a more efficient Drug Enforcement Agency that will knock down even more doors in the middle of the night.  I don’t want an efficient NSA that will spy more effectively on all of us.

The term “efficiency” works for the DOGE acronym, but we really don’t want more government efficiency.  We want less government.

Cutting Budgets in a Non-Libertarian World

We need much less government in our lives.  This means drastically reduced regulations, which will get less pushback from the average American.  Some big companies that are favored by the government will want these regulations to stay, but most Americans can get on board with less government regulation.

We also need drastically reduced spending.  The over $6 trillion spent annually by Washington DC is a major drain on Americans.  Instead of worrying about whether people are working at home, worry about how much you’re paying them.  And you are often paying them to regulate us more and to spend even more money.

I think the only realistic way to make a dent in the annual spending is through attrition and through payoffs.  As people retire or quit, don’t replace them.

For jobs that should be eliminated now (which is many) and that don’t even require any kind of transition or shifting of duties, I think the answer is to pay these people off.  It shouldn’t be with a nice early retirement plan, as that would just burden us more in future.  It should be a payoff now or in the very near future.

For example, you could offer to pay an employee a one-year salary if they leave now.  They could even go find another job (not in the federal government) and get double pay.

I know some people will be mad at this.  Why should they get all of this extra pay if we don’t need their job anymore?  In the private sector, you would just get laid off and might not even get a severance.

The reason to do this is so that it actually happens.  If there are hundreds of thousands of government employees that we don’t need and can be let go, let’s do something about it.  If we just say that they should all be fired immediately with no compensation, then there will be too much resistance.  There will be lawsuits.  People in Congress won’t support it because they will be hearing from constituents.

I understand it is taxpayer money.  It is not a pure libertarian solution because you still have to keep stealing money in the future to pay off these people.  But I believe this is the only way to make it work and have a realistic chance of actually cutting budgets.

Of course, you can cut massive budget cuts outside of government salaries.  There are government contracts everywhere that cost a lot of money.  The military-industrial complex is an obvious one, but it is far from the only one.

I am not naïve in how Washington works.  If the Trump administration can manage to just stop the budget from growing for a few years, this would seem like a victory.  If Elon and Vivek can somehow manage to cut even 10% out of the federal budget, this would practically be a miracle.

We need major cuts in government spending.  We don’t need the government to be more efficient.

It is not a total coincidence that the Nasdaq crossed 20,000 and Bitcoin crossed 100,000 on December 11, 2024.  Bitcoin had briefly touched that mark before that date, but both things crossed their milestones on Wednesday after an inflation report that came in largely as expected.

The CPI report for November showed that prices rose 0.3% for the month.  The year-over-year CPI now stands at 2.7%, which is a tick up from where it had been.

The median CPI was up 0.2% for the month, while the year-over-year median CPI is at 3.9%.  This is down from where it had been.

Correlation and the Everything Bubble

Bitcoin and the Nasdaq are actually highly correlated.  There doesn’t seem to be any reason for them to be correlated.  One is a so-called cryptocurrency.  It is digital code that can be traded, bought, and sold.

The Nasdaq is a stock index.  The stocks in the Nasdaq tend to be for technology-related companies.  If you own Nasdaq shares, you own a tiny piece of these technology companies.  These are real assets that typically produce real revenue and real profits.

But there is one major similarity of Bitcoin and the Nasdaq index.  They are part of the Everything Bubble.  In fact, these two things almost seem like the face of the bubble.

Just as housing and financial stocks were the face of the bubble in 2007/ 2008, the Nasdaq and Bitcoin are the speculative games in town for this one.

When the bubble finally bursts, there will be differences.  As stated above, when you own the Nasdaq, you at least own real assets, even if they are overvalued right now as compared to what they will be.

Who knows with Bitcoin?  It isn’t going to zero because there will always be libertarian-leaning tech nerds who will always insist that Bitcoin is the solution to all of our problems.  But Bitcoin could certainly fall 95% or more without much of a problem.

Ignoring the Fundamentals

I remember commenting on the Nasdaq back in early 2020.  I said that it may hit 10,000 that year and that that was a bubble.  It has now doubled from there.

To be sure, the Fed has done a lot of money creation since that time.  This may justify some of the increases.

With so much politics going on, especially with a new president coming in, it seems that everyone is talking about the good or the bad that will happen with Trump.

But the economy doesn’t really care about Trump.  We shouldn’t get blinded by the politics.

There has been an inverted yield curve for about two years now.  It is now just about flat.  The 30-year yield now sits slightly higher than the short-term yields.  Now that the yield curve is returning to normal, we are ready for a major recession.

It doesn’t matter that the Fed is lowering rates.  It is quite common for the Fed to lower rates ahead of when a recession begins, or at least ahead of when we realize there is a recession.

Plus, while everyone talks about the Fed lowering rates, the Fed is engaging in a seemingly contradictory policy.  It continues to drain its balance sheet.  In other words, the Fed is actually engaging in monetary deflation.

We have a falling balance sheet, a yield that is uninverting after two years, and ridiculous all-time highs in the markets.  It doesn’t matter if Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, or Ron Paul is set to take the White House.  There is a recession ahead.  The Everything Bubble is set to explode.

It appears that the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria has fallen.  While the establishment media in the West seem to celebrate this news, it is anything but good news for those who value liberty and human life.

In April 2018, I wrote a post titled “Assad Is Not Crazy, Therefore He Must Go”.  I wrote the following:

Bashar al-Assad is the son of Hafez al-Assad, who was president of Syria from 1971 to 2000.  Bashar al-Assad went to medical school and then went on to specialize in ophthalmology at the Western Eye Hospital in London.  He only was called back to Syria in the mid 1990s to become the heir apparent of his father after Assad’s older brother died in a car accident.

While this does not mean that Assad does not crave political power, it is obvious that his original intentions were not to be an overtly political figure.  Most people seeking political power when they are young do not become an eye doctor.

Assad was mostly praised by the Western media in previous decades.  Diane Sawyer interviewed him and had nice things to say about him.  There are pictures of John Kerry dining with Assad and their respective spouses before Kerry turned on him as part of the Obama administration.

Assad got on the naughty list of the U.S. establishment, and now he is called an animal, a terrorist, and almost everything else nasty that can think of.  Of course, we almost never hear these terms used against U.S. politicians.  If they are used against Trump, it isn’t because he dropped bombs on innocent people.  It is because he sent out a rude tweet.

Syria has been one of the few places in the Middle East where Christianity was allowed to thrive.  Incidentally, Iraq was another place where Christianity thrived up until the U.S. invasion.  Christianity is also tolerated in Iran.  For some reason, the U.S. government, with the support of a majority of self-identified Christian Americans, like to overthrow secular dictators and eliminate the Christian populations in these places.  Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia gets U.S. support.

It really is odd.  It just shows the irrationality that has prevailed with the out-of-control U.S. empire.  It’s bad enough that there is so much U.S. interventionism when it comes to foreign policy.  But the policies themselves are completely irrational.  We don’t even know which side we are on half the time.  Many times, we (meaning the U.S. government) are playing both sides.

I think Assad is probably one of the least bad people when it comes to dictators.  He may be one of the least bad people amongst all political leadership in the world.  He has actually tried to keep Syria together by protecting innocent people who have been terrorized by the thugs that have invaded the country due to the U.S. war in Iraq and the attempted overthrow of the Syrian government by the U.S. establishment.

Any crimes committed by the Assad regime pale in comparison to the crimes of U.S. presidents and those who surround them.

The 2024 Fall

The fall of the Syrian government to terrorists fits in with a lot of events in late 2024.  Russia is tied up in Ukraine.  The Israeli state is attempting to take down anyone it deems as an enemy.  Trump is coming into office with Tulsi Gabbard as an influence.  You can see why the powers-that-be wanted to get this done.

Biden and his handlers are now saying that they will fund the new government.  So, the U.S. taxpayer, 23 years after 9/11, will be funding Al Qaeda.

And of course, the U.S. empire likes to take out secular regimes that don’t obey the orders of the U.S. empire.  The U.S. government tried to take out Syria when Obama (the peace president) was in office.

They relied on a story of Assad using chemical weapons against his own people.  It is “weapons of mass destruction” all over again by the same liars.  In 2019, Wikileaks published an email with concerns by at least one of the investigators of the so-called chemical weapons saying that the report misrepresented the facts.

Of course, the same media that told you about the chemical weapons and that Assad is a really bad guy never go back and correct the record.

We will see what happens in Syria in the coming days and months, but it is not going to be good.  Under Assad, the Syrian government protected Christians.  It wasn’t a libertarian society by any means, just as no country on planet Earth is.  But at least it was largely peaceful before the U.S. started firing missiles and funding terrorist organizations in Syria.

This is why it is critical that Tulsi Gabbard is part of the Trump administration.  She has been called an Assad apologist by many people because she recognized what the U.S. government was doing in Syria and said so.

We can only hope that the truth will come out on this.  Assad was not the problem in Syria, and if he was, that was for the Syrian people to deal with.  The problem is the violence and interventionism of the U.S. government and its allies.

After Joe Biden, his press secretary, and most of the establishment media assured us that Joe Biden would not pardon his son, he has done just that.  The media used this as a talking point against Trump before the election, repeating that Biden is upholding the rule of law and will abide by the jury decision, unlike what Trump does.

I didn’t realize that this was an issue where the talking points went out and the media endlessly repeated them.  It was like the memo that went out to use the word “weird” to refer to J.D. Vance.

There are other more significant pronouncements such as the “safe and effective” vaccines and the “unprovoked” aggression of Putin.  The memo went out on these too, and the media repeated them constantly.

I’m not sure if J.D. Vance is weird because that is very subjective.  I do find Tim Walz, the running mate for Kamala Harris, to be weirder than Vance though.  With all of the pronouncements, it’s like they protest too much.  The vaccines were anything but safe and effective.  The invasion from Putin was anything but unprovoked.

So, when they assured us that Joe Biden wouldn’t pardon his son because Joe Biden believes in the rule of law, we should have assumed the opposite.

To be clear, the president does have the legal power to pardon according to the Constitution, but it doesn’t make all pardons right.  And the media used these lines about upholding the rule of law and jury decisions as a talking point against Trump.

Now that Joe Biden has pardoned Hunter Biden, the media will say a few things about it, but they won’t really revisit their own comments.  While conservatives are somewhat outraged, I don’t think most of them understand the depths of this.

What the Pardon Says

Joe Biden granted a full and unconditional pardon to Hunter Biden.  As a libertarian, I don’t care that he violated a gun regulation, missed some tax payments, or did drugs.  I only care in the sense that it shows the hypocrisy of his father who would gladly throw others in jail for these same offenses.

But this also doesn’t mean that Hunter Biden isn’t a criminal.  And the bigger criminal here is Joe Biden.

The pardon reads in part as follows:

“A Full and Unconditional Pardon – For those offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024, including but not limited to all offenses charged or prosecuted…”

So, the pardon is for any crimes he may have committed that are “including but not limited to” those he was charged with.  If Hunter Biden committed murder, then he couldn’t be charged at the federal level.  (I know that this should only be a crime at the state level, but this isn’t reality today.)

The other interesting thing about the pardon is the date.  It goes all the way back to January 1, 2014.  This is when Joe Biden was vice president.  It is also just before the U.S.-backed coup that took place in Ukraine.

The Consequences or Lack Of

There are no consequences for the criminal Biden family.  But let’s be clear that this isn’t just about corruption.  For them it was about corruption.  A Ukrainian company hired Hunter Biden as some kind of “consultant”, which was really to just get favor with the U.S. government.  Meanwhile, Hunter Biden paid 10% to “the big guy”, who was Joe Biden.

Ukraine is a giant slush fund for the Biden family.  It is like a large version of the Clinton Foundation.  Taxpayer money flows to Ukraine, while a small percentage (but significant amounts) flow back to the Biden family.

Again, this isn’t just about the corruption and skimming money, even though that is bad enough.  This is a war-ravaged country.

The U.S. helped overthrow the democratically-elected president in Ukraine in 2014 while Biden was VP.  This led to the slaughter of thousands of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine.

In 2021, Putin wanted assurance of Russia’s safety and requested assurances from the Biden administration.  Biden and his handlers basically gave Putin the middle finger.

There are a lot of things and people to blame for the war in Ukraine, but there is no question that Biden and company played a major role in provoking this whole thing.  There are probably hundreds of thousands of people dead, but at least Joe Biden and Hunter Biden got their checks.

This isn’t about petty crimes committed by Hunter Biden.  This is about the lives of millions of people that were cast aside by a criminal family.

When Trump tried to get dirt on Joe Biden when he was president in his first term, he was on to something.  He talked to the corrupt Zelensky about it, and the Democrats in Congress impeached Trump for his phone call.  Yet, it was actually Trump trying to expose the crimes of the Biden family.  Regardless of Trump’s motives, he was on the right track.

We will see if Joe Biden decides to issue a pardon for himself.  He is the bigger criminal than Hunter Biden who should be locked away for the rest of his life.  His criminality runs deep, but much of it is out in the open now if you just look close enough.

It is a mistake for libertarians and others advocating for more liberty to ignore appealing to people’s morality.  The interesting thing is that the authoritarians do this all the time to advance their own agenda.

“Do it for the children.”

“We need to save the planet from climate change by giving us more power to tax and regulate.”

“We need to save democracy in Ukraine by sending them money and weapons to fight the big, bad Putin.”

The authoritarians prey on the goodness of people and use it to enhance their own power.  Even when they are appealing to people’s own self-interest, they justify it in the name of being fair and just.

Selling the Benefits of Liberty

Libertarians should sell the benefits of liberty by appealing to people’s self-interest.  But this doesn’t mean that we should stop there and not also appeal to their morality.

It is easy to find conservatives and libertarians who argue that we should stop sending money to Ukraine.  The justification is typically that we shouldn’t be sending money to Ukraine while we have so many problems here at home.

This was an effective argument when there was severe flooding from Hurricane Helene.  It is a good question to ask why the government is sending hundreds of billions of dollars to Ukraine while largely ignoring (or worse) the people who have lost houses and are in desperate need of assistance.

This is appealing to people’s morality too, but they can more easily identify with someone who lives in North Carolina than someone who lives in Ukraine and speaks a different language.

Still, we shouldn’t stop there.  Even if there had been no disaster in North Carolina and other surrounding states, we still shouldn’t be forced to send money to Ukraine.

By sending money and weapons to Ukraine, it empowers the oligarchs in Ukraine while prolonging the war and all of the death and destruction that come with it.  If you care about the lives of innocent Ukrainians, then you should favor a halt of all U.S. taxpayer money going to Ukraine.  Who cares if Russia takes over eastern Ukraine where mostly ethnic Russians live?

If Ukrainians want to fight and die for that cause, we shouldn’t be funding it.  But if U.S. government funding stopped, it would likely lead to some kind of a peace settlement.

Of course, this war never would have happened in the first place if the U.S. government hadn’t assisted in overthrowing the democratically-elected president of Ukraine in 2014.

Incidentally, it was actually Trump who defended his position of wanting to reach a peace settlement by saying that he wants people to stop dying.  We’ll see if he maintains this position when he becomes president.

Effective Morality Plays

Even though the political left has largely advocated for U.S. involvement in Ukraine, there is a small part of the hard left that has protested the actions of Israel, particularly in Gaza.

This has actually been effective, as majorities in many countries throughout the world have agreed with criticisms of the Israeli state for the mass death and destruction it has caused in Gaza.  Even around half of Americans are at least somewhat opposed to the actions of the Israeli state.

You generally don’t hear the left saying that we should stop funding Israel because we could use that money at home to fight climate change and help the poor.

No.  We generally hear opposition to the Israeli state for murdering tens of thousands of innocent people.  And it has worked too.  That’s because most people find it appalling that someone would murder innocent people, even if it is state actors doing it.

You can debate about whether money going to Israel could be better spent at home by the government or by the individuals who actually earned it.  But when you turn it to morality, it becomes harder for the side who doesn’t have morality on their side.

Sure, people will say that Israel was attacked and they have a right to defend themselves.  But this has little to do with self-defense.  You can’t just blow up buildings and shoot children in the head while claiming the moral high ground.

You can always say that it is wrong to knowingly kill little children.  How could little children be guilty of anything?  The supporters of the Israeli state can claim self-defense all day long, but it doesn’t justify what is happening now.  Killing children is never justified.

Are People Good or Bad?

Most people are neither all good nor all bad.  There are maybe a few who are all bad.  Most people do live for their own self-interest, but they also want to generally be seen as good people.  They don’t favor murdering innocent people, and they certainly don’t want to be seen by others as wanting that.

Americans are generally good people.  Many just want to be left alone to live their own life.  They will take advantage of government welfare when it is available because they see it as part of the system, which it is.  Some actually favor it more than others.  There are certainly many people who would like to live at the expense of others.

Still, this doesn’t mean they favor murdering children.  Just because someone advocates for a government program that might favor them doesn’t mean they are completely evil.  There are varying degrees of morality.

So, when it comes to issues of war, the large and overwhelming majority of Americans don’t want to see innocent people murdered.  This is why the state uses propaganda.  They have to sell wars saying it is self-defense, it is to spread democracy, and it is to liberate others.

While economic arguments and appealing to people’s self-interest should not be ignored, liberty advocates should use morality arguments more often.  The idea of being a good person sells.

The S&P 500 index recently surpassed the 6,000 mark, even though it just closed the day slightly below that.  The Dow is closing in on 45,000.  The Nasdaq is above 19,000 and about 5% away from hitting the 20,000 mark.

I thought it was crazy a couple of years ago when the S&P 500 was at 4,000.  It is now 50% higher from there.

Gold recently hit all-time highs near $2,800 per ounce, but it has pulled back since the election.  Bitcoin is nearing the $100,000 mark.

This could be the mother of all bubbles.  That is particularly the case for stocks.

I thought we were in a bubble in 2019 and 2020.  The prices have roared a lot higher since then.

The Yield Curve

The yield curve has been mostly inverted for all of 2023 and most of 2024.  It has recently flattened quite a bit.  The current yields are as follows:

• 3-month yield = 4.62%
• 2-year yield = 4.21%
• 10-year yield = 4.27%
• 30-year yield = 4.45%

One more rate cut from the Fed should put the short-term rates below the long-term rates, which is where they normally are.

The inverted yield curve is when long rates are less than short rates.  This is a recession indicator.  But the key point here is that the recession doesn’t typically come until the inverted yield curve reverts to normal.  We are in that process now.

This is happening as stock indexes hit all-time highs with extraordinary gains.  It is an understatement to say that stocks are vulnerable right now.

Timing and Severity

While we are likely to see a recession and a reversion to the mean in terms of stock returns, we don’t know exactly when it will happen and how severe it will be.  With the massive gains we’ve seen in stocks over the last decade and a half, a reversion to the mean would mean big negative returns.

Even with that, we have no idea what the reaction will be.  Will the government throw more money at the problem?  Will the Fed reignite monetary inflation?  It may not matter what the Fed does in the short run.  When sellers want to sell and are willing to accept a much lower price for the sake of getting out, then stock prices will go down.

The reaction from the Fed will have an impact on how things take shape down the road.  A return to monetary inflation will likely lead to more price inflation down the road.  If the Fed has a milder response, it will be a more painful recession even though it is the long-term medicine that we need.

Again, a strong Fed response will not necessarily save the stock market from its plummet downwards, but it will impact things for years in the future.

Right now, it seems like stocks are destined to always go up no matter what the news brings.  This is when it is the most dangerous.  There is complacency out there.  There is also arrogance.  It will not last forever.

Now that the election dust has settled, we get to see where Trump is taking us for the next four years.

This is assuming that we will have four years ahead for planet Earth, because the Biden handlers seem determined to spark a nuclear war with Russia.  COVID lockdowns and shots weren’t enough.  They are stepping it up this time with the chaos-making and endangering human life.  What else could be their “reasoning” for greenlighting missile strikes inside of Russia?

It’s not that the deep state can’t cause massive chaos when Trump officially becomes president.  In fact, we should count on it.  But it seems important right now to fast forward two months and get the psychos out of the White House before a larger and more massive war breaks out.

The Most Controversial Appointment

There is a lot of discussion about Trump’s appointments.  The names that are being smeared by the establishment are typically the decent ones.

Matt Gaetz was a bit of a wildcard.  I don’t believe anything the FBI says about him because I don’t believe anything the FBI says with regard to anything of any significance.  Gaetz has withdrawn his name for Attorney General.  But he already resigned from his House seat.

There is speculation that he resigned his House seat because of an investigation and a House ethics report that was going to be released.  If you ever wondered what an oxymoron is, the term “House ethics report” fits nicely.

Even though the FBI and the establishment media make up stories, it is not to say that there couldn’t have been something embarrassing in the report about Gaetz.

Perhaps Trump nominated Gaetz as a middle finger to the criminals who have been going after Trump and Trump supporters.  Maybe Trump knew he wouldn’t get confirmed but used him to start the bidding.  Now the establishment people are more likely to accept another nominee that could be strong but a little less controversial.

Personally, I had my doubts about Gaetz because I saw him interviewed on Dave Smith’s podcast.  I thought Gaetz was slippery in many of his answers.  I already knew he was not a libertarian, but his appearance on the podcast lowered my opinion of him.

The Establishment Indicator

The biggest creeps in the establishment are making a fuss over two other Trump appointments: Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence and Robert Kennedy Jr. for Secretary of Health and Human Services.

There is almost a perfect correlation between how much the establishment and its shills in the media smear appointment candidates and how decent the people are.

They call Tulsi Gabbard a stooge for Russia and Putin.  They say she cozies up to dictators like Assad.  This is because she has sought truth and peace.  These allegations are childish lies, but unfortunately some people will believe them.  It is similar to when people opposed the Iraq War and we got comments like, “What, you love Saddam Hussein?”

For RFK Jr., they call him a kook or a conspiracy theorist.  This is because he has dared to question vaccine safety and has pointed out that big pharma and big agriculture have embedded themselves with big government to make us less healthy.  He has drawn attention to the chronic disease in the United States and has tied it to our food and the drugs that are prescribed.

As Dave Smith pointed out when he was on Joe Rogan’s podcast right after the election, RFK Jr. is the only presidential candidate who has brought up this issue.  If you think he is wrong on the reasons for why Americans are so unhealthy, then let’s debate the topic.  Offer your own reasoning or advocate for more research to get to the bottom of it.  Instead, the RFK critics just like to smear him and continue to pretend that there isn’t a health crisis in America.

If RFK Jr. gets confirmed, it will be quite interesting what happens.  Even if he doesn’t get much done in terms of cleaning out the rot in the system, he can have a substantial influence just by speaking up.  He can call attention to the unhealthy processed foods out there.  He can call attention to the plethora of drugs that are prescribed to cover up symptoms instead of addressing root causes of the diseases.  Even if he can just get the fluoride out of our tap water, this would be a big win.

Foreign Policy

Of course, there are a lot of bad and ugly picks from Trump, especially on the foreign policy front.  He has appointed several war hawks like Marco Rubio and Elise Stefanik.

Although Rubio is a war hawk, I do see him as someone who can be molded.  He isn’t much of a leader, which in this case might be good.  He isn’t like John Bolton or Nikki Haley.  Rubio will support the war machine, but he may not be smart and conniving enough to completely undermine Trump.

Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense is an interesting pick.  He now has assault allegations against him.  They don’t seem too credible given the timing, but it’s not to say they won’t hurt him.

He is certainly too pro war for my tastes, and he seems to be an Isreali firster like some of the other Trump picks.  I am familiar with Hegseth from Fox News.

He has something like 7 children.  He has been married and divorced twice and is married again.  He comes across as a decent family man now, but so did Mike Johnson, who is a creep.

It is very hard to say how Hegseth would be in this position.  One of his cohosts on Fox is Rachel Campos-Duffy.  Her husband, Sean Duffy, has been nominated as Transportation Secretary.  Rachel Campos-Duffy has been somewhat critical of the U.S. war machine.  The despicable war hawk Brian Kilmeade snapped at Campos-Duffy on an episode of Fox & Friends when Campos-Duffy was placing blame on the Biden administration for what happened in Ukraine.  For someone on Fox News, she has oftentimes been a reasonable voice on foreign policy.  We’ll see if that can spill over to Hegseth.

Trump Loyalists

I believe that Trump is trying, to some degree, to not make the same mistakes he made in his first term.  Most people Trump placed in powerful positions hated his guts and did everything to undermine him.

Trump is trying to surround himself with people who will be loyal without a lot of regard on where they stand on the issues.  While this is so far an improvement from 8 years ago, I still think his judgment is lacking.

If Trump wants people who are loyal, he needs to get over his ego and accept people who sometimes disagree with him and are even critical of him.

I’ll cite two examples.  First, there is Candace Owens.  She was somewhat critical of Trump regarding the COVID vaccines.  She said that Trump comes from an old school of thought that just automatically assumes that vaccines are always good.  She was actually saying this in defense of Trump.  She disagreed with his stance on the vaccines, but she was defending him in the sense that she thought it was coming from a good place.  She was basically saying he was ignorant on the issue, which is better than evil.

Trump immediately made an enemy out of her, and she said that the next time she saw him in person that he was quite rude to her.

Another example is Thomas Massie in 2020.  When he wanted a real vote in Congress for the trillions of dollars in COVID spending, Trump had a fit against Massie for daring to oppose the massive spending.  Trump suggested that he should be tossed out of the Republican Party.  According to Massie, it seems that Trump has gotten over that.

Candace Owens and Thomas Massie are both libertarian leaning.  They have disagreements with Trump.  But they defend Trump when it counts.  They won’t stab him in the back.  They defend Trump on all of the bogus allegations about January 6^th, Russian collusion, prosecutions, and even the smaller lies.  They may have disagreements with Trump, but they state it openly and honestly.  It is because they want more liberty.  It isn’t because they are trying to hurt Trump.

If Trump wants real loyalists, he would find people like Candace Owens and Thomas Massie.  This is why Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. are good picks.  They have disagreements too.  But they aren’t going to purposely undermine Trump.

The people who are open and honest and have real disagreements with Trump are the Trump loyalists.  They aren’t loyal in blindly following whatever he says, but they are loyal in the sense that they will not turn on him when it is convenient.  They will defend him against the deep state and the lies.

Conclusion

The Trump presidency will be filled with many good moments and bad moments for libertarians.  There aren’t going to be any miracles, and Trump may face a bad recession.  The best we can probably hope for in the short run is less war and maybe a tiny bit of fiscal sanity.

The tariffs will be bad, but we can only hope that there might actually be some real cuts in some agency budgets.  If Trump can somehow eliminate the Department of Education, that will be an impressive accomplishment.

There is little talk about the so-called COVID vaccines these days.  The powers-that-be still want you to get your ninth booster (or whatever they’re on), but the topic barely came up in the 2024 election.

Trump may have mentioned it once in the debate with Biden.  He briefly referred to mandates.  He got the message from his supporters that he shouldn’t be bragging about Operation Warp Speed.

The left wasn’t going to bring up the topic at all because it would just remind people of the Biden mandates and also the fact that the so-called vaccines did nothing to actually prevent people from getting COVID.

The Vote Numbers

There are a lot of questions now about how Kamala Harris managed to get about 8 million fewer votes than Joe Biden in 2020.  Part of the reason is Joe Biden himself.  He was so disastrous for four years that millions of people who voted for Biden didn’t vote for Harris.  After all, she said that she wouldn’t have done anything different as president.

Some are using the vote totals to point towards election fraud in 2020.  But this wouldn’t account for something like 8 million votes.  It might be a few hundred thousand votes in the big cities in swing states.

It is surprising that nobody of prominence has half-jokingly pointed to the COVID vaccines as a reason for fewer votes.  If the vaccines killed off a few million people, that would certainly have an impact.  There has been a significant excess death count over the last four years.  The CDC has been shady with some of its numbers, but there have likely been a couple of million deaths above and beyond what was projected for the last four years.

Maybe this isn’t primarily from the unsafe and ineffective vaccines, but someone should probably offer an alternative explanation.  Why didn’t the deaths fall after the vaccines became available?

If anything, they should have fallen below the norm because of some people dying slightly prematurely in 2020.

For example, maybe someone who was 87 years old in 2020 died from COVID or the horrible hospital protocols.  If not for COVID or mistreatment at the hospital, they would have lived another 2 years.  Therefore, the death was moved up from 2022 to 2020.  Yet, the excess deaths continued in 2021 and 2022.

Even in 2024, the deaths should be below what would have been expected five years ago, but it appears we are still seeing some excess death.

The Unspoken

The COVID vaccine issue may not have been an issue that was discussed in the election, but it doesn’t mean it wasn’t an issue.  There were millions of people who were greatly impacted in 2021 and 2022.

Joe Biden and his handlers directed that something near 100 million workers in the United States had to get a needle in their arm or else they were not permitted to have their job and feed their family.

The Supreme Court ended up striking down a big part of the mandate, but it had already done major damage on businesses and people’s lives.  Some businesses also required the shot because they were going along with the mandates, even if some of the dictates were eventually struck down.

This was a major cost of doing business.  Companies had to scramble to have a dedicated team of employees to check for vaccination status and to review exemption requests.  They also had the cost of employees quitting or firing them.

More importantly, this wrecked many lives.  Millions of people were compelled to get the shots because they didn’t want to lose their livelihood.  There were millions more who applied for exemptions and were forced to make major decisions.  This was an extremely stressful time for millions of Americans who didn’t want the shots.

The jabs were not safe.  They were not effective.  They didn’t prevent COVID, and they didn’t prevent transmission.

It is a joke for any leftist today to say “my body, my choice”.  They were primarily the ones who supported these awful mandates.  Some of them went so far as to advocate kidnapping your children or locking you up if you didn’t take their “medicine”.

Maybe Donald Trump and Kamala Harris didn’t talk about the vaccines, but you can bet that it was still an issue in the minds of at least a few million Americans out there.

And while Trump was not good on the vaccine issue, he didn’t try to mandate it, and there is little reason to believe he would have.  Plus, he had Robert Kennedy Jr. campaigning for him at the end, who was a big critic of the vaccine mandates.

So, while maybe this issue didn’t trump the economy in general, it was still a big issue in the minds of many Americans.  They want to see Kennedy expose some of the criminals at the FDA and the CDC at the top. They certainly didn’t want to reward Kamala Harris with the presidency, who said she supported everything that Biden did.

Kamala the Puppet

It is interesting to theorize what would have happened if Kamala Harris had dissented from the vaccine mandates.  Of course, this wouldn’t have happened because she doesn’t ever stray too far from the establishment narrative.

Still, imagine when she was asked that question on The View about what she might have done different from Biden.  Imagine if she said that she wouldn’t have mandated the vaccines and that she would have just tried to use gentle persuasion.  Perhaps most people would not have believed her and rightly so, because she should have said this back in 2021.

But it is still an interesting thought experiment.  There might be some leftists out there who don’t like Trump but are bitter about being forced to get a jab in the arm that they didn’t want.  It’s not a big percentage, but you have to imagine there are a few.

Trump was probably correct in just avoiding the issue.  He originally bragged about the vaccine, but a lot of his supporters never wanted it.  They don’t think it was safe or effective.  There are some Trump supporters who very willingly got the vaccine and don’t regret it.  It was a no-win issue for Trump except to say that he wouldn’t have mandated the shots.

Conclusion

It is likely that the COVID shots and the mandates cost Kamala Harris at least a couple of million votes across the country.  If the shots killed a million people, the majority of those people would have voted for Harris.

Even if the shots didn’t kill anyone (which isn’t the case), the mandates themselves likely turned away some people who might have otherwise supported her.  The left was busy calling Trump a fascist and a dictator.  Who was it again who told nearly 100 million people that they had to get an injection in the arm if they wanted to be able to earn an income and feed their families?

That is a major part of the legacy of the criminal Biden and his handlers.  For this one thing alone, they deserved to lose big.

The latest consumer price inflation (CPI) figures came out a week after Trump sealed up the presidential election.  The numbers are not promising.

The CPI rose 0.2% in October 2024, bringing the annual price inflation rate to 2.6%.  This is a slight uptick from September, which breaks the trend of a falling rate of price inflation.

The median CPI was up 0.3% for the month.  The year-over-year median CPI now stands at 4.1%.

This comes right after Trump’s election, but it also comes after the latest FOMC meeting where the Fed announced another cut to its federal funds rate.

The Fed is cutting rates while price inflation is still above its 2% target.  Meanwhile, the yield curve is close to flat after nearly two years of being inverted.  This screams recession while the Fed still has a slight price inflation problem.

The Trump Problem

Many of the really hardcore Trump fans are under the illusion that he is going to give us this great economy.  We should not live in this false reality.

Even if Trump were sound on economics, which he is not, he wouldn’t be able to work this miracle.  The recession is already baked into the cake.  It is going to happen no matter who is president.

Perhaps it is an interesting irony that Trump oversaw the massive monetary inflation and deficit spending in 2020, which led to the high price inflation a couple of years later under Biden.  There was enough of a lag that Biden got the blame.  If the higher price inflation had happened the moment Biden took office, most reasonable people would not have been able to blame Biden.

The Biden presidency has been a complete train wreck in many ways, but Biden wasn’t really that responsible for the price inflation except that he perpetuated the system of deficit spending.  There likely would have been significant price inflation no matter who became president in 2021.

And now it’s Trump’s turn to inherit the train wreck from Joe Biden.  If the recession starts in the next few months, then most reasonable people will not be able to blame Trump, or at least not at first.  If the recession begins and becomes evident on the day Trump takes office, there will be some on the left who will blame Trump, but this won’t stick with most people.

If Trump takes office and the recession doesn’t hit for another 6 months, then you get into the territory of Trump taking the blame.  If you are a Trump fan, you should be cheering for the start of the recession in the next two months.

The Inflation Pain

Trump can ease some pain by drastically cutting regulations that are just mostly burdensome and add to the cost of consumer goods and services.

Unfortunately, Trump is talking about slapping on massive tariffs.  This will only serve to make products more expensive.  The establishment media, in its quest to criticize Trump on anything, actually gets this point correct at times.  It is one of the very few things.  But we wouldn’t be hearing these criticisms of Harris if she had been elected.

People are still feeling the pain of higher prices.  Insurance has gone up a lot, particularly vehicle insurance in recent years.  This alone can destroy a household budget.

Let’s remember that when they say inflation is coming down, it doesn’t mean that prices are coming down. Overall prices are still going higher, just at a slower pace.  They are going up higher on top of the already high prices where people were struggling.

We may finally get a little relief with a deep recession, but that obviously has its own problems with unemployment and deflating asset prices.  It could mean another financial crisis.  It will really hurt people and companies with high debt loads.

The best way Trump can deal with this is to level with the American people.  He can be honest and tell them that is due to years of misallocations, reckless government spending, and Federal Reserve money manipulation.

Unfortunately, this is not likely to happen.  Trump doesn’t even understand this himself.  And even if he did, he would have to have the courage and honesty to tell the truth to his constituents.

Trump will not be able to pull off any miracles.  The best hope is that he scales down the war machine, cuts some regulations, and makes some actual budget cuts with the help of people like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.

With the tough economic times likely to continue in the near future, we have to defend liberty whenever possible.  We have to criticize Trump policies that are bad and praise Trump policies that are good.